Critical dialogue: China and the West

In November, 2005, The Journal of Architecture (Volume 10, Number 5) published Criticality in between China and the West by Jianfei Zhu: there followed extensive critical responses to this paper (on the architectural web in China; an extended seminar was held at Tongji University) which are detailed at the end of this section. Published here are two commentaries submitted to The Journal of Architecture, Tao Zhu's in direct response to the original essay, and Jianfei Zhu's response to Tao Zhu.     

Holl on Hybrids

Since his 1970s Pamphlet Architecture series on American architecture, Steven Holl has exhibited a unique ability to pinpoint intersections of culture and building. To gauge exactly how this current of thought might be running through Holl's present explorations, which range from small-scale domestic homespun projects to substantial schemes in China, guest-editor Everardo Jefferson interviews Holl at his New York base. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Gathering,Disposing and the Cultivation of Judgement in Sir Henry Wotton's: The Elements of Architecture

Employing a hermeneutic approach to Sir Henry Wotton's seventeenth century text on architecture, this paper discloses the discourse on judgement that lies at its heart. Wotton's conception of judgement is Aristotelian, and refers to Aristotle's Ethics; specifically his discourses on practical reasoning, legislation and political wisdom. Addressed to the aristocratic amateur architects of Jacobean England. The Elements of Architecture seeks to provide a ‘rule’ to guide the cultivation of good judgment in architecture. Nuances of the relationship between ‘rule’ and ‘example’ in Wotton's conception of judgement are examined, highlighting a consonance with the play between logos and ethos that is characteristic of Aristotelian ethics. This play, it is argued, is crucial to Wotton's conception of both judgement and architectural making     

石牌楼的化学加固

朱氏牌楼位于山西省原平县城西北15公里处的北阳武村，始建于清代咸丰五年九月（公元1855年），是中议大夫、陕西延榆绥道加盐运使衔武芳畴奉敕为其母朱氏雕造石质节孝牌坊。朱氏牌楼由于年久失修，加上人为破坏和风雨侵蚀，石头表面都有不同程度的风化剥落。屋顶构件摇摇欲坠，石檐下垂、断裂，下层南次楼前后外角塌落，明楼前檐二块飞椽从檐桁处断裂掉落。根据上述情况对朱氏牌楼进行化学加固维修，本文介绍各部位的修缮施工情况。     

Education for Change: An Experiment

Abstract

When Robert Venturi began writing Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in 1962, Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) was the subject of dinner-table conversation across the country. Apart from Jacobs's direct influence, among the parallels that emerged from their Townscape affiliations and other interests, the concept of complexity stands out, with Venturi's conception echoing Jacobs's historic introduction of complexity science into architectural and urban theory. While Venturi did not seek to extend the scientific research put forward by Jacobs, favoring instead the complexities suggested by gestalt theory and New Criticism, he cited similar scientific sources and derived similar principles for urbanism, as revealed by his Copley Square project of 1966.     

“I Will Try My Best to Make It Worth It”: Robert Venturi's Road to Rome

Robert Venturi's Rome Prize fellowship (1954–56) is a familiar, pivotal episode in his early career. But why did he want to go to the American Academy in the early 1950s? Venturi approached his fellowship with rare determination at a time when modernism made the Rome Prize's architectural relevance unclear. What made him certain this opportunity would be the key to his success, and how did this influence the book he published a decade later? As Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture marks its fiftieth anniversary, clarifying why Venturi valued the Rome Prize further illuminates his views on history, context, and meaningful design.     

Historicizing Pedagogy: A Critique of Kostof's A History of Architecture

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the practical problem of shaping a “History of Architecture” in a way that expands the dominant canon while acknowledging the complex and difficult realities of articulating difference. Through a critical analysis of Spiro Kostof's A History of Architecture and an exposition of the shortcomings of Kostof's attempts to discuss “alternative” histories, this paper investigates how architectural history textbooks could play an important role in initiating a broader, critical teaching of history.     

Reinventing Reality: Reconstructing Architecture

This article is based on a paper originally given as keynote address at the Ontario Association of Architects Convention, Toronto, March, 1988. Three issues are explored in this article: the historical background to the present situation in architecture and architectural education, with special reference to the work of Christian Norberg-Schulz, Robert Venturi, Colin Rowe, Bruno Zevi, Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves; the value of focussing again on the agenda of Norberg-Schulz's Intentions in Architecture (1962) as being a more reliable guide than the scattered opinions offered by other architects; a strategy for redesigning architectural education to reflect Norberg-Schulz's fundamental concerns about the role of architecture and architects, offering an integrated curriculum based upon a vertical rather than a horizontal structure of learning.     

Post-Event Cities

Planning ‘events’ such as the 19th-century foreign concessions in the sink ports and the late 20th-century Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have proved an important catalyst for development in China. Professor Zhi Wenjun , chief editor of Time + Architecture magazine, and architect Liu Yuyang look at how the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2010 Shanghai World Expo are redefining urbanism in China and raising significant questions about the sustainability of the post-event city. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Birds Must Be Eliminated: Air Architecture and the Planetary Reenactment of the Modern Void

This article analyzes Air Architecture, a work the artist Yves Klein developed with the help of architects Werner Ruhnau and Claude Parent, with the aim of situating it as an alternative intervention in the urban debates of the late 1950s. It reads Air Architecture in relation to the procedures that Klein used in his artistic work to understand how the project accomplishes two main goals: first, to highlight the strategic value that emptiness and the resulting void spaces had for urban modernism, and second, to critically examine the validity of that strategy in facing the emergence of a global urban society and the social transformation from industrialism to consumerism during the 1950s.     

