Author : Louis Sauer
Release : 2022-12-24
Genre :
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 779/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Not by Design Alone by : Louis Sauer

Download or read book Not by Design Alone written by Louis Sauer. This book was released on 2022-12-24. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about events that influenced Louis Sauer's life as a practicing architect, urban designer and teacher, including his exposure in the 1950s-60s to the Bauhaus and the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM). The book is for design students, professionals, and those increasingly interested in his masterful body of work in developing innovative medium-density low-rise housing in the USA. Sauer explores how his own life interacted with his work. The 200 pages are filled with narrative and copious photos and illustrations about his architectural career with bits about his painting, urban design, and teaching experiences. Unsure how he came by his intuition of form, its organisation, pattern, or geometric structure came from, Sauer wondered how he designed. Was he dominated by the accident-the contingent? When was he capable of turning accidents into ideas? What were the interactions between emotions, between the intuitive and the conceptually rational sources of inspiration that he may have used in his life, for his designs? Although Sauer had considered himself a Modern movement supplicant he was startled when some of his contemporaries suggested that his work was not Modernist and did not conform to CIAM beliefs. In fact, his work was highly contextual. In contrast to standard Modernist principles Sauer found architecture to be a discipline wherein the creation and realization of a design requires interaction with a range of other people: not solely clients, but a range of participants in the regulatory/development/construction industry, in what Sauer refers to as the 'development process'. Through knowledge of these participants and their relationship to design, architects could provide the less fortunate with better living conditions. For Sauer, architecture is fundamentally social, both in its production and existence. Because identity is so important, clients expect architects to create the character or image of a place, and, in the process, to create or reinforce a sense of identity. Architects do this through design. The more options, the easier Sauer believes it is for people to make choices that reinforce their identity.