Creation in Space: A Course in the Fundamentals of Architecture Volume 1: Architectonics

 

Creation in Space: Fundamentals of Architecture, Volumes 1 and 2, by Jonathan Friedman, provide all basic projects, guided instruction, commentaries, and selected readings for a full year course in the fundamentals of architecture.  It is designed to cover not only the normal technical requirements - drawing skills and techniques such as planimetrics, axonometrics and perspective projection, freehand drawing, and abrication skills for model making - but also fundamental design issues such as figure-ground ambiguity, proportion, scale, light and shade, and circulation.

The two volumes of Creation in Space together provide a basic introduction to understanding architecture.  The works assume no previous knowledge of the subject, only that all of us were architects as young children playing with blocks.

Jonathan Block Friedman is a registered architect who has taught architecture for over 15 years. He is Professor of Architecture and Coordinator of the Design Fundamentals Program at New York Institute of Technology, responsible for over 700 students and 35 instructors on three campuses. He has also taught at the University of Kentucky and the New Jersey Institute of Technology and has been a visiting critic at Cooper Union, Columbia, and Harvard. A National Merit Scholar, he was educated at Princeton and Cambridge, studying with Kenneth Frampton, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, and Charles Gwathmey, and has worked for Richard Meier, among other architects. He has won a national architectural design competition and a grant from the New York State Council on The Arts and recently earned Honorable Mention in the National Space Institute's Design Competition for a proposed Earthlight Lodge Lunar Resort and National Park. He has lectured in the US, Central America, Europe, and Australia. His architecture has been exhibited at the Cooper Union and Paul Robeson Rutgers Galleries and in Israel and Japan. He has worked with both New York's Mayor Lindsay and Portola Institute, the Whole Earth Catalog group in Palo Alto. He holds several US patents and is listed in Marquis "Who's Who in Computer Graphics."

The author lives with his wife and son in Glen Cove, New York.