Ecstatic Architecture: The Surprising Link
by Maggie Toy, Charles Jencks
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Today there is a broad trend towards an architecture that could be called ecstatic - partly motivated by pure architectural ideas pushed to their limits and a shift from functional concerns to sensual ones. Ecstatic Architecture is stimulating, holistic and overpowering; its primary contemporary monument is Frank Gehry's New Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa. Ecstatic Architecture has opened up architectural thought and made links with historic building. The term encompasses buildings widely show more distant in function and time, from cave art to the new cinema centre in Dresden, from explicitly erotic architecture to buildings which have a spiritual role, from conceptual and cybernetic artefacts to pure architecture. It suggests comparisons between the current practice of leading architects such as Hans Hollein, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Nigel Coates and Egyptian, Baroque and Art Nouveau architecture. Essays examining the historic and philosophical implications are complemented by major projects in the genre by Frank Gehry, Will Alsop, Ron Arad, Odile Decq, Eric Owen Moss and Shin Takamatsu. Major rhetorical tropes of Ecstatic Architecture are clarified in two extensive photo essays by Charles Jencks. The surprise is that Ecstatic Architecture links such widely divergent strands and forces us to reconsider architecture in a new key. show lessTags
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Architectural critic and historian Charles Jencks is the author of, among many other titles, Le Corbusier and the Tragic View of Architecture (Doubleday 50M copies sold to date)., The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, and The Architecture of the Jumping Universe. (Bowker Author Biography)
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