Architecture's Pretexts

Spaces of Translation

Aarati Kanekar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317610007
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Architettura generale

The aim of this book is to expose readers to architecture's pretexts that include literary narratives, film, theatre, painting, music, and ritual, as a bridge between diverse intellectual territories and architecture. It introduces a selection of seminal modern and contemporary architectural projects, their situation within the built environment, and their intellectual and formal situation/context as pretexts and design paradigms. Connections between diverse bodies of information will be cultivated along with the ability to posit consequential relationships for the production of architecture. Architecture's Pretexts seeks to cultivate a vision for architecture that sponsors operative links between the discipline of architecture and those outside of architecture.

Exploring the works of various architects including Guiseppe Terragni, Peter Eisenman, Peter Zumthor, Perry Kulper and Smout Allen, and Rem Koolhaas, this book provides the framework to understanding architecture through the lens of art. Key concepts discussed are: allegories, diagrams, form, material, montage, movement, musical ratios, narrative sequence and representation. A valuable tool, with over 75 black and white illustrations, for students and professionals interested in interdisciplinary methods of design thinking.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Illustration credits
• 1 Introduction: On Translation and the Spatial Construction of Meaning
• 2 The Space of Poetic Allegory: Translating the Divine Comedy – Terragni’s Danteum as a Study in the Projection of Meaning Across Symbolic Forms
• 3 Space of Narrative Structure: The Shaping of Romeo and Juliet – Eisenman’s “Moving Arrows, Eros and Other Errors”
• 4 Space of Sound and Music: Architecture as a Performative Instrument – Zumthor’s Sound Box
• 5 Space of Representation: The Generative Maps of Perry Kulper and Smout Allen
• 6 Space of Montage: Movement, Assemblage, and Appropriation in Koolhaas’ Kunsthal
• Bibliography
• Index