The Architecture Chronicle

Most books on architecture start when a building is completed, carefully editing out any evidence of the design and production process. As a result, architecture is often seen as a product rather than a process. The Architecture Chronicle – Diary of an Architectural Practice is about architecture as a practice. Adrian Forty observes that the pre-Renaissance architect worked on the building site amongst other tradesmen in an environment of dispersed authorship. It was his ability to draw and to write, acquired during the Italian Renaissance, that allowed the architect to remove himself from the site of construction and to upgrade his status from anonymous craftsman amongst others to artistic creator. Order your copy from the Ashgate website or search on Amazon.

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short listed for the RIBA Research Award 2010

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The writing is concise and engaging; it is animated by moments of incredible insight and pathos, as Kattein negotiates his projects through the labyrinth of competing interests, priorities, procedures, and statutory instruments that mark the development of a project from inception to sign-off. This is an incredibly insightful, beautifully crafted work that stakes out for practice, it’s proper poetics.

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… It is a major contribution to research into practice, because it takes a close look at the roles of the client, builder, consultant, architect, public authorities, users, stakeholdesr, institutions and the RIBA, and the relationships, contractual and otherwise, between them. It is also a consummate example of practice as research, in which the creative practice of architecture is itself a form of exploration into ideas to new knowledge.

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… this task of thinking through and re-dignifying the role of the architect is never more pertinent in an age when architecture is everywhere under threat by changes in society, technology, and the market.

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Dr. Lorens Holm, University of Dundee