SITELESS

1001 Building Forms

François Blanciak (The University of Sydney)

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Paperback

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English

Massachusetts Inst of Tec
29 February 2008

Architecture; Building construction & materials

Series: The MIT Press

An attempt to free architecture from site and program constraints and to counter the profusion of ever bigger architecture books with ever smaller content.

Some may call it the first manifesto of the twenty-first century, for it lays down a new way to think about architecture. Others may think of it as the last architectural treatise, for it provides a discursive container for ideas that would otherwise be lost. Whatever genre it belongs to, SITELESS is a new kind of architecture book that seems to have come out of nowhere. Its author, a young French architect practicing in Tokyo, admits he ""didn't do this out of reverence toward architecture, but rather out of a profound boredom with the discipline, as a sort of compulsive reaction."" What would happen if architects liberated their minds from the constraints of site, program, and budget? he asks. The result is a book that is saturated with forms, and as free of words as any architecture book the MIT Press has ever published.

The 1001 building forms in SITELESS include structural parasites, chain link towers, ball bearing floors, corrugated corners, exponential balconies, radial facades, crawling frames, forensic housing-and other architectural ideas that may require construction techniques not yet developed and a relation to gravity not yet achieved. SITELESS presents an open-ended compendium of visual ideas for the architectural imagination to draw from. The forms, drawn freehand (to avoid software-specific shapes) but from a constant viewing angle, are presented twelve to a page, with no scale, order, or end to the series. After setting down 1001 forms in siteless conditions and embryonic stages, Blanciak takes one of the forms and performs a ""scale test,"" showing what happens when one of these fantastic ideas is subjected to the actual constraints of a site in central Tokyo. The book ends by illustrating the potential of these shapes to morph into actual building proportions.

By: François Blanciak (The University of Sydney)
Imprint: Massachusetts Inst of Tec
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 137mm, Spine: 6mm
Weight: 295g
ISBN: 9780262026307
ISBN 10: 0262026309
Series: The MIT Press
Pages: 128
Publication Date: 29 February 2008
Recommended Age: From 18
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Francois Blanciak is an architect and Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo. He has worked for architectural firms in Los Angeles, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, and New York, with such architects as Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman.

Reviews for SITELESS: 1001 Building Forms

Imagine Learning from Las Vegas as illustrated by Chris Ware, and you'll get a sense of Francois Blanciak's marvelously inventive new book. -Metropolis In Siteless: 1001 Building Forms, French architect Francois Blanciak surrenders the usual anchors of function and site for an exercise in pure form. His astoundingly imaginative 1,001 designs could challenge architects and engineers for decades. -Santa Fe New Mexican