Architects
Portraits of a Practice
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Cornell University Press
Published:15th Jul '19
Should be back in stock very soon
What is creativity? What is the relationship between work life and personal life? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? These deep and deeply personal questions spring to the fore in Thomas Yarrow's vivid exploration of the life of architects. Yarrow takes us inside the world of architects, showing us the anxiety, exhilaration, hope, idealism, friendship, conflict, and the personal commitments that feed these acts of creativity.
Architects rethinks "creativity," demonstrating how it happens in everyday practice. It highlights how the pursuit of good architecture, relates to the pursuit of a good life in intimate and individually specific ways. And it reveals the surprising and routine social negotiations through which designs and buildings are actually made.
There is a good deal that we can recognise—and take comfort from—in Yarrow's portrait. Much of this is in the charmingly ramshackle way we conduct ourselves. Yarrow reminds us why [architects] persist with this badly paid, insecure struggle of practice... as a way of being in the world and to help us understand our place in it. This is an unusually human book.
-- Piers Taylor * Architecture Today *So rather than unlocking any finished design for us to copy, this book opens the potential for anthropologists and ethnographers to find meaning in the mundane, the high-value things that move us beyond imagination. That is where the magic resides.
* Journal of the Royal Anthropological InstituISBN: 9781501738494
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 16mm
Weight: 454g
300 pages