Serious play
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This volume shows how postwar designers embraced whimsy and eclecticism in their work, exploring playfulness as an essential construct of modernity. Following World War II, Americans began accumulating more and more goods, spurring a transformation in the field of interior decoration. Storage walls became ubiquitous, often serving as a home's centerpiece. Designers such(...)
Serious play
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$65.95
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Summary:
This volume shows how postwar designers embraced whimsy and eclecticism in their work, exploring playfulness as an essential construct of modernity. Following World War II, Americans began accumulating more and more goods, spurring a transformation in the field of interior decoration. Storage walls became ubiquitous, often serving as a home's centerpiece. Designers such as Alexander Girard encouraged homeowners to populate their new shelving units with folk art, as well as unconventional and modern objects, to produce innovative and unexpected juxtapositions within modern architectural settings. Playfulness can be seen in the colorful, child-sized furniture by Charles and Ray Eames, who also produced toys. And in the postwar corporate world, the concept of play is manifested in the influential advertising work of Paul Rand.
Design, Periods and Styles
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For thousands of years, architects have used models to invent, experiment and communicate. A world in miniature, such models are even more varied in their purposes and materials than their full-scale counterparts. This elegant book explores the fascinating nature of the architectural model through 26 illustrated essays, one for each letter of the alphabet. Unbound by the(...)
An alphabet of architectural models
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For thousands of years, architects have used models to invent, experiment and communicate. A world in miniature, such models are even more varied in their purposes and materials than their full-scale counterparts. This elegant book explores the fascinating nature of the architectural model through 26 illustrated essays, one for each letter of the alphabet. Unbound by the practicalities of life-size construction, models allow architects the flexibility and freedom to think in three dimensions. Whether made for purely speculative exercises or to solve a specific problem, they are aids to the imagination. Equally, they can be used as detailed representations of particular places, either built or as yet unrealized, in order to convey information to patrons or the public. Models also have a vibrant life outside the architect’s office, including as souvenirs, architectural fragments displayed in museums, and toys for children and adults alike. Written by architects, model-makers, curators, conservators and scholars, the texts in this absorbing ''Alphabet'' explore such fundamental issues as modelling materials and techniques, scale, and the role of the model in the design process. They also go beyond conventional accounts to look at models under the X-ray machine, their use in film, and edible models. The result is a wide-ranging, original account of the multiple lives of the architectural model.
Models
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It's impossible not to think, even upon close inspection, that Olivo Barbieri's photographs aren't images of obsessively detailed architectural maquettes. The trees seem plastic, the cars resemble toys and the buildings look as though they would fall over if you so much as breathed on them. The Waterfall Project brings this unreal quality to landscape, specifically to(...)
Olivo Barbieri: the waterfall project
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It's impossible not to think, even upon close inspection, that Olivo Barbieri's photographs aren't images of obsessively detailed architectural maquettes. The trees seem plastic, the cars resemble toys and the buildings look as though they would fall over if you so much as breathed on them. The Waterfall Project brings this unreal quality to landscape, specifically to such touristy waterfalls as Victoria (Zambia/ Zimbabwe), Iguazu (Argentina, Brazil), Khone Papeng (Laos/Cambodia) and Niagara (USA/Canada). In these disorienting images, the spectators on the crowded viewing platforms look like M & M's in a candy bowl, a cluster of toytown Pointillistic color against a backdrop of watery froth. The results are vertiginous and wonderfully bizarre. Critic Walter Guadagnini writes in the introduction: There is an evident technical expedient in this, and it is the choice to photograph from above, to place oneself in a privileged and anomalous condition. In the past, this expedient already gave rise to numerous readings, which range from acknowledging the historical roots of this perspective (going back all the way to Nadar's photographs from a hot-air balloon) up to the socio-political implications deriving from 9/11."
Photography monographs
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Today, the physical scale model is a centrepiece for design education, celebrated practices and architecture’s public relations. The development of digital fabrication devices has made model manufacture even more pervasive. The physical model is the most accessible form of architectural communication. Clients and the general public seem to immediately respond to and(...)
