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Architecture Oriented Otherwise by David Leatherbarrow
Princeton Architectural Press, 2009
Hardcover, 304 pages
David
Leatherbarrow begins his latest book with the sentence:
"Forces beyond the architect's control affect architecture's
concrete reality, regardless of what was intended in design."
Coincidentally, this sentiment is shared by another theoretical
book released about the same time, Jeremy Till's Architecture
Depends. Where Till takes aim square at the profession
and academia to shift architecture's focus towards different
ends, Leatherbarrow dances around the influence of external
factors, keeping his eleven essays firmly rooted in architectural
history and theory, though raising provoking ideas along
the way. This difference stems partly from the fact Till's
book is a cohesive theoretical argument and Leatherbarrow's
essays are an almost even mix of articles published previously
and ones printed here for the first time. The consistency
of the latter's thought and work creates his book's cohesion,
aided by the recurrence of certain ideas and characters.
While the first sentence quoted above
is most likely not intended as a summary of the book with
an intriguing title, it does find reiteration in the author's
insistence on architecture's fit into context, a situation
where buildings lose their singularity and become part of
a continuity of experience, what Leatherbarrow calls topography.
This theme has been explored
elsewhere by the author, who sees the term as a link
between architecture and landscape architecture. He defines
topography as terrain that is endowed with implications
extending beyond edges of discrete objects or events. Therefore
an architect who incorporates topography into his or her
design process will have a better chance of successfully
straddling the dichotomies of architecture and landscape,
building and city, individual and collective. Leatherbarrow's
penultimate example -- a hometown favorite that pops up
repeatedly for the Penn Design professor -- is George Howe's
PSFS
Building in Philadelphia, which he analyzes in depth,
from the level of the visitor to the viewer seeing the building
on the horizon.
As Leatherbarrow's book is basically
a collection of essays, it is best digested as such. His
writing can be dense at times, though well worth the effort
for extracting the most from his intriguing ideas. Reading
it straight through makes one realize his writing could
use more variety, as it sometimes seems only Corbusier,
Mies, Wright and Loos appear alongside Howe. In this sense
a couple of the best essays focus on lesser known architects:
the "breathing walls" of Henry
Klumb's San Martin de Porres church in Puerto Rico and
O'Donnell
+ Tuomey's Glucksman
Gallery in Ireland, which he wrote about for their 2006
monograph. These two essays can be seen as the practice
or design side of Leatherbarrow's theory, where the rest
is predominantly interested in architectural theory, such
as the ideas of Le Corbusier found in his writings. The
same ideas, like topography, find mention in the essays
on Klumb and O'Donnell + Tuomey, illustrating the consistency
of Leatherbarrow's ideas and the form of the architecture
and landscape that embodies such ideas.
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