Trajectories in Architecture

Book excerpt: Trajectories in Architecture: Plan, Sensation, Temporality presents a compelling examination of underlying issues in late-twentieth-century architecture. Three formal preoccupations and conceptual orientations are used as guiding threads or trajectories. These three trajectories – the plan as conceptual device, a logic of sensation, and temporalities – serve to organise individual chapters in the central sections of the book and provide a new lens to the study of period work, revealing architectural conditions and consequent spatial effects little explored to date. Trajectories in Architecture adds to scholarship and expands our understanding of the role of conceptual and formal criteria in the analysis and creation of works of architecture. The book provides potentially transformative new interpretations of influential architects and key projects from the last half of the twentieth century to reveal new alignments and potentialities in architecture’s recent past as a contribution to identifying future possibilities. In so doing, the book argues for the still-latent potential in modern architecture’s traditions and design principles and their future expression. Trajectories in Architecture includes analysis of significant projects of Le Corbusier, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, John Hejduk, Louis I. Kahn, and I. M. Pei.