Search results for ""Oro Editions""
Oro Editions Architectural Principles in the Age of Fraud
Philosophy exercises a massive influence on contemporary architectural culture and the understanding of the built environment. Discussions of architects and architectural academics are heavily loaded with theoretical ideas, concepts and views imported from the works of philosophers. At the same time this architectural employment of philosophy rarely goes beyond the tendency to mine philosophical works for ideas, words and phrases and use them, often without much understanding, in order to promote architectural agendas and embellish theoretical claims made by architects and academics. The book presents the history of this phenomenon for the past 100 years. It describes and analyses numerous, often funny, entertaining as well as embarrassing, examples of false intellectual pretence and pompous but incompetent philosophical posturing by prominent architects and architectural academics of the era and their efforts to bamboozle readers, colleagues and the general public. The book presents a powerful criticism of modernist views on architecture and argues that the rise of obfuscation and philosophical posturing among architects and architectural academics is a defensive strategy intended to draw attention away from the failure of Modernism in architecture.
£19.03
Oro Editions Uncertainty
Working in rural China is unlike other countryside: it is full of contradiction, neither rural nor urban, both traditional and modern, abandoned in some areas and yet others are becoming cities overnight. It is in fact a laboratory for new ways of living. And it has become our laboratory for new ways of making architecture. Whereas contemporary architecture since the advent of modernism has developed increasingly controlled, prototypical, and standardised mechanisms for building, our experiments embrace the opposite: a lack of control, taking place within the flux of political, social and economic uncertainties. The experiments presented here are examples taken from a series of design and build projects conducted from the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong over the past 10 years. They are remarkable in their diffuse explorations and situations. Some were urgent post-earthquake reconstructions, often adapting to extreme topographies or taking place in the midst of major urbanising transformations, whereas other experiments occurred in forgotten villages with left-behind craftspeople and their disappearing building cultures. These forays and what can be best described as adventures in building, left us with varied and novel (sometimes failed) experiments with structure and program. But they are presented here for the trait they have in common: an exploration of the limits of material, geometry, construction methods, and even historical context. The diversity manifested in this collection of projects is a direct reflection of the incredible diversity of climates, locations, and conditions that underlie the ongoing Chinese urbanisation experiment. The focus here is not on the what but the how, as each project engages with its own set of limiting factors or unideal conditions. They are stories of design, overcoming and even embracing adverse situations in order to discover some hidden advantage. Each chapter explores a different attempt to revert seemingly challenging limitations (particularly those which the architect cannot exert control over) and turn these into novel building approaches. As often occurs for architects working in a foreign landscape, the differences in language and culture have proven to be a source of constant miscommunication and surprising discovery. The lack of a common spoken language—these remote areas speak their own dialects—has placed an emphasis on drawing as another means of communication. Through drawing we have explored a means of design and a means of building. Therefore, this is also a book about ways of drawing that represent ways of control and, inversely perhaps, what not to control.
£23.36
Oro Editions Blank: Speculations on CLT
This book weaves a much needed and transformational narrative about making architecture through paying close attention to cross-laminated timber as a material for today. The material becomes the site of experimentation, innovation, and research in search of specific meanings of CLT in architecture at various scales by selecting the “CLT Blank” as the building unit. The structure of the book brings together work and texts from a diverse group of theorists and practitioners, who make material central to their inquiry, to suggest design approaches that will broaden the cultural, spatial, and technological significance for architecture, education, engineering, and industry. The outcome focuses on materiality through fast slippages between art, architecture, and science, that we hope will invigorate and expand new discourse to act as an antidote to the current conversations about the material, that is fixated on its making and mass production, disappointingly portraying it as a bland and lifeless product—a notion we want to be distant from in preference to seeking areas we feel were not yet conceptualised or theorised. The potential to see the spatial properties of its use and what kind of world that might suggest is shown in the book, with selected striking visual materials, to reposition its architecture though new forms of representation and responses that continue to stay in touch with pragmatics. Aesthetics of CLT with a connection to wood and art practice is a central thread though the book.
£33.30
Oro Editions City of Immortals: Père-Lachaise Cemetery, Paris
This first-person account of a legendary necropolis will delight Francophiles, tourists and armchair travelers, while enriching the experience of taphophiles (cemetery lovers) and aficionados of art and architecture, mystery and romance. Carolyn Campbell's evocative images are complemented by those of renowned landscape photographer Joe Cornish. City of Immortals celebrates the novelty and eccentricity of Pere-Lachaise Cemetery through the engrossing story of the history of the site established by Napoleonic decree along with portraits of the last moments of the cultural icons buried within its walls. In addition to several 'conversations' with some of the high-profile residents, three guided tours are provided along with an illustrated pull-out map featuring the grave sites of eighty-four architects, artists, writers, musicians, dancers, filmmakers and actors, including Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison of the Doors. Frederic Chopin, Georges Bizet, Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, Isadora Duncan, Eugene Delacroix, Gertrude Stein, Amedeo Modigliani, Sarah Bernhardt, Simone Signoret, Colette and Marcel Proust.
