London is a living architectural exhibition. This handy pocket guide: * aids navigation of the city’s greatest sights with a clear map-based format * features more than 260 buildings, with full notes and references * provides a superb full colour photographic record of the capital London's Contemporary Architecture is a practical and highly illustrated guide to the best modern buildings. Now in its fourth edition, this location-based book has been fully updated to cover the latest additions to the London skyline. This guide looks at London district by district. It identifies the buildings most worth visiting and offers essential information about the selected architectural gems. Packed with fascinating informative commentary and useful location maps, it also includes examples of London's finer older buildings that are found near to the key contemporary sites.

A lively tour of Vancouver's finest and internationally acclaimed architecture from the past 20 years. Illustrated with 160 full-colour photographs and 40 architects' drawings, and accompanied by critical writings that position Vancouver in the broader context of urban development, this new book in the series takes readers on a visual tour of the city's most important recent design accomplishments. It evokes a generation of building that represents a period of unprecedented growth, beginning with Expo 86 and continuing through the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. Drawing on the success of A Guidebook to Contemporary Architecture in Montreal, this book features buildings and public spaces grouped by areas, with maps so that a visitor can create walking tours, including downtown Vancouver, Richmond, the North Shore, Kitsilano, the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. The convenient size and format, including an index, allows a visitor to put this guidebook in a pocket and go.

An important resource for scholars of contemporary art and architecture, this volume considers contemporary art that takes architecture as its subject. Concentrated on works made since 1990, Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility is the first to take up this topic in a sustained and explicit manner and the first to advance the idea that contemporary art functions as a form of architectural history, theory, and analysis. Over the course of fourteen essays by both emerging and established scholars, this volume examines a diverse group of artists in conjunction with the vernacular, canonical, and fantastical structures engaged by their work. I? Manglano-Ovalle, Matthew Barney, Monika Sosnowska, Pipo Nguyen-duy, and Paul Pfeiffer are among those considered, as are the compelling questions of architecture's relationship to photography, the evolving legacy of Mies van der Rohe, the notion of an architectural unconscious, and the provocative concepts of the unbuilt and the unbuildable. Through a rigorous investigation of these issues, Contemporary Art About Architecture calls attention to the fact that art is now a vital form of architectural discourse. Indeed, this phenomenon is both pervasive and, in its individual incarnations, compelling - a reason to think again about the entangled histories of architecture and art.

Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture revolutionized the understanding of modernism in architecture, pushing back the sense of its origin from the early twentieth century to the 1750s and thus placing architectural thought within the a broader context of Western intellectual history. This new edition of Peter Collins's ground-breaking study includes all seventy-two illustrations of the original hard cover edition, which has been out of print since 1967, and restores the large format.

Modern Architecture in Historic Cities illustrates why France has been so successful in combining conservation and modernity, and points to important lessons for other countries which can be drawn from the French experience. Beginning with an empirical review of particular events which have affected attitudes towards heritage in France, this book highlights the continuity in French thinking and the longstanding role of the French government as patron and leader. Planning, conservation and design control legislation are examined, highlighting the range of instruments available to government in order to influence results and enhance the role of the architectural profession.

This project is born out of similar questions and discussions on the topic of organicism emergent from two critical strands regarding the discourse of organic self-generation: one dealing with the problem of stopping in the design processes in history, and the other with the organic legacy of style in the nineteenth century as a preeminent form of aesthetic ideology. The epistemologies of self-generation outlined by enlightenment and critical philosophy provided the model for the discursive formations of modern urban planning and architecture. The form of the organism was thought to calibrate modernism’s infinite extension. The architectural organicism of today does not take on the language of the biological sciences, as they did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but rather the image of complex systems, be they computational/informational, geo/ecological, or even ontological/aesthetic ‘networks’. What is retained from the modernity of yesterday is the ideology of endless self-generation. Revisiting such a topic feels relevant now, in a time when the idea of endless generation is rendered more suspect than ever, amid an ever increasing speed and complexity of artificial intelligence (AI) networks. The essays collected in this book offer a variety of critiques of the modernist idea of endless growth in the fields of architecture, literature, philosophy, and the history of science. They range in scope from theoretical and speculative to analytic and critical and from studies of the history of modernity to reflections of our contemporary world. Far from advocating a return to the romantic forms of nineteenth-century naturphilosophie, this project focuses on probing organicism for new forms of critique and emergent subjectivities in a contemporary, 'post'-pandemic constellation of neo-naturalism in design, climate change, complex systems, and information networks. This book will be of interest to a broad range of researchers and professionals in architecture and art history, historians of science, visual artists, and scholars in the humanities more generally.

