Customer Reviews

Siteless: 1001 Building Forms

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I would recommend this book to anybody who sometimes struggles with coming up with new ideas or often gets stuck in the design process.. I often flick through this book for inspiration or ideas. The forms inside do not necessarily need to be replicated, but can often lead to developments in your own ideas.

A really helpful, small book that should be kept in any architecture students backpack

To claim this book just adds to the general tendency of contemporary architecture seeking the immediately shocking, superficial and easily publishable is perhaps a sign of precisely this tendency: people losing the ability to dwell on things long enough for their imagination to come out.

Once applied on actual architecture these concepts would need to be closely linked to program, scale and site to be interesting. However in the initial program-, scale- and siteless condition they are presented in this book, they evoke intense imagination in me. The sketches being hand drawn also adds to this.

You can be impatient and flip through it in five minutes, or you can focus your attention and find the potential and depth these forms have.

Anyway, diverging criticism and provocation is usually a sign of quality.

I am not an architect but I am fascinated by the multiple varieties of shapes in this book. I can literally dive into this imaginative world.
The architectural context seems to give the work some kind of
justification, which is not needed. It is a fine piece of art all by
itself.
It makes a good present as well, as the price is very reasonable, and can be a source of inspiration not only for architects but also for artists (I personally intend to offer it to a friend who is a wood sculptor). I think this book is an appealing work for all kinds of creative people.

This book makes a compelling opening written statement, laying out his process. Then what follows is a set of 3d 'parti' drawings, siteless, scaleless architectural 'units', drawn with a scrupulous knowledge of Jacob Chernikov's scrupulously minimal style. Each drawing is an intense, little HAND DRAWN architectural configuration, a pure expression of gestural thought, and the resulting wellspring of direct architectural applications they suggest will be a tempting crutch for a student. Any of these vivid diagrams can jar the architectural imagination, to scale these ideas, site them, and lay out the future of architecture. Not bad for a little book. Packs a great punch. A secret weapon if you're stuck, but maybe it could inspire you to your own path, and your own encylopedia of invention. So good you might want to avoid looking at it, if you want to feel original.

I bought this book out of curiosity after reading few contrasting reviews and I was quite surprised by the density of its content. It breaks with the usual graphic design of architecture books in the way it mixes text with images. Funnily enough, it also goes much further into morphological explorations than CAD-driven methodologies. Definitely worth buying.

The book filled with hundreds of small sketches, the title of each sketch is pretty mindless..
It did not have the depth and sophistication one would like to explore when looking at this tiny sketches. All in black and white.
I don't care who the author is, but to draw that many sketches, I think he owes more narrative to the readers how this 'manifestos' could define architecture.
So, it is pretty much ideas without explanation.. that's it pretty much it.
good thing is, the book is not expensive..But I'd not buy this book for more than 7 bucks.

El libro es muy bueno, en cuanto a diseño es una buena herramienta de creatividad.

This is a book that reflects the disease that afflicts modern architecture these days. Out of "boredom" with the field we are given a bunch of random meaningless forms which proudly state they have no relationship to site, community, or humanity. How clever. Even the genesis of form based on nature would be more interesting than this visual equivalent of navel gazing. Maybe this reflects the utter detachment from the real world that current modernist architects have attained. In an age where we, the human beings, could certainly use better visions for the built environment, we are offered some idle, ego-driven, abstract puttering. Anyone who needs this book as form-giver, shouldn't be practicing architecture, or attempting to learn it.

It's a very interesting little pamphlet, and amusing to flip to any page and see what's there.
That being said, the forms don't communicate that much, and it requires an iron attention span to "read" for more than about 5 minutes.

I happened across this book in Amazon and bought it without much research because of the cost. That will teach me. Basically, its filled with endless postage-stamp size sketches exploring a variety of forms. I find it hard to understand as a "manifesto" or any of the other grand notions of the publisher's description. I have two main problems with the book:
1. "Siteless" doesn't have to mean pointless. The forms are presented with no indicators of what inspired them, how they might inspire inhabitation or use, etc. So they are reduced to visual stimuli and the shallowness of picking a form from a catalog the way one might choose a new centerpiece for the dining room. Hardly the stuff of serious architecture.
2. Because the forms have no context, and therefore no scale, they actually come off more as test forms for a pottery class. In trying to eliminate scale, he has also stripped away his chance to create detail, complexity, and intricacy. Even at the level of pure formalism, the ability to play with relative scale changes, complex vs. simple areas/forms, light vs. heavy, and other dualities can give much joy.

In short, the main way I use this book now is as examples to my architecture students about the dangers of simplistic solutions and thoughts, when they don't push themselves to engage with architecture on a meaningful level. I doubt "what NOT to do" was what the author had in mind.