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Ceilings and Dreams

The Architecture of Levity
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
Ceilings and Dreams explores the role of ceilings as spaces for inspiration and imagination in the twenty-first century. Through twenty essays spanning cultures and eras, this book reveals how ceilings serve as repositories of stories and creativity. It highlights the decline of environments that foster innovative thinking in modern architecture, often dominated by low, technology-filled ceiling grids. The essays invite architects, designers, and students to reconsider ceilings as vital elements that uplift the human spirit and unlock architectural imagination, organised into themes of reveries, suspensions, and inversions.
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Format: Paperback / softback
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

Ideal for architects, design professionals, researchers, and students interested in the cultural and imaginative significance of architectural elements, particularly ceilings. Also suited for readers curious about the intersection of art, architecture, and creativity.

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Ceilings and Dreams encourages looking up through writings organized into three expansive categories: reveries, suspensions and inversions. The contributors contemplate the architecture of levity and the potential of the ceiling as a place for dreaming.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Where is the space for dreaming in the twenty-first century? Lofty thoughts, like dreams, are born and live overhead, just as they have been represented in Renaissance paintings and modern cartoons. Ceilings are often repositories of stories, events, and otherwise invisible oneiric narratives. Yet environments that inspire innovative thinking are dwindling as our world confronts enormous challenges, and almost all of our thinking, debating, and decision-making takes place under endless ceiling grids.

Quantitative research establishes that spaces with taller ceilings elicit broader, more creative thoughts. Today, ceilings are usually squat conduits of technology: they have become the blind spot of modern architecture. The twenty essays in this book look across cultures, places, and ceilings over time to discover their potential to uplift the human spirit. Not just one building element among many, the ceiling is a key to unlock the architectural imagination.

Ceilings and Dreams aims to correct this blind spot and encourages architects and designers, researchers and students, to look up through writings organised into three expansive categories: reveries, suspensions, and inversions. The contributors contemplate the architecture of levity and the potential of the ceiling, once again, as a place for dreaming.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781138479388

Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 29 July 2019

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Routledge

Illustration: 39 Line drawings, black and white; 73 Halftones, black and white; 112 Illustrations, black and white

Contributors:

  • Edited by Federica Goffi
  • Edited by Paul Emmons
  • Edited by Jodi La Coe

Audience: Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly

DIMENSIONS

Width: 174.0mm

Height: 246.0mm

Weight: 556g

Pages: 252

About the Author

Paul Emmons is a registered architect; Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, College of Architecture and Urban Studies at Virginia Tech; and a professor at the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center, where he coordinates the PhD program in Architecture + Design Research. Dr. Emmons earned a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master of Architecture from the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on theories of practice and drawing in architectural design. In addition to his forthcoming book Drawing Imagining Building: Embodiment in Architectural Drawing Practices, he is a co-editor of Confabulations, Storytelling in Architecture (2017) and The Cultural Role of Architecture (2012).

Federica Goffi is an Associate Professor (2007–present) and Co-Chair of the PhD program at the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She holds a PhD from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She published book chapters and journal articles on the threefold nature of time-weather-tempo. Her book, Time Matter[s]: Invention and Re-imagination in Built Conservation: The Unfinished Drawing and Building of St. Peter’s in the Vatican, was published by Ashgate in 2013. She holds a Dottore in Architettura from the University of Genoa, Italy. She is a licensed architect in her native country, Italy.

Jodi La Coe is an architect teaching at the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center of Virginia Tech, where she earned a PhD in Architecture and Design Research. Her dissertation examines the exploration of space-time theories in the work of LΓ‘szlΓ³ Moholy-Nagy, informing his experimentation with photography and collage and, in particular, providing the basis for an original interpretation of his Partiturskizze zu einer mechanischen Exzentrik (Score-Sketch for a Mechanical Eccentric, c. 1924). La Coe received a Master of Architecture from McGill University in the History and Theory of Architecture (2000) and a Bachelor of Architecture from Penn State (1994) where she taught in the Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (2003–14).

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