School of Architecture + Design

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Browsing School of Architecture + Design by Subject "Architecture"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Better by Design? Architecture, Urban Planning, and the Good City
    Knox, Paul L. (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2020-10-09)
    The design professions—architecture, city planning, landscape architecture, and urban design—share a great deal in terms of intellectual antecedents, professional ideals, and praxis. In particular, they share a commitment to creating better cities—whether at the scale of buildings, neighborhoods, or city-regions. But who decides what constitutes a “good” city, and how should such an ideal be implemented? In Better by Design? Paul Knox explores the intellectual roots of the design professions, showing how architects, planners, and other designers have traditionally interpreted their roles and implemented their ideas in cities across North America and the UK. Drawing on his long record of research and award-winning publications on the social production of the built environment, Knox offers a critical appraisal of their ultimate effectiveness in achieving the goal of creating and sustaining good cities.
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    Democracy, discourse, and design: Cape Town’s (re)turn to public space
    Tomer, Sharóne L. (Cambridge University Press, 2020-09)
    Public spaces had been central to Cape Town’s colonial planning and spatial order, but became marginalised in the twentieth century under modernist planning and apartheid policy. As apartheid came towards its close, architects and planners began to champion public space as a way of addressing the city’s deficiencies. Books, articles, and policy documents were written celebrating public space as a humanist device and vehicle for democracy. The City of Cape Town’s emerging Urban Design Branch instituted a major public space program: the Dignified Places Programme. This paper traces the history of public space as a terrain through which political aspirations, whether of domination or contestation, have been asserted in Cape Town. The paper will argue that at the end of apartheid, a public space turn occurred which reflected the specificities of post-apartheid democracy, in both its aspirations and limitations.
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    No compromise: The integration of technology and aesthetics
    Dunay, Robert J.; Wheeler, Joseph; Schubert, Robert P. (Informa, 2006-11-01)
    Solar technology is burdened with a stigma that contradicts a sense of proportion and beauty in building. Arbitrarily attached to new or existing construction, the technology is often associated with a small clique of individuals disenfranchised from the mainstream. This project is designed to challenge these perceptions and reestablish the ideals of solar energy by integrating architecture and technology. It pushes existing paradigms by proposing architectural form that celebrates solar power while obtaining a high level of system integration. As each technical decision was measured against its contribution to spatial effect, the project attained a simultaneous sense of the sustainable and the beautiful.
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    Strong Island: Portsmouth's History in Brick and Stone
    Knox, Paul L. (Virginia Tech, 2020-04)
    Some cities are the product of an exceptional history that has produced a distinctive cityscape. Portsmouth, on Britain's south coast across the English Channel from France, is one of these cities, with a built environment and sense of place shaped as much by a unique physical situation and by the tides of war and peace as by economic, social, and architectural history.