Welcome to the Hotel Architecture (Writing Architecture) [Paperback]

Roger Connah (Author), Daniel Libeskind (Foreword)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0262531534 | ISBN-13: 978-0262531535 | Publication Date: May 15, 1998

Departing from conventional genres of architectural writing, Roger Connah presents an original and wry reflection on the fickle but exciting role that language, semantics, and philosophy have played this century in relation to architecture. Welcome to the Hotel Architecture is a five-part "anti-epic" poem on the culture of architecture--its tribes and inventions, the spectacular and vernacular, and the processes through which names and movements are secured, erased, forgotten, and manipulated.Using various styles and poetic approaches mimetic of the restless adventures, swerves, and hijacks of language and philosophy in architecture, Connah takes us on an eccentric hop, skip, and jump along the compound walls of architecture and eventually to the Hotel Architecture itself, where we witness a New Year's Eve symposium on December 31, 1999, that is truly carnivalesque. As we wander through the foyer to the Digital Lounge, where the DITTO conference is taking place, we hear some guests raising their glasses to Gin and Tectonica, others saying good-bye to the rhetoric of the last century, while others still cling to literary theory and philosophical thinness. Following the midnight hour, the crews finally arrive to clean up the mess left over from the architecture wars of the last century. Welcome to the Hotel Architecture! A project to build, a new accommodation, from degree zero to top speed, an architecture of true "unrest" for the next millennium.Along with Paul Valéry's Eupalonius, or the Architect, Le Corbusier's Poem of the Right Angle, and Paul Muldoon's Shining Brow, this is one of only a handful of long poems devoted to the subject of architecture written in the twentieth century. Certainly, it is one of the most unorthodox treatments of architecture in any genre since Connah's last tour de force of criticism, Writing Architecture: Fantomas Fragments Fictions, insinuated itself upon the discipline. Writing Architecture (MIT Press, 1989) won the International Congress of Architectural Critics Book Award and prefigured the name of the series in which this work appears.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An epic poem about the history of ideas in modern architecture? As unlikely as such a project might appear at first glance, architecture critic Roger Connah offers just such an original creation, and in a highly entertaining and provocative fashion... anyone hungry for a poetic game of free-association through networks of linguistic and philosophical ideas affecting the profession will find much to savor. This is an enticing invitation, in Connah's words, ‘to leapfrong/Instead of hitchiking onto the ideas of this century.’" -- Norman Weinstein, Architectural Record, October 1998

About the Author

Writer and filmmaker Roger Connah is Visiting Lecturer at the Stockholm Royal School of Fine Arts.

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (May 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262531534
• ISBN-13: 978-0262531535
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,689,111 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars melancholy, August 24, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Welcome to the Hotel Architecture (Writing Architecture) (Paperback)

This is a frustrating yet beautifully sad book. It is moving. Architecture doesn't need philosophy, so it is argued by architects. Less do they need critics. Architecture criticism suffers from its own omnipotence. Noone is listening, except other critics. Architecture is frozen music, not frozen words, however much critics think otherwise, so it is written. Connah lives this frustrated doomed world.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars incommensurable worlds, June 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Welcome to the Hotel Architecture (Writing Architecture) (Paperback)

We had to read this book for a class on architecture theory. What has this book of poems got to do with architecture? It hits out at the pretensions of mediocre architecture theorists Better to be a man of the forest than a theoretical bore who doesn't know his hind from his Heidegger. This book is great elitism, in the most positive sense of the word. If you can't stand with the very best then bow down before those who know what they are talking about, and pay attention. Or shed your pretensions and work with that which is close at hand, the techtonics of architecture. Recommended reading for all students.