Siteless: 1001 Building Forms | 
| Author: Francois Blanciak
Publisher: The MIT Press
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $8.94
You Save: $6.01 (40%)
New (32) Used (8) from $8.94
Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 287737
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 128
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.3 x 0.4
ISBN: 0262026309
Dewey Decimal Number: 721
EAN: 9780262026307
ASIN: 0262026309
Publication Date: March 31, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Some may call it the first manifesto of the twenty-first century, for it lays down a new way to think about architecture. Others may think of it as the last architectural treatise, for it provides a discursive container for ideas that would otherwise be lost. Whatever genre it belongs to, SITELESS is a new kind of architecture book that seems to have come out of nowhere. Its author, a young French architect practicing in Tokyo, admits he "didn't do this out of reverence toward architecture, but rather out of a profound boredom with the discipline, as a sort of compulsive reaction." What would happen, he asks, if architects liberated their minds from the constraints of site, program, and budget? The result is a book that is saturated with forms, and as free of words as any architecture book the MIT Press has ever published.
The 1001 building forms in SITELESS include structural parasites, chain-link towers, ball-bearing floors, corrugated corners, exponential balconies, radial facades, crawling frames, forensic housingaand other architectural ideas that may require construction techniques not yet developed and a relation to gravity not yet achieved. SITELESS presents an open-ended compendium of visual ideas for the architectural imagination to draw from.
The forms, drawn freehand (to avoid software-specific shapes) but from a constant viewing angle, are presented twelve to a page, with no scale, order, or end to the series. After setting down 1001 forms in siteless conditions and embryonic stages, Blanciak takes one of the forms and performs a "scale test," showing what happens when one of these fantastic ideas is subjected to the actual constraints of a site in central Tokyo. The book ends by illustrating the potential of these shapes to morph into actual building proportions.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Extremely helpful if your stuck in the design process August 29, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I would recommend this book to anybody who sometimes struggles with coming up with new ideas or often gets stuck in the design process.. I often flick through this book for inspiration or ideas. The forms inside do not necessarily need to be replicated, but can often lead to developments in your own ideas.
A really helpful, small book that should be kept in any architecture students backpack
To the magic of architectural creativity August 8, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
To claim this book just adds to the general tendency of contemporary architecture seeking the immediately shocking, superficial and easily publishable is perhaps a sign of precisely this tendency: people losing the ability to dwell on things long enough for their imagination to come out.
Once applied on actual architecture these concepts would need to be closely linked to program, scale and site to be interesting. However in the initial program-, scale- and siteless condition they are presented in this book, they evoke intense imagination in me. The sketches being hand drawn also adds to this.
You can be impatient and flip through it in five minutes, or you can focus your attention and find the potential and depth these forms have.
Anyway, diverging criticism and provocation is usually a sign of quality.
A highly creative book June 27, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I am not an architect but I am fascinated by the multiple varieties of shapes in this book. I can literally dive into this imaginative world.
The architectural context seems to give the work some kind of
justification, which is not needed. It is a fine piece of art all by
itself.
It makes a good present as well, as the price is very reasonable, and can be a source of inspiration not only for architects but also for artists (I personally intend to offer it to a friend who is a wood sculptor). I think this book is an appealing work for all kinds of creative people.
 Low point in architectural design June 9, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is a book that reflects the disease that afflicts modern architecture these days. Out of "boredom" with the field we are given a bunch of random meaningless forms which proudly state they have no relationship to site, community, or humanity. How clever. Even the genesis of form based on nature would be more interesting than this visual equivalent of navel gazing. Maybe this reflects the utter detachment from the real world that current modernist architects have attained. In an age where we, the human beings, could certainly use better visions for the built environment, we are offered some idle, ego-driven, abstract puttering. Anyone who needs this book as form-giver, shouldn't be practicing architecture, or attempting to learn it.
 Siteless: don't let your professors see this May 17, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
It's a very interesting little pamphlet, and amusing to flip to any page and see what's there.
That being said, the forms don't communicate that much, and it requires an iron attention span to "read" for more than about 5 minutes.
|
|
|
