Invisible in Architecture

de Ole Bouman

This vast and comprehensive volume of work on and by the world's finest and most representative architects and essayists is unparalleled in its field. Faced with the increased invisibility of the architectonic discourse itself, as media attention focuses more on the visual aspects of architecture, this book restores the balance between social and artistic choices and their consequences. The Invisible in Architecture provides a rigorous survey of the principal trends in present-day architecture and highlights the versatility of the discipline, avoiding a one-sided emphasis on technique and design at the expense of the intellectual and tactile dimensions. Architecture and its cultural context are presented as completely interwoven, without losing sight of the professional characteristics. Within a discursive framework, ranging between the encyclopaedian and the utopian, and sustained by leading thinkers including Ernest Mandel, Gianni Vattimo, Hal Foster, David Harvey and Richard Sennett, the book examines the work of architects such as Rogers, Hasegawa, Koolhaas, Herzog & De Meuron, Holl Venturi and Scott Brown, and many others; probing the hidden facets of the architects' approach and project descriptions, coupled with incisive articles and often controversial questioning of concepts, allow Ole Bouman and Roemer van Toorn to use the powers of verbal and visual arguments to give architecture, once more, its rightful place in the public sphere.