Architecture and the miniature : models
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Today, the physical scale model is a centrepiece for design education, celebrated practices and architecture’s public relations. The development of digital fabrication devices has made model manufacture even more pervasive. The physical model is the most accessible form of architectural communication. Clients and the general public seem to immediately respond to and understand the model, over blueprints and computer simulations. Many architects use finished models for presentations, competitions and exhibitions. Others also embrace sketch models as quick, economic and flexible generative tools. It is only with the rise of the virtual that the advantages and disadvantages of more traditional models can be fully evaluated. As attested by this book, we are now at an important watershed for the model in architecture. Practitioners and educators alike are seeking to fully understand the multiplicity of model types and how they might be strategically deployed at appropriate stages in the design process. The historic role that the model has played is outlined with attention paid to Alberti, John Soane, the Bauhaus and education reforms. A cultural history is offered by examining models in the guise of toys, food, cinema, product design, souvenirs, narrative and art. Model theories are considered and tied to specific examples in the field. New technologies and creative combinations of traditional model-making techniques are evaluated. Kinetic, multi-media, nightscape and interdisciplinary models reveal the broad scope and exceptional versatility offered by this important tool. Models: Architecture and the Miniature focuses on current model use and experimentation by architects across the globe including David Chipperfield, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Daniel Libeskind, Greg Lynn and UN Studio.
Models
The architectural model: histories of the miniature and the prototype, the exemplar and the muse
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For more than five hundred years, architects have employed three-dimensional models as tools to test, refine, and illustrate their ideas. But, as Matthew Mindrup shows, the uses of physical architectural models extend beyond mere representation. An architectural model can also simulate, instruct, inspire, and generate architectural designs. It can be, among other things,(...)
The architectural model: histories of the miniature and the prototype, the exemplar and the muse
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For more than five hundred years, architects have employed three-dimensional models as tools to test, refine, and illustrate their ideas. But, as Matthew Mindrup shows, the uses of physical architectural models extend beyond mere representation. An architectural model can also simulate, instruct, inspire, and generate architectural designs. It can be, among other things, sign, souvenir, toy, funerary object, didactic tool, medium, or muse. In this book, Mindrup surveys the history of architectural models by investigating their uses, both theoretical and practical. Tracing the architectural model's development from antiquity to the present, Mindrup also offers an interpretive framework for understanding each of its applications in the context of time and place. He first examines models meant to portray extant, fantastic, or proposed structures, describing their use in ancient funerary or dedicatory practices, in which models are endowed with magical power; as a medium for architectural reverie and inspiration; and as prototypes for twentieth-century experimental designs. Mindrup then considers models that exemplify certain architectural uses, exploring the influence of Leon Battista Alberti's dictum that models be simple, lest they distract from the architect's ideas; analyzing the model as a generative tool; and investigating allegorical, analogical, and anagogical interpretations of models. Mindrup's histories show how the model can be a surrogate for the architectural structure itself, or for the experience of its formal, tactile, and sensory complexity; and beyond that, that the manipulation, play, experimentation, and dreaming enabled by models allow us to imagine architecture in new ways.
Architectural Theory
Wooden marbles and blocks
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This is a re-production of a 1920's architectural building toy based on the concepts of Fredrich Froebel. In 1837, naturalist and educator Fredrich Frobel invented kindergarten (or "garden of children") - the concept that children should be nurtured like the new sprouts. Frobel carefully chose materials that allow children to discover properties of geometry and design(...)
Children's Books
January 1900,
Wooden marbles and blocks
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This is a re-production of a 1920's architectural building toy based on the concepts of Fredrich Froebel. In 1837, naturalist and educator Fredrich Frobel invented kindergarten (or "garden of children") - the concept that children should be nurtured like the new sprouts. Frobel carefully chose materials that allow children to discover properties of geometry and design through play. Since play is at the heart of this method, it is important not to instruct,but rather to allow children to learn through self-activity. Children learn through the impression they form while doing. Because of their playful spirit, children become absorbed by the task at hand. Artists and architects Frank Lloyd Wright, piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, and Buckminister Fuller used this system.
Children's Books
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Thomas Demand’s photographic practice - the depiction of meticulously recreated life-size interiors and environments - takes on a new twist with this volume. The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles is home to the architectural maquettes of architect John Lautner, whose buildings are highlights of Californian architecture. Lautner’s space-age structures - such as the(...)
Thomas Demand : model studies
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Thomas Demand’s photographic practice - the depiction of meticulously recreated life-size interiors and environments - takes on a new twist with this volume. The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles is home to the architectural maquettes of architect John Lautner, whose buildings are highlights of Californian architecture. Lautner’s space-age structures - such as the legendary “Chemosphere,” a four-bedroom house resembling a flying saucer, mounted atop a 20-foot concrete pillar - are particularly toy-like in their maquette versions, and for this project, Demand photographed 12 of these models in close-up detail. Model Studies includes more than 130 color images of Lautner’s models. With this volume, Demand, who has always been concerned with the intersections of art and architecture, now looks at the architect as sculptor, paying tribute to Lautner on the centenary of the architect’s birth.
Photography monographs