I felt like casting a net out into the waters of this forum to see the spectrum of written work people feel have influenced their work in Architecture the most.
While the develpment of one's work has a mulititude of influences many of which are not written, I want to bracket the question (at least to start) to text.
Fictional or Non, poetic or prose, philosophical, technical, etc.. doesn't really matter.
If you had to point to one or a few pieces of written work that reflect or have had a significant impact on your personal endeavour in Architecture, what would those be?
housebuilding and such things - heinrich tessenow (and the related articles in the issue of 9h in which it was published, by giorgio grassi, walter jessen, michael hays)
notes on the synthesis of form -- c. alexander
a dynamic systems approach to the development of cognition and action - e. thelen & l.b. smith
natural-born cyborgs -- a. clark
edge city -- j. garreau
capsular civilization: on the city in the age of fear -- l. de cauter
and I'll add a vote for: for an architecture of reality
Allegorical Fiction:
Mao II and White Noise — Don Delillo
Short Stories and Diaries — Franz Kafka
Waiting for the Barbarians — JM Coetzee
Blood Meridian — Cormac McCarthy (some of the language in here is incredible and hallucinogenic)
Dystopian Fiction:
Neuromancer — William Gibson
Any Novel by Phillip K. Dick
Supercannes and Concrete Island — JG Ballard
The Possibility of an Island —Michel Houllebecq
Architectural Essays:
Points and Lines — Stan Allen
"The Generic City" and "What Ever Happened to Urbanism?" — Rem Koolhaas
The Soviet formula was to build the biggest unit possible out of the most permanent material at a give-take cost analysis of the best quality for the lowest price possible.
In any government run scheme, there's not any sort "performance " benefit-- basically no one gets bonuses or pay cuts for as much or as little work as actually gets done. Anyways, "performance" in the Soviet days is quite a different benchmark as "performance" in the current era.
Bad "performance" could land you in jail (when it came to civil servants like planners, architects and the like). Good "performance" landed you a stately apartment and access to a motor vehicle. Many people in the US painted the Soviets as "evil" for this.
But, my main interest with Soviet Era planning was this-- a Soviet apartment was built from the ground up. From every floor to door to dish to sofa to doorknob was designed, built and manufactured in the USSR. And they did all of this at a price point lower than what the US can currently provide for much more basically public housing accommodations.
And that's what makes soviet planning interesting is the degree and depth of industrial planning with the context of broad urban planning. In the US, most planners, architects and designers never get the opportunity to do this kind of planning (and for the most part, this variety of planning is managed by the government [Army Corps of Engineers]).
While large portions of Soviet Russia was a giant shithole, there's also a lot of good. When the US made comparisons to the Soviets, they picked places that were the equivalent of say Alabama or Arkansas.
We were never made aware of places like this:
OR
I can make the same unfair comparison of say Zinc, Arkansas:
To Hong Kong:
Isn't America a shithole?
But yeah, Soviet Era planning helped bring a lot of people that use to starve and die in winter to a group of people who were given monthly rations of fish eggs, cabbage, champagne and stately neo-classical apartments (and some modernist prison boxes). In either event, you can't touch a Soviet apartment now in Moscow for less than a few thousand a month.
Also, many social experiments, architectural interventions and planned urban developments we are now just attempting Russia had already begun testing them decades before we did.
Unicorn Ghost
Thanx for the detailed answer. I was just curious as we're trying hard to get rid of the Soviet planning system here in Russia (without any notable result yet) while the US people have become interested in it (I've seen a post by a guy from GSAPP who is studying "khrushchevki" while we're demolishing them at the moment).
<The Soviet formula was to build the biggest unit possible out of the most permanent material at a give-take cost analysis of the best quality for the lowest price possible.>
If it's about prefabricated housing - the idea seems promising but in practice the quality is pretty poor and the variations are reduced because of inertness of the building industry.
The Konstructivists' experiments in housing I find quite interesting though, unfortunately the examples are not in good shape now (physically).
I was in Ukraine in the recent past and most of the planning in the city I experienced, residue from the Soviet era, was megablock after megablock (prison boxes) with kiosk stores peppered in the foreground and playgrounds in -between. No scale sensitivity. Its interesting how the density was created even though not necessary.
o7o...
I think Unicorn Ghost was talking about the experiments in planning in the 1920-30s, and you've seen the prefabricated mass-produced blocks of the 1970s, which is a really awful example of degradation of the late Soviet planning system.
Good Deeds, Good Design - Bryan Bell
The Color of Summer - Reinaldo Arenas
The Lie of the Land - Don Mitchell
Cosmos - Carl Sagan
Delirious New York - Rem Koolhaas
Bomb the Suburbs - William Upski Wimsatt
No More Prisons - William Upski Wimsatt
The Book of Tea - Kakuzo Okakura
...and most notably: Napalm and Silly Putty - George Carlin
I think good fiction and good humor can give you new perspectives, which in turn influences the way you approach design problems.
