Overview

Architecture Constructed explores the central, open secret of architecture: the long-suppressed conflict between arche and teckton—between those who design, and those who build. This unresolved tension has a centuries-old history in the discipline, persisting through Classical and Renaissance times to the present day, and yet it has rarely been addressed through a historical and theoretical lens. In this book, acclaimed architectural theorist Mark Jarzombek examines this tension head-on, and uses it to rethink the nature of the history of architecture. He reveals architecture to be a troubled, interconnected realm, incomplete and unstable, where labor, craft, and occupation are the ‘invisible’ complements to the work of the architect. Erudite, entertaining, and full of surprising and thought-provoking juxtapositions and challenges, Architecture Constructed is packed with novel insights into the internal conflicts and paradoxes of architecture, and is rich with examples from modern and contemporary practice—including Mies, Koolhaas, Potrc, Hadid, Bawa, Diller + Scofidio—which demonstrate how contemporary architecture inhabits the very same tensions that have riven the discipline since the days of Alberti. This provocative book will stimulate conversations among students, researchers, and designers, as it pushes the boundaries on how we define the professional discipline of architecture and overturns entrenched assumptions about the nature of architectural history and theory.

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9781350326118

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Reviews

Aphoristic, erudite, humorous, and extraordinarily capacious, Architecture Constructed deftly explores the thinker/maker opposition, the way it has played out in architecture, and the complex effects to which it has given rise. This is a consistently provocative and thought-provoking text - opinionated, challenging, and argued with bravado. * Mark Dorrian, University of Edinburgh, UK * Brilliantly written, Architecture Constructed uncovers blind spots in the very construction of architecture theory. In so doing, Jarzombek performs a Derridean deconstruction of long-established disciplinary concepts and manages, while constructing a grammatology of the discipline itself, to perform a 'Derrida' on Jacques Derrida himself. * Marc Angelil, ETH Zurich, Switzerland *

Author Information

Mark Jarzombek is Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. He has published widely on many historical and theoretical topics, and is one of the discipline’s leading advocates for global history, publishing several books and articles on that topic including the ground-breaking textbook A Global History of Architecture (co-authored with Prakash and Ching, 2006).

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