
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Design for Diversity: Exploring Socially Mixed Neighbourhoods

Building Type Basics for Museums

- Hardcover: 272 pages
- Publisher: Wiley (January 1, 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0471349151
- ISBN-13: 978-0471349150
Building Type Basics for Museums is a one-stop source for the essential information architects need to fast-start the design process. In this book, author Arthur Rosenblatt draws upon the expertise of leading architects from around the world to present all aspects of museum and cultural facility design. This book provides critical information on the process, potential problems, design concerns, and recent trends in museum and cultural facility design, along with complete coverage of energy issues, mechanical systems, and structural concerns as well as acoustic control, lighting, internal traffic, security, and other important topics. This indispensable guide:
- Asks and answers twenty questions that frequently arise in the early phases of a project commission
- Provides project photographs, diagrams, floor plans, sections, and details
- Includes guidelines for art, science, and natural history museums; ethnic art and cultural centers; and more
This conveniently organized quick reference is an invaluable guide for busy, dedicated professionals who want to get moving quickly as they embark on a new project. Like every Building Type Basics book, it provides authoritative, up-to-date information instantly and saves architects countless hours of research. Engineering consultants will also find a wealth of information to help them tackle museum commissions of all kinds.
ARCHI SPEAK

Architectural Design - New Health Facilities

Archeticture: Ecstasies of Space, Time, and the Human Body

The opening chapter of Archeticture proposes a new reading of Plato's Timaeus, the seminal work in Western philosophy on the architecture of the universe and the human body. It pays close attention to the figures of Chaos, Necessity, and khora in Timaeus, arguing that the Demiurge is less a divine craftsman or technician than a lover and a father--admittedly, a father of an awkward and forgetful sort. Among the things the Demiurge forgets to acknowledge are the elements, spaces, and places, the materiality and the spatiality, in which he finds himself--but which he does not master. Chapter 2 moves from Plato to the modern and contemporary philosophers Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. It sees in the projects of these thinkers a growing liberation of choric space from time, culminating in an ecstatic interpretation of human spatiality. Yet ecstatic spatiality is anything but familiar; it is essentially unhomelike and uncanny. Chapter 3 offers a series of archetictural sections--as opposed to architectural plans or elevations--of Freud and Heidegger on the theme of the uncanny and unhomelike, das Unheimliche. The fourth and final chapter turns to three recent thinkers who, in very different ways, introduce uncanny human bodies into unhomelike spaces: Merleau-Ponty, Bataille, and Irigaray.