Kissing Architecture

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Sylvia Lavin

Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2011, English

Nonfiction, Architecture

6 x 7 inches, hardcover, 136 pages, 5 halftone illustrations

ISBN: 9780691149233

Suggested Retail Price: $16.95

From the Publisher. Kissing Architecture explores the mutual attraction between architecture and other forms of contemporary art. In this fresh, insightful, and beautifully illustrated book, renowned architectural critic and scholar Sylvia Lavin develops the concept of "kissing" to describe the growing intimacy between architecture and new types of art—particularly multimedia installations that take place in and on the surfaces of buildings—and to capture the sensual charge that is being designed and built into architectural surfaces and interior spaces today. Initiating readers into the guilty pleasures of architecture that abandons the narrow focus on function, Lavin looks at recent work by Pipilotti Rist, Doug Aitken, the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and others who choose instead to embrace the viewer in powerful affects and visual and sensory atmospheres. Kissing Architecture is the first book in a cutting-edge new series of short, focused arguments written by leading critics, historians, theorists, and practitioners from the world of urban development and contemporary architecture and design. These books are intended to spark vigorous debate. They stake out the positions that will help shape the architecture and urbanism of tomorrow. Addressing one of the most spectacular and significant developments in the current cultural scene, Kissing Architecture is an entertainingly irreverent and disarmingly incisive book that offers an entirely new way of seeing—and experiencing—architecture in the age after representation.

On 3 book lists

Neil Denari

On Neil Denari’s Notable Books of 2011 list

Greg Lynn

On Greg Lynn’s Current Reading list

—September 2013. I think my wife (Sylvia Lavin) is a genius but she never gives me her writings to see so I have to buy the books myself in order to read them.

Galia Solomonoff

On Galia Solomonoff’s Notable Books of 2011 list

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