Comments on: Ubi-recap

By: karen

karen — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 13:56:15 +0000

damn! I meant ’4dspace: Interactive Architecture’ by Lucy Bullivant. ‘Responsive Environments’ is the more recent of her books but I prefer the earlier one.

By: karen

karen — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 11:31:44 +0000

Without knowing what you have already read I offer my own personal reading list The books listed here are not by any means all architectural in background but I find them all inspiring to my work in this field. In no particular order, they are..
Responsive Architecture: Lucy Bullivant
(the previously mentioned) How Buildings Learn: Stewart Brand
An Evolutionary Architecture: John Frazer (out of print but available here http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/publications/ea/intro.html)
The Empty Space: Peter Brook
The Art of Computer Games: Chris Crawford (also out of print but usually online here – http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/game-book/ – though it seems to be down right now)
The Hidden Dimension: E.T. Hall
Space and Place: YiFu Tuan
and Hertzian Tales: Tony Dunne.
I’m currently reading ‘The Social Logic of Space’ by Bill Hillier and Julianne Hansan which might also turn out to be important..
Architects who I consider to be working in areas vaguely related to Ubicomp include Diller & Scofidio, Decoi and Asymptote.
It’s great to read everyone else’s recommendations. There are so many books mentioned here that I should track down!

By: Enrique Ramirez

Enrique Ramirez — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 01:31:10 +0000

Having read both “A Pattern Language” as well as “Notes on the Synthesis of Form,” I wonder about their utility. In other words, how much mileage do you get out of using texts that supposedly model themselves on computers for analyzing urban interactions, or even architectural interventions? You know I am not a fan of Christopher Alexander — if you read Sean Keller’s excellent “Fenland Tech: Architecture and Science in Postwar Cambridge”, you’ll recall that Alexander was riding the coattails of people who were really developing formalist, computer-based investigations into architecture (yes, scale is important here … I said architecture, not urbanism). Eisenman took this approach to hyperlogical extremes; Alexander kinda took it a face value. So yeah, although Archigram may be helpful with this stuff, just remember it all begins with Cambridge (isn’t it funny to think that only a couple of years before Lionel March was trying to “code” Johnson’s Seagram’s building, Watson and Crick uncoded the double helix? That’s right. Cambridge).
As for speculative fiction that may serve some guidance, Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in The High Castle” as well as Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age” are my lodestones. They both deal, in a certain sense, with technological interfaces for manuvering through the großstadt: the I Ching (in PKD’s normative universe), and the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (in “The Diamond Age”).

By: mantella

mantella — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 15:02:45 +0000

Like Adam said, I don’t think I can offer much that you haven’t already read, but just in the interest of building a reading list, I’ll throw out a few things. On the history of early computing, Vannevar Bush’s “As we may Think” and Licklider’s “Man Computer Symbiosis” are both seminal works and virtually unknown among architects. Follow it up with Chun’s “On Software”, which covers some of the the same ground from a feminist cultural theorist standpoint.
Architects today are perhaps better off to start with Alexander’s “The City is not a Tree” than with “A Pattern Language.” Follow that up with Wigley’s “Network Fever”, which has a lot to offer to current discussions.
And maybe some Buckminster Fuller. And Neal Stephenson’s non-fiction (In the Beginning was the Command Line, Mother Earth Mother Board) just for fun.

By: adamgreenfield

adamgreenfield — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 15:56:34 +0000

Honestly, I’m not sure there’s much in the way of writing about interactions on the urban scale that you haven’t already read – so I wonder if it isn’t so much a problem of “we need new reading lists” as “we need new books.”
Among my own favorites, Marc Auge’s “Non-places” you will have read, and the same is true of the Castells and Sassen and Mitchell material I know you’re familiar with.
Reyner Banham’s unjustly neglected and hard-to-find “Megastructures” usefully connects Archigram to co-extant streams of urbanist thought, notably the Japanese Metabolists. Martin Pawley’s “Terminal Architecture” is creepy and entirely straight-faced, and useful for that reason: he really *believes* this shit. Further afield (or maybe closer to home) Simon Sadler’s books on Situationism and Archigram are very useful overviews, and can profitably be mined for long lists of primary source material. But I’m willing to bet you’ve seen a lot of that too.
If there’s any virgin field for exploration left to you, in fact, I’d wager it lies mainly in the area of fiction – I don’t seem to recall you mentioning any of the urbanist SF I grew up on, and which remains useful to me in understanding some of the prospects for urban form. In this regard, Samuel Delaney’s “Dhalgren,” Tom Disch’s “334,” John Brunner’s “Stand on Zanzibar” and “The Shockwave Rider,” and just about any of the later Ballard stand out as perennially useful points of departure. Hope this helps.

By: dmellis

dmellis — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 13:16:54 +0000

Of course, Digital Ground by Malcolm McCullough is all about architecture and interaction design.

By: heyotwell

heyotwell — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 00:16:38 +0000

Dan Hill’s the one you want to get suggestions from here, but:
Kevin Lynch’s “The Image of the City” is good if you like Alexander’s stuff, as is Stewart Brand’s “How Buildings Learn.”
I’d love to actually get my hands on a copy of “Playgrounds and the City”, the exhibition catalog about Aldo van Eyck’s Amsterdam playgrounds that Ben Cerveny turned me on to. (It’s impossible to find for less than several hundred bucks, though…)
Archis magazine is great to browse through, and of course Metropolis magazine covers design and architecture about equally.