Architects
Portraits of a Practice
Published on 15. July 2019
Book
Paperback/Softback
300 pages
978-1-5017-3849-4 (ISBN)
Description
What is creativity? What is the relationship between work life and personal life? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? These deep and deeply personal questions spring to the fore in Thomas Yarrow's vivid exploration of the life of architects. Yarrow takes us inside the world of architects, showing us the anxiety, exhilaration, hope, idealism, friendship, conflict, and the personal commitments that feed these acts of creativity.
Architects rethinks "creativity," demonstrating how it happens in everyday practice. It highlights how the pursuit of good architecture, relates to the pursuit of a good life in intimate and individually specific ways. And it reveals the surprising and routine social negotiations through which designs and buildings are actually made.
Architects rethinks "creativity," demonstrating how it happens in everyday practice. It highlights how the pursuit of good architecture, relates to the pursuit of a good life in intimate and individually specific ways. And it reveals the surprising and routine social negotiations through which designs and buildings are actually made.
Reviews / Votes
There is a good deal that we can recognise-and take comfort from-in Yarrow's portrait. Much of this is in the charmingly ramshackle way we conduct ourselves. Yarrow reminds us why [architects] persist with this badly paid, insecure struggle of practice... as a way of being in the world and to help us understand our place in it. This is an unusually human book.- Piers Taylor (Architecture Today) So rather than unlocking any finished design for us to copy, this book opens the potential for anthropologists and ethnographers to find meaning in the mundane, the high-value things that move us beyond imagination. That is where the magic resides.
(Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute)
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Ithaca
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
33 b&w halftones - 33 Halftones, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 231 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
436 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5017-3849-4 (9781501738494)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
07/2019
Cornell University Press
€8.49
Available for download
Person
Thomas Yarrow is a social anthropologist whose work focuses on the social life of expertise. He is particularly interested in everyday interactions through which professional knowledge is produced, the personal and ideological commitments that propel this work, and the routine ethical dilemmas that arise. For Architects, Yarrow turned his attention to the lives and work of ten architects who comprise the Millar Howard Workshop, an architectural firm in the Cotswolds, UK. Yarrow is also the author of Development Beyond Politics, and the co-author of Detachment, Differentiating Development, and Archaeology and Anthropology.