Writing Architecture in Modern Italy tells the history of an intellectual group connected to the small but influential Italian Einaudi publishing house between the 1930s and the 1950s. It concentrates on a diverse group of individuals, including Bruno Zevi, an architectural historian and politician; Giulio Carlo Argan, an art historian; Italo Calvino, a fiction writer; Giulio Einaudi, a publisher; and Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese, both writers and translators. Linking architectural history and historiography within a broader history of ideas, this book proposes four different methods of writing history, defining historiographical genres, modes, and tones of writing that can be applied to history writing to analyze political and social moments in time. It identifies four writing genres: myths, chronicles, history, and fiction, which became accepted as forms of multiple postmodern historical stories after 1957. An important contribution to the architectural debate, Writing Architecture in Modern Italy will appeal to those interested in the history of architecture, history of ideas, and architectural education.

Somewhere between 1910 and 1970, architecture changed. Now that modern architecture has become familiar (sometimes celebrated, sometimes vilified), it's hard to imagine how novel it once seemed. Expensive buildings were transformed from ornamental fancies which referred to the classical and medieval pasts into strikingly plain reflections of novel materials, functions, and technologies. Modern architecture promised the transformation of cities from overcrowded conurbations characterised by packed slums and dirty industries to spacious realms of generous housing and clean mechanised production set in parkland. At certain times and in certain cultures, it stood for the liberation of the future from the past. This Very Short Introduction explores the technical innovations that opened-up the cultural and intellectual opportunities for modern architecture to happen. Adam Sharr shows how the invention of steel and reinforced concrete radically altered possibilities for shaping buildings, transforming what architects were able to imagine, as did new systems for air conditioning and lighting. While architects weren't responsible for these innovations, they were among the first to appreciate how they could make the world look and feel different, in connection with imagery from other spheres like modern art and industrial design. Focusing on a selection of modern buildings that also symbolize bigger cultural ideas, Sharr discusses what modern architecture was like, why it was like that, and how it was imagined. Considering the work of some of the historians and critics who helped to shape modern architecture, he demonstrates how the field owes as much to its storytellers as to its buildings. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

More than any other building type in the twentieth century, the hospital was connected to transformations in the health of populations and expectations of lifespan. From the scale of public health to the level of the individual, the architecture of the modern hospital has reshaped knowledge about health and disease and perceptions of bodily integrity and security. However, the rich and genuinely global architectural history of these hospitals is poorly understood and largely forgotten. This book explores the rapid evolution of hospital design in the twentieth century, analysing the ways in which architects and other specialists reimagined the modern hospital. It examines how the vast expansion of medical institutions over the course of the century was enabled by new approaches to architectural design and it highlights the emerging political conviction that physical health would become the cornerstone of human welfare.

The importance of protecting significant buildings from decay and destruction would seem to be undeniable. Yet whilst the majority of buildings of merit constructed before the Second World War have been highlighted as worthy of protection there is much indifference, and in some cases hostility towards many important post-war buildings. These deserve to receive wider formal recognition but in many cases continue to be mistreated or even demolished.This book examines many of the philosophical and practical issues surrounding the conservation of modern buildings and also the problems faced by building practitioners in dealing with buildings constructed in a wider range of styles and materials than at any other time. Climate change in particular has forced change in the way in which we think about buildings, with the pressures to address issues of energy efficiency becoming more urgent and likely to have consequences that may alter the perceived architectural and historic interest of modern and traditional buildings alike.