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Culicidae Architectural Press News

• CAP to publish Architecture Cookbook by author Julie A. Arntson

  2008 Jun 12

  Kansas City-based author Julie Arntson will publish her archi-biographical book Architecture Cookbook with Culicidae Architectural Press this summer. In her unique book Arntson moves deftly through a series of essays from architectural practice through architecture theory and design to sensory design, and finally dessert.
  
  Available in August of 2008.

• Shortcut to Christopher Alexander published by Jenny Quillien

  2008 Feb 14

  Delight’s Muse: on Christopher Alexander’s THE NATURE OF ORDER, by Jenny Quillien, Culicidae Architectural Press, Ames, Iowa, 2008, 171 pages, 220 color illustrations, ISBN 978-1-4303-1317-5.
$65.95
  
  Ames, Iowa, February 14, 2008.
  Delight’s Muse is a blessedly short, accessible, and thoughtfully illustrated summary of Christopher Alexander’s four volume work, The Nature of Order. It rescues readers from the massive effort required to navigate Alexander’s 2000-page labyrinth without map or compass.
  
  Famous (and infamous) architect and author Christopher Alexander is an iconoclast both revered and despised. But in this overview of his recent and ever-so-ambitious magnum opus Jenny Quillien (a former colleague of Alexander) suggests that we eschew those conventional judgments and simply recognize that Alexander is ‘on to something’ novel, useful and important. Alexander aims not only to examine the how and why of true success in built environments, but pushes on to far-reaching discussions about order and process in the natural and man-made worlds, questioning the very character of beauty, wholeness, and spirituality.
  
  Quillien’s synopsis and interpretative commentaries foreground what can be called Alexander’s ‘General Theory of Everything’ with the goal of promoting critical discussion and thoughtful implementation. She argues that we need not be wedded to the products of Alexander’s thought but can benefit greatly by courting its process. Winning an audience over to innovative ideas is a ‘high-stakes’ proposition for all parties. Listening sympathetically—the only way really to truly ‘hear’ what a new point of view is proposing—is to risk changing one’s mind. In turn, a new perspective, if openly engaged, will be transformed by those listening. On offer is a restructuring of the attending mind.
  
  Delight’s Muse will interest not only fans of Alexander’s earlier books (the best known being A Pattern Language from 1977, and The Timeless Way of Building from 1979) but everyone willing to entertain a fresh and stimulating way to observe the world and the variety of things we place in it.
  
  Jenny Quillien is a Research Associate with the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She can be reached at jquillien@cybermesa.com or by phone at 1 505 983 7129.
  
  Delight’s Muse is available for on-line purchase from Culicidae Architectural Press, from the on-demand printer Lulu.com, major bookstores, or Amazon.com.
  
  The book is currently available through Lulu as a full color paperback or as a downloadable .pdf.
  
  
  
  
  © 2008 9one8Design.com

• CAP to publish book by architect Harry Merritt

  2007 Dec 25

  Culicidae Architectural Press will publish the book Perspective Drawing: The Projected Image Method by architect and retired University of Florida Architecture Professor Harry Merritt in the Spring of 2008. Merritt, who now lives in Maine, has developed a method of perspective drawing that allows architecture students—and anyone interested in producing fast and accurate hand-drawn perspectives—to do just that. Merritt has developed the projected image method over the past twenty years, and the hands-on exercises will allow the reader to quickly learn how to represent spatial ideas accurately using just a pencil and graph paper.
  
  
  
  
  
  © 2008 9one8Design.com

• Jenny Quillien to publish book on Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order

  2007 Sep 3

  Culicidae Architectural Press will publish Jenny Quillien’s book Delight’s Muse: On Christopher Alexander’s “The Nature of Order” in the fall of 2007.
  
  Below is some more information about the book, compiled by the author:
  
  “The Nature of Order, Alexander’s four-volume magnum opus, runs almost 2000 pages. The length alone will deter many potential readers. Its breadth will deter others. The topic is everything—well, almost everything—the nature of order in the universe, science, art, and again and again (since Alexander is, after all, an architect) the nature of order in our habitats.
  
  My understanding of The Nature of Order is based on six years of collaborating directly with Alexander on the manuscript. Delight’s Muse summarizes that work for the general reader. One goal is to provide a stepping-stone into the original material. Armed with an overview and an initial understanding of the main themes, potential readers of the four volumes can more easily navigate the labyrinth as well as enjoy the finer points and fuller discussions. A second goal is to forefront the basic scaffolding of what can be considered a new General Theory.
  
  Additional interpretive sections of Delight’s Muse recount my attempts to implement Alexander’s new ideas on a small scale. Here also are short essays which aim to more clearly place The Nature of Order within the current Zeitgeist in science (notably biology and complexity theory). Further commentaries consider The Nature of Order in the context of Alexander’s previous publications. Readers of those earlier books will find familiar questions and goals still present, but now the scope of inquiry is far greater and it invokes a radically new vocabulary.”
  
  
  
  
  © 2008 9one8Design.com

• CAP publishes interdisciplinary book on Music and Architecture

  2007 Apr 15

  Culicidae Architectural Press editors just published the book Resonance: Essays on the Intersection of Music and Architecture, a collection of nine essays by an international group of scholars and designers from architecture, music, landscape architecture, The book is available at lulu.com and also via Amazon.
  
  Resonances: Essays on the Intersection of Music and Architecture is a collection of nine texts written by international scholars. Most of the essays were originally presented at the interdisciplinary conference Architecture | Music | Acoustics that took place in Toronto, Canada, in June 2006 at Ryerson University. Colin Ripley was instrumental in organizing the event. The texts in the book range from historiographical and theoretical explorations of the relations between music and architecture via translations of architectural spaces into music to analytical case studies of architectural spaces for musical performance. Engineer/architect Sven Sterken (Belgium) explores music as an art of space through the work of the architect, engineer, and composer Iannis Xenakis. Architect and designer Kourosh Mavash (Canada) investigates Murray Schafer’s Soundscape and its potential for a new pedagogy of architecture. Musician and landscape architect Galia Roe (Israel) examines existing notation systems and then develops a new scoring method for architectural analysis and design as she compares linear sequences in music and space. The ethnomusicologist, composer, and performer Kim Chow-Morris (Canada) chronicles the translation of a Toronto city street into a musical composition that was premiered at the Architecture | Music | Acoustics conference. Architect and professor Jim Lutz (USA) traces the transformations of architecture as instrument—and its inverse, instrument as architecture—through a series of projects that straddle the line between both fields of study. Architect and musician Yu Zhang (China) discovers musical design in the 18th-century architecture of the Altar of Heaven and the Zither Rhythm Studio in Beijing, China. Composer John Sands (USA) considers the societal function of music and architecture through an analysis of Markus Pernthaler’s Helmut-List-Halle in Graz, Austria. Architect and musician Garth Ancher (Australia) translates the intangible qualities of Miles Davis’ jazz-rock fusion into architecture through his design for a Contemporary School of Music in Launceston, Tasmania. Designer/architecture professor Mikesch Muecke and musicologist/music professor Miriam Zach (USA) trace in their essay the intersection of architecture and music throughout history in the work of architects and musicians, discovering along the way the potential of an interdisciplinary practice to transform both disciplines.
  
  
  
  
  © 2008 9one8Design.com