Urban structuring: studies of Alison & Peter Smithson (A Studio Vista/Reinhold art paperback)

Smithson, Alison Margaret

REINHOLD

<p>Detailed book on work of architectural Team 10, illustrated.</p>

Team 10 Primer

Arts & Photography

Architecture

Studio Vista

Until recently the ideas of Alison and Peter Smithson have been known mainly to those professionally involved in architecture and urban design. This is so because they have presented their ideas usually in project form, accompanied by elliptical texts designed to prevent the building up of rigid thought patterns in the minds of those studying them.  Ordinariness and Light, by contrast, is an extended exploration of their theories and work over the past seventeen years, in which not only their aesthetic but also their political and emotional concerns are made plain. The book brings together a previously unpublished long text of 1952-53, "Urban Re-identification," and a sequence of later essays and statements. All this material has been revised for the present volume, and provided with a linking commentary.  The general theme is "the invention of an architecture structured by notions of association." The authors argue that the form of the city and the town must correspond to the human needs of the present; looser knit than in the past, even the quite recent past; more open and changing. And for city and town to correspond to this pattern of society there must be better systems of physical communication, and new form-concepts through which society can recognize and realize its new self.  The arguments, examples, and illustrations in the book show how a very small shift in our way of looking at the ordinary things that go to make up cities and towns could restore to them their rich classic connotations. Houses would once more feel like places of adventure, as well as security; roads would be made to give a sense of cohesion and connection, as well as of release. For the Smithsons, to sense an "ordering" in things is to feel liberated and free to use them. Ordinariness and Light will enable all who are exercised about the deterioration of urban life to share their dream of cities that can breathe. It may help, perhaps, to generate in society at large that kind of committed participation that their notion of "ordering" implies.

Ordinariness and Light: Urban Theories 1952-1960 and their Application in a Building Project 1963-1970

Faber and Faber

<p>The British architect Alison Smithson has produced one of the most significant and influential bodies of work of the second half of the 20th century. Her books include Urban Structuring, Ordinariness and Light, Without Rhetoric, The Shift, and the influential Team X Primer. Alison Smithson died in 1993.</p>

The heroic period of modern architecture

Rizzoli

Without rhetoric;: An architectural aesthetic, 1955-1972

"When le Corbusier assembled Vers Une Architecture," write the Smithsons, "he gave to young architects everywhere a way of looking at the emergent machine-served society, and from that, a way of looking at antiquity and a rationale to support his personal aesthetic. Viollet-le-Duc had performed the same service to architects before le Corbusier: the role they played is traditional to the development of architecture. In this essay, based on material written between 1955 and 1972, we try to do the same as these architects before us.  "We write to make ourselves see what we have got in the inescapable present...to give another interpretation of the same ruins...to show a glimpse of another aesthetic."  The Smithsons gained an international reputation in the early 1950s, both for their buildings and for being instrumental in the development of the "thoughtful" approach to modern architecture. Their theoretical accommodation of the economic and social context in which the architect/urbanist works was set out as succinctly as possible in Urban Structuring, published in 1967. Team 10 Primer, first published in a special issue of Architectural Design in 1962, and subsequently brought up to date and published by The MIT Press in book form in 1968, documented the Smithsons' search with other leading architect/urbanist/teachers for a technique of working together, a skill or way of thinking that past cultures obviously had but that seemed to be lost to the builders in our present cities.  Without Rhetoric—concerned with architectural form and its material embodiment—is a parallel volume to Ordinariness and Light (The MIT Press, 1970), which contained those essays concerning urban form written over the years 1952-1960. Architecture tends to be long-lasting, which makes thoughtful architects cautious, anxious to try to understand, to respond intelligently. They tend to dig into things, so that their intuition has as sound a base as possible to work on. Without Rhetoric is a refinement of the results of twenty years of such digging, intended to give the reader a real feeling for these particular architects' interests and obsessions. Among the many subjects discussed in word and image are The New Brutalism...the role of advertising in shaping what we think we need...The Rocket, a statement on the present state of architecture...Mies van der Rohe, a homage...some meditations on Braun...The use of repetition....

Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

Latimer New Dimensions

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Books by Smithson, Alison Margaret