Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, high-quality, modern edition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction on technical drawing and drafting.
It is "A step-by-step method for student draughtsmen, together with details of construction and design. Sizes which are more or less standard, and the ranges through which they are generally used for such details as doors, stairs, flues for chimneys, et cetera, are given, as are also the way these and other details are ordinarily shown on plans and other drawings.
While these are intended to teach the student in the drawing of the plans, to quite a large class of people who are building or about to build homes for themselves, these will be of equal value as showing just what is meant by these details on the plans they are studying. Plates show the usual types of window box construction, gutters and cornices. The similarity of plans and the types into which they fall are shown. A series of plates show the "Orders of Architecture," Doric, Ionic, etc.
Excellent lettering is shown all through the plates. Score: 5. Emmons considers drawing practices in the Renaissance and up to the first half of the twentieth century. Combining systematic analysis across time with historical explication presents the development of hand-drawing, while also grounding early modern practices in their historical milieu.
By documenting some of the ways of thinking through practices of architectural handdrawing, it describes how practices can enrich the ethical imagination of the architect. This book would be beneficial for academics, practitioners, and students of architecture, particularly those who are interested in the history and significance of hand-drawing and technical drawing.
But we also have to remember that the modernist architecture of the west — especially during the era of McCarthyism — tried to present itself in opposition to the emerging architecture of the Soviet Bloc Popescu If for architects within the Soviet Bloc, architecture was a tool to solve social problems and establish and maintain political order, for architects from the west it very quickly became a tool to flaunt technological superiority.
This technological progress became a driving force for western architecture. However, even then — as this debate proved — the well-being of citizens and egalitarianism in society was an important part of political discourse. What if society does not really exist in the United Kingdom any more? This is true today, more than ever, because the modern university has become above all a place to acquire specific skills needed in the labour market.
Employability has become a keyword. This relation- ship between what students learn, and the world outside also has an ethi- cal dimension. We need to remember that students take loans to study and therefore the duty of the university and tutors is to teach students the skills and provide them with the knowledge that will enable them to repay this monetary debt.
Therefore, the fundamental question arises: is the existing political and economic context in the United Kingdom a place for progres- sive architecture? In other words: is radical, socially sensitive, egalitarian and democratic architecture at all possible in the neo-liberal city? Is it possible to teach this kind of architecture in contemporary Britain?
This is a question that must be answered positively. Of course, the scale of radicalism, social sensitiv- ity and so on will depend on the socio-political context, but if the neo-liberals can use the crisis to promote their ideas, even in a situation of deepening crisis, then should not other parties also use a similar tactic?
The starting point of such progressive architecture is neither in sharp opposition to the existing regime nor to the existing model of the university no institution will support activities questioning its legibility but rather, it requires the expansion of the field of discussion.
The trick is how not to change the University into another type of consultancy, but to keep the openness and ability to follow the prevailing socio-political forces and also to shape the future. Chipperfield Non-mainstream architecture and the post capitalist city There is a strong tradition of architecture that can be defined as non- mainstream, its most famous representative being perhaps the Rural Studio, but of course there are many similar groups and institutions. There are several reasons for that and one of the most important is the fact that this architecture is targeted at the poorest parts of society and must necessarily be cheap and relatively easy to construct.
The other difference is that modernism aspired to become the mainstream practice, not simply an alternative. The most important achievement of CIAM was to put socially commit- ted, egalitarian architecture at the centre of mainstream discourse.
This is also a critical challenge for contemporary architects. Is it not this similar to the anti-bureaucratic agenda of contempo- rary conservative governments? Where more sophisticated bureaucratic? The city is a social structure, but it is very different from simple communi- ties such as the family or a clan.
Neither does it possess the seductive power of the nation. The contemporary city — not a Polis with several thousand citizens, but rather a metropolis with hundreds of thousands or millions of people — is a network of relationships, interests and institutions, something extremely complicated, which cannot be restored quickly and easily.
If the management structure of such a complex organism is dissolved even partially , what remains and how can it be rebuilt?
If individual survival is what counts above all in a post-crisis post-apocalyptic? And yet, something — at least here and there — is starting to change.
Groups of urban activists continue to appear, trying to rebuild the ideas of urban community. They are different people with different political beliefs and a variety of aims. Because today the city is a resource — of people, buildings, land — fed upon by huge sharks, our brave activists are trying to transform cities from resources into autonomous entities.
But how to transform self-organizing groups of enthusiasts into a mature social structure? How can a group of students planting shrubs recreate the subjectivity of a city? Although we can quite easily imagine the end of the world, it seems we just cannot imagine the beginning of a new one.
Architecture beyond design Please allow me to make a personal digression. My father was an architect who never really worked for large corporations, neither for private investors. Throughout his life, he tried to work for groups of people, mostly parishes and local communities. The most interesting from this point of view was a period of several years of his life when he worked almost exclusively for a small town, numbering just over 10, residents.
