BUILDING TYPES AND BUILT FORMS

Skrevet af STEADMAN

Building Types and Built Forms weaves two books together in alternating
chapters: one about the history of building types, the other about their
geometry. The first book follows the histories of some common types of
building: houses, hospitals, schools, offices and prisons. Examples are
drawn from the 19th and early 20th centuries in France, America and
Britain, with the central focus on London. They include the 'pavilion
hospitals' associated with the name of Florence Nightingale, English
Board and Modernist schools of the 1920s and 30s, tall office buildings
in Chicago and New York, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon penitentiary, and
'radial prisons' on the model of Cherry Hill and Pentonville. The second
book takes these histories and uses them to explore how the forms of
these buildings are constrained by some of the basic functions of
architecture: to provide daylight and ventilation to the interior, to
provide access to all rooms, or to allow occupants to see from one part
of a building to another. A new way of thinking about these 'worlds of
geometrical possibility' is introduced, in which the forms of many
buildings can be catalogued and laid out systematically in
'morphospaces', or theoretical spaces of forms. As building types change
over time, they come to occupy different positions within the worlds of
possible forms. Building Types and Built Forms is filled with over 400
illustrations, many drawn especially for the book. It offers a new
theoretical approach, combined with a series of historical accounts of
building types, some well known, some less familiar. It should appeal to
academics, practitioners, historians and students of architecture.