Bøker av Franz Graf

A book that brings awareness to preservation in architecture. This third TSAM volume presents content from teaching courses that have been developed at the EPFL for fifteen years. The aim is to promote preservation as a discipline, one of the main branches in the emerging field of socioecological transition. This book also demonstrates how the educational potential of preservation can be harnessed, uniting many social and scientific disciplines, the history of architecture and architects, materiality and its constructed expression, the theory of architecture and design, and the examination‿both abstract and concrete‿of what surrounds us in every sense, from the teaspoon to the territory. In short, what a minority of responsible architects has always concerned itself with: a silent and sometimes fragile architecture. These qualities should enable preservation to reform and reconstruct a new design process for architecture, which will in turn lead to a new kind of practice. Â

The first book on Le Corbusiers's iconic apartment-studio. Le Corbusier's apartment-studio is an iconic object of the twentieth century, combining the indisputable material values of the building with the intangible "sense of place" of an architect's home. Le Corbusier, who lived there from 1934 until his death in 1965, treated it as a permanent construction site--a unique place of spatial, plastic, and constructional experimentation. The phases of change at the apartment-studio are layered over each other, and thus the apartment's "many lives" create major philosophical problems for conservation. The "stratigraphy" itself, hard to unscramble yet full of meaning, is key to the apartment's importance. This first book on the apartment-studio, richly illustrated with largely unpublished visual material, presents research undertaken by the Laboratory of Techniques and Preservation of Modern Architecture (TSAM) for the Fondation Le Corbusier during preparatory investigations for the program of restoration. Lavish and thorough, Many Lives of Apartment-Studio Le Corbusier is an exploration of an iconic space.