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A House and its Atmosphere is a meditative essay about the experience of designing and building a house of one's own. Told in seventy black and white photographs and a series of narrative excursions, architect Ben Jacks reflects on a lifetime of influences as he reveals the personal nature of inhabiting a place at the edge of a tidal cove on an island in Maine. In the book he quietly advocates for the simple logic and modest ease of direct experience and an observational perspective in architecture.In chapters about imagining, walking, and designing Ben Jacks reflects on the essence of architectural experience, describing what it is like to begin to make momentous decisions, arguing that aesthetic experience is the result of how one has learned to see. Memory, family, nature, relationships, and work inform design at every step.A House and its Atmosphere is a grounded story about designing and building a small work of architecture. With students of architecture and amateur builders in mind, Ben Jacks makes a case for design informed by theories of place-identification, detail, and craft. The book is a primary source and a chronicle of experience of radical empiricism. As such it offers a kind of conceptual tool kit for those interested in thinking about the processes of architecture, designing, and placemaking.The book is a fresh and valuable contribution to the shelter memoir genre, from a professional architect's perspective.Praise for A House and its AtmosphereFrom the time of the author's pacings across the future building's site to his savorings of the house's several atmospheres, the ideas and chapters of this marvelously written book were imagined, discussed, sketched, and constructed in ways that intertwine places and patterns of life. Both the text and the house reveal architecture's power to enrich existence by giving dimension and expression to a basic human desire: being at home. Atmosphere, a topic with unmatched currency today, is rendered nearly palpable on these pages and in these photographs, communicating not only emotions-the necessary but limited topic of most atmosphere discussions in architecture today-but also things to think about: the interdependence of culture and ecology, the conditions under which craft still has a place in architecture, the aesthetic dimension of everyday life, and so on. The book is unhesitatingly personal, but not for that reason private. Instead, its accessible prose and immediacy engage central topics in architectural education and practice: design, theory, and construction technology. Professors and professionals will find the book radical in a simple way: it penetrates to ground on which good lectures and projects are constructed-pre-professional life. Here is an eloquent, optimistic, and profoundly humane book.David LeatherbarrowProfessor and Chair of the Graduate Group in ArchitectureUniversity of Pennsylvania
From the Introduction Como's Asilo D'Infanzia Sant'Elia occupies a unique position in the oeuvre of Giuseppe Terragni. Executed between his two most celebrated works, the Casa del Fascio of 1932, and the Casa Giuliani Frigerio of 1939, Terragni was possibly at the apex of his architectural prowess, via imagination and creativity, at its execution. The building itself is a physical manifestation encompassing Terrangni's seminal ideas and theories on architecture and urbanism. [...] The Asilo, a public nursery school, was a relatively modest project, situated in a working class quarter of Como, just south of the city walls. Its humble location alone rendered the project a departure from the conspicuously public site of the Casa del Fascio, located directly behind the Duomo in the center of town. [...] It is one of the few projects that utilize all of Terragni's architectural canons. It remains the only built project that is neither a casa del fascio, nor a tomb or residential project. The Asilo remains a building largely ignored by both the academy and the architecture profession. However, this humble yet monumental building holds within it a culmination of the lessons and ideas of one of the modern architectural masters of the twentieth century. Careful analysis of this building reveals moments where architecture and meaning come together with both subtlety and consequence. [...] >What Others Say About the Book: In Rationalism and Poetry we finally get an update to the voluminous Schumacher works [from the early 1990s] and, this time, rendered from an architect's perspective. Where Schumacher conducted a historian's reconstruction, Andrews draws for us an architect's analysis. He minutely examines, and often diagrams, the corpus of each building-not in relationship to history but relative to the bodies of other buildings both historic and contemporary. In this concise volume, each chapter becomes a frame for considering one aspect of Terragni's enigmatic design. >As pointed out by Igor Stravinsky, in the first page of his book Poetics of Music, "poetic" is a word related to the concept of "making", of "doing". Brian Andrews [...] uses the tool of drawing to dissect the Asilo Sant'Elia, unveiling the compositional principles, the design strategies and the hidden geometries, recognizing the parts and elements, exposing the mechanisms of this particular "machine for teaching and learning". At the same time the author's reflections on the urban issues [...], Terragni's proximity to the world of art (Radice, of course, and the other members of the "Astrattismo Comasco" movement, with a fertile cross-pollination between painting and architecture), the reference to the Italian architectural tradition (Michelangelo, the reinterpretation of classical architectural themes), complete Andrews' lively and affectionate portrait of Terragni, an architect who preferred to make architecture (with a strong and personal poetic), instead of being a theoretician. Patrizio M. Martinelli, Oxford, Ohio
In Walkscapes Francesco Careri explores the act of walking, taking a deeper look at three important moments of passage in art history-all absolutely familiar to historians-in which an experience linked to walking represented a turning point. These are the passages from Dada to Surrealism (1921-1924), from the Lettrist International to the Situationist International (1956-1957), and from Minimal Art to Land Art (1966-1967). By analyzing these episodes we simultaneously obtain a history of the roamed city that goes from the banal city of Dada to the entropic city of Robert Smithson, passing through the unconscious and oneiric city of the Surrealists and the playful and nomadic city of the Situationists. What the rovings of the artists discover is a liquid city, an amniotic fluid where the spaces of the elsewhere take spontaneous form, an urban archipelago in which to navigate by drifting. A city in which the spaces of staying are the islands in the great sea formed by the space of going. Fundamentally, for Careri, the act of walking-although it does not constitute a physical construction of a space-implies a transformation of a place and its meanings. The mere physical presence of humans in an unmapped space, as well as the variations of perceptions they register while crossing it, already constitute forms of transformation of the landscape that-without leaving tangible signs-culturally modify the meaning of space and therefor the space itself. From the Introduction by Gilles A. Tiberghien In Walkscapes, Francesco Careri does more than write a book on walking considered as a critical tool, an obvious way of looking at landscape, and as a form of emergence of a certain kind of art and architecture. [...H]e offers us a rereading of the history of art in terms of the practice of walking (such as he conceives of it), from the erection of the menhirs, through Egypt and Ancient Greece, up to the protagonists of Land Art. [...] The idea suffusing the book as a whole, and which the author convincingly describes [...] is that walking has always generated architecture and landscape, and that this practice, all but totally forgotten by architects themselves, has been reactivated by poets, philosophers and artists capable of seeing precisely what is not there, in order to make 'something' be there. [...] Such an enterprise has a genuine 'political' stake-in the primal sense of the word-a way of keeping art, urbanism and the social project at an equal, and sufficient, distance from each other in order to effectively illuminate these empty spaces we have such need of to live well. From the Foreword by Christopher Flynn Careri traces a genealogy of walking across the twentieth century here, but the aggregate does more than that. This is a smart book, and more importantly, a useful one for those interested in what it means to walk through the banal cityscapes and suburbs of a world whose relationship to urbanism is once more in the midst of radical change.
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