Bøger af Melanie van der Hoorn

An imaginative inquiry into the spatial implications of 20th-century games, from doll houses to SimCityThis volume examines architecture and urban design games that have been conceived and created by architects, urban designers, artists and game developers since the end of the 20th century, from doll's houses to construction games and city building games, from SimCity to Block by Block. Serious Fun examines games from both a technical and an architectural-critical point of view. As much attention is paid to the games themselves--the way they look, their construction and rules--as to their sociospatial implications, addressing the following questions: what perception of, and interaction with, the built environment do they express? What messages do the games communicate? How critical and innovative are the underlying concepts? Serious Fun presents games and playfulness as tools worthy of earnest investigation, concluding with a triptych about alternative forms of representation and communication in architecture and urban design.Cover image by Zupagrafika

Collapsing concrete colossuses, run-down overgrown skeletons, immutable architectural misfits: the outcasts from our built environment, which we are dying to dispose of - and yet cannot do without - have inspired many ghost stories, crime novels and urban legends. Such narratives reveal the significance of architectural eyesores for the people who live or work in or near them. After exploring various approaches to building lives and deaths, the author presents a rich variety of undesired edifices in Germany, Hungary, Austria and Bosnia-Herzegovina and investigates the different methods used to dispose of them: eliminating, damaging, transforming or 'reframing' them, abandoning them to progressive dilapidation or virtually rejecting them. Discarding an edifice, however, need not bring its social life to an end. This analysis continues with a reflection on the afterlife of unwanted buildings, and concludes with a discussion on the life expectancy of buildings, their multi-sensory materiality and 'thingly' agency.