CENTER 4: Buildings and Reality: Architecture in the Age of Information

DECEMBER 1988

The fourth issue of CENTER collects papers and presentations made at a symposium held on October 23-24, 1986 at the University of Texas at Austin as well as a number of invited papers on the topic “Buildings and Reality: Architecture in the Age of Information.”

The contents of this issue of CENTER are divided into three parts. The first, “Media and the Environment,” is dedicated to presenting a picture of how the media, especially television, comprise an ever-growing sector of our subjective environment. The second section, “Abstraction, Imagination, Reality,” presents a number of papers that address the question of how architecture becomes meaningful as it leaves or approaches veridical renderings of intuited reality. The third section, “Toward a Real Architecture,” presents a number of essays that struggle to define what one could mean by real that is not also trivial.

ISBN: 0-8478-5484-1

tABLE OF CONTENTS 

 

MEDIA AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Media as Environment, by Horace M. Newcomb
The Re-Decade, by Tom Shales
The Stuff of Dreams: Plastics and Cultural Synthesis, by Jeffrey L. Meikle

ABSTRACTION, IMAGINATION, AND REALITY

The Voices of Space, by Karsten Harries
The Authenticity of Difference: Architecture and the Crisis of Reality, by Peter Eisenman
The Castle in the House: A Project by George Ranalli in New York, by Anthony Vidler
A Design Begins in the Mind, by Stanley Saitowitz
Derrida and Beyond, by Robert Mugerauer

TOWARDS A REAL ARCHITECTURE 

Realness and Realism: A New Direction, by Michael Benedikt
Realist Architecture in the Australian Idiom: The Work of Glenn Murcutt, by J.V. DeSousa
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, by Lawrence W. Speck
Edge of Center, by Tod Williams
Architecture, Reality, and Transcendence, by Coy Howard
Realism at Hand: A Portfolio
Notes on the Symposium, by Lawrence W. Speck

EDITOR

Michael Benedikt

PRODUCTION EDITOR

Susan R. Hoover

PRODUCTION & ASSISTANT EDITOR

Patricia Henderson