Architecture And Ugliness
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Architecture and Ugliness
Author: Wouter Van Acker
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date: 2020-01-09
Whatever 'ugliness' is, it remains a problematic category in architectural aesthetics – alternately vilified and appropriated, used either to shock or to invert conventions of architecture. This book presents sixteen new scholarly essays which rethink ugliness in recent architecture – from Brutalism to eclectic postmodern architectural productions – and together offer a diverse reappraisal of the history and theory of postmodern architecture and design. The essays address both broad theoretical questions on ugliness and postmodern aesthetics, as well as more specific analyses of significant architectural examples dating from the last decades of the twentieth century. The book attends to the diverse relations between the aesthetic register of ugliness and closely connected aesthetic concepts such as the monstrous, the ordinary, disgust, the excessive, the grotesque, the interesting, the impure and the sublime. This volume does not simply document the history of a postmodern anti-aesthetic through case studies. Instead, it aims to shed light on aesthetic problems that have been largely overlooked in the agenda of architectural theory. This book answers in detail the questions: How did postmodern architects appropriate troublesome contradictions bound to the raw ugliness of the real? How have the ugly and the antiaesthetic been a productive force in postmodern architecture? How can ugliness be of value to architecture? And how can architecture make good use of ugliness?
Architecture and Ugliness
Author: Wouter Van Acker
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date: 2020-01-09
Whatever 'ugliness' is, it remains a problematic category in architectural aesthetics – alternately vilified and appropriated, used either to shock or to invert conventions of architecture. This book presents sixteen new scholarly essays which rethink ugliness in recent architecture – from Brutalism to eclectic postmodern architectural productions – and together offer a diverse reappraisal of the history and theory of postmodern architecture and design. The essays address both broad theoretical questions on ugliness and postmodern aesthetics, as well as more specific analyses of significant architectural examples dating from the last decades of the twentieth century. The book attends to the diverse relations between the aesthetic register of ugliness and closely connected aesthetic concepts such as the monstrous, the ordinary, disgust, the excessive, the grotesque, the interesting, the impure and the sublime. This volume does not simply document the history of a postmodern anti-aesthetic through case studies. Instead, it aims to shed light on aesthetic problems that have been largely overlooked in the agenda of architectural theory. This book answers in detail the questions: How did postmodern architects appropriate troublesome contradictions bound to the raw ugliness of the real? How have the ugly and the antiaesthetic been a productive force in postmodern architecture? How can ugliness be of value to architecture? And how can architecture make good use of ugliness?
The Australian Ugliness
Fifty years after its first publication, Robin Boyd's bestselling The Australian Ugliness remains the definitive statement on how we live and think in the environments we create for ourselves. In it Boyd rallied against Australia's promotion of ornament, decorative approach to design and slavish imitation of all things American. 'The basis of the Australian ugliness,' he wrote, 'is an unwillingness to be committed on the level of ideas. In all the arts of living, in the shaping of all her artefacts, as in politics, Australia shuffles about vigorously in the middle - as she estimates the middle - of the road, picking up disconnected ideas wherever she finds them.' Boyd was a fierce critic, and an advocate of good design. He understood the significance of the connection between people and their dwellings, and argued passionately for a national architecture forged from a genuine Australian identity. His concerns are as important now, in an era of suburban sprawl and inner-city redevelopment, as they were half a century ago. Caustic and brilliant, The Australian Ugliness is a masterpiece that enables us to see our surroundings with fresh eyes. This handsome anniversary edition is complemented by Robin Boyd's original sketches for the book and a new afterword by major contemporary architects.