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Forty Ways to Think about Architecture: Architectural History and Theory Today
How do we think about architecture historically and theoretically? Forty Ways to Think about Architecture provides an introduction to some of the wide-ranging ways in which architectural history and theory are being approached today.The inspiration for this project is the work of Adrian Forty, Professor of Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL), who has been internationally renowned as the UK's leading academic in the discipline for 40 years. Forty's many publications, notably Objects of Desire (1986), Words and Buildings (2000) and Concrete and Culture (2012), have been crucial to opening up new approaches to architectural history and theory and have helped to establish entirely new areas of study. His teaching at The Bartlett has enthused a new generation about the exciting possibilities of architectural history and theory as a field.This collection takes in a total of 40 essays covering key subjects, ranging from memory and heritage to everyday life, building materials and city spaces. As well as critical theory, philosophy, literature and experimental design, it refers to more immediate and topical issues in the built environment, such as globalisation, localism, regeneration and ecologies. Concise and engaging entries reflect on architecture from a range of perspectives.Contributors include eminent historians and theorists from elsewhere - such as Jean-Louis Cohen, Briony Fer, Hilde Heynen, Mary McLeod, Griselda Pollock, Penny Sparke and Anthony Vidler - as well as Forty's colleagues from the Bartlett School of Architecture including Iain Borden, Murray Fraser, Peter Hall, Barbara Penner, Jane Rendell and Andrew Saint. Forty Ways to Think about Architecture also features contributions from distinguished architects, such as Tony Fretton, Jeremy Till and Sarah Wigglesworth, and well-known critics and architectural writers, such as Tom Dyckhoff, William Menking and Thomas Weaver. Many of the contributors are former students of Adrian Forty.Through these diverse essays, readers are encouraged to think about how architectural history and theory relates to their own research and design practices, thus using the work of Adrian Forty as a catalyst for fresh and innovative thinking about architecture as a subject.
- GenresArchitecture
280 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 6, 2014
3 people are currently reading
40 people want to read
About the author
Iain Borden
36 books17 followersIain Borden is Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London, England.
His research explores how architecture and cities are experienced and re-used by the public.
Architecture and cities are crucial to how people live and society operates. Without homes, shops and parks, without offices, workplaces and airports, our world would grind to a halt. As a historian and theorist of architecture and urban culture, he is interested not just in how our cities function but also how they are designed, what they mean to people and how they are experienced.
To do this, he has studied a diverse range of subjects and places, from Italian renaissance piazzas to surveillance cameras in shopping malls, from architectural modernism to recent postmodernism, from issues of gender and ethnicity in cities to the way architecture is represented in cinema and photography. In particular, he has completed an in-depth study of the urban practice of skateboarding, looking at how skateboarders adopt modern cities as their own pleasure-ground, creating a culture with its own architecture, clothes, attitudes and social benefits. He has also extended this investigation into the world of automobile driving, looking at movies to explore how people’s experiences of the city from the car changes their engagement with architecture and urban space. Recent work explores how specific places and buildings in cities worldwide can be encountered through different kinds of social engagement, such as memory and risk-taking.
His research explores how architecture and cities are experienced and re-used by the public.
Architecture and cities are crucial to how people live and society operates. Without homes, shops and parks, without offices, workplaces and airports, our world would grind to a halt. As a historian and theorist of architecture and urban culture, he is interested not just in how our cities function but also how they are designed, what they mean to people and how they are experienced.
To do this, he has studied a diverse range of subjects and places, from Italian renaissance piazzas to surveillance cameras in shopping malls, from architectural modernism to recent postmodernism, from issues of gender and ethnicity in cities to the way architecture is represented in cinema and photography. In particular, he has completed an in-depth study of the urban practice of skateboarding, looking at how skateboarders adopt modern cities as their own pleasure-ground, creating a culture with its own architecture, clothes, attitudes and social benefits. He has also extended this investigation into the world of automobile driving, looking at movies to explore how people’s experiences of the city from the car changes their engagement with architecture and urban space. Recent work explores how specific places and buildings in cities worldwide can be encountered through different kinds of social engagement, such as memory and risk-taking.
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October 17, 2020
This book includes forty essays designed to investigate and celebrate architectural historian Adrian Forty's forty years of teaching at London's Bartlett School of Architecture. As with any compilation of essays, there is a variety of themes, tones, and levels of applicability and success. The best way to approach it is to drop in and out of the ones that seem most fitting and strike a chord.
The trick here is that sometimes the most promisingly titled chapters sway off into seemingly unrelated topic areas, whilst the improbable ones often held powerful ideas. A chapter titled 'Buildings: A Reader's Guide' about London Library spoke promisingly of how a single object can be read differently by different people – (which is very of-the-title) - but the author didn't elaborate on those different ways. Instead, she said that as a journalist, she and her colleagues enjoy playing 'compare-and-contrast' after an event to separate the multiple versions of 'spin' that they all heard. Although interesting, there were no real learning-moments here. The best way to read this book, therefore, is to skim read the opening paragraphs of each essay until you find the ones that 'resonate' with you. For me, the two that had my mind buzzing were chapter-essays four and nine.
In Chapter Four, 'Homely Affinities' by architectural historian Barbara Penner, Penner compares two works; Mary Douglas' "Purity and Danger," and Adrian Forty's "Objects of Desire." As she says, her essay "speaks less about influences and more about affinities, for what is most interesting about reading Douglas's and Forty's books today is how they resonate with each other. There is a kind of shared sensibility: both books are 'homely' […] and express ideas in a plain and unvarnished way." She goes on to demonstrate some of those resonating affinities while reminding us that each work remains an emblematic product of its own time and place. Interestingly, the glimpse that she provided into "Purity and Danger" made me want to rush off and read it, far more than Forty's work. That said, there was a fun direct quote from his work, in which he denigrates historians for throwing around social descriptors without explaining their relationship and relevance to the core topic. To do so, he uses what Penner refers to as a 'concrete metaphor'; "Such cursory references to the social context are like weeds and gravel around a stuffed fish in a glass case: however realistic these may be, they are only furnishings, and taking them away would have little effect on our perception of the fish."
