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Favorite Book Lists on Architecture and the Built Environment
Rami Farouk Daher
CEO: TURATH: Architecture & Urban Design Consultants
Amman, Jordan
Amman, Jordan
I read this book at a later stage in my academic and professional life, specifically in 2001 while spending a sabbatical at the University of California, Berkeley. I even read it twice as I did not understand much of it the first time around. This book not only introduced me to the concept of “discourse,” but also helped me understand how ‘ideas’ are formed and how they are related to practices of power, which is conceived beyond the over-simplistic binary structural separation of ‘empowered’ and ‘dominator’ on the one hand, and ‘marginalized’ and ‘dominated’ on the other. I was able to project many concepts I have learnt from this book onto real-life situations through projects I have worked on relating to building, architecture, and place transformations. This book, together with other writings by Foucault, triggered me to reveal, qualify, and grant voice to disguised and subjugated ‘local’ realities and knowledge.
I have developed an interest over the years in the epistemologies of knowledge. This book on the phenomenology of architecture introduced me to notions of place, and to an understanding of a higher order and of a different nature of such notions. Norberg-Schulz, who was influenced by Martin Heidegger, helped me arrive at a phenomenological understanding of place beyond its physical qualities and even beyond a ‘romantic’ and over-simplified relationship between place and the individual. The meaning of place accordingly reveals itself to you based on the nature of your level of engagement and understanding. Again, and as is the case with the first book in this list, a second reading of this book - and especially after reading Heidegger as well - revealed ‘hidden’ concepts that were not clear to me the first time around I read it, and helped me arrive at a different level of understanding of place.
This remarkable narrative on Modern architecture presented to me architectural, technical, and territorial transformation that took place in Europe and the United States during the past three centuries. Embedded in social theory and political economy, I consider this book a fundamental reference to the understanding of Modernity as a cultural movement of change and transformation that also affected the rest of the world - including our Arab World - towards the end of the first half of the twentieth century.
I find Edward Said a fascinating personality, and his book Orientalism an eye opener. It is true that he borrowed many concepts, and specifically the relationship between the production of knowledge and the exercise of power, from Michel Foucault, but he brilliantly projected these concepts on theOrient to be conceived as discourse and discussed how the West ‘appropriated,’ talked about, described, and inscribed the Orient during the past two centuries. The details of such a process are so fascinating. Even today, many local Arab institutions and individuals unfortunately still perpetuate such concepts in their practices in many fields related to cultural production, architecture, education, and tourism, to mention a few.
I have developed over the past twenty years or so an interest in public space, not only in terms of understanding its processes of production, but also its design and occupation. This fascinating book, which concentrates on contemporary trends in the design of open and public space, addresses the challenge of delineating and building a new identify as well as searching for a new meaning for this transient and continually-transforming category: open and public space. The book looks at space beyond the binary division of ‘building’ and ‘landscape,’ and rather investigates landscape urbanism through emerging ‘surfaces,’ ‘verticals,’ ‘enclosures,’ ‘shelters,’ and ‘events.’
November 2, 2014
Han Tumertekin
Principal and Founder, Mimarlar Tasarim Danismanlik LtdIstanbul, Turkey
Editor's note: Han Tumertekin's list is different from previous lists we have published so far in that he chose to present his books through a narrative that is defined by the challenges he faced as a student joining Istanbul Technical University in 1976, when Turkey was undergoing intense political turbulences.
When I was admitted to Istanbul Technical University (ITU) in 1976, an informal civil war was going on in Turkey. Each day, nearly twenty people were killed due to the conflict between rightists and leftists. This troubling period lasted until the army’s intervention in 1980. In this kind of an environment, it was unavoidable that education would be hampered, especially at ITU, which was a leftist university. One positive outcome of those difficult years – during which many paid a serious price, both socially and personally - was that we had a good amount of time to read. Naturally, the majority of the books read and the arguments discussed were political. The discussions were very intense and everything was open to discussion. This condition also applied to architectural education. My education was supposed to begin with a period where reading was as important as drawing, but due to boycotts, the start date of the term was delayed from September to May. I used the incredible amount of free time I had to read books that my brother picked for me. That is how I started to read about architecture.
One of the first books I read during that period was Bruno Zevi’s Apprendre A Voir L’Architecture(1948; translated into English under the title of Architecture as Space: How to Look at Architecture). I suppose that my unexpectedly easy understanding of the concept of “space” comes from two drawings in Zevi’s book that consisted of plans of Saint Peter’s Cathedral in Rome placed side by side. In one plan, he marked the walls and columns to attract attention to the void. In the other, he marked the void instead. Through this comparison, I understood that the “void” is not what remains after one removes the walls and columns, but that it actually has a body and a mass itself. Zevi presented an amazing way to make the void visible.
During that same period, I also read Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (1941). The book was about how modern architecture emerged through industrial developments, and how it is still developing through various dynamics. For instance, the invention of the elevator and the development of structural steel enabled the building of skyscrapers. These kinds of relationships made me understand that architecture cannot only be handled in a formal world that merely involves the manipulation of forms, spaces, and surfaces.
Following that, I read Auguste Choisy’s Histoire De L’Architecture (1899), which chose drawings of some structures that also showed their building processes. I was so impressed by the book’s bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye sectional axonometrics that showed both spaces and supports. It is a technique that I still use when sketching. These drawings made me realize that we always need to think about the entire components of the space together with the plan.
