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.

Selected, peer reviewed papers from the 4th International Conference on Civil Engineering, Architechture and Building Materials (CEABM 2014), May 24-25, 2014, Haikou, China

Critiques the legacy and ongoing influence of Deleuze on the discipline and practice of architecture. This collection looks critically at how Deleuze challenges architecture as a discipline, how architecture contributes to philosophy and how we can come to understand the complex politics of space of our increasingly networked world. Since the 1980s, Deleuze's philosophy has fuelled a generation of architectural thinking, and can be seen in the design of a global range of contemporary built environments. His work has also alerted architecture to crucial ecological, political and social problems that the discipline needs to reconcile.

Since antiquity, the sciences have served as a source of images and metaphors for architecture and have had a direct influence on the shaping of built space. In recent years, architects have been looking again at science as a source of inspiration in the production of their designs and constructions. This volume evaluates the interconnections between the sciences and architecture from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Architecture and the Sciences shows how scientific paradigms have migrated to architecture through the appropriation of organic and mechanical models. Conversely, architecture has provided images for scientific and technological discourse. Accordingly, this volume investigates the status of the exchanges between the two domains.Contents include: Alessandra Ponte, Desert Testing; Martin Bressani, Violet-le-Duc's Optic; Georges Teyssot, Norm and Type: Variations on a Theme; Reinhold Martin, Organicism's Other; Catherine Ingraham, Why All These Birds? Birds in the Sky, Birds in the Hand; Antoine Picon, Architecture, Science, Technology and the Virtual Realm; and Felicity Scott, Encounters with the Face of America.

Published in conjunction with a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this catalogue reveals new perspectives on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, a designer so prolific and familiar as to nearly preclude critical reexamination. Structured as a series of inquiries into the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, the book is a collection of scholarly explorations rather than an attempt to construct a master narrative. Each chapter centers on a key object from the archive that an invited author has "unpacked"-interpreting and contextualizing it, tracing its meanings and connections, and juxtaposing it with other works from the archive, from MoMA, or from outside collections. The publication aims to open up Wright's work to questions, interrogations, and debates, and to highlight interpretations by contemporary scholars, both established Wright experts and others considering this iconic figure from new and illuminating perspectives.

This well illustrated text forms a critical appraisal of the place and direction of architecture and urban design in a new world order at the start of the 21st century. The book defines architectural and environmental goals for the New Age by analysing recent contemporary work for its responsiveness to important social and environmental issues and comparing it to successful precedents in architecture. It argues that this new sustainable approach to architecture should be recognised as a new development of mainstream architectural history. This practical guide illustrates current social and natural resource issues to aid architects in their approach to future design. Environmental economics is presented as a potential bridge over the divide between the expectations of the business sector and the concerns of environmental lobbies. Through examples and case studies, an accessible analysis of carefully researched data, drawn from primary sources over four continents, allows the author to outline the current urgency for architects and urban designers to respond with real commitment to current and future changing contexts. This book expresses a holistic vision and proposes a value system in response to the diagnosis. It includes: sound architectural and environmental ethics; end user involvement in the design process and technological advances aimed at sustainable resource use. Includes international case studies from Europe, North America, the Developing world including South Africa, South America and Central Asia.

The “organic” is by now a venerable concept within aesthetics, architecture, and art history, but what might such a term mean within the spatialities and temporalities of film? By way of an answer, this concise and innovative study locates organicity in the work of Béla Tarr, the renowned Hungarian filmmaker and pioneer of the “slow cinema” movement. Through a wholly original analysis of the long take and other signature features of Tarr’s work, author Thorsten Botz-Bornstein establishes compelling links between the seemingly remote spheres of film and architecture, revealing shared organic principles that emphasize the transcendence of boundaries.

At the start of this book Imre Makovecz gently criticises the commentators who first brought his work to the West. He is grateful to them of course, but he claims they only half understood, simplifying and misinterpreting. They presented him as a heroic rebel against the communist system, rather than seeing his battle against a larger enemy that we all still face: this he calls impersonal intelligence. When he remarks that architecture is not regarded as an art in Hungary, but as a service, and that it has no place in the Ministry of Culture, we find it all too familiar. It is perhaps understandable that someone so concerned with cultural memory -- especially long-repressed folk memories -- should arise in much-oppressed Hungary, which was fought over for millennia even before the advent of the Soviet Empire, but the same cultural amnesia is occurring throughout the world, exhibited in increasing rootlessness and placelessness. Perhaps the most misleading reading of all has been Makovecz the wild man or primitive, but this book shows him to be a highly articulate architectural philosopher and intellectual, conversant from the start with a wide range of international sources. There is much more to the work than the expressive image we first encounter. It warmly embraces place and community, and quite aside from its ecological dimension, there is a concern with the building process and the participation of craftsmen that would have warmed William Morris' heart. Most bold and most intriguing is Makovecz's claim to be tapping into ancient and universal folk memories that are lodged in hand-made patterns, gestures and even dance. Over the last century we have had to revise our sense of civilisation, for cities and writing are but five thousand years old, yet our forebears tens of thousand years ago could scarcely have been less intelligent and communicative than ourselves.

The church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, also called San Carlino, is an architectural artefact that continues to attract numerous hypotheses and geometric analyses attempting to explain its form and meaning. Numerous investigations have attempted to reveal its underlying geometrical principles, without, however, reaching a consensus. Finding San Carlino presents an edited collection of perspectives on Borromini’s famous Baroque church from a range of established and emerging scholars in architectural history and theory, including Werner Oechslin, Karsten Harries, Michael Hill and Lauren Jacobi amongst others. This book offers the reader different means of engaging with, enjoying and articulating San Carlino’s complexity, non-consensus and ambiguity. It is precisely such a unique disposition that motivates this book to explore multiple modes of architectural enquiry and delve into a series of theoretical and historiographical questions such as: why was Borromini not able to post-rationalize his architecture with his drawings? What is San Carlino’s exemplary value, and why does it continually engender exegetical and hermeneutic desire? What is the role of geometry in architecture, in history and today? Written for researchers, scholars and postgraduate students in architectural history and theory, the book uses San Carlino as an enigmatic centering point for a set of significant contemporary voices to explore new modes of confrontation and comparison.