Gathering twenty essays written over twenty years, Figments of the Architectural Imagination explores the frontiers of speculative architectural design, theory, and pedagogy to offer clear-eyed and incisive treatments of some of the most important projects, practices, and polemics at work making contemporary architecture contemporary.
Widely known for his award-winning design work, the Los Angeles based architect Craig Hodgetts has distinguished himself as one of the key voices of his generation through trenchant commentary and visionary speculation on architecture and design.
Focusing on Reyner Banham's influential contributions to architectural discourse, this analysis explores his writings on High Tech architecture and its predecessors. Todd Gannon highlights Banham's dialectical approach, examining his relationships with movements like New Brutalism and his support for innovative design concepts from figures like Cedric Price and Archigram. The study also delves into Banham's late work, offering new insights from archival materials, including an unpublished draft introduction to his unfinished manuscript, "Making Architecture: The Paradoxes of High Tech."
Offers a unique look into the mind and method of one of the most important architects working today.
Zaha Hadid's highly inventive and seemingly unbuildable designs have defied conventional ideas of architectural space and construction. The BMW Central Building in Leipzig, Germany, is no exception. It is the heart of the BMW factory complexthe dynamic focal point of the entire plant that visually, physically, and experientially sustains a sense of animation and motion. With an audacious and abstracted geometry of forms and lines, the BMW Central Building challenges the notion of building as static and is definitive evidence of architecture as art. Zaha BMW Central Building , the seventh volume in the Source Books in Architecture series, provides a comprehensive look at this instant modern masterpiece.