I also read the French translation of Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture(1966; De L’Ambiguite En Architecture). It is an important book as it warns the mind, which is busy creating spaces, about the use of these spaces. I remember being impressed with the way Venturi refers to the normal behaviors of everyday life to discuss space. I realized through reading this book that architecture is not about building structures; it is more about designing spaces, which allow us to live in an organized fashion. I remember how enlightened I felt after reading how staircases not only work as circulation systems, but also as spaces as one may sit on their steps and have a chat.
October 1, 2014
Emre Arolat
Founding Partner, EAA - Emre Arolat Architects
Istanbul, Turkey
Istanbul, Turkey
Without any doubt, this classic work, which has been republished numerous times, is one of the most influential sources on modern architectural thought. Sigfried Giedion (1888 – 1968) was an important historian and a significant actor in the Modern Movement. He was the first secretary-general of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) in 1928, and had very close contacts with the pioneers of Modern Architecture. All this makes this book very enticing.
A Pattern Language, which is the second in a three-book series that Alexander wrote, had a very assuasive effect on me during my university studies. I remember the comfort and confidence I felt when I finished reading this book as I was struggling with other cumbersome texts. As a very rough summary, I can describe it as a long text that uses several scales, different ranges, and various instruments to scan the whole architectural field and build a perceptible working document about designing and constructing the various elements of the built environment.
“La Tendenza” was the pioneering international architectural movement that came out of Italy in the post-war period. As a practicing architect, Rossi was the leader of this movement, but he also was an influential theorist. The Architecture of the City is his major written work and is a critique of the Modern Movement that focuses on cities and emphasizes the collective memory and the public realm. I remember how as a university student I had a lot of difficulty reading this book in French. I found it boring and confusing. A few years later, I tried to read it in English, but still found it boring, and I realized that the problem was not with the language in which I read it. Just like his buildings, Rossi’s writings are important and deserve to be considered very carefully, but they are not easy to live with. Despite that, this book is one of my all-time favorites, as is the case with most of Rossi’s buildings.
Some say that Lynch’s The Image of the City is as important as Camillo Sitte’s The Art of Building Cities. Others find it too formalistic. It is one of my favorite writings about large-scale design theory. This easy to follow book discusses environmental images in our urban lives by mostly analyzing the central areas of three American cities: Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles, and by focusing on the evaluation of city form. In addition to the readability of whole text, its images, maps and other graphics are extremely clear and informative.
I find this book by far the most useful and impressive source about early modern Turkish Architecture. Architectural historian Sibel Bozdogan expresses the cultural history of a very critical period in the evolution of modern Turkey, which begins with the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and extends until 1950, when Kemal Ataturk’s Republican People’s Party was first voted out of power. The text is very valuable not only because of the information it provides us about the architectural approaches of this era, but also because it sheds light on the complex relationship that took place between modernity and nationalism in Turkey.
This work by Juhani Pallasmaa is a significant criticism of the domination of sight over the other four senses in architectural culture and design. The book is a revelation for its readers, and it provides new and fresh insights regarding architectural culture.
This collection of writings includes essays by more than forty important historians, critics, and architects, including Christopher Alexander, Alan Colquhoun, B. V. Doshi, Kenneth Frampton, Sigfried Giedion, Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra, Suha Ozkan, Juhani Pallasmaa, and James Stirling. The book provides a very useful exploration of the concept of regionalist thinking in architecture, which is extremely important today as the notion and sense of “place” is being rapidly crushed and blurred under the influence of global neo-liberalism.
September 7, 2014
Nora Akawi
Curator, Studio X, Amman LabColumbian University Middle East Research Center, Columbia Global Centers
Amman, Jordan
Amman, Jordan
This volume was my first encounter, as a first-year architecture student, with architectural theory. The texts included here provided me with the tools to begin exploring the relationship between architecture and politics.
This book was recommended to me by my advisor, Professor Felicity Scott, as I was working on my thesis focusing on the political role of the archive in imagining alternative political and spatial organization. This book, which culminated from a symposium held at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1998, made it impossible to think about the politics of the archive in Palestine without studying the South African experience. This might, at first glance, seem irrelevant to the built environment, unless we understand the city as the surface of inscription of events and cultures. The process of selecting of the narratives which are to take part in the official archive of a place or a state (whether through the preservation of places, documents, or oral histories), and consequently the erasure (destruction) of those rendered invisible, directly shapes our built environment.
Illustrating the impossibility of democracy without conflict, Jacques Rancière offers the tools to explore and experiment with visual representations of the multiplicity of (conflicting) narratives existing within a territory, and of the stages where those left "unselected" from the official archive (see above) are given space to perform.
I only regret getting to this book as late as I did. I wish I would have had it accompany me from the first day I began my journey as an architecture student.
Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 2008
Since this list is meant to contain books rather than film, this one stands for fiction and the city. Whether through films or novels, I want to stress the importance of the narrative and the experiential in portraying or imagining a place and exploring the political, economic, and social forces that shape it.
Since this list is meant to contain books rather than film, this one stands for fiction and the city. Whether through films or novels, I want to stress the importance of the narrative and the experiential in portraying or imagining a place and exploring the political, economic, and social forces that shape it.
August 4, 2014