Chapter Nine, 'Carte Blanche?' By Davide Deriu, explores the peril and potential of the blank page. I loved the obvious, yet strangely revelatory, correlation between architect and writer sitting before a blank page and trembling with dread and excitement. I was thrilled to read that Le Corbusier left a blank page in one of his books with the notation "Left blank for a work expressing modern feeling," and I enjoyed Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk's pronouncement; "Why didn't I become an architect? Answer: Because I thought the sheets of paper on which I was to pour my dreams were blank. But after twenty-five years of writing, I have come to understand that those pages are never blank."
The strongest of all essays, however, is probably the first; Forty's lecture titled 'Future Imperfect'. For my research, the most relevant point is the one he makes about concrete being both natural and artificial. Forty says that whilst it is true, to think of it that way, as being both simultaneously, is near impossible because the two qualities are so diverse. He says it requires 'too high a degree of mental effort,' and one that is "just too anxiety-inducing." Yet, I would say that this type of thinking is precisely what metaphor trains us to do. As with Orwell's 1984 concept of 'Doublethink,' imagining two opposing qualities simultaneously collocated, is 'anxiety-inducing'. However, metaphor shows us that it can also be an amusing and entertaining form of confusion. Like a good joke, or a rollercoaster ride, the gag of a belly-laugh-til-we-cry suggests we are capable of seeing concrete (and other aspects of architecture) simultaneously as two things at once.
At the risk of producing my own gagging-gravel-studded-stuffed-fish, to summarise such a diverse compilation of essays and ideas in a few short words, I would say that this book is an exciting look into the way that architectural building and writing can coexist with equal merit and should do so, so that they might influence and improve each other. Here's cheers to more years of ideas, purity, danger, and blank pages.
The trick here is that sometimes the most promisingly titled chapters sway off into seemingly unrelated topic areas, whilst the improbable ones often held powerful ideas. A chapter titled 'Buildings: A Reader's Guide' about London Library spoke promisingly of how a single object can be read differently by different people – (which is very of-the-title) - but the author didn't elaborate on those different ways. Instead, she said that as a journalist, she and her colleagues enjoy playing 'compare-and-contrast' after an event to separate the multiple versions of 'spin' that they all heard. Although interesting, there were no real learning-moments here. The best way to read this book, therefore, is to skim read the opening paragraphs of each essay until you find the ones that 'resonate' with you. For me, the two that had my mind buzzing were chapter-essays four and nine.
In Chapter Four, 'Homely Affinities' by architectural historian Barbara Penner, Penner compares two works; Mary Douglas' "Purity and Danger," and Adrian Forty's "Objects of Desire." As she says, her essay "speaks less about influences and more about affinities, for what is most interesting about reading Douglas's and Forty's books today is how they resonate with each other. There is a kind of shared sensibility: both books are 'homely' […] and express ideas in a plain and unvarnished way." She goes on to demonstrate some of those resonating affinities while reminding us that each work remains an emblematic product of its own time and place. Interestingly, the glimpse that she provided into "Purity and Danger" made me want to rush off and read it, far more than Forty's work. That said, there was a fun direct quote from his work, in which he denigrates historians for throwing around social descriptors without explaining their relationship and relevance to the core topic. To do so, he uses what Penner refers to as a 'concrete metaphor'; "Such cursory references to the social context are like weeds and gravel around a stuffed fish in a glass case: however realistic these may be, they are only furnishings, and taking them away would have little effect on our perception of the fish."
Chapter Nine, 'Carte Blanche?' By Davide Deriu, explores the peril and potential of the blank page. I loved the obvious, yet strangely revelatory, correlation between architect and writer sitting before a blank page and trembling with dread and excitement. I was thrilled to read that Le Corbusier left a blank page in one of his books with the notation "Left blank for a work expressing modern feeling," and I enjoyed Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk's pronouncement; "Why didn't I become an architect? Answer: Because I thought the sheets of paper on which I was to pour my dreams were blank. But after twenty-five years of writing, I have come to understand that those pages are never blank."
The strongest of all essays, however, is probably the first; Forty's lecture titled 'Future Imperfect'. For my research, the most relevant point is the one he makes about concrete being both natural and artificial. Forty says that whilst it is true, to think of it that way, as being both simultaneously, is near impossible because the two qualities are so diverse. He says it requires 'too high a degree of mental effort,' and one that is "just too anxiety-inducing." Yet, I would say that this type of thinking is precisely what metaphor trains us to do. As with Orwell's 1984 concept of 'Doublethink,' imagining two opposing qualities simultaneously collocated, is 'anxiety-inducing'. However, metaphor shows us that it can also be an amusing and entertaining form of confusion. Like a good joke, or a rollercoaster ride, the gag of a belly-laugh-til-we-cry suggests we are capable of seeing concrete (and other aspects of architecture) simultaneously as two things at once.
At the risk of producing my own gagging-gravel-studded-stuffed-fish, to summarise such a diverse compilation of essays and ideas in a few short words, I would say that this book is an exciting look into the way that architectural building and writing can coexist with equal merit and should do so, so that they might influence and improve each other. Here's cheers to more years of ideas, purity, danger, and blank pages.
Displaying 1 of 1 review