The Environmental Imagination

Technics and Poetics of the Architectural Environment

By Dean Hawkes

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About the Book

This title, from a well-regarded and established expert, explores the changing relationship between the poetic intentions and technical means of environmental design in architecture. Working thematically and chronologically from the eighteenth century to the present day, these essays reach beyond the narrow conventional view of the purely technical to encompass the poetics of architecture, redefining the historiography of environmental design.

Through an assessment of the works of several leading figures throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hawkes deftly shows the growth of environmental awareness and adds a consideration of the qualitative dimension of the environment to the existing, primarily technological, narratives. Essays on earlier buildings highlight the response of pioneering architects to the ‘new’ technologies of mechanical services and their influence on the form of buildings, while the late twentieth-century design is explored in particular depth to illustrate individual strands of the environmental diversity of modern practice.

Table of Contents

Introduction Part One: From Enlightenment to Modernity 1. Soane, Labrouste, Mackintosh - Pioneers of Environment Part Two: The Twentieth Century Environment - Themes and Variations 2. Le Corbusier and Mies van der Roche: Continuity and Invention 3. The 'Other' Environmental Tradition: Erik Gunnar Asplund and Alvar Aalto 4. Louis I. Kahn: The Poetics of Served and Servant 5. Carlo Scarpa: "I Wish I Could Frame the Blue of the Sky" 6. Sigurd Lewerentz: Architecture of Adaptive Light Part Three: Image and Environment 7. The Sheltering Environment: Fehn and Zumthor 8. The Art Museum: Art, Environment, Imagination Moneo, Siza, Caruso St John, Zumthor 9. Sacred Places: Zumthor, Siza, Holl 10. Airs, Water, Places: Therme Vals Bibliography