Architecture History and Theory in Reverse: From an Information Age to Eras of Meaning [Paperback]

This book looks at architecture history in reverse, in order to follow chains of precedents back through time to see how ideas alter the course of civilization in general and the discipline of architecture in particular. Part I begins with present-day attitudes about architecture and traces them back to seminal ideas from the beginning of the twentieth century. Part II examines how pre-twentieth-century societies designed and understood architecture, how they strove to create communal physical languages, and how their disagreements set the stage for our information age practices. Architecture History and Theory in Reverse includes 45 black-and-white images and will be useful to students of architecture and literature.

Preface  Introduction  Epilogue: Today in the Beginning&  Part 1: Architecture in an Information Age  1. 21^st Century Trajectories  2. Modernitys Legacy in a New Millennium  3. A Postmodern Profession, circa 1991  4. Formal or Phenomenological: a feud between forms of information  5. Deconstruction, Irony, the Pompidou, and the S?o Pedro  6. Mies van der Rohe in Chicago  7. Language Games  8. Loos and the Ascension of Space in the Marketplace  Interlude: The Information Reformation, or This Killed That &  Part 2: Architecture in Eras of Meaning  9. 16 June 1904: Ulysses and the Uncanny  10. Marx, Meaning, and Matter  11. Exchange and Evolution  12. In What Style: epistemes and monsters  13. The Pr?cis and the Paternity of Perception  14. De Sade versus Descartes: competing conceptions of language  15. The Tense of Abstract Nouns  16. Vitruvian Cycles 1: representations against space  17. Vitruvian Cycles 2: physil3Ž