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Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession

Product ID : 24805737


Galleon Product ID 24805737
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About Four Walls And A Roof: The Complex Nature Of A

Product Description Architecture, we like to believe, is an elevated art form that shapes the world as it pleases. Four Walls and a Roof challenges this notion, presenting a candid account of what it is really like to work as an architect.Drawing on his own tragicomic experiences in the field, Reinier de Graaf reveals the world of contemporary architecture in vivid snapshots: from suburban New York to the rubble of northern Iraq, from the corridors of wealth in London, Moscow, and Dubai to garbage-strewn wastelands that represent the demolished hopes of postwar social housing. We meet oligarchs determined to translate ambitions into concrete and steel, developers for whom architecture is mere investment, and the layers of politicians, bureaucrats, consultants, and mysterious hangers-on who lie between any architectural idea and the chance of its execution.Four Walls and a Roof tells the story of a profession buffeted by external forces that determine―at least as much as individual inspiration―what architects design. Perhaps the most important myth debunked is success itself. To achieve anything, architects must serve the powers they strive to critique, finding themselves in a perpetual conflict of interest. Together, architects, developers, politicians, and consultants form an improvised world of contest and compromise that none alone can control. Review “Something of a revelation…[De Graaf] has produced an original and even occasionally hilarious book about losing ideals and finding them again…He deftly shows that architecture cannot be better or more pure than the flawed humans who make it.” ― The Economist “[It] tells the stories that tend to get left out of official histories, but which actually shape our physical environment…De Graaf’s book is sharp, revealing, funny, drily passionate and not always encouraging.” ― Rowan Moore , The Guardian “This is a book about power, money and influence, and architecture’s complete lack of any of them. It is a book not about architecture’s successes but about its failures. Witty, insightful and funny, it is a (sometimes painful) dissection of a profession that thinks it is still in control.” ― Edwin Heathcote , Financial Times “De Graaf is an excellent, witty and perceptive essayist. The heart of the book is a series of astonishing accounts of the protracted―and as it turns out, all doomed―sagas to get big urban projects approved and built in London (just pre-crash), Moscow (just pre-Putin), the Emirates (just pre-oil slump), and Kurdistan (just pre-Isis). The way de Graaf builds up to each (in hindsight) inevitable disappointment is masterly…He emerges as an unlikely, deeply skeptical architectural Everyman.” ― Hugh Pearman , The Spectator “This is the most stimulating book on architecture and its practice that I have read for years. Not only is de Graaf a good anecdotalist (his hilarious account of a long-winded and fruitless masterplanning competition in Russia should be turned into a film), but a perceptive analyst of how architecture represents, or connects with, wider political and economic movements and trends.” ― Paul Finch , Architects’ Journal “Takes an idiosyncratic look at architectural history and dissects contemporary practice―from the quotidian (and sometimes comic) frustrations to the occasional triumphs and memorable failures.” ― Josephine Minutillo , Architectural Record “Provocative…De Graaf has no fixed method. But the impressive extent and depth of his knowledge persistently inform his meditations, which take in many subjects. His mood is invariable. He is constantly and exhilaratingly cynical…Because he displays such candor―albeit polished candor, and such a perfectly gauged lack of tact―it is easy to forget that de Graaf is an architect, an insider, part of the system he dissects…De Graaf is likely to remain an architect for decades to come. In those circumstances, his enthusiasm for biting the hand that feeds him is admirably risky.” ― Jonathan