Point: Essays on Architecture

"Peter Eisenman, Winner of the Kanter Tritsch Medal for Excellence in Architecture and Environmental Design, University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design" Peter Eisenman is founder and principal of Eisenman Architects and visiting professor at the Yale School of Architecture. His many books include Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004 and Tracing Eisenman. Elisa Iturbe is cofounder of the firm Outside Development and a critic at the Yale School of Architecture and the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union. Sarah Whiting is Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. A provocative case for historical ambiguity in architecture by one of the field's leading theorists Conceptions of modernity in architecture are often expressed in the idea of the zeitgeist, or "spirit of the age," an attitude toward architectural form that is embedded in a belief in progressive time. Lateness explores how architecture can work against these linear currents in startling and compelling ways. In this incisive book, internationally renowned architect Peter Eisenman, with Elisa Iturbe, proposes a different perspective on form and time in architecture, one that circumvents the temporal constraints on style that require it to be "of the times"-lateness. He focuses on three twentieth-century architects who exhibited the qualities of lateness in their designs: Adolf Loos, Aldo Rossi, and John Hejduk. Drawing on the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and his study of Beethoven's final works, Eisenman shows how the architecture of these canonical figures was temporally out of sync with conventions and expectations, and how lateness can serve as a form of release from the restraints of the moment. Bringing together architecture, music, and philosophy, and drawing on illuminating examples from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, Lateness demonstrates how today's architecture can use the concept of lateness to break free of stylistic limitations, expand architecture's critical capacity, and provide a new mode of analysis. "The arguments . . . . written here with Iturbe in such an exceptionally didactic and succinct way, and illustrated so unmistakably, as to be rare amid the current proliferation of obscure and turgid architectural theories."---Preston Scott Cohen, The Week "Lateness is the latest in a series of analogies and concepts that Peter Eisenman has used to interpret architecture, and that have defined the analytic methods that have made him a great teacher throughout his career. . . . The arguments . . . are written . . . in such an exceptionally didactic and succinct way, and illustrated so unmistakably, as to be rare amid the current proliferation of obscure and turgid architectural theories. . . . What really stands out are the penetrating formal analyses of the selected exemplars."---Preston Scott Cohen, Architectural Record "In a time when our neo-modern zeitgeist has resulted in increased isolation through the guise of individualism, Eisenman and Iturbe here offer up an alternative perspective-something outside our fixation with conventions and universality, probing the possibility of a world view that is free of the shackles of form and time. Lateness will be of value to both students using parametric tools, alongside their professors who continue to teach Venturi and Giedion's critical discourses, with the book's authors providing food for thought in our digital age, as well as being an update to Benjamin's famous angel of history."---Sean Ruthen, Spacing "Novel…Lateness has to be lauded for its attempt to sort out an architect's relation to and engagement with history and time. – Michael Bell, CAA.Reviews" "Fascinating and important. Lateness provokes a wide range of conversations about Eisenman's own work, but also about the nature of architecture as a field and a discipline."-Mark Jarzombek, author of D

Sylvia Lavin is professor of architecture and urban design at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her books include Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture. Architecture's growing intimacy with new types of art Kissing Architecture explores the mutual attraction between architecture and other forms of contemporary art. In this fresh, insightful, and beautifully illustrated book, renowned architectural critic and scholar Sylvia Lavin develops the concept of "kissing" to describe the growing intimacy between architecture and new types of art-particularly multimedia installations that take place in and on the surfaces of buildings-and to capture the sensual charge that is being designed and built into architectural surfaces and interior spaces today. Initiating readers into the guilty pleasures of architecture that abandons the narrow focus on function, Lavin looks at recent work by Pipilotti Rist, Doug Aitken, the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and others who choose instead to embrace the viewer in powerful affects and visual and sensory atmospheres. Kissing Architecture is the first book in a cutting-edge new series of short, focused arguments written by leading critics, historians, theorists, and practitioners from the world of urban development and contemporary architecture and design. These books are intended to spark vigorous debate. They stake out the positions that will help shape the architecture and urbanism of tomorrow. Addressing one of the most spectacular and significant developments in the current cultural scene, Kissing Architecture is an entertainingly irreverent and disarmingly incisive book that offers an entirely new way of seeing--and experiencing--architecture in the age after representation. "Informed, contemporary conversations on architecture presented in this format are sure to engage critics, historians, practitioners, artists as well as the general public. For the architect long out of school, yet still passionate about the profession, this series of extended essays should be a welcome addition to their reading lists."---Donna Wax, New York Journal of Books "The book's arguments are framed by well-chosen, nicely illustrated case studies. . . . The book presents important and relevant ideas that deserve consideration." "[Lavin] smartly keeps her writing light, playfully drawing out her extended analogy of kissing throughout the book's four sections. If this is your first rendezvous with Lavin, I hope that she will soon become one of your steadies. . . . May you fall madly in love."---Elissa Favero, Yellow Umbrella "In the most sober assessment I can offer, I find Sylvia Lavin's Kissing Architecture to rank among the most original writings in contemporary art discourse I have ever read. Utterly disarming, it is wondrous, brilliant, innocent, naughty, trite, hilarious, fresh, weightless, and profound. Simply put, I am mad for it."-Jeffrey M. Kipnis, Ohio State University "Kissing Architecture is a work of wit and intelligence sprinkled with just a microgram of L.A. antiestablishment venom, and enough bite to make you almost afraid to put it down lest you miss something urgently worth knowing about. Lavin is poised to become one of the most important writers on architecture since the 1970s, and this book is surely a significant step toward that inevitability."-K. Michael Hays, author of Architecture's Desire

