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What is Architecture?: An Essay on Landscapes, Buildings, and Machines
British architect and critic Paul Shepheard is a fresh new voice in current postmodern debates about the history and meaning of architecture. In this wonderfully unorthodox quasi-novelistic essay, complete with characters and dialogue (but no plot), Shepheard draws a boundary around the subject of architecture, describing its place in art and technology, its place in history, and its place in our lives now. At a time when it is fashionable to say that architecture is everything--from philosophy to science to art to theory--Shepheard boldly and irreverently sets limits to the subject, so that we may talk about architecture for what it is. He takes strong positions, names the causes of the problems, and tells us how bad things are and how they can get better. Along the way he marshals some unlikely but plausible witnesses who testify about the current state of architecture. Instead of the usual claims or complaints by the usual suspects, these observations are of an altogether different order. Constructed as a series of fables, many of them politically incorrect, What is Architecture? is a refreshing meditation on the options, hopes, possibilities, and failures of shelter in society.
141 pages, Paperback
First published February 10, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 11, 2016
I picked up this book because of the provocative title and I generally trust the MIT Press imprint.
I give it one star for being short. Had it been longer, I would have docked that star.
The prose is lyrical, as some other reviewers have noted. But it also sounds like your professor got drunk at a party (or worse, before lecture) and then rambled for 90 minutes. If you were stuck at a party next to someone spouting like this, would you be looking around for your exit strategy?
Excerpt from page 115 (Landscapes: strategy)
"Whenever I've touched on landscape before, it's been as if my legs have gone weak, and I've been like a Mohican, down on my knees, glorying at the wonder of the rising sun. When I mentioned the White Horse earlier, I said that architecture as landscape is a perception made tangible. Now I am saying that it is a prerequisite of architectural action to have a landscape strategy to frame it. There it is, in Philadelphia--the gridded landscape of liberal rationalism. There it is, in Antipater's seven wonders of the world--the forested, flat earth studded with the first civilizations' feat of building. There it is, in the gardens of the eighteenth century, the ruins of antiquity set in a landscape of stories, a themed landscape."
Then on page 117:
"...Take the rational-naturalist landscape at Stowe, for example, where the theme is Whigs, or that at Stourhead, where the theme is Aeneas, and look at the park--the trees and the hills and the lakes of them--instead. It works with EPCOT, too. When I see a geodesic, I think of the air force, not Mickey Mouse.
But if theme is a subject in literature and a base melody in music, there is something it is in the landscape, too. In my phrase a perception made tangible, it's the perception: it's the jelly between the senses and the extra human world--it's the human version of the landscape. It is as volatile as jet fuel, this thing..."
The parts about military equipment and the space shuttle is bizarre. I think he is trying to talk about design as in solving a technical problem, but he gets a lot of the facts wrong. The book is published in 1994 and may have been written earlier. He may not have been familiar with the changes in how the space shuttle actually operates instead of early plans.
Can someone recommend a more instructive book?
I give it one star for being short. Had it been longer, I would have docked that star.
The prose is lyrical, as some other reviewers have noted. But it also sounds like your professor got drunk at a party (or worse, before lecture) and then rambled for 90 minutes. If you were stuck at a party next to someone spouting like this, would you be looking around for your exit strategy?
Excerpt from page 115 (Landscapes: strategy)
"Whenever I've touched on landscape before, it's been as if my legs have gone weak, and I've been like a Mohican, down on my knees, glorying at the wonder of the rising sun. When I mentioned the White Horse earlier, I said that architecture as landscape is a perception made tangible. Now I am saying that it is a prerequisite of architectural action to have a landscape strategy to frame it. There it is, in Philadelphia--the gridded landscape of liberal rationalism. There it is, in Antipater's seven wonders of the world--the forested, flat earth studded with the first civilizations' feat of building. There it is, in the gardens of the eighteenth century, the ruins of antiquity set in a landscape of stories, a themed landscape."
Then on page 117:
"...Take the rational-naturalist landscape at Stowe, for example, where the theme is Whigs, or that at Stourhead, where the theme is Aeneas, and look at the park--the trees and the hills and the lakes of them--instead. It works with EPCOT, too. When I see a geodesic, I think of the air force, not Mickey Mouse.
But if theme is a subject in literature and a base melody in music, there is something it is in the landscape, too. In my phrase a perception made tangible, it's the perception: it's the jelly between the senses and the extra human world--it's the human version of the landscape. It is as volatile as jet fuel, this thing..."
The parts about military equipment and the space shuttle is bizarre. I think he is trying to talk about design as in solving a technical problem, but he gets a lot of the facts wrong. The book is published in 1994 and may have been written earlier. He may not have been familiar with the changes in how the space shuttle actually operates instead of early plans.
Can someone recommend a more instructive book?
August 21, 2007
it is fun to be wordy and write your brains out onto paper. There is some cohesion and egomania issues with this book, but it is dreamy and theoretical and I tend to like that.
July 7, 2014
A brilliant engrossing introduction to architecture. It made Architecture accessible and understandable to me at the early stages of university.
I remember being touched by a line about the how the skyline of a city is telling of it's inhabitants' ideals and aspirations.
I remember being touched by a line about the how the skyline of a city is telling of it's inhabitants' ideals and aspirations.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews