A theoretical history of anthropomorphism and proportion in modern architecture, this volume brings into focus the discourse around proportion with current problems of post-humanism in architecture alongside the new possibilities made available through digital technologies. The book examines how the body and its ordering has served as a central site of architectural discourse in recent decades, especially in attempts to reformulate architecture’s relationship to humanism, modernism and technology. Challenging some concepts and categories of architectural history and situates current debates within a broader cultural and technological context, Hight makes complex ideas easily accessible. Extensively illustrated and written without academic jargon for an informed but non-specialized architectural audience, this book elucidates the often obscure debates of avant-garde architectural discourse and design, while demonstrating how these debates have affected everyday places and concepts of architecture. As a result, it will appeal to professional architects, academics and students, combining as it does an insightful introduction to the fundamental issues of architectural history and theory over the past fifty years with entirely new formulations of what that history is and means.

A theoretical history of anthropomorphism and proportion in modern architecture, challenging the concepts and categories of architectural history and placing the current debates into a broader cultural and technological context.

In the era of cybernetics, architects suddenly encountered entirely new ways of operating technical systems: buildings could be calculated using circuit diagrams, creativity and imagination were confronted with the technical intelligence of thinking machines. Architects found themselves in the crosshairs of cybernetics. At stake was nothing less than the continued existence of the architect’s inventive intelligence in a techno-scientific world. Today, we see computing machines, once so heavy, losing weight while gaining power. Computers are fully colonizing the human environment, creating their own digital ecosystems, and giving rise to forms of society and ways of being that cannot even be explained without big data. Available for the first time in English as a new edition.

For the past 50 years, the advancements of technology have equipped architects with unique tools that have enabled the development of new computer-mediated design methods, fabrication techniques, and architectural expressions. Simultaneously, in contemporary architecture new frameworks emerged that have radically redefined the traditional conceptions of design, of the built environment, and of the role of architects. Cybernetic Architectures argues that such frameworks have been constructed in direct reference to cybernetic thinking, a thought model that emerged concurrently with the origins of informatics and that embodies the main assumptions, values, and ideals underlying the development of computer science. The book explains how the evolution of the computational perspective in architecture has been parallel to the construction of design issues in reference to the central ideas fostered by the cybernetic model. It unpacks and explains this crucial relationship, in the work of digital architects, between the use of information technology in design and the conception of architectural problems around an informational ontology. This book will appeal to architecture students and scholars interested in understanding the recent transformations in the architectural landscape related to the advent of computer-based design paradigms.

As architects and designers, we struggle to reconcile ever increasing environmental, humanitarian, and technological demands placed on our projects. Our new geological era, the Anthropocene, marks humans as the largest environmental force on the planet and suggests that conventional anthropocentric approaches to design must accommodate a more complex understanding of the interrelationship between architecture and environment Here, for the first time, editor Ariane Lourie Harrison collects the essays of architects, theorists, and sustainable designers that together provide a framework for a posthuman understanding of the design environment. An introductory essay defines the key terms, concepts, and precedents for a posthuman approach to architecture, and nine fully illustrated case studies of buildings from around the globe demonstrate how issues raised in posthuman theory provide rich terrain for contemporary architecture, making theory concrete. By assembling a range of voices across different fields, from urban geography to critical theory to design practitioners, this anthology offers a resource for design professionals, educators, and students seeking to grapple the ecological mandate of our current period. Case studies include work by Arakawa and Gins, Arons en Gelauff, Casagrande, The Living, Minifie van Schaik, R & Sie (n), SCAPE, Studio Gang, and xDesign. Essayists include Gilles Clément, Matthew Gandy, Francesco Gonzáles de Canales, Elizabeth Grosz, Simon Guy, Seth Harrison, N. Katherine Hayles, Ursula Heise, Catherine Ingraham, Bruno Latour, William J. Mitchell, Matteo Pasquinelli, Erik Swyngedouw, Sarah Whatmore, Jennifer Wolch, Cary Wolfe, and Albena Yaneva

22 White, wide and scattered: picturing her housing career -- 23 Toward a theory of Interior -- 24 Repositioning. Theory now. Don't excavate, change reality! -- Part VII: Forms of engagement -- 25 (Un)political -- 26 Prince complex: narcissism and reproduction of the architectural mirror -- 27 Less than enough: a critique of Aureli's project -- 28 Repositioning. Having ideas -- 29 Post-scriptum. 'But that is not enough' -- Index

Intimate Metropolis explores connections between the modern city, its architecture, and its citizens, by questioning traditional conceptualizations of public and private. Rather than focusing purely on public spaces—such as streets, cafés, gardens, or department stores—or on the domestic sphere, the book investigates those spaces and practices that engage both the urban and the domestic, the public and the private. The legal, political and administrative frameworks of urban life are seen as constituting private individuals’ sense of self, in a wide range of European and world cities from Amsterdam and Barcelona to London and Chicago. Providing authoritative new perspectives on individual citizenship as it relates to both public and private space, in-depth case studies of major European, American and other world cities and written by an international set of contributors, this volume is key reading for all students of architecture.