Critical Architecture: (Critiques)

Critical Architecture examines the relationship between critical practice in architecture and architectural criticism. Placing architecture in an interdisciplinary context, the book explores architectural criticism with reference to modes of criticism in other disciplines - specifically art criticism - and considers how critical practice in architecture operates through a number of different modes: buildings, drawings and texts. With forty essays by an international cast of leading architectural academics, this accessible single source text on the topical subject of architectural criticism is ideal for undergraduate as well as post graduate study.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Critical Architecture: Between Criticism and Design Part 1: Criticism/Negation/Action Introduction 1. Criticality and Operativity 2. Unfinished Business: The Historical Project after Manfredo Tafuri 3. Architecture as Critical Knowledge 4. Passing through Deconstruction 5. Utopia, Critique, and Contemporary Discourse 6. Militant Architecture: Destabilising Architecture’s Disciplinarity 7. Architecture’s Critical Context: The Athens’ Activist Experiment 8. Criticism in/and/of Crisis Part 2: Architecture-Writing Introduction 1. The Drowing Method: On Giving an Account in Practice-Based Research 2. The Poetics of Urban Inscription: From Metaphorical Cognition to Counter-Representation 3. Critical Action and Active Criticism 4. Film as Spatial Critique 5. Architectural History, Friendship and Filmed Conversations 6. Image, Text, Architecture: The Presence that 'Was Here' 7. Fluttering Butterflies, a Dusty Road, and a Muddy Stone: Criticality in Distraction (Haga Park, Stockholm, 2004) 8. Memoirs: It will Have Already Happened 9. Site-Writing: Enigma and Embellishment Part 3: Criticism by Design Introduction 1. Centuries of Ambiguity: Sublime and Beautiful Weather at the Farnsworth House 2. Immediate Architecture 3. Alvin Boyarsky’s Delicatessen 4. Out of the Salon – with Natalie Barney towards a Critically Queer Architecture 5. Writing about Things and the Doing of Them 6. Quilting Jakarta 7. Where is the Project? Cedric Price on Architectural Action 8. The Fall: The Allegorical Architectural Project as a Critical Method 9. On Drawing Forth, Designs and Ideas Part 4: Cultural Context Introduction 1. I Mean to be Critical, But... 2. Critical Post-Critical: Problems of Effect, Experience and Immersion 3. A Critical Architectural Icon and its Contextual Argumentation 4. Three Scenarios for a Critical Architecture of Desert Mobility 5. The Responsive City 6. China as a Global Site: In a Critical Geography of Design 7. Critical Practice 8. Architecture for an Active Edge: The Gateway, Derby 9. Neuland: Disenchanted Utopias for Tel Aviv 10. Beyond Koolhaas

About the Author :
Jane Rendell is Professor of Architecture and Art and Director of Architectural Research at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Jonathan Hill is Professor of Architecture and Visual Theory and Director of the MPhil/PhD by Architectural Design programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Murray Fraser is Professor of Architecture at the University of Westminster in London. Mark Dorrian is Reader in Architecture at the School of Arts, Culture and Environment, University of Edinburgh and co-director of Metis.