The Constant : Dialogues on Architecture in Black and White - Hardcover

Catalano, Eduardo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0937999024 ISBN 13: 9780937999028

Publisher: Cambridge Architectural Press, 2000

Synopsis

The book is a dialogue between an architect and a mathematician taking place over a period of seven days and presenting examples of architectural system-forms that originate in many scientific fields as well as mathematical abstractions that are translated into flowing three-dimensional forms leading to new conceptions of structure and space.

The book is directed to the young, to students and educators longing for change, to historians of art and architecture who want to challenge long standing myths and precedents; to planners who want to conceive a new urban environment since no change is valid while it preserves the unimaginative and obsolete structures of the past, to architects in order to narrow the increasing gap between art, science and technology by means of a new science, the Science of Systems and to the general reader who is interested in architecture and can see it here in a unique literary context.

The constant reduces 5000 years of architecture to a single concept and to three buildings that have introduced fundamental innovation into the art. It simplifies architecture into a universal concept called Generic Architecture whose bare bones are inclusive, long lasting, adaptable to change and so flexible as to encompass all building types.

About this title

About the Author

Eduardo Catalano is an architect in constant search of synthesis. He calls it synthesis of the essential.

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he graduated from the University of Buenos Aires in 1940 and in 1944, 1945 from the Universities of Pennsylvania and Harvard where he studied under Walter Gropius. He taught at the Architectural Association in London, England, at the School of Design in Raleigh, North Carolina State University, where he was the head of the Department of Architecture and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, where he is a Professor Emeritus.

He has received five first prizes in national architectural competitions in the United States. Among the buildings he has designed are the Raleigh House, designated for its audacious conception of thin shell structure and space as one of the two hundred most important works of architecture in the country, also the Juilliard School of Music in Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, in asociation with Pietro Belluschi, and Embassies of the United States of America in Argentina and South Africa.

He is the author of four books, a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Enciclopedia Ilaliana and a member of the Academy of Science in Buenos Aires.

His buildings and articles have been published in numerous professional books and periodicals of architure and engineering all over the world and his work has been exhibited in the United States and in Europe.

He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Review

I would like to be an architect in order to enjoy the constant even more. It is rich in content, full of images, poetry, metaphors and flashes of colorful humor. The fictional architect-author of the dialogue is rigorous, subtle and profound. He is a rebel. Many of the themes within each subject are highly imaginative. Among them: "The Importance of the Unimportant?", "The Festival of the Imagination Minus Two" and "If Linnaeus and Darwin had been Architects".

Architecture has discovered a scientist and a poet among her narrators and guardians. -- E. Anderson Imbert, The Thomas Professor of Literature, Harvard University

One is used to reading memoirs, pretentious essays written about architecture, or descriptions of an architect's own work. the constant is a unique book.

The two characters of the dialogue have evoked in me the image of an alchemist, a wise poet or a sorcerer. It is mysterious at times, and at other times magical. The architect and the mathematician remind me of diamond cutters who, with their great imagination and creative rigor, are short on words and long on knowledge. The stones that they face are at first irregular in form without transparency. Yet by looking at them the cutters discern their geometry, how to cut them, the number of facets and the final polyhedral form that will multiply the light.

This is my vision of the constant, a book of vision and light, hard to put aside. -- Luis Grossman, Architect, Director of Architecture Supplement of La Nacion, Argentina

The new book of Eduardo Catalano, the constant, has the potential to become an enduring classic. It reveals the insights of a deeply thoughtful individual about what is essential in architecture and confronts many widely-held orthodoxies.

The reader will find this original book richly illustrated, artfully composed, intellectually provocative and deeply rewarding. -- Robert Burns, FAIA, ACSA Distinguished Professor of Architecture, N.C. State University, Raleigh

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge Architectural Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0937999024
• ISBN 13: 9780937999028
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 245