He designed a school, interiors and extension of three kindergartens, a centre for the elderly resi- dents and other similar objects. All these buildings served the local commu- nity, all were ordered by the local community and funded by them. He became a strong part of the kind of plexus, which worked to improve the qual- ity of life and social cohesion of the town. I would say that if one defines a role of an architect as someone who designs buildings, my father could easily be replaced in the network.
However, when he died, no one took his place. Indeed, for some time the community continued to invest in buildings of social infrastructure, but after a while this interest ceased to exist.
From this story, one can draw two lessons. First, that progressive architecture on a larger scale may arise only when it has significant social and political forces behind it. Second, that architecture as the skill of designing buildings is of the same — or of even less — importance as architecture as an element of the socio- economic and political plexus.
Just as commercially minded architects spend a lot of time creating intricate social network links to sustain funding from the elite, progressive architects must in the same way build broad coalitions of progressive social and political forces in order to be able to design socially responsive archi- tecture.
In his latest book he writes: Protection of a small part of territory — that of designed buildings — has allowed others to claim the larger networks. Now is the time to step over the self-defined boundaries of the profession and share in that expensive spatial field, or more particularly to act as spatial agents. Awan et al. This is one way that architecture should be understood: the process of creating a network which enables the construction of a building.
How to teach and what is progressive architecture There is an ongoing debate about the funding of British universities, which is obviously part of the wider debate in the western world concerning the nature of the contemporary university.
From J. However, one aspect remains the same: the university was and still is a part of the socio-political realm. British universities have always claimed to be autonomous yet that auton- omy was and is limited by political context Cowart The white paper on higher education, The Future of Higher Education Department for Education and Skills , published before the current coalition government came to power, expresses the current socio-political context in which British universities have to operate.
Jens-Christian Smeby describes different studies on the relationship between teaching and research going back to the Humboldtian University. Nowadays, a postmodern approach understands truth as something constructed, not found. As Smeby points out, the contemporary relationship between research and teaching depends on many factors — such as the level of study and field of science, to highlight two of the most obvious.
Social science and architecture definitely has a social science component could be considered as a potentially challenging field where, together, student and tutor construct the truth or body of knowledge Hattie and Marsh However, architecture also combines different disciplines, including, for example, a very strong engineering component, firmly connected with a prac- tical and pragmatic approach to studying. Currently, there is a strong ambition to move towards more socially engaged aspects.
There is an interesting contrast between conti- nental, profession-oriented, technical architectural education and the much more conceptual, artistic education in the majority of but obviously not all British architectural schools, where the practicalities of architecture are ignored and regarded as something almost disgusting. However, from a political point of view, both the paths seem to be impotent. It might teach how to solve the problem, but it is not able to question the problem itself.
Conceptual architecture is politically and economically on the neo-liberal side of the spectrum. It can only engage with fantasies created by developers; it is able to produce an image, whilst completely ignoring socio-economic reality.
The Master of Architecture programme at Plymouth goes even further — engagement with projects outside academia aims to conceptualize particular design solutions into the wider context of our current failing neo-liberal socio-economic model. Solving problems is not enough; fixing some urban flaws cannot be an aim of an academic programme.
The specificity of the programme was defined thus: Six years ago, Illinois native Bob Brown became the director of the Master of Architecture. Brown gave the programme a very strong char- acter of social responsibility. Second year students began to study sites outside the UK, typically in cities experi- encing rapid social and spatial change. What distinguishes the M.
One can imagine a single progressive client wanting to build one progressive build- ing. But it is impossible to build part of the city whilst ignoring the socio- economical, political and cultural context of the project. Have no doubts: on such a scale architecture is political.
At the scale of the city, it becomes clear that each design decision reinforces specific groups, specific interests and weakens others. It does not prejudge what those choices are; it is just that there must be some. Their strategies tried to produce autonomous zones rather than hacking the existing system, finding voids and cracks to be explored and used instead of entering into open conflict.
The following descriptions of projects give an indication of how this approach was utilized. One of the most fascinat- ing proposals was for a pirate wastewater treatment plant. This project is a typical example of attempts to create an autonomous zone the author refers here to Polish history, when the structures of the underground state often occurred in parallel with formal structures of power.
Another project attempts to design radically low-cost housing. In this case, municipal authorities play a key role, allocating land and funding. The radicalism of this project is expressed in the way it rejects the paradigm of profit-oriented housing, and instead switches to a paradigm focused on satisfying the basic necessities of life. The project assumes that for some reason the city would be keen to give free land to construct social housing, a utopian belief that the city would prioritize social needs and the state over neo-liberal profit- based development.
However, belief in the necessity of cooperation between grass-roots organizations and institutions of the city represents an important moment of transition beyond a purely regressive utopia. Another project expresses disappointment with the broken promises of the postmodern world and tries to reclaim the neo modernist idea of the city as a machine. In that city everything is connected, built on systems of synergies and everybody has their own place and meaning.
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