Descripciones mejoradas de Syndetics:

Why the rise of redundant precision in architecture and the accompanying fear of error are key to understanding the discipline's needs, anxieties and desires.

When architects draw even brick walls to six decimal places with software designed to cut lenses, it is clear that the logic that once organized relations between precision and material error in construction has unraveled. Precision, already a promiscuous term, seems now to have been uncoupled from its contract with truthfulness. Meanwhile error, and the always-political space of its dissent, has reconfigured itself.

In The Architecture of Error Francesca Hughes argues that behind the architect's acute fetishization of redundant precision lies a special fear of physical error. What if we were to consider the pivotal cultural and technological transformations of modernism to have been driven not so much by the causes its narratives declare, she asks, as by an unspoken horror of loss of control over error, material life, and everything that matter stands for? Hughes traces the rising intolerance of material vagaries-from the removal of ornament to digitalized fabrication-that produced the blind rejection of organic materials, the proliferation of material testing, and the rhetorical obstacles that blighted cybernetics. Why is it, she asks, that the more we cornered physical error, the more we feared it?

Hughes's analysis of redundant precision exposes an architecture of fear whose politics must be called into question. Proposing error as a new category for architectural thought, Hughes draws on other disciplines and practices that have interrogated precision and failure, citing the work of scientists Nancy Cartwright and Evelyn Fox Keller and visual artists Gordon Matta-Clark, Barbara Hepworth, Rachel Whiteread, and others. These non-architect practitioners, she argues, show that error need not be excluded and precision can be made accountable.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Preface(p. ix)
• Acknowledgments(p. xiii)
• Introduction False Economy: Precision and Error in Architecture(p. 1)
• 1 Error and Precision(p. 17)
• The Troping of Precision
• Hooke's Needle and Sutherland's Window
• 2 Error and Matter(p. 45)
• Anatomy of an Accident: Aristotle in the Garden
• Hepworth's Quarry
• 3 Error and Materiality I(p. 77)
• Room for Doubt: Instrumentalism, Inference, and Ideology
• Gallaudet's Dodo
• 4 Error and Materiality II(p. 113)
• Abdicated Measures: Liquid Automation, Anxiety, and the Politics of Optimization
• Axel's Stream
• 5 Error and Representation(p. 139)
• The Blind Spot and the Bridge
• Matta-Clark's Jigsaw
• 6 Error and Reproduction(p. 163)
• Miniature Giants: Colonial Adventures in Entropy and Scale
• Schrooinger's Dolls' House
• 7 Error and Reproduction II(p. 193)
• The Copying Machine Fails: The Double Helix and the Loop
• Perec's Corridor
• 8 Error and Surface(p. 217)
• Counted Away: Indexicality and the Sublimation of Ornament
• (Hermine) Wittgenstein's Radiator
• Postscript(p. 247)
• Notes(p. 249)
• Bibliography(p. 287)
• Index(p. 297)

Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

CHOICE Review

The Architecture of Error surveys the landscape and shifting terrain of error in the process of materialization in architecture, which exists in the reality of materials, as well as in the ideologies, usage, preoccupation, and fetishization of precision within architecture, particularly modernism. Focusing on the translation between representation (drawing) and built object (materiality), the book is a treatise on the architect's negation of error, and the general impossibility of achieving this despite the architects' increasingly precise tools by which to draw (particularly through digitalization). The chapters explore how fear of error has in fundamental ways shaped the understanding of architecture through historical moments in science (material and theoretical) and in the representation of architecture, from Robert Hooke's microscopic analysis of the end of the needle, to the invention of computer-aided drafting, or from Le Corbusier's virtual error elimination through concrete production to the optimization afforded in parametric software. The book also discusses key practitioners in the arts whose work engages with the generative possibilities in error, including Gordon Matta-Clark, Rachel Whiteread, Vija Clemins, Georges Perec, and Barbara Hepworth, cracking open the door to confronting error in architectural practice. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate, research, and professional collections. --Genevieve Baudoin, Kansas State University

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Francesca Hughes lives and works in London, where she taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Architectural Association for many years. She is the editor of The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice (MIT Press) and Drawings That Count.