£17.95
Oro Editions Archive, Matrix, Assembly: The Photographs of Thomas Struth 1978-2018
Archive, Matrix, Assembly: The Photographs of Thomas Struth 1978-2018 presents the first comprehensive, systematic theory of contemporary German artist Thomas Struth's main body of photographic work from its beginnings in the late 1970s until his most recent work in 2018. The book presents a unique, evolutionary understanding of the work, proposing that it has established three stages of production: archive, matrix, and assembly. Together the three stages form a developmental system that characterises the individual photographs, their relation to their subject matter, and how they form larger, significant collections of images. In covering all phases of the artist's work, it also develops a comprehensive critical reading of the work, serves as a monograph of the artist, and provides an extensive analysis of the photographs at all stages, including the less discussed, more recent photography, which is placed on par with his earlier work for which Struth first became internationally renowned.
£29.95
Oro Editions HOK Design Annual 2018
The HOK Design Annual 2018 highlights this leading global design firm's most exceptional recent work in architecture, interior design, planning, urban design, and product design. The projects featured demonstrate the intersection between HOK's thought leadership in specialty areas - including aviation + transportation, tall buildings, sports, healthcare, science + technology, urbanism, workplace, and sustainability - and its firm-wide commitment to design excellence. Geographically diverse, these projects represent a variety of scales, and are technologically advanced examples of how great design can bring significant benefits to clients and the people who experience these spaces. The HOK Design Annual 2018 is a valuable global trends reference source for design professionals, students, and architecture enthusiasts. It provides insight into the creative process of the teams that are creating society's next generation of buildings.
£33.75
Oro Editions The Work of Machado & Silvetti
The Work of Machado and Silvetti presents the projects designed in the last four decades by these two architects. As active participants in the architectural scene of the '70s and '80s, they were intensely engaged in the origins of the debate that changed the course of architectural thinking, and of its pedagogical and professional practice implications. At the emergence of postmodernism, being considered as "outsiders," they escaped from the reductionist attitudes that either took historical forms for legitimizing architectural practice, or renounced to accept that a tabula rasa as unthinkable. They confront the practice of architecture with realism and from a cultural perspective that engages the multiple social and technical practices that bear on the creative process of making architecture: they consider typologies as indifferent to function or to iconographic definition, and defend the potential of architectural language and of architecture as a discipline. Machado and Silvetti have coined the idea of unprecedented realism to describe their distinctive design strategies and techniques of assemblage, personal interpretation, the production of meaning and the creation of emerging typologies. Their work pays attention to the culture, site, market, material detailing and architectural composition.
£31.50
Oro Editions Ecologies of Prosperity For the Living
Ecologies of Prosperity for the Living City is a collection of writings, interviews, and projects exploring themes introduced during the 2016 Woltz Symposium: Novel Synergies, the Instrumental Commons, and Dispersed Concentrations. With new material from speakers Philippe Rahm, Nina-Marie Lister, Marina Alberti, Paola Vigano, Niek Hazendonk, Albert Cuchi, and Jedediah Purdy, the dialogue is framed by a series of seminal texts from the 20th century and reimagines existing urban challenges through exemplary design projects of today. Structured as a reader for students and design practitioners, it promotes urban design as a catalyst for cultural, social, and environmental transformation within cities, towns, communities, institutions, and individuals faced with today's most pressing urban challenges.
£27.00
Oro Editions Rurality Re-imagined: Villagers, Farmers, Wanderers and Wild Things
urality Re-imagined is divided into four loosely-themed sections: Villagers, Farmers, Wanderers, and Wild Things. Each comprises five or six diverse chapters of varied length. In the Villagers section rural communities are considered as assemblages and spaces of vernacularity, as dark settings for TV dramas, new wave photography, and as sites for community arts projects. The Farmers section critically re-invigorates the historical fascination with peasantry and farming in the arts, through essays, painting, and photography that collectively place the agency of the artist under as much scrutiny as images of agricultural space and people. Stereotypically, the word 'Wanderers' conjures images of gypsy caravans, or country ramblers, but in this section the term is stretched to include not only the traditional migrations of reindeer herds, but also that of the motorway driver, and migrations of cultural forms too, such as that of hip-hop from the clubs of New York to the fields of rural Devon. In the essays and images in the Wild Things section the wilderness emerges as a highly contested cultural terrain, far from any state of purity, as it manifests itself in the behaviours of people, flora, and fauna in cultivated and uncultivated landscapes and parks.
£27.00
Oro Editions Life of Olgivanna Wright
Using previously unpublished autobiographical material, a glimpse is offered into the life of Olgivanna Wright.
£20.66