David Joselit is the Carnegie Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. His books include American Art Since 1945 (Thames & Hudson) and Feedback: Television against Democracy. How digital networks are transforming art and architecture Art as we know it is dramatically changing, but popular and critical responses lag behind. In this trenchant illustrated essay, David Joselit describes how art and architecture are being transformed in the age of Google. Under the dual pressures of digital technology, which allows images to be reformatted and disseminated effortlessly, and the exponential acceleration of cultural exchange enabled by globalization, artists and architects are emphasizing networks as never before. Some of the most interesting contemporary work in both fields is now based on visualizing patterns of dissemination after objects and structures are produced, and after they enter into, and even establish, diverse networks. Behaving like human search engines, artists and architects sort, capture, and reformat existing content. Works of art crystallize out of populations of images, and buildings emerge out of the dynamics of the circulation patterns they will house. Examining the work of architectural firms such as OMA, Reiser + Umemoto, and Foreign Office, as well as the art of Matthew Barney, Ai Weiwei, Sherrie Levine, and many others, After Art provides a compelling and original theory of art and architecture in the age of global networks. "[A] succulent little book."---Flora Samuel, Times Higher Education "Joselit, a Yale professor and critic whose previous writings have assiduously observed the intersection of art and tech, lays his argument out with pedagogic steadiness." "[After Art] is insightful and offers countless examples of the cultural and political forces influencing creative arts. . . . [W]ell-referenced and clearly written." "Joselit points out a stimulating journey through recent art and architecture where his discourse functions as a sort of guide, complete with images and diagrams, within the illuminating text."---Kieran Lyons, Leonardo Reviews "Standing at the intersection of media studies, architectural criticism, and art history, David Joselit's After Art confronts the question of contemporary art in an age of proliferating networks. Joselit tracks the literal and epistemic 'states of form' of recent visual culture and offers a powerful new model for thinking about art's circulation and currency."-Pamela M. Lee, Stanford University "David Joselit's concisely argued After Art might well have been entitled After Aura as he elegantly replies to Walter Benjamin's sense of art's loss of power with the introduction of technological reproduction. Instead, Joselit makes a persuasive case for the reinvigoration of the power of the image in contemporary artistic and architectural production as a result of the distributive capacity of communication networks."-Anthony Vidler, The Cooper Union "Pertinent and intelligent, After Art will be of great interest to art historians and readers of contemporary art and media theory."-Sylvia Lavin, author of Kissing Architecture

"Honorable Mention for the Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize, Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada" James Nisbet is associate professor of art history and visual studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s and the coeditor of The Invention of the American Desert: Art, Land, and the Politics of Environment. He lives in Irvine, California. A meditation on how environmental change and the passage of time transform the meaning of site-specific art In the decades after World War II, artists and designers of the land art movement used the natural landscape to create monumental site-specific artworks. Second Site offers a powerful meditation on how environmental change and the passage of time alter and transform the meanings-and sometimes appearances-of works created to inhabit a specific place. James Nisbet offers fresh approaches to well-known artworks by Ant Farm, Rebecca Belmore, Nancy Holt, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson. He also examines the work of less recognized artists such as Agnes Denes, Bonnie Devine, and herman de vries. Nisbet tracks the vicissitudes wrought by climate change and urban development on site-specific artworks, taking readers from the plains of Amarillo, Texas, to a field of volcanic rock in Mexico City, to abandoned quarries in Finland. Providing vital perspectives on what it means to endure in an ecologically volatile world, Second Site challenges long-held beliefs about the permanency of site-based art, with implications for the understanding and conservation of artistic creation and cultural heritage. "A brisk, contemplative, and often brilliant study. . . . Second Site is an example of how issues of climate change, global politics, and social justice currently inform and redirect the ways in which we understand the history of site-specificity and land art. "---Enrique Ramirez, Landscape Architecture Magazine "[Nisbet's] achievement in Second Site is the way in which he places a number of site-specific works of varying renown into conversation, recontextualizing each through the lens of its secondary effects and impacts, and lay­ering this onto urgent concerns around conservation - both curatorially and ecologically."---Emily Cadotte, Esse Magazine "[Second Site] is a welcome addition to a body of literature on site-specificity, or the idea that a particular space or place is integral to the meaning of an artwork, where activities, events, or objects turn a location into a unique site. . . . Concise and thought-provoking."---Brianne Cohen, caa.reviews "Engaging and provocative. Nisbet persuasively argues that we need to think closely about the physical and ecological changes in many works of land art, revisiting them not as originals but as works that inherently embrace change."-Mark A. Cheetham, University of Toronto, author of Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature since the '60s "Second Site is a crisply written, knowledgeable, and theoretically sophisticated exploration of temporality in site-specific art."-Gary Shapiro, author of Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel