Product Description

Shortlisted for the RIBA Sir Robert McAlpine International Book Award for Construction. and Shortlisted for the 2008 RIBA International Book Awards, Architectural Practice category.

Confronted with the intricate construction details of Italian architect Carlo Scarpa's Querini Stampalia Gallery—steel joined at odd intervals, concrete spilled out of concatenated forms, stone cut in labyrinthine patterns—Michael Cadwell abandoned his attempts to categorize them theoretically and resolved instead to appreciate their idiosyncrasies and evoke their all-embracing affects. What he had dismissed as a collection of fetishes he came to understand as a coherently constructed world that was nonetheless persistently strange. In Strange Details, Cadwell looks at the work of four canonical architects who "made strange" with the most resistant aspect of architecture—construction. In buildings that were pivotal in their careers, Scarpa, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn all created details that undercut our critical and analytical terra firma.

Cadwell explores the strangeness in the material menagerie of Scarpa's Querini Stampalia, the wood light frame construction of Wright's Jacobs House, the welded steel frame of Mies's Farnsworth House, and the reinforced concrete of Kahn's Yale Center for British Art. Each of these architects, he finds, reconfigures the rudimentary facts of construction, creating a subtle but undeniable shift in a building’s physicality. And for each of them, nature is strange, and its strangeness infects; nature unmoors exhausted cultural ideas, constricted analytical procedures, and outmoded production techniques. An awakening to nature's strangeness forces a new sense of the world, one that we can detect in these architects' configurations of the world's materials—their strange details.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #212540 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780262532914
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Review
"In our spectacularly enervated age, this brilliant interpretive excursus reminds one that, as with music (to which it used to be compared), one cannot enter a work of architecture without a cultivated sensibility, compounded in equal measure out of knowledge and imagination. These four critical essays on the theme of tectonic estrangement, together with the author's meticulously annotated bibliography, should be required reading and re-reading in every school of architecture."
—Kenneth Frampton, Ware Professor of Architecture, Columbia University

"In the course of his brief book, Mr. Cadwell provides admirably focused, legible, and sympathetic readings of the similar accomplishment of four very different structures, each in its way a milestone of mid-century modernist architecture."
— James Gardner, The New York Sun

"With a forthright and sweeping historical consciousness untainted by ideological proselytizing, Cadwell has invented a new form of architectural writing fusing the personal essay, the journalistic critique, and the academic treatise."
— Norman Weinstein, The Architect's Newspaper

About the Author
Michael Cadwell is a practicing architect and Associate Professor in the Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio State University. A former Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the MacDowell Colony, he is the author of Small Buildings.

Customer Reviews

Thickening Tectonics
There is no better argument for the reexamination of "architectural language" than this excellent book by Michael Cadwell. Writing in a tradition stemming from Kenneth Frampton's "Studies in Tectonic Culture," this volume examines four buildings by canonic figures--Carlo Scarpa, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn.

Cadwell writes that, in 1999, after being granted a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, he hoped to study the work of Carlo Scarpa, in particular the Querini Stampalia Foundation in Venice, discussed at length in the first chapter. After studying and drawing Scarpa's meticulous details at length, Cadwell discovered that "The drawings refused to cooperate. No matter how I arranged the details on the walls, they resisted an order." From this resistance emerged this book, which does not discuss the clear, perfectly articulated theories of architecture (e.g. Le Corbusier and his contemporary rationalist disciples), but rather the materials of architecture that resist explanation, a thickness of material that expands beyond its physical depth.

Cadwell performs this operation again and again, tying each architect's conceptual project to the physical, material nature of their buildings. Scarpa's details flow and dissolve like the water that runs through them, Wright's Jacobs house moves in and out of his idyllic, suburban vision of the broadacre city, and Mies's Farnsworth house is revealed not as a heroic mastery of nature, but as the epitome of humility, reinserting and immersing its occupant in the surrounding environment. Cadwell has the ability to make all of these apparent at a larger level, but always zooms in and out -- the details of architecture truly become the analogue for the world around it.

Finally, Cadwell's book suggests an alternate path for contemporary practice (though it never does so explicitly, a tactic that I believe carries more weight than even a manifesto). The architects discussed here are concerned with the architectural object, the physical entity of architecture. Today's image-driven architectural culture is more invested in the rendering than the building itself, the concept over the detail, architecture as graphic design--flat, flashy, and fatuous. Cadwell's analyses point toward a reevaluation of the material nature of buildings, a position that will undoubtedly be disregarded by some as hopelessly atavistic, but a position that asserts architecture in its barest, most exposed state, as the physical negotiation of the myriad worldly forces surrounding it.

good insight
Great way of looking, and describing, architecture. Although the buildings are well known, at least in photos by most architects, the deep descriptions and analisis gives them (the buildings) a new breath and depth, specialy for those of us who haven't experienced them in person. And it is a good interesting read, not a huge bore as most of these (written architecture) things are.