Experiments in architectural education in the post-World War II era that challenged and transformed architectural discourse and practice.

In the decades after World War II, new forms of learning transformed architectural education. These radical experiments sought to upend disciplinary foundations and conventional assumptions about the nature of architecture as much as they challenged modernist and colonial norms, decentered building, imagined new roles for the architect, and envisioned participatory forms of practice. Although many of the experimental programs were subsequently abandoned, terminated, or assimilated, they nevertheless helped shape and in some sense define architectural discourse and practice. This book explores and documents these radical pedagogies and efforts to defy architecture's status quo.

The experiments include the adaptation of Bauhaus pedagogy as a means of "unlearning" under the conditions of decolonization in Africa; a movement to design for "every body," including the disabled, by architecture students and faculty at the University of California, Berkeley; the founding of a support network for women interested in the built environment, regardless of their academic backgrounds; and a design studio in the USSR that offered an alternative to the widespread functionalist approach in Soviet design. Viewed through their dissolution and afterlife as well as through their founding stories, these projects from the last century raise provocative questions about architecture's role in the new century.
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Une histoire des écrits et manifestes d'architectes modernes, notamment autour de la figure de Mies van der Rohe, qui constitue par là-même une étude des relations entre écriture et oeuvre construite.

Dans cette étude, Beatriz Colomina explore l'impact des technologies médicales d'imagerie et de diagnostic sur la perception et la représentation de l'architecture contemporaine. Elle part du postulat que l'architecture du début du XXe siècle a été principalement déterminée par la lutte contre la tuberculose et par une invention majeure : la visualisation par rayons X. Le discours architectural assimilant généralement le bâtiment à un corps, l'autrice montre comment les regards portés sur le public et le privé ont ainsi changé dans l'architecture.

The sequel to the authors' Are We Human?, this provocative book is an urgent manifesto for an alternative architectural philosophy. It treats bacteria as the real architects, construction workers, maintenance crews and inhabitants of buildings. Colomina and Wigley draw on the latest research into microbes to rethink the past and possible futures of the built environment.

The book explores the intimate entanglements of the microbes within bodies and buildings over the last 10,000 years, culminating in the antibiotic philosophy of contemporary architecture. The diseases of our time are diseases of the built environment. The deadly combination of rapidly declining microbial diversity and rising antibiotic-resistant bacteria is as great a threat as climate change. Hostility to bacteria has to give way to new forms of hospitality from a more symbiotic architecture that learns from bacteria, embracing them and reconnecting with soil, plants and other species. Buildings based on fear of bacteria, which is to say fear of life itself, must give way to buildings learning from models of coexistence based on bacteria themselves.The main goal of the book is to rethink the very idea of shelter in terms of forms of inclusion rather than prophylactic forms of exclusion. Lire la suite Fermer

In the immediate postwar years, a new type of modern architecture emerges. Beatriz Colomina presents domesticity as a potent new weapon in a changed architectural battlefield. This architecture becomes the property of the middle-class consumer bombarded w