- 248 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Immaterial Architecture
About This Book
This fascinating argument from Jonathan Hill presents the case for the significance and importance of the immaterial in architecture.
Architecture is generally perceived as the solid, physical matter that it unarguably creates, but what of the spaces it creates? This issue drives Hill's explorative look at the immaterial aspects of architecture. The book discusses the pressures on architecture and the architectural profession to be respectively solid matter and solid practice and considers concepts that align architecture with the immaterial, such as the superiority of ideas over matter, command of drawing and design of spaces and surfaces.
Focusing on immaterial architecture as the perceived absence of matter, Hill devises new means to explore the creativity of both the user and the architect, advocating an architecture that fuses the immaterial and the material and considers its consequences, challenging preconceptions about architecture, its practice, purpose, matter and use.
This is a useful and innovative read that encourages architects and students to think beyond established theory and practice.
Frequently asked questions
Information
House and Home
The Home of Architecture
The Home of the Home
As far as the idea of home is concerned, the home of the home is the Netherlands. This ideaâs crystallisation might be dated to the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century, when the Dutch Netherlands amassed an unprecedented and unrivalled accumulation of capital, and emptied their purses into domestic space.55 Tabor, p. 218.
The well-kept home was the place where the soiling world subjected to tireless exercises in moral as well as physical ablution ⌠That threshold, moreover, need not be literal. Very many, if not most, businesses and trades were still carried on within the physical precincts of the house, but the division between living and working space in middle-class households was nonetheless clearly demarcated and jealously guarded.1717 Schama, p. 391.
Managing the Home
There was a commonplace analogy in seventeenth-century literature that compared a manâs soul to a privy chamber, but it is hard to tell now which became private first, the room or the soul. Certainly, their histories are entwined.1818 Evans, âFigures, Doors and Passagesâ, p. 75
people ⌠ask nothing of the house in architectural terms, except that it be sealed away absolutely successfully from any natural process ⌠There is no reason why the window cannot be fixed the next day, or the next week. But it simply follows from the degree of psychic investment which people have made in respect of the buildingâs integrity, that it must be fixed at four in the morning.2020 Cousins, âThe First Houseâ, p. 37.
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Half Title Page
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Table of Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: immaterial/material
- 1. House And Home
- 2. Hunting The Shadow
- conclusion: immaterialâmaterial
- Index Of Immaterial Architectures
- bibliography
- Index