Customer Reviews

Perfect Acts Of Architecture

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

First what this book is not. This is not a book about buildings, in a traditional sense, although all the architects with work represented in the book are actually far busier these days building real buildings than creating the sort of explorations seen here. Don't confuse this book for anything other than avant-garde drawing exercises.

So what this book IS -- well, the possibility that these avant-garde drawings can be a good thing, even a visionary and optimistic thing, that they can inspire, and finally can stretch the possibilities of what we mean by architecture. The title calls these "acts" of architecture, which really is just a bit of jargon meaning ravishingly beautiful drawings that are riffs on architectural ideas. These ideas don't always boil down into words (you could for instance skip most of the text), or comprehensible buildings, but are irreduceably visual and all exciting.

The collection presented here is a work of a generation of visionary architects now our elders and respected and all that means (like building real stuff now), but at the time this work was done these architects were effectively scribbling in their attics with no real commissions. The group as a whole was, and continues to be, enormously influential. It's also interesting to see the development of such famous architects as Rem Koolhaas or Tom Mayne (although hard to single them out amongst this group) compared to their mature and more "mainstream" production now.

One star is cut from the rating for the quality of reproductions. This is a catalogue for the MoMA and Wexner show, and the original drawings at the show were far more subtle and ravishing that the printing here. Especially the Mayne and Libeskind work suffers. Finally, Terry Riley's introduction is pitch-perfect, as one would expect.

This is a great book, awesome spine and cover design, and the typeset plays really well with the subject matter, especially for Rem and Elia's Exodus proposal.

Also you get pretty much all of the Manhattan Transcripts for about the same price as they'd be on their own.

The book shows exceptional stratigical drawing from a selection of famous achitects. Although some explanations about the projects is short, this book is great for architectural students because it simply provokes thought.

The author notes that these works were produced in an economic slump when many architects were forced to turn to drawings and teaching to suplement their incomes. In a way, that period was the beginning of the end of architecture too. In place of real design, intelligent solutions, an interest in housing and other real-world problems, the architecture of academia took root. For some, this took precedence over real building and design. What we have here is a series of absurd propositions that Kipnis (perhaps he too was in an economic slump and needed to write a book), finds more fascinating than they really are. This was the period when it became popular (amongst a self-styled academic elite), to produce incomprehensible drawings as a way of distinguishing oneself from the pack. Great claims were made about the newness of this architecture and like much of what went before, we are suffering bthe urban degredation that Eisenman, Tschumi, Libeskind et al have reaped on cities across the globe. - Flack lackey Kipnis does little more than ingratiate himself into the circle. Like his subjects, however, he has little to offer sensible architectural commentary. Avoid.

Notwithstanding that these projects (thankfully) were never built, they shatre the commonality of lacking any substance. The drawings are obtuse and match the pretentious texts that typify what passes for academic writing today. In the main, however, they have nothing worthwhile to say. This book might best be described as a collection of self-important musings by architects who have made questionable contributions to the cities we live in.