Buildings speak volumes, not just about their occupants or owners, but about the countries in which they exist. From colonnades to paving stones, the architecture of any building does more than simply date the structure—it celebrates the spirit of a people and a nation. Roger Connah's latest book, Finland, explores the culture and democratic spirit of a country whose buildings carry the indelible markings of Finland's political and physical climate. Nearly all of the country's buildings were constructed after 1917, when Finland gained its independence from Russia. The resulting architecture—often springing from hugely popular public competitions—is emphatically democratic in structure and usage. Finland's extreme northern latitudes, for their part, have given rise to buildings with an acute sensitivity to the physical environment and to the delicate interplay of light and shadow. From museums to schools to subsidized housing developments, Connah's Finland is an important survey of the country's architecture. Fully illustrated and with detailed examinations of many of the Finnish master architects—including Alvar Aalto—it is also a valuable contribution to the studies of modern architecture and Nordic history.
Fables of content and undoing on the current state of architecture. In How Architecture Got Its Hump, Roger Connah explores the "interference" of other disciplines with and within contemporary architecture. He asks whether photography, film, drawing, philosophy, and language are merely fashionable props for architectural hallucinations or alibis for revisions of history. Or, are they a means for widening the site of architecture? Connah shows how these disciplines have not only contributed to new developments in architectural theory and practice, but have begun to insinuate new possibilities of space. Sometimes seamless, sometimes awkward like the hump acquired by the camel in one of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, these disciplines have had their own responsibilities and excesses grafted onto architecture, just as architecture has tried to shake off their limitations. Taking interference a step further, Connah also considers the implications of philosophical incongruity and architectural unrest. He asks how architecture loses its head, transcends the dead language it now entraps, and houses meanings it wants to contest. Hardly bleak questions, suggests Connah, for they point to ways for architecture to rescue itself.
In this tantalizing work, Roger Connah explores the peculiar odyssey of twentieth-century architecture through the buildings and writings of Finlands iconoclastic architect, Reima Pietila. Among architects, Pietila is a cult figure, a respected but often misunderstood outsider and "arctic shaman," only recently granted the international acclaim and appreciation that are his due. Pietila's complex, geomorphic structures have been compared to the work of Gaudi and Bruce Goff and variously labeled surrealistic, romantic, or expressionistic. Writing Architecture positions Pietila at the heart of contemporary architectural debates - the carnival of conflicting isms, modern post-modern, post-structuralist, deconstructive. From his relative isolation in Helsinki, he is thrust into the community of this century's most revolutionary artists and thinkers, including Wittgenstein, Einstein, Beckett, Borges, Magritte, and McLuhan. Through Pietila Connah reflects on architecture's progress and excess in this century, tracing a path through multiple meanings and intellectual adventures. More metaphysical inquiry than conventional monograph, this extraordinary study draws from various sources to "read" architecture as Pietila does, as a form of cultural composition in which all theory, literature, music, art, or natural phenomena are potential sources for architectural meaning. Like the existential detective in the pulp crime novels on Fantomas, the elegant French philosopher-thief, Connah offers fragmentary clues, contradictory solutions, and digressive speculations on the particular mystery, misery, and miracle that is modern architecture, but wisely leaves the final verdict up to his discerning readers. Roger Connah's extensive collaboration with Reima Pietila has provided him with a unique opportunity to trace the architect's inimitable approach to architecture and culture. Since 1986 the author has been living in India working as a freelance writer; he is visiting Professor at The National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and The Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi.
Departing from conventional genres of architectural writing, Roger Connah presents an original and wry reflection on the fickle but exciting role that language, semantics, and philosophy have played this century in relation to architecture. Welcome to The Hotel Architecture is a five-part "anti-epic" poem on the culture of architecture - its tribes and inventions, the spectacular and vernacular, and the processes through which names and movements are secured, erased, forgotten, and manipulated.
Through a constructive way of looking at the timing of architecture, this reference explores the myths of a critical history. The featured ideas are made more concrete and specific by focusing the enquiry on a forgotten building outside Helsinki--Espoonlahti Church--designed by the architects Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen.
Departing from conventional genres of architectural writing, Roger Connah presents an original and wry reflection on the fickle but exciting role that language, semantics, and philosophy have played this century in relation to architecture. Welcome to The Hotel Architecture is a five-part "anti-epic" poem on the culture of architecture - its tribes and inventions, the spectacular and vernacular, and the processes through which names and movements are secured, erased, forgotten, and manipulated.
Fables of content and undoing on the current state of architecture. In How Architecture Got Its Hump, Roger Connah explores the "interference" of other disciplines with and within contemporary architecture. He asks whether photography, film, drawing, philosophy, and language are merely fashionable props for architectural hallucinations or alibis for revisions of history. Or, are they a means for widening the site of architecture? Connah shows how these disciplines have not only contributed to new developments in architectural theory and practice, but have begun to insinuate new possibilities of space. Sometimes seamless, sometimes awkward like the hump acquired by the camel in one of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, these disciplines have had their own responsibilities and excesses grafted onto architecture, just as architecture has tried to shake off their limitations. Taking interference a step further, Connah also considers the implications of philosophical incongruity and architectural unrest. He asks how architecture loses its head, transcends the dead language it now entraps, and houses meanings it wants to contest. Hardly bleak questions, suggests Connah, for they point to ways for architecture to rescue itself.
Buildings speak volumes, not just about their occupants or owners, but about the countries in which they exist. From colonnades to paving stones, the architecture of any building does more than simply date the structure—it celebrates the spirit of a people and a nation. Roger Connah's latest book, Finland, explores the culture and democratic spirit of a country whose buildings carry the indelible markings of Finland's political and physical climate. Nearly all of the country's buildings were constructed after 1917, when Finland gained its independence from Russia. The resulting architecture—often springing from hugely popular public competitions—is emphatically democratic in structure and usage. Finland's extreme northern latitudes, for their part, have given rise to buildings with an acute sensitivity to the physical environment and to the delicate interplay of light and shadow. From museums to schools to subsidized housing developments, Connah's Finland is an important survey of the country's architecture. Fully illustrated and with detailed examinations of many of the Finnish master architects—including Alvar Aalto—it is also a valuable contribution to the studies of modern architecture and Nordic history.
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