How Architecture Got Its Hump (Preston Thomas Memorial Lecture Series) - Softcover

Connah, Roger

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262531887 ISBN 13: 9780262531887

Publisher: The MIT Press, 2001

Synopsis

In How Architecture Got Its Hump, Roger Connah explores the "interference" of other disciplines with and within contemporary architecture. He asks whether photography, film, drawing, philosophy, and language are merely fashionable props for architectural hallucinations or alibis for revisions of history. Or, are they a means for widening the site of architecture? Connah shows how these disciplines have not only contributed to new developments in architectural theory and practice, but have begun to insinuate new possibilities of space. Sometimes seamless, sometimes awkward like the hump acquired by the camel in one of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, these disciplines have had their own responsibilities and excesses grafted onto architecture, just as architecture has tried to shake off their limitations. Taking interference a step further, Connah also considers the implications of philosophical incongruity and architectural unrest. He asks how architecture loses its head, transcends the dead language it now entraps, and houses meanings it wants to contest. Hardly bleak questions, suggests Connah, for they point to ways for architecture to rescue itself.

About this title

About the Author:

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

Review:

"How did architecture get its hump if not by recycling back into its body its own image previously hijacked by visual and linguistic representations? In a remarkably skeptical style, Roger Connah traces architectural experience as scene-ing instead of screening, scribbling instead of drawing, stuttering instead of discursifying, thus shifting the question from the casual to the causal, from redundancy to rebirth and anticipation."--Nikos Georgiadis, Architect, Anamorphosis Architects, Athens; researcher; and editor, Tracing Architecture, 1998

About this edition

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0262531887
• ISBN 13: 9780262531887
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 184