Böcker av Andre Tavares

A highly original exploration of the history of architecture in relation to fish, shedding light on the connection between marine environments and terrestrial landscapes. Architecture Follows Fish is set in the North Atlantic, and its protagonist is fish. In this book author and architect André Tavares explores the notion of fishing architecture, a concept coined to describe architectural practices that are spawned by fisheries. To encompass the scope of fishing architecture, and to establish the connections between marine ecology and architectural practice, the book oscillates between different continents, centuries, and species. Fisheries are unique, and this book sheds light on that uniqueness through an articulated narrative and a wealth of iconography. Up until now there has been no history of architecture from the perspective of fish, although there are counterparts for meat, timber, oil, and many other industries. Tavares provides a counter-narrative to the traditional history of marine environments, which is typically focused on water ecosystems, and instead forms a bridge between what happens at sea and what happens on land. The hope is that, after reading this book, readers will better understand life in the sea in relation to urban growth and terrestrial landscapes.

Vitruvius's De architectura, written in the first century BCE, has been revered as the first treatise on architectural theory. Since its resurrection during the Renaissance, its enigmatic text has been adjusted, refined, and redefined in subsequent iterations. The book at hand bypasses exegeses of the text to focus on the material history of the printed editions disseminated throughout Europe. It surveys overa hundred editions of Vitruvius from 1486 to the present, tracing the power of the printed page in establishing the Roman author as an authority. Focusing on the impact of the physical objects that embody the Vitruvian canon highlights how book history and architectural history cross paths and how a symbiotic relationship between the printed and the built emerges. The resulting picture is that of a zigzagging thread between practice and theory, an elusive network of fruitful carelessness in architecture.