Interviews with thirty famous Swiss architects including: Herzog & de Meuron, Peter Zumthor, Valerio Olgiati, Mario Botta, Luigi Snozzi and many others.

Resilience will be a defining quality of the twenty-first century. As we witness the increasingly turbulent effects of climate change, the multiple challenges of resource depletion and wage stagnation, we know that our current ways of living are not resilient. This volume takes resilience as a transformative concept to ask where and what architecture might contribute. Bringing together cross-disciplinary perspectives from architecture, urban design, art, geography, building science and psychoanalysis, it aims to open up multiple perspectives of research, spatial strategies and projects that are testing how we can build local resilience in preparation for major societal challenges, defining the position of architecture in urban resilience discourse. Chapter 16 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 3.0 license.

he dialogue, as “the talking of the soul with itself” that constitutes the act of thinking (Plato), has been selected as the ideal form through which to vividly and accurately convey the thinking of a number of protagonists of Italian modern architecture. Knowledge remains a latent legacy of the soul until a given stimulus reawakens its memory: architecture, more than sophia (wisdom), becomes philo-sophia, i.e. love of knowledge. A reading of the architectural phenomenon aimed at faithfully bringing out its complexity cannot help but involve the stories directly told by the protagonists, and the micro-stories of individual episodes, in order to explore the relationship that exists between the poetic and the technical-scientific spheres, underlining their complementary and conflictual nature. The disciplinary tools of exegesis of design and its materialization stimulate a form of critique of criticism driven by the rejection of an angle of interpretation of architecture oriented exclusively towards its results. Method and result constitute the inseparable terms: the direct testimony of certain protagonists of Italian architecture makes it possible to reconnect the interrupted threads of a narrative that has often been rendered syncopated and unilateral by excessively superficial explanation. The Dialogues on Architecture explore the interaction between idea, design and construction, revealing different operative and conceptual modes through which to achieve the finished work. Franco Albini, Lodovico B. Belgiojoso, Guido Canella, Aurelio Cortesi, Roberto Gabetti & Aimaro Isola, Ignazio Gardella, Vittorio Gregotti, Vico Magistretti, Enrico Mantero, Paolo Portoghesi, Aldo Rossi, Giuseppe Terragni, Vittoriano Viganò are the authors of this narrative.

Considering the influence of the forms and tectonics of the Mediterranean vernacular on modern architectural practice and discourse from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Can architectural discourse rethink itself in terms of a radical emancipatory project? And if so, what would be the contours of such a discourse?

Architecture in Dialogue with an Activated Ground sets out to validate the role of the unreasonable in the design process. Using case study projects, architect Urs Bette gives an insight into the epistemological processes of his creative practice, and unveils the strategies he deploys in order to facilitate the poetic aspects of architecture within a discourse whose evaluation parameters predominantly involve reason. Themes discussed include the emergence of space from the staged opposition between the architectural object and the site, and the relationship between emotive cognition and analytic synthesis in the design act. In both cases, there is a necessary engagement with forms of ‘unreasonable’ thought, action or behaviours. By arguing for the usefulness and validity of the unreasonable in architecture, and by investigating the performative relationship between object and ground, Bette contributes to the discourse on extensions, growth and urban densification that tap into local histories and voices, including those of the seemingly inanimate – the architecture itself and the ground it sits upon – to inform the site-related production of architectural character and space. In doing so, he raises debates about the values pursued in design approval processes, and the ways in which site-relatedness is both produced and judged.

Examining the changing attitudes toward the city as the site for public art.

Bestselling author Alain de Botton considers how our private homes and public edifices influence how we feel, and how we could build dwellings in which we would stand a better chance of happiness. In this witty, erudite look at how we shape, and are shaped by, our surroundings, Alain de Botton applies Stendhal’s motto that “Beauty is the promise of happiness” to the spaces we inhabit daily. Why should we pay attention to what architecture has to say to us? de Botton asks provocatively. With his trademark lucidity and humour, de Botton traces how human needs and desires have been served by styles of architecture, from stately Classical to minimalist Modern, arguing that the stylistic choices of a society can represent both its cherished ideals and the qualities it desperately lacks. On an individual level, de Botton has deep sympathy for our need to see our selves reflected in our surroundings; he demonstrates with great wisdom how buildings — just like friends — can serve as guardians of our identity. Worrying about the shape of our sofa or the colour of our walls might seem self-indulgent, but de Botton considers the hopes and fears we have for our homes at a new level of depth and insight. When shopping for furniture or remodelling the kitchen, we don’t just consider functionality but also the major questions of aesthetics and the philosophy of art: What is beauty? Can beautiful surroundings make us good? Can beauty bring happiness? The buildings we find beautiful, de Botton concludes, are those that represent our ideas of a meaningful life. The Architecture of Happiness marks a return to what Alain does best — taking on a subject whose allure is at once tantalizing and a little forbidding and offering to readers a completely beguiling and original exploration of the subject. As he did with Proust, philosophy, and travel, now he does with architecture.