Caruso St. John: Almost Everything

Overview

Adam Caruso and Peter St. John, partners in the London firm Caruso St. John, insist on architectural history as a creative resource, and on embracing that resource rather than forsaking it for the rat-race Modernist pursuit of novelty: as St. John argues, "The new for its own sake seems to us both hopeless and pathetic. We prefer characterful ugliness to calculated perfection." Aiming for a "richly associative" architecture that draws on the nature of its materials, Caruso St. John embraces outside disciplines like art, design, literature and philosophy to enrich its practice—Claes Oldenburg's 1960s work at the Storefront Gallery, for example. Almost Everything documents buildings and ...

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Overview

Adam Caruso and Peter St. John, partners in the London firm Caruso St. John, insist on architectural history as a creative resource, and on embracing that resource rather than forsaking it for the rat-race Modernist pursuit of novelty: as St. John argues, "The new for its own sake seems to us both hopeless and pathetic. We prefer characterful ugliness to calculated perfection." Aiming for a "richly associative" architecture that draws on the nature of its materials, Caruso St. John embraces outside disciplines like art, design, literature and philosophy to enrich its practice—Claes Oldenburg's 1960s work at the Storefront Gallery, for example. Almost Everything documents buildings and projects in Britain and Continental Europe since the early 1990s, and also assesses Caruso St. John's philosophy. With contributions by Philip Ursprung, Thomas Demand, John Blockehurst and Jonathan Glancey, it is a thorough overview of one of Britain's most independent-minded architectural firms.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9788434311701
  • Publisher: Poligrafa, Ediciones, S. A.
  • Publication date: 3/4/2009
  • Pages: 328
  • Product dimensions: 6.70 (w) x 9.60 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Meet the Author

Thomas Demand was born in Munich in 1964. He studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Munich, the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, the Cite des Arts, Paris, and Goldsmiths College, London. Demand begins by translating a preexisting image, usually culled from the media, into a life-size model he makes out of colored paper and cardboard. He recreates a room, a parking lot, a staircase, a landscape--then he photographs the model and destroys it. Demand's photographs appear at once compellingly real and strangely artificial. Since their subjects--handcrafted facsimiles of both architectural spaces and natural environments--are themselves built in the image of other images, the photographs are three times removed from the scenes they seek to depict. Combining craftsmanship and conceptualism in equal parts, Demand pushes the medium of photography toward uncharted frontiers.

Jonathan Glancey is the architecture and design editor of The Guardian.

Table of Contents

1 Building an Empire

2 Poetic Realism

3 Anachronism and Entropy

4 Images

Glossary

Biographies

Bibliography

Index

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