Steven Ward, fantastic list. You're consistently impressive. :)
Some of mine:
Architecture Depends by Jeremy Till
Dalibor Vesely's Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation
Alberto Pérez-Gómez's (Vesely's student) Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge
How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
Mikhail Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination
And most of what Jonathan Hill has written is fantastic
& Fiction:
Georges Perec's Species of Spaces and Life: A User's Manual
Jorge Luis Borges's Garden of Forking Paths and The Aleph
Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities
Salvador Plasencia's People of Paper
I know this book appeals to many of the crazies out there, but I enjoy it as a meditative and consciousness-refresher of the human condition and footprint on our planet. An easy read as well.
What written work(s) has(have) influenced your work the greatest?
I felt like casting a net out into the waters of this forum to see the spectrum of written work people feel have influenced their work in Architecture the most.
While the develpment of one's work has a mulititude of influences many of which are not written, I want to bracket the question (at least to start) to text.
Fictional or Non, poetic or prose, philosophical, technical, etc.. doesn't really matter.
If you had to point to one or a few pieces of written work that reflect or have had a significant impact on your personal endeavour in Architecture, what would those be?
In no particular order.
Invisible Cities, Calvino
Poetics of Space, Bachelard
The Trial, Kafka
Walden, Thoreau
The artless word
peanuts
dr. rex morgan
On Adam's House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History, by Joseph Rykwert
Strange Siblings - Being and No-Thinness: An Inadvertant Hommage to Charles and Ray Eames, by Douglas Graf (in Datutop 14)
James Turrell: Geometry of Light
Close Reading: Chuck Close and the Artist Portrait, by Martin Friedman
how buildings learn - stewart brand
of other spaces, heterotopias - michel foucault
the beer can by the highway - john kouwenhoven
housebuilding and such things - heinrich tessenow (and the related articles in the issue of 9h in which it was published, by giorgio grassi, walter jessen, michael hays)
planned assaults - lars lerup
being and time - heidegger
an american culture of construction - tom peters
Steven's last one, plus For an Architecture of Reality by Michael Benedikt.
Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski
Complicity and Conviction - Steps Toward an Architecture of Convention, William Hubbard
92 In The Shade - Thomas McGuane
Sketch N Sniff - Ching
I always think of the opening chapter of Mason & Dixon as the richest display of language I have ever read. I was absolutely transfixed by it.
The Architecture of Community - Leon Krier
:)
notes on the synthesis of form -- c. alexander
a dynamic systems approach to the development of cognition and action - e. thelen & l.b. smith
natural-born cyborgs -- a. clark
edge city -- j. garreau
capsular civilization: on the city in the age of fear -- l. de cauter
and I'll add a vote for: for an architecture of reality
Allegorical Fiction:
Mao II and White Noise — Don Delillo
Short Stories and Diaries — Franz Kafka
Waiting for the Barbarians — JM Coetzee
Blood Meridian — Cormac McCarthy (some of the language in here is incredible and hallucinogenic)
Dystopian Fiction:
Neuromancer — William Gibson
Any Novel by Phillip K. Dick
Supercannes and Concrete Island — JG Ballard
The Possibility of an Island —Michel Houllebecq
Architectural Essays:
Points and Lines — Stan Allen
"The Generic City" and "What Ever Happened to Urbanism?" — Rem Koolhaas
this is a cool thread!
i'm curious how some of these fictional works have specifically influenced your work? like philip dick (who is badass) in farwest's case, for instance
Arete: Greek sports from ancient sources
By Stephen Gaylord Miller
Soul murder and slavery
By Nell Irvin Painter
Soul by soul: life inside the antebellum slave market
By Walter Johnson
Aspects of industry in Roman Yorkshire and the North
By Peter R. Wilson, Jennifer Price
Mazzini
By Denis Mack Smith
Redesigning cities: principles, practice, implementation
By Jonathan Barnett
Green urbanism: learning from European cities
By Timothy Beatley
The social & economic history of the Roman Empire, Volume 1
By Michael Ivanovitch Rostovtzeff
Soviet planning: principles and methodology
By Joseph B. Duray
Soviet urban housing: problems and policies
By Alfred John DiMaio
Unicorn Ghost
Can I ask - why are u interested in Soviet planning?
Soviets ran some nicceeee cities.
The Soviet formula was to build the biggest unit possible out of the most permanent material at a give-take cost analysis of the best quality for the lowest price possible.
In any government run scheme, there's not any sort "performance " benefit-- basically no one gets bonuses or pay cuts for as much or as little work as actually gets done. Anyways, "performance" in the Soviet days is quite a different benchmark as "performance" in the current era.
Bad "performance" could land you in jail (when it came to civil servants like planners, architects and the like). Good "performance" landed you a stately apartment and access to a motor vehicle. Many people in the US painted the Soviets as "evil" for this.
But, my main interest with Soviet Era planning was this-- a Soviet apartment was built from the ground up. From every floor to door to dish to sofa to doorknob was designed, built and manufactured in the USSR. And they did all of this at a price point lower than what the US can currently provide for much more basically public housing accommodations.
