. These are perhaps the most potent tools of cultural production, yet also the most contested. These citations―written or spoken, drawn or built―rely on their antecedent, and carry the stamp of authority. In the field of architecture, and more conspicuous than ever, appropriation is faster, easier, but also less regulated.
Perspecta 49 welcomes the contest. Digital scripts are downloaded, altered, and re-uploaded―transposing the algorithm, not the object itself. In the sea of memes and gifs, quotes are both innumerable and viral, tweets and retweets, giving voice to anyone with access to these channels. Traditionally, the practice of quotation has inoculated the author against accusations of plagiarism.
Instead, buildings are copied before construction is completed. Although architecture is a discipline that prizes originality and easily ascribed authorship, intentional, and vital, it is important to recognize that quotation and associated operations are ubiquitous, not just palliatives to the anxiety of influence.
Perspecta 50: Urban Divides
Perspecta 50 invites readers to question the inevitability and ubiquity of urban divides. Contributorsmarisa angell brown, jesse vogler, todd reisz, dana cuff, alishine osman, studio gang, andrés jaque, annabel jane wharton, andreea cojocaru, Michael Sorkin with Terreform, Gary McDonogh, Mitch McEwen, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Jenny Holzer, Guy Trangoš, Jeffrey Hou, Jon Calame, Kian Goh, Urban-Think Tank, Meghan McAllister, Mahdi Sabbagh, Jyoti Hosagrahar, City Reparo, Tatiana Bilbao Estudio, Theresa Williamson .
Yet, with intensifying gentrification and ghettoization, urban divides are often not merely walls. In texts, images, perspecta 50 explores broad questions facing urbanism and architecture today, and studio projects, including the effect on urban housing of migration and the blurred boundaries between the formal and informal city.
This volume of perspecta―the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America―investigates divides as a mechanism of urbanism, both spatially and socially complex. Spatial urban divides are often perceived as binary: separating one entity from the other with walls, fences, and infrastructure―symptoms of conflict or of a failed society.
They have historically defined communities for cultural, political, and economic purposes. People embrace the idea of walls out of fear, and leaders make promises that only reinforce divisions.
Perspecta 51: Medium
This volume of perspecta―the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America―takes a broad view of medium to take stock of and unpack unexpected relationships. The study of medium is transscalar and transhistorical. For this reason, perspecta 51 does not focus exclusively on the “new media” of today or predictions about the future; instead, it presents a conversation among varied theories on medium set against a series of architectural case studies.
Perspecta 51 provides new histories and fresh responses to the notion of medium that might illuminate possibilities for its productive use and misuse by architects. Contributorsshamsher ali, ginger nolan, beatriz colomina, marshall mcluhan, christine shannon mattern, christina varvia, etienne turpin, evangelos Kotsioris, Dubravka Sekulic, Shawn Maximo, Nashin Mahtani, åyr, Nick Axel, DIS, Scott McQuire, Keller Easterling, Shveta Sarda, Reinhold Martin, Jeffrey Schnapp, Molly Steenson, Aleksandr Bierig, Prasad Shetty, Neyran Turan, Moritz Gleich, Francesco Casetti, Georgios Eftaxiopoulos, Richard Vijgen .
But what is a medium? dictionaries define “medium” as something in the middle, or, and this elemental understanding of medium has nourished early conversations of networks and cybernetics, a means of conveyance, as well as recent media theory. These stories are grounded in the theories of medium design, mediascapes, and media politics.
A chapter on flexibility demonstrates its thesis by being printed intentionally upside down.
Perspecta 48: Amnesia
Ruminations on the paradoxical nature of amnesia: can the gaps it creates provide spaces for invention?Architecture, is inextricably linked to issues of memory, nostalgia, the most durable of the arts, and history. As archives overflow and data multiplies, these accumulating facts lack any theory of significance.
Contributions from a diverse group of scholars, suppressed, or manufactured to reenergize current practice? How might we construct counter-narratives, artists, rebel histories, and practitioners explore the paradoxical nature of amnesia: How can forgetfulness be both harmful and generative? What will we borrow or abandon from yesterday to confront tomorrow? What sort of critical genealogies can be repurposed, and alternative canons that are relevant to our present moment?Perspecta 48 considers the uses and abuses of history and ignites a debate about the role of memory in architecture.
Contributors esra akcan, mario Carpo, Iwan Baan, David Chipperfield, Amale Andraos, T. J demos, hans ulrich obrist, anthony vidler, gary leggett, maria giudici, marco frascari, kyle dugdale, Stephan Petermann and OMA/AMO, Sylvia Lavin, Andrew Kovacs, Sam Jacob, Karsten Harries, Russell Thomsen, Ed Eigen, Saskia Sassen, Matt Roman, Richard Mosse, Stanislaus von Moos .
The stream of readily accessible information has trapped us in a perpetual present, and our attention spans have been reduced to 140-character bursts.
Perspecta 43: Taboo
Contributorspier vittorio aureli, pamela karimi, peggy deamer, keith krumwiede, peter eisenman, marcel vellinga, edward eigen, Alicia Imperiale, Thomas de Monchaux, NaJa & DeOstos, Mario Gooden, Loïc WacquantInterviewsSunil Bald, Erika Naginski, Glen Cummings, Michelangelo Sabatino, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Taryn Simon, Arindam Dutta, Thomas Beeby, Neri Oxman, Greg Lynn, and Robert A.
