Nathaniel Coleman - Böcker

While the work of Henri Lefebvre has become better known in the English-speaking world since the 1991 translation of his 1974 masterpiece, The Production of Space, his influence on the actual production of architecture and the city has been less pronounced. Although now widely read in schools of architecture, planning and urban design, Lefebvre’s message for practice remains elusive; inevitably so because the entry of his work into the Anglosphere has come with repression of the two most challenging aspects of his thinking: romanticism and Utopia, which simultaneously confront modernity while being progressive.Contemporary discomfort with romanticism and Utopia arguably obstructs the shift of Lefebvre’s thinking from being objects of theoretical interest into positions of actually influencing practices. Attempting to understand and act upon architecture and the city with Lefebvre but without Utopia and romanticism risks muting the impact of his ideas. Although Utopia may seem to have no place in the present, Lefebvre reveals this as little more than a self-serving affirmation that ‘there is no alternative’ to social and political detachment. Demanding the impossible may end in failure but as Lefebvre shows us, doing so is the first step towards other possibilities. To think with Lefebvre is to think about Utopia, doing so makes contact with what is most enduring about his project for the city and its inhabitants, and with what is most radical about it as well. Lefebvre for Architects offers a concise account of the relevance of Henri Lefebvre’s writing for the theory and practice of architecture, planning and urban design. This book is accessible for students and practitioners who wish to fully engage with the design possibilities offered by Lefebvre’s philosophy.

While the work of Henri Lefebvre has become better known in the English-speaking world since the 1991 translation of his 1974 masterpiece, The Production of Space, his influence on the actual production of architecture and the city has been less pronounced. Although now widely read in schools of architecture, planning and urban design, Lefebvre’s message for practice remains elusive; inevitably so because the entry of his work into the Anglosphere has come with repression of the two most challenging aspects of his thinking: romanticism and Utopia, which simultaneously confront modernity while being progressive.Contemporary discomfort with romanticism and Utopia arguably obstructs the shift of Lefebvre’s thinking from being objects of theoretical interest into positions of actually influencing practices. Attempting to understand and act upon architecture and the city with Lefebvre but without Utopia and romanticism risks muting the impact of his ideas. Although Utopia may seem to have no place in the present, Lefebvre reveals this as little more than a self-serving affirmation that ‘there is no alternative’ to social and political detachment. Demanding the impossible may end in failure but as Lefebvre shows us, doing so is the first step towards other possibilities. To think with Lefebvre is to think about Utopia, doing so makes contact with what is most enduring about his project for the city and its inhabitants, and with what is most radical about it as well. Lefebvre for Architects offers a concise account of the relevance of Henri Lefebvre’s writing for the theory and practice of architecture, planning and urban design. This book is accessible for students and practitioners who wish to fully engage with the design possibilities offered by Lefebvre’s philosophy.

Utopian thought, though commonly characterized as projecting a future without a past, depends on golden models for re-invention of what is. Through a detailed and innovative re-assessment of the work of three architects who sought to represent a utopian content in their work, and a consideration of the thoughts of a range of leading writers, Coleman offers the reader a unique perspective of idealism in architectural design. With unparalleled depth and focus of vision on the work of Le Corbusier, Louis I Kahn and Aldo van Eyck, this book persuasively challenges predominant assumptions in current architectural discourse, forging a new approach to the invention of welcoming built environments and transcending the limitations of both the postmodern and hyper-modern stance and orthodox modernist architecture.

Disabled by chasing curricular criteria (required for accreditation and professional registration), architecture schools are mostly compliance and reproduction machines serving the building industry. As a corrective, Recoding Architecture Pedagogy: Insurgency and Invention asserts disciplinary knowledge over professional skills as the proper aim and focus of architecture education. The insurgent pedagogy introduced subverts architecture and its teaching’s capture by capitalism’s dominant modes of production and consumption to reveal unexpected tactics for enlarging possibilities.Grounded in architecture histories and theories, philosophy, and anarchism’s emphasis on use and dissensus, combined with PUNK’s DIY ethos, design studio emphasis on technicity is upended to reveal the subversive aim of intensifying tensions between (doomed) desires for artistic autonomy and (intrinsic) burdens of use constituting architecture as a discipline, instead of seeking resolution, some neutral middle ground, or escape into banal practice or paper palaces.By concentrating on what architecture education suppresses (tensions), disavows (its capture within the building industry), or affirms (commercial practice over disciplinary knowledge), Recoding Architecture Pedagogy: Insurgency and Invention cracks open horizons of possibility by showing how intensifying agonistic relationships between the myriad binaries that characterize architecture and its teaching is generative, in ways conciliatory synthesis, cathartic resolution, and uncritical affirmation are not.

Interweaving architecture, philosophy and cultural history, Materials and Meaning in Architecture develops a rich and multi-dimensional exploration of materials and materiality, in an age when architectural practice seems otherwise preoccupied with image and visual representation.Arguing that architecture is primarily experienced by the whole body, rather than chiefly with the eyes, this broad-ranging study shows how the most engaging built works are as tactile as they are sensuous, communicating directly with the bodily senses, especially touch. It explores the theme of ‘material imagination’ and the power of establishing ‘place identity’ in an architect’s work, to consider the enduring expressive possibilities of material use in architecture.The book’s chapters can be dipped into, each individual chapter providing close readings of built works by selected modern masters (Scarpa, Zumthor, Williams and Tsien), insights into key texts and theories (Ruskin, Loos, Bachelard), or short cultural histories of materials (wood, brick, concrete, steel, and glass). And yet, taken together, the chapters build to a powerful book-length argument about how meaning accrues to materials through time, and about the need to reinsert the bodily experience of materiality into architectural design. It is thus also, in part, a manifesto: arguing for architecture to act as a bulwark against the tide of an increasingly depersonalised built environment. With insights for a wide range of readers, ranging from students through to researchers and professional designers, Materials and Meaning in Architecture will cause theorists to rethink their assumptions and designers to see new potential for their projects.