Overview

Boredom as an impetus for architectural theory and practice Any theorist or practitioner of architecture must confront, and even be compelled by, boredom. Called ennui, Langeweile, or acedia, boredom is a pressing concern, as the production and obsolescence of images accelerates with new technologies, leaving individuals saturated with information presented in fleeting displays that are easy to produce, easy to delete, and easy to consume. In this innovative book, Andreea Mihalache discusses the work of a quartet of well-known thinkers—designer Bernard Rudofsky, architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and artist Saul Steinberg—who all recognized this form of exhaustion and shallowness as the disease of the modern world. Rudofsky found it in a deeper and more intimate engagement between the human body and its environment. Proclaiming “Less is a bore,” Venturi, and later Scott Brown, explored excess as the remedy to boredom. With detachment and irony, Steinberg mocked the homogenous architecture of the American city. Taken together, Mihalache shows, these four offer a comprehensive view of the alienated relationship of individuals with their world at three different, yet interrelated scales: the body, the building, and the urban space.

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9780813951560

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Reviews

A thoroughly researched study, Boredom and the Architectural Imagination is also an eminently quotable work, thanks to Mihalache's finely tuned statements and precisions, both on her subjects of choice, and on the use of terminology. . . . Together with Walter Benjamin, the reader will find excerpts from some other usual suspects of twentieth century architectural and visual theory . . . and a myriad of other referents that open up a similar number of connections s/he will feel tempted to check up. A deep, rich, yet agile and engaging read, but perhaps not one to engage in a mode of distraction, Boredom and the Architectural Imagination succeeds in contributing to fill a persistent gap in a growing field of academic study almost universally neglected by architectural academia. And this book does it in a seriously entertaining way.--The Plan

Author Information

Andreea Mihalache is Associate Professor in the College of Architecture, Arts, and Construction at Clemson University.

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