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Strange Details (Writing Architecture) by Michael Cadwell (6-Jul-2007) Paperback
A lively and unconventional appreciation of pivotal buildings by Carlo Scarpa, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn that reveals enough idiosyncrasies and conceits to make any rationalist shudder--and invites a deeper appreciation of the prosaic construction detail.
Confronted with the intricate construction details of Italian architect Carlo Scarpa's Querini Stampalia Gallery--steel joined at odd intervals, concrete spilled out of concatenated forms, stone cut in labyrinthine patterns--Michael Cadwell abandoned his attempts to categorize them theoretically and resolved instead to appreciate their idiosyncrasies and evoke their all-embracing affects. What he had dismissed as a collection of fetishes he came to understand as a coherently constructed world that was nonetheless persistently strange. In Strange Details, Cadwell looks at the work of four canonical architects who made strange with the most resistant aspect of architecture--construction. In buildings that were pivotal in their careers, Scarpa, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn all created details that undercut our critical and analytical terra firma. Cadwell explores the strangeness in the material menagerie of Scarpa's Querini Stampalia, the wood light frame construction of Wright's Jacobs House, the welded steel frame of Mies's Farnsworth House, and the reinforced concrete of Kahn's Yale Center for British Art. Each of these architects, he finds, reconfigures the rudimentary facts of construction, creating a subtle but undeniable shift in a building's physicality. And for each of them, nature is strange, and its strangeness infects; nature unmoors exhausted cultural ideas, constricted analytical procedures, and outmoded production techniques. An awakening to nature's strangeness forces a new sense of the world, one that we can detect in these architects' configurations of the world's materials--their strange details.
Confronted with the intricate construction details of Italian architect Carlo Scarpa's Querini Stampalia Gallery--steel joined at odd intervals, concrete spilled out of concatenated forms, stone cut in labyrinthine patterns--Michael Cadwell abandoned his attempts to categorize them theoretically and resolved instead to appreciate their idiosyncrasies and evoke their all-embracing affects. What he had dismissed as a collection of fetishes he came to understand as a coherently constructed world that was nonetheless persistently strange. In Strange Details, Cadwell looks at the work of four canonical architects who made strange with the most resistant aspect of architecture--construction. In buildings that were pivotal in their careers, Scarpa, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn all created details that undercut our critical and analytical terra firma. Cadwell explores the strangeness in the material menagerie of Scarpa's Querini Stampalia, the wood light frame construction of Wright's Jacobs House, the welded steel frame of Mies's Farnsworth House, and the reinforced concrete of Kahn's Yale Center for British Art. Each of these architects, he finds, reconfigures the rudimentary facts of construction, creating a subtle but undeniable shift in a building's physicality. And for each of them, nature is strange, and its strangeness infects; nature unmoors exhausted cultural ideas, constricted analytical procedures, and outmoded production techniques. An awakening to nature's strangeness forces a new sense of the world, one that we can detect in these architects' configurations of the world's materials--their strange details.
- GenresArchitectureNonfiction
Unknown Binding
First published June 1, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 16, 2009
A thorough exploration of one building each by four architects. This book gets filed under "Remind Yourself Why Architecture is a Passion for Many." Cadwell walks in a lightly-tread territory of architecture writing when writing about smells, speculative futures, and biographical connections to architectural masterworks but this reads as frosting on an otherwise scholarly cake.
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July 26, 2011I felt a deeper appreciation for Wright and van der Rohe after these essays. Cadwell is a bit more successful in examining these small, intimate buildings than the larger structures by Scarpa and Khan. The Khan essay is a nice approach to the modernist's enthusiasm for concrete...it is like some crazy bubble egg-mud you can make anything with.
August 19, 2010
Author does a good job of both describing the technical aspects and the emotional response to it. I liked the way Cadwell worked to bring aspects of literary criticism to the discussion of spaces. It also started a love affair with raw plaster in my personal work.
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February 19, 20144 essays about 4 buildings. Nice little book that links the technical qualities and aesthetic effects in clear ways. I've written a riff off Chapter 2 here:
http://twwarch.wordpress.com/2014/02/...
http://twwarch.wordpress.com/2014/02/...
January 5, 2015
Just read the chapter on the Querini Stampalia Palace
Scarpa's "deft interventions into historic buildings rebuked late modernism's self-righteous bulldozings and post-modernism's trite panderings." p4
Scarpa's "deft interventions into historic buildings rebuked late modernism's self-righteous bulldozings and post-modernism's trite panderings." p4
September 24, 2008
A lovely little group of essays analyzing four significant works, Cadwell does a convincing job of fusing the scholarly with the experiential. Truly a page turner!
October 28, 2008
schmaltzy, sentimental bullshit.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews