While much has been written on Marcel Duchamp - one of the twentieth century's most beguiling artists - the subject of his flirtation with architecture seems to have been largely overlooked. Yet, in the carefully arranged plans and sections organising the blueprint of desire in the Large Glass, his numerous pieces replicating architectural fragments, and his involvement in designing exhibitions, Duchamp's fascination with architectural design is clearly evident. As his unconventional architectural influences - Niceron, Lequeu and Kiesler - and diverse legacy - Tschumi, OMA, Webb, Diller + Scofidio and Nicholson - indicate, Duchamp was not as much interested in 'built' architecture as he was in the architecture of desire, re-constructing the imagination through drawing and testing the boundaries between reality and its aesthetic and philosophical possibilities. Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire examines the link between architectural thinking and Duchamp's work. By employing design, drawing and making - the tools of the architect - Haralambidou performs an architectural analysis of Duchamp’s final enigmatic work Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas... demonstrating an innovative research methodology able to grasp meaning beyond textual analysis. This novel reading of his ideas and methods adds to, but also challenges, other art-historical interpretations. Through three main themes - allegory, visuality and desire - the book defines and theorises an alternative drawing practice positioned between art and architecture that predates and includes Duchamp.

In this extraordinary story the author digs and digs until she finds the whole story. Along the way she discovers that not only was her great-grandfather murdered by the husband of Evelyn Nesbitt, a showgirl at the time, who was enraged with jealously, only to be acquitted on the grounds of insanity, but that the repercussions of this event and of her great-grandfather's behaviour on the rest of the family and its subsequent generations was devastating. Throughout the gripping narrative snippets of information about Stanford are woven into the incredible tale of the author's own upbringing and the whole family. By the end the story of the murder and its sordid circumstances are revealed. A beautifully written and extraordinary powerful book.

Mercenaries in lace and steel roam the countryside and the heads of criminals are impaled on London Bridge. The characters' relationships are played out in the shadow of the hangman's rope. Sequel to Rats and Gargoyles.

Theorizes an architectural ethos of extreme self-reflection and finality from a Lacanian perspective. While it is widely recognized that the advanced architecture of the 1970s left a legacy of experimentation and theoretical speculation as intense as any in architecture's history, there has been no general theory of that ethos. Now, in Architecture's Desire, K. Michael Hays writes an account of the “late avant-garde” as an architecture systematically twisting back on itself, pondering its own historical status, and deliberately exploring architecture's representational possibilities right up to their absolute limits. In close readings of the brooding, melancholy silence of Aldo Rossi, the radically reductive “decompositions” and archaeologies of Peter Eisenman, the carnivalesque excesses of John Hejduk, and the “cinegrammatic” delirium of Bernard Tschumi, Hays narrates the story of architecture confronting its own boundaries with objects of ever more reflexivity, difficulty, and intransigence. The late avant-garde is the last architecture with philosophical aspirations, an architecture that could think philosophical problems through architecture rather than merely illustrate them. It takes architecture as the object of its own reflection, which in turn produces an unrelenting desire. Using the tools of critical theory together with the structure of Lacan's triad imaginary-symbolic-real, Hays constructs a theory of architectural desire that is historically specific and yet sets the terms and the challenges of all subsequent architectural practice, including today's.

In an era of brash, expensive, provocative new buildings, a prominent critic argues that emotions—such as hope, power, sex, and our changing relationship to the idea of home—are the most powerful force behind architecture, yesterday and (especially) today. We are living in the most dramatic period in architectural history in more than half a century: a time when cityscapes are being redrawn on a yearly basis, architects are testing the very idea of what a building is, and whole cities are being invented overnight in exotic locales or here in the United States. Now, in a bold and wide-ranging new work, Rowan Moore—former director of the Architecture Foundation, now the architecture critic for The Observer—explores the reasons behind these changes in our built environment, and how they in turn are changing the way we live in the world. Taking as his starting point dramatic examples such as the High Line in New York City and the outrageous island experiment of Dubai, Moore then reaches far and wide: back in time to explore the Covent Garden brothels of eighteenth-century London and the fetishistic minimalism of Adolf Loos; across the world to assess a software magnate’s grandiose mansion in Atlanta and Daniel Libeskind’s failed design for the World Trade Center site; and finally to the deeply naturalistic work of Lina Bo Bardi, whom he celebrates as the most underrated architect of the modern era.

