Form-Finding, Form-Shaping, Designing Architecture

Experimental, Aesthetical, and Ethical Approaches to Form in Recent and Postwar Architecture

  • Series Mendrisio Academy Press
  • Edited by Sonja Hildebrand, Elisabeth Bergmann
  • Binding Paperback with flaps
  • Size 19 x 24,5 cm
  • Pages 180
  • Illustrations 100
  • Language Texts in the original language
  • Year 2015
  • ISBN 9788836632657
  • Price € 32,00  € 30,40
Add to cart Add to cart Add to cart
Abstract

During the last twenty years, the topic of form has become one of the most controversial issues in public and professional discussions about architecture. Ever since the Digital Turn, it has been exacerbated, since computer-aided design makes it possible, rapidly and effortlessly, to create extraordinary and emblematic buildings. These icons are threatening to become banal and often express little but their own form. Hardly anyone reflected on this as intensely as the 2015 Pritzker Prize winner Frei Otto, an innovative explorer on the boundary between architecture and civil engineering. His concept of form-finding is aimed at preventing any process of designing or shaping. This raises questions that are closely related to current debates on architectural form. This book aims to re-examine the issue by expanding on the exemplary case of Frei Otto. The subject is approached from varyingly wide perspectives, ranging from pathways to form in engineering research and in experimental model-making to the ideological-critical reflections on form by Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas.

Contents

Pathways to Form. Frei Otto and Beyond
Sonja Hildebrand, Elisabeth Bergmann

"A man a-riding upon nawthin". Light Structures and New Mobility Cultures Around 1900
Kurt Moser

Pensare in piccolo per costruire in grande. Teoria, prassi e cultura del modello in scala ridotta nella ricerca della forma strutturale nel XX secolo
Gabriele Neri

Capturing the Incalculable. Frei Otto's Experimental Models
Daniela Fabricius

Anti-Monumental Anti-Nationalist National Monumentality. The Postwar Politics of Form-Finding
Sean Keller

La "filosofia architettonica" di Frei Otto. I concetti di forma, estetica ed etica e la loro ricezione
Elisabeth Bergmann

Stuttgart SmartShell. A Full-Scale Adaptive Shell Structure
Stefan Neuhauser, Martin Weickgenannt, Christoph Witte, Walter Haase, Oliver Sawodny, Werner Sobek

Le costruzioni in legno dell'IBOIS. Forme curvate, intessute, intrecciate: una conversazione con Yves Weinand
Elisabeth Bergmann

Towards an Expanded Concept of Form. Gottfried Semper on Ancient Projectiles
Sonja Hildebrand

Within the Technical lmage. An Alternative Reading of Contemporary Swiss-German Architecture
Roberta Grignolo

Rem Koolhaas and Oswald Mathias Ungers. A Plausible Relationship Between the Formal and the Social?
Lara Schrijver

Index of names