A Theory for Practice: Architecture in Three Discourses
by Bill Hubbard (9780262082358)

Bill Hubbard
Release Date: 10 April 1995
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 192
Category: Criticism
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9780262082358
ISBN-10: 0262082357

To speak comprehensively about a building today requires that we thinkabout the building in three different ways - as an instance of architectural order, as an embodiment of values about living, and as an instrument for bringing aboutresults. With this insight, Bill Hubbard offers architects a useful new way ofthinking about the work they do. He looks at all of the groups with an interest in awork of architecture - owners, inhabitants, customers, community groups, critics andhistorians, architecture schools -- and presents a conceptual framework in whichthose disparate interests are not just given a place but are honored for providingdifferent perspectives on the building.Recalling a time when a building could beencompassed by a single way of thinking, Hubbard reviews how political, economic, and philosophical movements have fostered new roles for buildings and provided newways of thinking about them. How can these ways of thinking talk to each other, muchless have a conversation that can produce a building? To find a language for suchconversation is the task Hubbard takes on, through an exploration of the concept ofa sense of place.In the book's closing chapters Hubbard describes the varieties ofplace that we can feel, and proposes a way to characterize such feelings and renderthem usable by designers. In so doing, he raises a fundamental question about thepractice of architecture; he proposes that a theory for practice founded on the ideaof creating a sense of place is not a radical departure for architects because theacts of creating place are the acts architects do, for themselves, in their dailylives.

USD $35.00