M. Stern. Taboos structure our thinking and frame our discussions. Exploring the ill-defined realm of the architectural taboo, from the hidden spaces of American life to artistic practices in postrevolutionary Iran. We are beset by unspoken rules. In articles and projects, theorists, historians, and practitioners investigate contemporary and historical instances of taboo, aiming to uncover its function in the pedagogy and praxis of architecture.
A taboo is a restriction invented and agreed upon by a social group that maintains stability disciplinary order but also induces transgressions the possibility of an avant-garde.
Perspecta 44: Domain
Each of these shifts poses dramatic changes to how we conceive of boundaries, physically and conceptually. Dana tomlin, stuart Wrede Used book in Good Condition. Yet the defining boundaries of the discipline are often contested. Michael Rock, C. Perspecta 44's multidisciplinary scope, with contributors ranging from legal scholars to software engineers, asserts a new set of coordinates for mapping the terms of architectural production.
Architects can and often must embody a spectrum of characters in their practice: politician, physicist, artist, entrepreneur. Essays, interviews, and projects explore an expanded vocabulary of spatial practice. Architecture exists in the public sphere and is the product of collective work and knowledge. Since “architecture” has become a metonym for increasingly distributed persons and practices, accessed, how―and for whom―do we establish its domain?To trace the evolving meanings of the term “domain” is to trace the changing ways that space has been defined, and constructed: from domain as a territory of private ownership or legal control; to the egalitarian promise of public domain; to an Internet site situated within an infinitely dispersed global network.
. By embracing the inherent complexities of domain, program, perspecta 44 seeks to overcome the architect's conventional repertoire―Site, and User as an expanded vocabulary for spatial practice, and Client―and propose instead Field, Protocol, not without boundaries but rather abiding by the shifting logics and contours of public space.
Perspecta 45: Agency
Instead of assuming that architects can only throw up their hands in despair, the editors of this issue of Perspecta invite them to roll up their sleeves and get to work. In perspecta 45, scholars, prominent architects, and artists investigate how architects can become agents for change within their own discipline and in the world at large.
The retreat from liability, the barricade of theory, and the silos of specialization have generated a field that is risk-averse and reactive, rather than bold and active. The great depression, the fall of the berlin Wall, and Hurricane Katrina, for example, were all catalysts for architectural response and resulted in a diversification of the architect's portfolio.
Yet far too often, architects simply react to changes in the world, rather than serving as agents of change themselves. This issue of perspecta―the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America―takes a broader view, using the concept of agency to explore the future of architecture.
.
Not Interesting: On the Limits of Criticism in Architecture
Each chapter introduces its topic through an analysis of a different image, which serves to unpack the specific character of each term and its relationship to architecture. These are presented in parallel to the text and show what architecture may look like through the lens of these other terms. Not interesting proposes another set of terms and structures to talk about architecture, without requiring that it be interesting.
Used book in Good Condition.
Perspecta 46: Error
Used book in Good Condition. Perspecta 46 argues that error is part of architecture's essence: mistranslations, contradictions, happy accidents, and wicked problems pervade our systems of design and building, almost always yielding surprising aberrations. Every project deviates from its designers' expectations, and wise architects learn to anticipate, mitigate, and sometimes celebrate the errors along the way.
Essays and projects illuminate the nature of error and its creative possibilities for architecture. Architecture never goes entirely according to plan. Essays and projects illuminate error's ambiguous agency both in reality and in the architectural imagination, covering topics that range from Dante's cosmos of divine justice and Michelangelo's architectural “abuses” to Dada urbanism and the warped skyscrapers of Google Earth.
.
Points and Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City
The book's title refers to this interplay of practice and theory, evoking not only the points of activity and the paths of movement found in a contemporary city but also the points of speculation and lines of argument in theoretical discourse. Projects include the cardiff bay opera house, madrid; and White Columns Gallery, Los Angeles; the Museo del Prado, Wales; the Korean-American Museum of Art, New York.
Michael hays contributes an introductory essay; R. Organized in the form of a user's manual, it juxtaposes speculative texts outlining Allen's general principles with specific projects created by his office. Somol writes the postscript. E.
The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence Writing Architecture
But today's digitally intelligent architecture no longer looks that way. In the second digital turn, mario carpo explains that this is because the design professions are now coming to terms with a new kind of digital tools they have adopted―no longer tools for making but tools for thinking. In the early 1990s the design professions were the first to intuit and interpret the new technical logic of the digital age: digital mass-customization the use of digital tools to mass-produce variations at no extra cost has already changed the way we produce and consume almost everything, and the same technology applied to commerce at large is now heralding a new society without scale―a flat marginal cost society where bigger markets will not make anything cheaper.
But today, the unprecedented power of computation also favors a new kind of science where prediction can be based on sheer information retrieval, and form finding by simulation and optimization can replace deduction from mathematical formulas. Designers have been toying with machine thinking and machine learning for some time, and the apparently unfathomable complexity of the physical shapes they are now creating already expresses a new form of artificial intelligence, outside the tradition of modern science and alien to the organic logic of our mind.
Used book in Good Condition.