This first English translation of Precisions reproduces the original book published in French in 1930, with an introduction added by the author in 1960. It is a spontaneous and exuberant series of 10 lectures Le Corbusier gave in Buenos Aires during the fall of 1929. As he spoke Le Corbusier improvised drawings on large sheets of paper with crayons. While similar drawings appear in other works, here all the lectures and images appear in their original context as Le Corbusier assembled them. Precisions reflects a new maturity in Le Corbusier's thinking and an extreme confidence in the development of his ideas. The drawings and lectures are unique in their eloquent and concise summary of his philosophy of architecture and urban design, stating the principles that informed his work from the 1920s on. They contain some of his most compelling aphorisms, both verbal and visual, covering technique as the basis of architecture, the human scale in design, furniture, the private house, apartments and office buildings, the city, the League of Nations competition, teaching architecture, and a splendid analysis of the transformation of his own work in houses from La Roche­Jeanneret to the Villa Savoye.

A comprehensive new survey tracing the global history of urbanism and urban design from the industrial revolution to the present. Written with an international perspective that encourages cross-cultural comparisons, leading architectural and urban historian Eric Mumford presents a comprehensive survey of urbanism and urban design since the industrial revolution. Beginning in the second half of the 19th century, technical, social, and economic developments set cities and the world's population on a course of massive expansion. Mumford recounts how key figures in design responded to these changing circumstances with both practicable proposals and theoretical frameworks, ultimately creating what are now mainstream ideas about how urban environments should be designed, as well as creating the field called "urbanism." He then traces the complex outcomes of approaches that emerged in European, American, and Asian cities. This erudite and insightful book addresses the modernization of the traditional city, including mass transit and sanitary sewer systems, building legislation, and model tenement and regional planning approaches. It also examines the urban design concepts of groups such as CIAM (International Congresses of Modern Architecture) and Team 10, and their adherents and critics, including those of the Congress for the New Urbanism, as well as efforts toward ecological urbanism. Highlighting built as well as unbuilt projects, Mumford offers a sweeping guide to the history of designers' efforts to shape cities.

The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.

This project is born out of similar questions and discussions on the topic of organicism emergent from two critical strands regarding the discourse of organic self-generation: one dealing with the problem of stopping in the design processes in history, and the other with the organic legacy of style in the nineteenth century as a preeminent form of aesthetic ideology. The epistemologies of self-generation outlined by enlightenment and critical philosophy provided the model for the discursive formations of modern urban planning and architecture. The form of the organism was thought to calibrate modernism’s infinite extension. The architectural organicism of today does not take on the language of the biological sciences, as they did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but rather the image of complex systems, be they computational/informational, geo/ecological, or even ontological/aesthetic ‘networks’. What is retained from the modernity of yesterday is the ideology of endless self-generation. Revisiting such a topic feels relevant now, in a time when the idea of endless generation is rendered more suspect than ever, amid an ever increasing speed and complexity of artificial intelligence (AI) networks. The essays collected in this book offer a variety of critiques of the modernist idea of endless growth in the fields of architecture, literature, philosophy, and the history of science. They range in scope from theoretical and speculative to analytic and critical and from studies of the history of modernity to reflections of our contemporary world. Far from advocating a return to the romantic forms of nineteenth-century naturphilosophie, this project focuses on probing organicism for new forms of critique and emergent subjectivities in a contemporary, 'post'-pandemic constellation of neo-naturalism in design, climate change, complex systems, and information networks. This book will be of interest to a broad range of researchers and professionals in architecture and art history, historians of science, visual artists, and scholars in the humanities more generally.

This book offers a detailed insight into the desire for, and consequences of, precise communications in the daily life of contemporary architectural practice through close readings of constructed architectural details by Sigurd Lewerentz, Caruso St John Architects, Mies van der Rohe and OMA. In the professionalised context of the contemporary architectural profession, precise communications – drawings, specifications, letters, faxes and emails – are charged with the complex task of translating architectural intent into a neutral and quantifiable language which is expected to guarantee an exact match between the architects’ intentions and the constructed result. Yet, as any architectural practitioner will know, it is doubtful whether the construction of any architectural project may ever exactly match all written and drawn predictions. This book challenges claims to certainty which have been attributed to such communications from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, and critiques ongoing expectations of certainty in contemporary architectural production.

Published in 1923, Toward an Architecture had an immediate impact on architects throughout Europe and remains a foundational text for students and professionals. Le Corbusier urges readers to cease thinking of architecture as a matter of historical styles and instead open their eyes to the modern world. Simultaneously a historian, critic, and prophet, he provocatively juxtaposes views of classical Greece and Renaissance Rome with images of airplanes, cars, and ocean liners. Le Corbusier's slogans--such as "the house is a machine for living in"--and philosophy changed how his contemporaries saw the relationship between architecture, technology, and history. This edition includes a new translation of the original text, a scholarly introduction, and background notes that illuminate the text and illustrations.

Brasilia, Caracas, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro ... cities synonymous with some of the most innovative and progressive architecture of the past century.

Architecture is conventionally seen as being synonymous with building. In contrast, this book introduces and defines a new category - the unbuildable. The unbuildable involves projects that are not just unbuilt, but cannot be built. This distinct form of architectural project has an important and often surprising role in architectural discourse, working not in opposition to the buildable, but frequently complementing it. Using well-known examples of early Soviet architecture – Tatlin’s Tower in particular – Nerma Cridge demonstrates the relevance of the unbuildable, how it relates to current notions of seriality, copying and reproduction, and its implications for contemporary practice and discourse in the computational age. At the same time it offers a fresh view of our preconceptions and expectations of early Soviet architecture and the Constructivist Movement.

This is the first book to give such close attention to Le Corbusier's approach to the making of buildings. It illustrates the ways in which Le Corbusier's details were expressive of his overall philosophical intentions. It is not a construction book in the usual sense- rather it focusses on the meaning of detail, on the ways in which detail informs the overall architectural narrative of a building. Well illustrated and containing several specially prepared scaled drawings it acts as timely reminder to both students and architects of the possibilities inherent in the most small scale tectonic gestures.