How Architecture Got Its Hump

By Roger Connah

Book Overview

Fables of content and undoing on the current state of architecture. In How Architecture Got Its Hump , Roger Connah explores the "interference" of other disciplines with and within contemporary architecture. He asks whether photography, film, drawing, philosophy, and language are merely fashionable props for architectural hallucinations or alibis for revisions of history. Or, are they a means for widening the site of architecture? Connah shows how these disciplines have not only contributed to new developments in architectural theory and practice, but have begun to insinuate new possibilities of space. Sometimes seamless, sometimes awkward like the hump acquired by the camel in one of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, these disciplines have had their own responsibilities and excesses grafted onto architecture, just as architecture has tried to shake off their limitations. Taking interference a step further, Connah also considers the implications of philosophical incongruity and architectural unrest. He asks how architecture loses its head, transcends the dead language it now entraps, and houses meanings it wants to contest. Hardly bleak questions, suggests Connah, for they point to ways for architecture to rescue itself.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262531887
• ISBN13: 9780262531887
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 1.01 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 7.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Missing the point(er)

I don't mean to be argumentative, but the book produces no clear argument because none can be produced. It is about as solid an effort as can be made - using words to refer to what words cannot fully express, contain, etc.

Explores architecture's influence on other disciplines

How Architecture Got Its Hump explores architecture's influence on other disciplines, drawing some unusual links between photography, film, drawing and architecture and how these genres can widen the site and nature of architecture. These disciplines have contributed to new developments in architectural practice, and new ideas about the use and presentation of space: this explores just how.