Description
Book SynopsisBuilding Theories speaks to the value of words in architecture. It addresses the author's fascination with the voices of architects, engineers, builders, and craftspeople whose ideas about building have been captured in text. It discusses the content of treatises, essays, articles, and letters by those who have been, throughout history, committed to the art of building. In this, Building Theories argues for the return of a practice of architectural theory that is set amongst building, buildings, and builders. This journey of close reading reinterprets the words of Vitruvius, Alberti, de L'Orme, Le Camus de Mézières, Boullée, Laugier, Rondelet, Semper, Viollet-le-Duc, Hübsch, Bötticher, Berlage, Muthesius, Wagner, Behrendt, Gropius, and Arup. With chapters dedicated to texts from antiquity, the Renaissance, and the nineteenth century, and with a critical eye on architectural theory popularized in the Anglo-Saxon world post-1968, readers are introduced to a wider,
Trade Review
"Trubiano reminds us that it is precisely the serial historic identity crisis of the architect around the irreconcilable meeting of thought and material that is architecture’s shapeshifting impetus for renewal. In a moment when architectural imagination around the becoming-of-things is more critical than ever, she navigates the minefield of past moralism, zealotry, despair and naïve hope with not another disciplinarian rappel a l’ordre, but an inspired coaxing of every architect, no matter how estranged from matter, back into the fray of the building site where materials feature as nature’s protagonists in the drama of construction. With cunning and rigour Trubiano exposes the opposition of text and material as false in order to harness anew the transformative power of making and its mutuality."
Francesca Hughes, author of The Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure and the Misadventures of Precision
Table of Contents1. Thinking through Building 2. Building and the Treatise 3. Architect as Builder and Thinker 4. Matter(s) Hidden in Plain Sight 5. Lost in Translation 6. From Aesthetics to Ethics, and back 7. Design and Construction - Walter Gropius and Ove Arup 8. The Composite Mind Re-Builds Theory Bibliography Index
