reading KINETIC ARCHITECTURE lately?
2006.05.21 17:42
Anyone else reading
William Zuk and Roger H. Clark, Kinetic Architecture (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1970)
lately?
From the front flat of the dust jacket:
"Surely our present task is to unfreeze architecture--to make it a fluid, vibrating, changable backdrop for the varied and constantly changing modes of life. An expanding, contracting, pulsating, changing architecture would reflect life as it is today and therefore be part of it"*
Kinetic Architecture captures the very essence of the above statement. But more than that, it gives every architect, engineer, city planner and builder a working knowledge of emerging, evolutionary concepts and ideas which are flexible to the speed, scale, and nature of change today.
Fully evaluating the bold and exciting potentials of architecture which can accommodate time-change effects, the authors provide a wealth of supporting examples which show how man can now, for the first time, construct a physical environment that is adaptable to his specific needs.
Denouncing the "monument syndrome of static, permanent architecture" in light of current needs, the authors persue new architectural mediums which would remain responsive to a broad spectrum of changing conditions. Such buildings might expand, contract, or even move as pointed up in the book's numerous examples and illustrations.
Here you'll gain new insights into the principles and possibilities of dynamic self-erecting structures such as the United States Pavilion on Osaka, Japan . . . incremental structures which have the potential to meet changing pressures through additive, substractive, or substitutive capabilities (which suggest new ideas for the mobile home industry) . . . disposable buildings--a possible solution to cost-benefit problems . . . the merits of a "second-hand" building market based on the capabilities od reversible architecture . . . and many more equally fascinating innovations.
*"Editorial" by Jan Rowan, Progressive Architecture
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