An exploration of walking and mapping as both form and content in art projects using old and new technologies, shoe leather and GPS.
From Guy Debord in the early 1950s to Richard Long, Janet Cardiff, and Esther Polak more recently, contemporary artists have returned again and again to the walking motif. Today, the convergence of global networks, online databases, and new tools for mobile mapping coincides with a resurgence of interest in walking as an art form. In Walking and Mapping, Karen O'Rourke explores a series of walking/mapping projects by contemporary artists. She offers close readings of these projects--many of which she was able to experience firsthand--and situates them in relation to landmark works from the past half-century. Together, they form a new entity, a dynamic whole greater than the sum of its parts. By alternating close study of selected projects with a broader view of their place in a bigger picture, Walking and Mapping itself maps a complex phenomenon.
Dans Mondrian's Dress, Nancy J. Troy et Ann Marguerite Tartsinis offrent un regard extraordinaire sur la façon dont le style des peintures abstraites de Piet Mondrian a été approprié à titre posthume par la mode, le pop art et la culture de consommation des années 1960. Portant tout particulièrement son attention sur l'évolution de la maison Saint Laurent, la publication aborde aussi le travail d'artistes tels que Andy Warhol et Tom Wesselmann et propose des évaluations critiques du dialogue de Saint Laurent avec l'art, de la remarquable collection d'art qu'il a constituée avec son partenaire Pierre Bergé et du rôle crucial que joue la photographie dans le marketing de la couture. Première étude de ce genre, Mondrian's Dress est une réévaluation provocatrice de la manière dont l'art, le commerce et la mode sont devenus fondamentalement liés dans la période d'après-guerre.
How architecture in Belgium, from its very beginnings, has epitomized modernity and singularity.
Since the foundation of the country in 1830, architecture in Belgium has been an expression of the key issues of modern Western societies. In Something Completely Different, Christophe Van Gerrewey uses this small European country as a case study to describe, interpret, and criticize more universal spatial problems and behaviors. In seven wide-ranging essays, he looks at the activities of architects from the past two centuries to better understand political evolutions, social gaps, aesthetic considerations, housing and planning, transport and infrastructure, order and chaos, and culture and ecology. The result is a literary text full of surprises and discoveries, showing both the shortcomings and the merits of what architects do.
Written as a kind of anti-guidebook, Something Completely Different appropriates certain clichés about Belgium (Baudelaire famously called Belgian monuments «counterfeits of France»), eschews the pragmatism of most guidebooks in favor of meditative, essayistic prose, and finally, cunningly, reveals that all along the subject has not been Belgium at all, but rather the nature of architecture.
A landmark study of abstraction in architectural history, theory, and practice that challenges our assumptions about the meaning of abstract forms.
In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecture--the first of its kind--Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms--the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials--Aureli shows that abstraction instead arises from the material conditions of building production. In a lively study informed by Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and other social theorists, this book presents abstraction in architecture not as an aesthetic tendency but as a movement that arises from modern divisions of labor and consequent social asymmetries.
These divisions were anticipated by the architecture of antiquity, which established a distinction between manual and intellectual labor, and placed the former in service to the latter. Further abstractions arose as geometry, used for measuring territories, became the intermediary between land and money and eventually produced the logic of the grid. In our own time, architectural abstraction serves the logic of capitalism and embraces the premise that all things can be exchanged--even experience itself is a commodity. To resist this turn, Aureli seeks a critique of architecture that begins not by scaling philosophical heights, but by standing at the ground level of material practice.
Au cours des trente dernières années, près de 100 petits livres qui s'appropriaient ou rendaient hommage à Ed Ruscha et ses petits formats comme Twenty-Six Gazoline Stations ont paru à travers le monde. Ce livre rassemble quatre-vingt-onze de ces projets d'artistes variés, présentant la couverture et des exemples de mises en page de chacun ainsi qu'une description de l'oeuvre. Il comprend également des sélections des livres de Ruscha et une annexe répertoriant tous les hommages connus des livres de Ruscha.
Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of "common" people and less immodest in their erections of "heroic," self-aggrandizing monuments. This revision includes the full texts of Part I of the original, on the Las Vegas strip, and Part II, "Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed," a generalization from the findings of the first part on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl. (The final part of the first edition, on the architectural work of the firm Venturi and Rauch, is not included in the revision.) The new paperback edition has a smaller format, fewer pictures, and a considerably lower price than the original. There are an added preface by Scott Brown and a bibliography of writings by the members of Venturi and Rauch and about the firm''s work.
Essays on a range of photographic topics by the recently appointed chief curator of photography at MoMA.
This volume offers a selection of essays by the renowned photography historian Clément Chéroux. Chéroux, appointed chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 2020, takes on a variety of topics, from the history of vernacular photography to the influence of documentary photography on Surrealism. The texts, published together in one volume for the first time and newly translated into English, reflect the breadth of Chéroux's thinking, the rigor of his approach, and his endless curiosity about photographs.
