Architects: Portraits of a Practice

by Thomas Yarrow

Overview

What is creativity? What is the relationship between work life and personal life? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? These deep and deeply personal questions spring to the fore in Thomas Yarrow's vivid exploration of the life of architects. Yarrow takes us inside the world of architects, showing us the anxiety, exhilaration, hope, idealism, friendship, conflict, and the personal commitments that feed these acts of creativity.

Architects rethinks "creativity," demonstrating how it happens in everyday practice. It highlights how the pursuit of good architecture, relates to the pursuit of a good life in intimate and individually specific ways. And it reveals the surprising and routine social negotiations through which designs and buildings are actually made.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501738517
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	07/15/2019
Series:	Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	300
File size:	5 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Thomas Yarrow is a social anthropologist whose work focuses on the social life of expertise. He is particularly interested in everyday interactions through which professional knowledge is produced, the personal and ideological commitments that propel this work, and the routine ethical dilemmas that arise. For Architects, Yarrow turned his attention to the lives and work of ten architects who comprise the Millar Howard Workshop, an architectural firm in the Cotswolds, UK. Yarrow is also the author of Development Beyond Politics, and the co-author of Detachment, Differentiating Development, and Archaeology and Anthropology.

What People are Saying About This

Prue Chiles

A beautiful description of the struggle and doubts of the design process, Yarrow's anthropological gaze is enchanted by the practice office that represents a way of life, contains bits of everything, and has little room for more. Architects is one of the most generous books I have read.

Keith M. Murphy

Thomas Yarrow's book is extremely valuable and opens up anthropological writing to folks who aren't already a part of the conversation. Anyone will be able to read and relate to Architects.

Anand Pandian

Tacking deftly between vivid narrative description and rich theoretical reflection, this outstanding book will appeal to a wide readership in anthropology, design, art, and architecture.

Albena Yaneva

Architects is an insightful anthropological study of architects at work. There are amazing ethnographic descriptions of architectural work throughout.

Editorial Reviews

So rather than unlocking any finished design for us to copy, this book opens the potential for anthropologists and ethnographers to find meaning in the mundane, the high-value things that move us beyond imagination. That is where the magic resides.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

There is a good deal that we can recognise—and take comfort from—in Yarrow's portrait. Much of this is in the charmingly ramshackle way we conduct ourselves. Yarrow reminds us why [architects] persist with this badly paid, insecure struggle of practice... as a way of being in the world and to help us understand our place in it. This is an unusually human book.

Architecture Today - Piers Taylor

There is a good deal that we can recognise--and take comfort from--in Yarrow's portrait. Much of this is in the charmingly ramshackle way we conduct ourselves. Yarrow reminds us why [architects] persist with this badly paid, insecure struggle of practice... as a way of being in the world and to help us understand our place in it. This is an unusually human book.

--Piers Taylor "Architecture Today"

From the Publisher

"A beautiful description of the struggle and doubts of the design process, Yarrow's anthropological gazeis enchanted by the practice office that represents a way of life, contains bits of everything, and has little room for more. Architects is one of the most generous books I have read."

Prue Chiles

"Tacking deftly between vivid narrative description and rich theoretical reflection, this outstanding book will appeal to a wide readership in anthropology, design, art, and architecture."

Anand Pandian

"Thomas Yarrow's book is extremely valuable and opens up anthropological writing to folks who aren't already a part of the conversation. Anyone will be able to read and relate to Architects."

Keith M. Murphy

"Architects is an insightful anthropological study of architects at work. There are amazing ethnographic descriptions of architectural work throughout."

Albena Yaneva