Reading architecture and culture: researching buildings, spaces, and documents

List of illustrations

Illustration credits

Notes on contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Opening

1. Breathing walls / David Leatherbarrow

Part 1. Extraordinary buildings, divergent readings

2. An augury of collapse: Herzog and De Meuron's CaixaForum in Madrid / Adam Sharr

3. Fostering relations in Kazakhstan / Edward Wainwright

4. Reading the site at Sverre Fehn's Hamar Museum / Suzanne Ewing

5. A hellish cloud and a very clear air: industry, nature and weather in early eighteenth-century England / Jonathan Hill

Part 2. Familiar buildings, unfamiliar readings

6. Extension stories / Flora Samuel

7. Lounge space: the home, the city and the service area / Samuel Austin

8. The architecture of urban life: 67 rue des Meuniers / Daina Periton

9. The setting and the social condenser: transitional objects in architecture and psychoanalysis / Jane Rendell

Part 3. Redolent details, insightful documents

10. Four lines / Michael Cadwell

11. 'God is in the details'/'The detail is moot': a meeting between Mies and Koolhaas / Mhairi McVicar

12. Specifying transparency: from 'best seconds' to 'new glass performances' / Katie Lloyd Thomas

13. Making plans: Alberti's ichnography as cultural artefact / Paul Emmons / Jonathan Foote

14. How the mind meets architecture: what photography reveals / Hugh Campbell

Epilogue

15. An architectural good-life can be built, explained and taught only through storytelling / Marco Frascari

Select bibliography

Index