Building/Object: Shared and Contested Territories of Design and Architecture

by Charlotte Ashby (Editor), Mark Crinson (Editor)

Overview

Building/Objectaddresses the space in between the conventional objects of design and the conventional objects of architecture, probing and reassessing the differences between the disciplines of design history and architectural history

Each of the 13 chapters in this book examine things which are neither object-like nor building-like, but somewhere in between - air conditioning; bookshelves; partition walls; table-monuments; TVs; convenience stores; cars - exposing particular political configurations and resonances that otherwise might be occluded. In doing so, they reveal that the definitions we make of objects in opposition to buildings, and of architecture in opposition to design, are not as fundamental as they seem.

This book brings new aspects of the creative and experiential into our understanding of the human environment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350234048
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	01/25/2024
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Charlotte Ashby is an art and design historian based at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Modernism in Scandinavia (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2017) and co-editor of Imagined Cosmopolis: Internationalism and Cultural Exchange, 1870s-1920s (2019).

Mark Crinson is Professor of Architectural History at Birkbeck, University of London. Among his books are Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (2003) and Rebuilding Babel: Modern Architecture and Internationalism (I.B. Tauris, 2017).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Contributors

Foreword, Adrian Forty (University College London, UK)

Introduction, Mark Crinson and Charlotte Ashby (Birkbeck, University of London, UK)

Part 1: Grey Zones

1. A Good Shelf: The Material Culture of Reading in Colonial India, Swati Chattopadhyay (University of California-Santa Barbara, USA)

2. Power of Television in Modern Turkish Homes, Meltem Ö. Gürel (Yasar University, Turkey)

3. Bin, Bag, Box: The Architecture of Convenience, Louisa Iarocci (University of Washington, USA)

4. Atmospheric Exchanges: Air-conditioning, Thermal Material Culture, and Public Housing in Singapore, Jiat-Hwee Chang (National University of Singapore)

5. Beyond Buildings and Objects: Reyner Banham's Freeway Ecology, Richard J. Williams (University of Edinburgh, UK)


Part 2: Dissolved Distinctions

6. Designing for a Nocturbanal Banquet, Versailles 1674, Panagiotis Doudesis (University of Cambridge, UK)

7. Printed Objects and Ready-Mades in the Architectural Magazine (1834-38), Anne Hultzsch (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)

8. Entangled Histories of Buildings and Furbaniture: Knoll International and the Production and Mediation of Modern Architecture in Post-war Belgium, Fredie Floré (KU Leuven, Belgium)

9. Disaster Relief and 'Universal Shelters': Humanitarian Imaginaries and Design Interventions at Oxfam, 1971-1976, Tania Messell (University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern, Switzerland) and Lilian Sanchez-Moreno (University for the Creative Arts, UK)


Part 3: Uneasy Difference

10. Regulation by Design: Reification and Building Regulations, Alistair Cartwright (Independent Scholar, UK)

11. The Relational Object: Haus-Rucker-Co.'s Designs for Re-Shaping the Environment, Ross K. Elfline (Carleton College, USA)

12. The Stylistic End-games of Modernism: High Tech Design in Criticism and History, Jane Pavitt (Kingston University, UK)

13. Shared and not Contested: Modern Erasures in Design and Architecture: History, Practice and Education in Brazil, Livia Rezende (University of New South Wales, Australia) and Tatiana Pinto (Independent Scholar, Sweden)

Afterword, Ben Highmore (University of Sussex, UK)

Index