In this strikingly designed and generously illustrated volume, Chéroux presents unique case studies and untold stories. He discusses ways of sharing images, from the nineteenth century to the digital age; considers the utopian ideals of early photography; and analyzes the duality of amateur photography. Among other things, he describes the appeal of photographs snapped from a speeding train and explains historical value of first-generation prints of photographs. Through an analysis of key photographs taken on 9/11, Chéroux shows that the same six images were seen again and again in the press. Widely ranging, erudite, and engaging, these essays present Chéroux's innovative investigations of the histories of photography.
A rich exploration of the extraordinary life and work of celebrated architect Yasmeen Lari.
After more than three decades as a renowned global architect, Yasmeen Lari, the first woman to open her own architecture firm in Pakistan in 1964, developed Zero Carbon Architecture, which unites ecological and social justice. This volume, edited by Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny, and Marvi Mazhar,;presents Laris trajectory from exemplary modernist to zero carbon revolutionary, with a focus on her remarkable contributions to the global architectural movement to decarbonize and decolonize. The book includes extensive;photographs, drawings, and plans from Laris archive, most of which have;not previously been shown or published.
Laris architectural thinking and activism have always gone beyond the quest for a singular built solution. Rather, she strategically plans systemic approaches and solutions, be it for housing, a heritage foundation, or zero-carbon shelters with communities at risk. Original essays from diverse international contributors contextualize Laris work; investigate architecture and the postimperial, postcolonial, and postpartition condition; and examine the intersections of architecture and human rights, climate change, decolonization, gender, care, activism, and vernacular innovation. More than a tribute to Yasmeen Laris extraordinary career, this volume brings her legacy forward and shows how to create change today.
Shadows of Reality présente un catalogue unique et entièrement illustré des photographies de W.G. Sebald : une combinaison extraordinaire de négatifs de films, de tirages et de diapositives provenant de la collection photographique de l'Université d'East Anglia, du Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach et des archives de Sebald. Ce livre complet couvre les multiples facettes photographiques de son oeuvre publiée et comprend une quantité substantielle de matériel inédit.
A concise, accessible introduction to language endangerment and why it is one of the most urgent challenges of our times.
58% of the world's languages--or, approximately 4,000 languages--are endangered. When we break this figure down, we realize that roughly ten percent of languages have fewer than ten language keepers. And, if one language stops being used every three months, this means that in the next 100 years, if we do nothing, 400 more languages will become dormant. In
A new interpretation of the work of Bramante, suggesting an agenda for contemporary architectural practice.
In On Bramante, architect Pier Paolo Tamburelli considers the work of the celebrated Italian Renaissance architect Donato Bramante and through this reappraisal suggests a possible agenda for current architectural practice. Bramante, Tamburelli argues, offers an excellent starting point to imagine a contemporary theory of space, to reflect on the relationship between architecture and politics, and to look back--with neither nostalgia nor contempt--at the tradition of Western classicism.
Starting from a discussion of the difference in the work of Bramante in Milan (1481-1499) and Rome (1499-1514), Tamburelli highlights the peculiarities of Bramante's architecture, especially in comparison to that of his predecessor Leon Battista Alberti and successor Andrea Palladio. This in turn opens up new possibilities for appreciating his spatial experiments, and to derive from Bramante's abstraction and disassociation of form from function a revised theory of space for contemporary architecture. Such a theory might even advance a newfound political understanding of classicism, and a model--perhaps more valid now than ever before--for a public architecture.
The text is bookended by a series of color photographic plates of Bramante's works by photographer Bas Princen.
Une célébration de la baignade - piscines, saunas, plages, bains rituels, huttes de sudation, etc. - à travers le prisme de l'architecture et du paysage.
An illuminating study of the work of artist Martin Kippenberger, whose art expressed the enthusiasms and frustrations of the West German middle class.
Martin Kippenberger: Everything Is Everywhere is the first scholarly monograph in English on West German artist Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997), one of the most prominent German artists of the 1980s. In this book, Chris Reitz shows that the condition of Kippenberger's art was an endless, enthusiastic searching, constrained by the impossibility of fulfillment. A child during West Germany's Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s, and a young adult during the economic recession and political tumult of the 1970s, Kippenberger belonged to the first truly postwar generation. But, largely uninterested in the legacy of National Socialism that had occupied his predecessors, Kippenberger instead pursued a hyperproductive artistic practice that reflected the dreams and fears of the ascendent 1980s West German middle class.
