Welcome to ArkLog!!!
“Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, "Lighthouses" as the poet said "erected in the sea of time." They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer
Ever since my academic years, I got the curiosity to dwell more on architectural theory. The initial motivation surged at the beginning stages of preparing my Master’s dissertation thesis. I realized that even with the internet available (2006), most of my published interests were not available on the web. To prepare for the investigation, I got confronted with the reality of Architectural books’ availability and pricing, but most importantly, many theoretical works were simply unavailable in new editions. During the following years, following tips from fellow architects, on where to find certain published articles, my library grew exponentially based on rare old publications, in which the articles were still kept.
After some 16 years, of finding and collecting these publications, one publication grew my favourite, which was “Detail - Magazine for Architecture”. The quality of theoretical content together with concrete architecture-built examples was for me the “holy Grail” of architecture publications. I acquired most of the Detail publications, since the Nº1 - 1961 … passing through all the decades 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, 2000’s ... these publications are filled with past works and details of architecture which are I believe priceless to our practice.
This blog or .. the arklog will be my tool to contribute to the sharing of many of these rare articles which still to date, are not available online (2022), hence the title .. an Ark of Architecture theory logged online.
Most of the publications will be punctual, whether an article written by an architect, or an interview, or a project, they will all be provided from my library. As a recent grown interest in the work of Beatriz Colomina and her Research and presentation on the theme “Playboy Architecture”, I have been managing to acquire some of these publications to find these architectural articles, and I have been so surprised that do not get surprised with some of my content will come from Playboy Magazines from 1955 till 1979.
I hope to contribute to the general knowledge support of architectural discourse and practice, through sharing these publications.
Thank you,
Francisco c.p. Vasconcelos
P.S.: translation from Deutsch to English through scan to text and auto-translation. The original is provided. I am not a german native, although I lived a few years and can understand some basic german, I leave this as it is. Will accept any help on the correction of the translation if provided. Thank you for your understanding.