[ePub] Creativity and Social Support in Mental Health: Service Users' Perspectives by R. McDonnell in Arts-Photography

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 "didnt 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 if architects liberated their minds from the constraints of site; program; and budget? he asks. 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 housing -- and 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.