MAXXI,Rome: Zaha Hadid Architects

Mark Garcia , editor of The Diagrams in Architecture (John Wiley & Sons, 2010), one of the first significant accounts of the diagram in architectural design, provides a unique insight into the diagrammatic form of Zaha Hadid Architects' new MAXXI museum in Rome. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cross the River by Touching the Stones: Chinese Architecture and Political Economy in the Reform Era: 1978-2008

China's Open Door Policy and economic development set in motion in 1978 can be regarded as the triumph of pragmatism over theory - specifically Chairman Mao's brand of Marxist theory. Tao Zhu traces the progress of reform over the last 30 years, and its impact on Chinese architectural culture. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Architect's Handbook of Professional Practice

Abstract

Book reviewed in this article:

Architecture of the Everyday Edited by Steven Harris and Deborah Berke

A Hut of One's Own: Life Outside the Circle of Architecture Ann Cline

Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster Mike Davis     

Charles Jencks and the historiography of Post-Modernism

The history of Post-Modern Architecture was to a large extent tied to the name of Charles Jencks, who played an operative role in promoting the movement, much like his predecessor Sigfried Giedion had done for Modern Architecture in the 1930s. Like Giedion, Jencks was a prolific writer and a protagonist of a radical change in the direction of architecture. In the thirty-five year period from the appearance of his first book in 1971, Jencks published more than twenty four works, not counting the ones he edited or co-edited. And like Giedion, Jencks also attempted to reach a synthesis of opposites, by including disparate examples within his original ‘canon’, extending it in its last revision to include works by Eisenman and Tschumi, as Giedion had done by the inclusion of Aalto and Utzon in his later editions of Space, Time and Architecture. This paper will discuss Jencks's historiography of Post-Modernism by looking at the seminal texts that he wrote from 1970 until 2007, beginning with Architecture 2000 and ending with Critical Modernism. The main focus of this article is critically to examine his major work, the Language of Post Modernism, and to trace its evolution as a means of evaluating his contribution to the development of this movement, as well as to architectural historiography.     

北京文物建筑设计咨询公司

曲阜大庄琉璃瓦有悠久的历史,公元1381年建厂开始烧制琉璃瓦。山东的一些庙宇均用曲阜大庄朱氏烧制的琉璃瓦件和陶瓦件。大庄烧制的琉璃上有“裕盛公”或“曲阜裕盛公”图章的戳记。新中国建立以后大庄琉璃得到了较大的发展。党的十一届三中全会以后,大庄琉璃厂通过采用先进科学技术,对琉璃制作进行改造,成为山东最大的琉璃制品厂。     

Sir Banister Fletcher: pillar to post–colonial readings

Looking at world architecture in a post-colonial light, what is the possibility for a ‘world history of architecture’? This question is approached through thoughts on east-west plunderings in architectural history and in the strange double image of world history portrayed in Banister Fletcher's A History of Architecture , which (in all but the earliest and very latest editions) divided the world into ‘The Historical Styles’ and ‘The Non-historical Styles’.

Resonating throughout this text, which began as a paper to a conference on ‘Globalisation and Representation’,1 1. This essay is enlarged from a paper given to the international conference Globalisation and Representation, University of Brighton, UK, 11th to 13th March, 2005. is the knowledge that the author has been commissioned to undertake a completely new text for the next edition of Banister Fletcher, for which work started in November, 2005. Pointers to how that project might proceed include its becoming a dual work, aware of the unspoken space between:

— a narrative with stress on points of cultural intersection and articulation of hybridity (after Homi Bhabha) rather than on the ‘constituent’ as opposed to ‘transitory’ facts of architectural history (after Siegfried Giedion), and:

— an archive of illustrated places, itself a social construct but one which recognises the role of viewer/reader in its [re]construction—for images are there to be plundered and misread, which is always their fate in the hands of creative designers.     

一种现实(主义)--读朱涛工作室近期两个作品有感

中国近十年来巨大的现实变化,呼唤建筑师们寻找新的关于真实性的标准,重新界定建筑与社会现实的关系,并建立新的语言规范。在这种时代背景下,朱涛工作室近期的两个作品体现了朝向这个方向的自觉努力。     

朱启钤学术遗产研究的可视化回顾与展望 # ——纪念朱启钤先生诞辰 150 周年

朱启钤是著名的古建筑学家、工艺美术家与实业家,于晚清至民国身居要职,对北京城之建设、营造学社之创办影响深远。本文以可视化知识图谱分析回顾了学界基于朱启钤学术遗产的相关探究之况,并结合中国古建筑领域的热点研究主题,展望基于朱启钤学术遗产的研究之趋,以期先生严谨踏实与深入实际的研究风气继续传承与发扬,并进一步推动我国传统文化的保护与发展。