And that's what makes soviet planning interesting is the degree and depth of industrial planning with the context of broad urban planning. In the US, most planners, architects and designers never get the opportunity to do this kind of planning (and for the most part, this variety of planning is managed by the government [Army Corps of Engineers]).
While large portions of Soviet Russia was a giant shithole, there's also a lot of good. When the US made comparisons to the Soviets, they picked places that were the equivalent of say Alabama or Arkansas.
We were never made aware of places like this:
OR
I can make the same unfair comparison of say Zinc, Arkansas:
To Hong Kong:
Isn't America a shithole?
But yeah, Soviet Era planning helped bring a lot of people that use to starve and die in winter to a group of people who were given monthly rations of fish eggs, cabbage, champagne and stately neo-classical apartments (and some modernist prison boxes). In either event, you can't touch a Soviet apartment now in Moscow for less than a few thousand a month.
Also, many social experiments, architectural interventions and planned urban developments we are now just attempting Russia had already begun testing them decades before we did.
Unicorn Ghost
Thanx for the detailed answer. I was just curious as we're trying hard to get rid of the Soviet planning system here in Russia (without any notable result yet) while the US people have become interested in it (I've seen a post by a guy from GSAPP who is studying "khrushchevki" while we're demolishing them at the moment).
<The Soviet formula was to build the biggest unit possible out of the most permanent material at a give-take cost analysis of the best quality for the lowest price possible.>
If it's about prefabricated housing - the idea seems promising but in practice the quality is pretty poor and the variations are reduced because of inertness of the building industry.
The Konstructivists' experiments in housing I find quite interesting though, unfortunately the examples are not in good shape now (physically).
I was in Ukraine in the recent past and most of the planning in the city I experienced, residue from the Soviet era, was megablock after megablock (prison boxes) with kiosk stores peppered in the foreground and playgrounds in -between. No scale sensitivity. Its interesting how the density was created even though not necessary.
NEST magazine
o7o...
I think Unicorn Ghost was talking about the experiments in planning in the 1920-30s, and you've seen the prefabricated mass-produced blocks of the 1970s, which is a really awful example of degradation of the late Soviet planning system.
Many Soviet cities were leveled by the Nazis forcing them to re-plan and build from scratch after WWII.
Good Deeds, Good Design - Bryan Bell
The Color of Summer - Reinaldo Arenas
The Lie of the Land - Don Mitchell
Cosmos - Carl Sagan
Delirious New York - Rem Koolhaas
Bomb the Suburbs - William Upski Wimsatt
No More Prisons - William Upski Wimsatt
The Book of Tea - Kakuzo Okakura
...and most notably: Napalm and Silly Putty - George Carlin
I think good fiction and good humor can give you new perspectives, which in turn influences the way you approach design problems.
Steven Ward, fantastic list. You're consistently impressive. :)
Some of mine:
Architecture Depends by Jeremy Till
Dalibor Vesely's Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation
Alberto Pérez-Gómez's (Vesely's student) Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge
How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
Mikhail Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination
And most of what Jonathan Hill has written is fantastic
& Fiction:
Georges Perec's Species of Spaces and Life: A User's Manual
Jorge Luis Borges's Garden of Forking Paths and The Aleph
Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities
Salvador Plasencia's People of Paper
Great thread! This book is also worth checking out: Architect's and Their Books
^Er, "Architect's" = "Architects"
built upon love
perez-gomez
building desire
dodds
smoot's ear
tavernor
Ishmael - Daniel Quinn
I know this book appeals to many of the crazies out there, but I enjoy it as a meditative and consciousness-refresher of the human condition and footprint on our planet. An easy read as well.
For inspiration...
The Fountainhead
Life and Death of Great American Cities
most prose written by RW Emerson
thanks, aesthete.
two more:
one had a long title, couldn't remember, but it had a huge impact on me in undergrad, especially thesis:
figures of architecture & thought: german architecture culture: 1880-1920, francesco dal co
the other is a more recent touchstone in the way i think about our business:
the ethical architect, by tom spector
The Unfettered Mind - Takuan Soho
Each Moment Is The Universe - Dainin Katagiri
Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa
The Silmarillion - JRR Tolkien
Curves of Time: Memoirs of Oscar Nieyemer - Oscar Niemeyer
"As I Lay Dying" - W. Faulkner
"Temptation of St Antony" - G. Flaubert
"The Lost Ones" - S. Beckett
"Life: A Users Manual" - G. Perec
"Ulysses" - J. Joyce
"2666" - Roberto Bolano
"The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries" - R. Evans
"The Idea of a Town" - J. Rykwert
"In The Manor of Nietzsche" - J. Kipnis
"A Scientific Autobiography" - A. Rossi
"Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille" - Denis Hollier
"Idea: A Concept in Art Theory" - E. Panofsky
"Towards an Architecture" - Le Corbusier
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.