Kippenberger's ambitions took him everywhere: he founded a museum in Greece, invested in a fashion business and a restaurant, and even bought a gas station in Brazil. He made art in a dizzying range of genres, from paintings to poetry, from posters to stickers. He made art out of his appetites, too, producing art on the theme of his own alcoholism. Intensely entrepreneurial, Kippenberger carried out an artistic practice in which his diverse endeavors, and the people who joined him in them, were all connected in a sprawling network. Reitz deftly presents Kippenberger's career as an allegory of the neoliberal networks of capital, technology, and culture that spanned Europe and America in the 1980s.
A bold new spatial perspective on modern sculpture, with 800 color images of work by artists including Henry Moore, Lygia Clark, Anish Kapoor, and Ana Mendieta.
This monumental, richly illustrated volume from ZKM Karlsruhe approaches modern sculpture from a spatial perspective, interpreting it though contour, emptiness, and levitation rather than the conventional categories of unbroken volume, mass, and gravity. It examines works by dozens of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists, including Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Lygia Clark, Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, Ana Mendieta, Fujiko Nakaya, Tomás Saraceno, and Alicja Kwade. The large-scale book contains over 800 color images.
Negative Space comes out of an epic exhibition at ZKM, and volume editor Peter Weibel (Chairman and CEO of ZKM) takes a curatorial approach to the topic. The last exhibition to deal comprehensively with the question "What is modern sculpture?" was at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1986. Weibel and ZKM pick up where the Pompidou left off, examining sculptures not as figurative, solid, and self-contained monoliths but in terms of open and hollow spaces; reflection, light, shadow; innovative materials; data; and the moving image. Weibel puts advances in science, architecture, and mathematics in the context of avant-garde sensibilities to show how modern sculpture significantly deviates from the work of the past. Texts in the volume include an introduction and twelve chapters written by Weibel with contributions by cocurators as well as facsimiles and reproductions of artist-authored manifestos.
Rocks, wind, sea, and sky frame a house on the Sardinian coast, and the house frames a family's life and art, suspended in memory.
How does a house shape experience? How does architecture establish a practice of living? Architect Sebastiano Brandolini invites readers on a meditative tour of his family's house on the Sardinian coast, describing everything from the geology of the rocks beneath, to the history of the surrounding villages, to the way the shifting light measures the day. More than the story of a single summer home written by an accomplished architect, this is a study of how place, the built environment, and daily practice make up our lives, at the most minute level of detail. Recalling the essays of Walter Benjamin, Bill Bryson, Rebecca Solnit, and Lawrence Weschler, Brandolini's writing weaves literature, art history, and the transformation of Sardinia since the 1960s into a single fabric.
The House at Capo d'Orso is not only a study of architecture and life in the built environment, but of family life, and the way the Brandolini family adapted themselves to the house they built. For Sebastiano Brandolini's parents, this meant letting their house influence their work in poetry and visual art, and this book attends carefully to the way houses can guide the creative process. The wind and water of Sardinia change more than the rocks and trees; they invite the imagination itself to form new shapes.
"Certain places--or perhaps objects--in the interior of Sardinia have left such a deep impression on my mind that I cannot rid myself them, becoming obsessions that give me pleasure and prompt reflections. For us obligatory positivists of the twenty-first century, there is something enigmatic and incomprehensible about these objects. They oscillate between architecture, archeology, geology, and landscape, but do not belong to any of these categories; as soon as we think we've found a plausible classification, we are assailed by doubts and qualifications."--from The House at Capo d'Orso
A lavishly illustrated guide to the magnum opus of the great seventeenth-century anatomist, master embalmer, artist, and collector of specimens.
Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731) was a celebrated Dutch anatomist, master embalmer, and museologist. He is best remembered today for strange tableaux, crafted from fetal skeletons and other human remains, that flicker provocatively at the edges of science, art, and memento mori. Ruysch exhibited these pieces, along with hundreds of other artful specimens, in his home museum and catalogued them in his lavishly illustrated Thesaurus Anatomicus. This book offers the first English translation of Ruysch's guide to his collection, along with all the illustrations from the original volume, photographs of some his most imaginative extant specimens, and more.
Ruysch was at once a brilliant scientist, a preternaturally gifted technician, an esteemed physician, a religious moralizer, and an artist whose prime form of expression was the medium of human remains. His works were sometimes described as Rembrandts of anatomical preparation; today they seem so strange that we can hardly believe that they even existed, much less that they were so popular in their time. His combination of the religious and the scientific, the painstakingly accurate and the extravagantly fantastical, offers vivid testimony of an era in which science overlapped seamlessly with religion and art. Essays accompanying Ruysch's text and images consider such topics as the historical context of Ruysch's work, the paradox of an artist of death whose work engenders the illusion of life, the conservation of Ruysch's specimens, and the shifting ascendancies of romanticism and rationality in the natural sciences.