Part-Architecture presents a detailed and original study of Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre through another seminal modernist artwork, Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass. Aligning the two works materially, historically and conceptually, the book challenges the accepted architectural descriptions of the Maison de Verre, makes original spatial and social accounts of its inhabitation in 1930s Paris, and presents new architectural readings of the Large Glass. Through a rich analysis, which incorporates creative projects into history and theory research, the book establishes new ways of writing about architecture. Designed for politically progressive gynaecologist Dr Jean Dalsace and his avant-garde wife, Annie Dalsace, the Maison de Verre combines a family home with a gynaecology clinic into a ‘free-plan’ layout. Screened only by glass walls, the presence of the clinic in the home suggests an untold dialogue on 1930s sexuality. The text explores the Maison de Verre through another radical glass construction, the Large Glass, where Duchamp’s complex depiction of unconsummated sexual relations across the glass planes reveals his resistance to the marital conventions of 1920s Paris. This and other analyses of the Large Glass are used as a framework to examine the Maison de Verre as a register of the changing history of women’s domestic and maternal choices, reclaiming the building as a piece of female social architectural history. The process used to uncover and write the accounts in the book is termed ‘part-architecture’. Derived from psychoanalytic theory, part-architecture fuses analytical, descriptive and creative processes, to produce a unique social and architectural critique. Identifying three essential materials to the Large Glass, the book has three main chapters: ‘Glass’, ‘Dust’ and ‘Air’. Combining theory text, creative writing and drawing, each traces the history and meaning of the material and its contribution to the spaces and sexuality of the Large Glass and the Maison de Verre. As a whole, the book contributes important and unique spatial readings to existing scholarship and expands definitions of architectural design and history.

A reconsideration of Constant Nieuwenhuys's visionary architectural project, New Babylon, and of the role of drawing in and electronic age.

Since the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Indonesia has undergone a radical program of administrative decentralization and neoliberal reforms. In Methods of Desire, author Aurora Donzelli explores these changes through an innovative perspective—one that locates the production of neoliberalism in novel patterns of language use and new styles of affect display. Building on almost two decades of fieldwork, Donzelli describes how the growing influence of transnational lending agencies is transforming the ways in which people desire and voice their expectations, intentions, and entitlements within the emergent participatory democracy and restructuring of Indonesia’s political economy. She argues that a largely overlooked aspect of the Era Reformasi concerns the transition from a moral regime centered on the expectation that desires should remain hidden to a new emphasis on the public expression of individuals’ aspirations. The book examines how the large-scale institutional transformations that followed the collapse of the Suharto regime have impacted people’s lives and imaginations in the relatively remote and primarily rural Toraja highlands of Sulawesi. A novel concept of the individual as a bundle of audible and measurable desires has emerged, one that contrasts with the deep-rooted reticence toward the expression of personal preferences. The spreading of foreign discursive genres such as customer satisfaction surveys, training sessions, electoral mission statements, and fundraising auctions, and the diffusion of new textual artifacts such as checklists, flowcharts, and workflow diagrams are producing forms of citizenship, political participation, and moral agency that contrast with the longstanding epistemologies of secrecy typical of local styles of knowledge and power. Donzelli’s long-term ethnographic study examines how these foreign protocols are being received, absorbed, and readapted in a peripheral community of the Indonesian archipelago. Combining a telescopic perspective on our contemporary moment with a microscopic analysis of conversational practices, the author argues that the managerial forms of political rationality and the entrepreneurial morality underwriting neoliberal apparatuses proliferate through the working of small cogs, that is, acts of speech. By examining these concrete communicative exchanges, she sheds light on both the coherence and inconsistency underlying the worldwide diffusion of market logic to all domains of life.

Surrealism expanded our reality by drawing upon myths, dreams, and the subconscious as sources of artistic inspiration. Beginning in the 1930s, the movement made a crucial impact on design, and it continues to inspire designers to this day. »Objects of Desire: Surrealism and Design« is the first book to document this fascinating conversation. It includes numerous essays and a comprehensive selection of images which traces these reciprocal exchanges by juxtaposing exemplary artworks and design objects. Among the featured artists and designers are Gae Aulenti, Achille Castiglioni, Giorgio de Chirico, Le Corbusier, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, ntoni Gaudí, Frederick Kiesler, René Magritte, Carlo Mollino, Meret Oppenheim, and many others. The book is rounded off with historical text material as well as short texts and statements by contemporary designers. This in- depth examination makes one thing abundantly clear: form does not always follow function -- it can also follow our obsessions, our fantasies, and our hidden desires.

Traces and analyzes the history of product design since 1750, beginning with the design and marketing innovations of Josiah Wedgwood, and examines how product design came into existence, how it influences our choices, and what is says about society