Reading architecture and culture : researching buildings, spaces and documents / edited by Adam Sharr

Includes index.

Breathing walls / David Leatherbarrow -- An augury of collapse: Herzog and De Meuron's CaixaForum in Madrid / Adam Sharr -- Fostering relations in Kazakhstan / Edward Wainwright -- Reading the site at Sverre Fehn's Hamar museum / Suzanne Ewing -- A hellish cloud and a very clear air: industry, nature and weather in early eighteenth-century England / Jonathan Hill -- Extension stories / Flora Samuel -- Lounge space: the home, the city and the service area / Samuel Austin -- The architecture of urban life: 67 rue des Meuniers / Diana Periton -- The setting and the social condenser: transitional objects in architecture and psychoanalysis / Jane Rendell -- Four lines / Michael Cadwell -- 'God is in the details'/'The detail is moot': a meeting between Mies and Koolhaas / Mhairi McVicar -- Specifying transparency: from 'best seconds' to 'new glass performances' / Katie Lloyd Thomas -- Making plans: Alberti's ichnography as cultural artefact / Paul Emmons and Jonathan Foote -- How the mind meets architecture: what photography reveals / Hugh Campbell -- An architectural good-life can be built, explained and taught only through storytelling / Marco Frascari.

Architecture displays the values involved in its inhabitation, construction, procurement and design. It traces the thinking of the individuals who have participated in it, their relationships, and their involvement in the cultures where they lived and worked. In this way, buildings, their details, and the documents used to make them, can be read closely for cultural insights. Introducing the idea of reading buildings as cultural artefacts, this book presents perceptive readings by eminent writers which demonstrate the power of this approach. The chapters show that close readings of architecture.