Architecture and the Sciences

by Picon, Antoine

• ISBN13: 9781568983653
• ISBN10: 1568983654
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-05-01
• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Pr

Summary

The sciences have long served as a source of images and metaphors for architecture. frequently exerting a direct influence on the shaping of built space. In recent years. architects have turned with renewed vigor to science for design inspiration. Why is this? In what ways does the current appropriation of scientific methods and models. perspectives and paradigms. differ from those of the past? How did this migration of ideas from one field to the other begin. and what were its implications over time? The essays in this volume examine various points of exchange between architecture and the sciences from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Written by leading scholars in the fields of both architecture and the history of science. they offer startling insights into the character and consequences of such interdisciplinary borrowings. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Alessandra Ponte is an assistant professor at the School of Architecture, Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Antoine Picon teaches at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. 6
Introduction	p. 10
Ptolemy and Vitruvius: Spatial Representation in the Sixteenth-Century Texts and Commentaries	p. 20
The Place of Distribution: Episodes in the Architecture of Experiment	p. 52
Desert Testing	p. 80
Viollet-Le-Duc's Optic	p. 118
Norm and Type. Variations on a Theme	p. 140
Organicism's Other	p. 174
War Against the Center	p. 196
Why All These Birds? Birds in the Sky, Birds in the Hand	p. 228
Encounters with the Face of America	p. 256
Architecture. Science. Technology, and the Virtual Realm	p. 292
Flow, Process, Fold	p. 314
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