What Architecture Means ─ Connecting Ideas and Design

What Architecture Means introduces you to architecture and allows you to explore the connections between design ideas and values across time, space, and culture. It equips you to play an active and informed role in architecture either as a professional or as a consumer, client, and citizen. By analyzing famous and everyday buildings while presenting and questioning the positions of important architects and theorists, this book will help you to evaluate and decide what qualities, ideas, and values you believe are important in architecture.

You'll learn:

-How various definitions of "architecture" establish different relationships with all buildings, and even non-buildings;
-How buildings express and accommodate ideas of the sacred, the family, and the community;
-What an architect is, and what priorities they bring to design and construction;
-How an architect’s expertise relates to that of the engineer, and why these are distinct disciplines;
-About values like beauty, originality, structural expression, and cultural memory and their purpose in architectural design;
-About the interests and ethical values that architects, and architecture, serves and promotes.

Topics include sacred spaces, the house, the city, architects and engineers, aesthetics and design, originality and method, technology and form, memory and identity, and ethics and responsibility.

Denise Costanzo is an assistant professor of architecture at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA. During 2014-2015 she was the American Academy in Rome’s Marian and Andrew Heiskell Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Modern Italian Studies.