A comprehensive account of how energy has shaped society throughout history, from pre-agricultural foraging societies through today''s fossil fuel-driven civilization. "I wait for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next ''Star Wars'' movie. In his latest book, Energy and Civilization: A History , he goes deep and broad to explain how innovations in humans'' ability to turn energy into heat, light, and motion have been a driving force behind our cultural and economic progress over the past 10,000 years. --Bill Gates, Gates Notes , Best Books of the Year Energy is the only universal currency; it is necessary for getting anything done. The conversion of energy on Earth ranges from terra-forming forces of plate tectonics to cumulative erosive effects of raindrops. Life on Earth depends on the photosynthetic conversion of solar energy into plant biomass. Humans have come to rely on many more energy flows--ranging from fossil fuels to photovoltaic generation of electricity--for their civilized existence. In this monumental history, Vaclav Smil provides a comprehensive account of how energy has shaped society, from pre-agricultural foraging societies through today''s fossil fuel-driven civilization. Humans are the only species that can systematically harness energies outside their bodies, using the power of their intellect and an enormous variety of artifacts--from the simplest tools to internal combustion engines and nuclear reactors. The epochal transition to fossil fuels affected everything: agriculture, industry, transportation, weapons, communication, economics, urbanization, quality of life, politics, and the environment. Smil describes humanity''s energy eras in panoramic and interdisciplinary fashion, offering readers a magisterial overview. This book is an extensively updated and expanded version of Smil''s Energy in World History (1994). Smil has incorporated an enormous amount of new material, reflecting the dramatic developments in energy studies over the last two decades and his own research over that time.
B>An argument against the ideology of domesticity that separates work from home; lavishly illustrated, with architectural proposals for alternate approaches to working and living.br>;/b>br>br>Despite the increasing numbers of people who now work from home, in the popular imagination the home is still understood as the sanctuary of privacy and intimacy. Living is conceptually and definitively separated from work. This book argues against such a separation, countering the prevailing ideology of domesticity with a series of architectural projects that illustrate alternative approaches. Less a monograph than a treatise, richly illustrated, the book combines historical research and design proposals to reenvision home as a cooperative structure in which it is possible to live and work and in which labor is socialized beyond the family--freeing inhabitants from the sense of property and the burden of domestic labor.;br>;br>The projects aim to move the house beyond the dichotomous logic of male/female, husband/wife, breadwinner/housewife, and private/public. They include the reinvention of single-room occupancy as a new model for affordable housing; the reimagining of the simple tower-and-plinth prototype as host to a multiplicity of work activities and enlivening street life; and a plan for a modular, adaptable structure meant to house a temporary dweller. All of these design projects conceive of the house not as a commodity, the form of which is determined by its exchange value, but as an infrastructure defined by its use value.br>;br>br>br>;
Experiments in architectural education in the post-World War II era that challenged and transformed architectural discourse and practice.
In the decades after World War II, new forms of learning transformed architectural education. These radical experiments sought to upend disciplinary foundations and conventional assumptions about the nature of architecture as much as they challenged modernist and colonial norms, decentered building, imagined new roles for the architect, and envisioned participatory forms of practice. Although many of the experimental programs were subsequently abandoned, terminated, or assimilated, they nevertheless helped shape and in some sense define architectural discourse and practice. This book explores and documents these radical pedagogies and efforts to defy architecture's status quo.
The experiments include the adaptation of Bauhaus pedagogy as a means of "unlearning" under the conditions of decolonization in Africa; a movement to design for "every body," including the disabled, by architecture students and faculty at the University of California, Berkeley; the founding of a support network for women interested in the built environment, regardless of their academic backgrounds; and a design studio in the USSR that offered an alternative to the widespread functionalist approach in Soviet design. Viewed through their dissolution and afterlife as well as through their founding stories, these projects from the last century raise provocative questions about architecture's role in the new century.
A systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations. Growth has been both an unspoken and an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving. It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies; it shapes the capabilities of our extraordinarily large brains and the fortunes of our economies. Growth is manifested in annual increments of continental crust, a rising gross domestic product, a child''s growth chart, the spread of cancerous cells. In this magisterial book, Vaclav Smil offers systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations. Smil takes readers from bacterial invasions through animal metabolisms to megacities and the global economy. He begins with organisms whose mature sizes range from microscopic to enormous, looking at disease-causing microbes, the cultivation of staple crops, and human growth from infancy to adulthood. He examines the growth of energy conversions and man-made objects that enable economic activities--developments that have been essential to civilization. Finally, he looks at growth in complex systems, beginning with the growth of human populations and proceeding to the growth of cities. He considers the challenges of tracing the growth of empires and civilizations, explaining that we can chart the growth of organisms across individual and evolutionary time, but that the progress of societies and economies, not so linear, encompasses both decline and renewal. The trajectory of modern civilization, driven by competing imperatives of material growth and biospheric limits, Smil tells us, remains uncertain.
