1 comments about Summerour: Architecture of Permanence, Scale, and Proportion.

1. The work of Keith Summerour is a great example of a modern day use of traditional proportion, scale, and precedence. The design concepts portrayed in his architecture bring to mind exquisite works of architecture built over 100 years ago. Keith Summerour is able to bring old world techniques into play in the 21st century and is therefore able to acheive a level of detail that distinguishes him from the majority of architects practicing today.

1 comments about Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture 1750-1950.

1. Peter Collins is one of the more erudite architectural writers you will ever come across. This book was published in 1965, barely pre-dating the publication of Venturi's influential "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture." Now that I've read both, if I had to recommend one, I would recommend Peter Collins. While Venturi attacks Modernism by simply saying "its not complicated enough, I like complex architecture (and therefore you should too)" Collins goes much, much more in-depth.
   
   The various ideas architects have desperately flung around since 1750 are all traced, dissected, and put into their social contexts. Rationalism, Romanticism, Ecclecticism, Historicism/Archeology, Classics versus Goths, the Moderns, the various analogies to other fields architects have attempted - it is all discussed. The book stops at 1950, but this does not detract from its relevance in 2004, as we can see that architects have continued to explore connections with other genres in order to create their various forms. It is important to realize what we're doing and if it has ever be done before - and - it all pretty much has been. Not to despair though, Collins keeps it an interesting read, if you do not chuckle at his wit every now and then, then your sense of humor is dead. It is important to read this critically, and I found myself only very occasionally disagreeing.
   
   One of my favorite chapters, which is almost a six-page long joke, is entitled "Architecture and Gastronomy." (and yet - it is not a joke!)
   
   The only criticism of the book is perhaps his less-intensive use of illustrations than he might have. Those that he does include however are well-chosen.
   
   A very closely related work to this is J. Mordaunt Crook's 1987 "The Dilemma of Style: Architectural Ideas from the Picturesque to the Post Modern." Crook makes a book that attempts to do essentially the same thing, but has a slightly diferent perspective. I mention it because I believe these two, Crook and Collins, should be read by any architect worth their salt.
   
   Kenneth Frampton writes a fairly interesting introduction to the 1998 edition, hopefully this book will continue to have stamina for future generations of architects.

No comments about 30 60 90 09: Regarding Public Space.

No comments about Steven Ehrlich Architects.

2 comments about The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable: In Pursuit of Architectural Meaning.

1. As Robert Harbison puts it: "It all begins with gardens, the most trusting and innocent of human constructions. Yet, inspiring them, the supposed innocence of gardens, one is tempted to call it, for they are places where the undeclared war between architecture and its antitype, nature, between growth and the ordering impulse, is presented in delicious harmony. They are places which flirt with allowing art to disappear, which seem to embrace principles hostile to form of any kind --irregularity, change, and urge to destroy. This is the hubris of gardens, to think that they could really improve on or collect the unruliness of natural forces and make a scene of it, like a play in which the actors were all wild animals." (The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable)
   
   Gardens represent the dynamic tension between the forces of chaos and the forces of order...thereby creating a pocket of order within a sea of change; the edge of chaos, a metaphor for Life itself.
   
   Harbison also delves into those other "nonessential" forms of the built environment such as ruins and monuments. In so doing, he crosses the line from pure art history or architecture into the realms of psychogeography. As Guy Debord puts it "Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The adjective psychogeographical, retaining a rather pleasing vagueness, can thus be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and even more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery."
   
   Harbison waxes toward the poetical when entering into descriptions, often vague, of various points along an architectural amble. He approaches the necessity and purpose of ruins as a basis of self-consumption and a reminder of mortality. He addresses himself to monuments, which are concrete reminders of the id and the ego. He posits the dynamic metaphor of gardens. Ultimately he arrives at the border of the unreal, fantastic and mythical architecture, what he regards as the "unbuildable."
   
   In many ways Harbison's journey mirrors that of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an anonymnous book printed by Aldus Manutius in 1499. The text of the book is written in a bizarre Latinate Italian. Its story consists of precious and elaborate descriptions of scenes involving the title character, Poliphilo (the lover of Many Things), as he wanders a sort of bucolic-classical dreamland in search of his love Polia (Many Things).
   
   As Harbison may have noted himself, sardonically, "The imaginary is that which tends to become real."



2. This is a good book of 18th century architecture, it has many excellent scetches of ideas held by the architects of the time.

No comments about American Building: The Environmental Forces That Shape It.

No comments about Architecture and Power in the Ancient Andes: The Archaeology of Public Buildings (New Studies in Archaeology).

No comments about Irigaray for Architects (Thinkers for Architects).

No comments about Artificial Light: A Narrative Inquiry into the Nature of Abstraction, Immediacy, and Other Architectural Fictions.

No comments about The Interior Dimension: A Theoretical Approach to Enclosed Space.