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Title:
La publicité du privé : de Loos à Le Corbusier

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À travers l'oeuvre de deux figures majeures du mouvement moderne, Adolf Loos et Le Corbusier, Béatriz Colomina analyse cette architecture qui ne devient moderne que dans sa confrontation avec les mass médias. Au lieu d'aborder l'architecture moderne comme une pratique artistique en opposition à la culture de masse, Colomina considère les systèmes émergents de communication, qui définiront la culture du XXe siècle, comme le lieu véritable de production de l'architecture moderne. Elle déplace ainsi le discours architectural vers l'intersection de nombreux systèmes de représention (dessin, maquette, photographie, livre, publicité). Avec la modernité, le lieu de la production architecturale s'est littéralement transféré de la rue vers les photographies, les films, les publications ou les expositions - déplacement qui présuppose un nouveau sens de l'espace, défini par des images plutôt que par des murs. Colomina nous retrace ces modifications radicales dans l'expérience de l'espace à travers les incarnations modernes de l'archive, de la ville, de la mode, du tourisme, de la guerre, de la sexualité.

Title:
Cold war hothouses : inventing postwar culture, from cockpit to Playboy

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The technological innovation and unprecedented physical growth of the cold war era permeated American life in every aspect and at every scale. From the creation of the military-industrial complex and the beginnings of suburban sprawl to the production of the ballpoint pen and the TV dinner, the artifacts of the period are as numerous and diverse as they are familiar. Over the past half-century, our awe at the advances of postwar society has softened to nostalgia, and our affection for its material culture has clouded our memories of the enormous spatial reorganizations and infrastructural transformations that changed American life forever. "Cold War Hot Houses" casts a clear, even playful, eye on this pivotal time in history, examining topics as diverse as the creation of the interstate highway system and the shopping centre, and the domestication of the national parks as well as the production of such seemingly mundane products as the drive-in theater, aluminum foil, and the king-size bed. The result is a vivid snapshot of American culture that still resonates today.

Title:
We the bacteria: Notes towards biotic architecture

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The sequel to the authors’ “Are We Human?”, this provocative book is an urgent manifesto for an alternative architectural philosophy. It treats bacteria as the real architects, construction workers, maintenance crews and inhabitants of buildings. Colomina and Wigley draw on the latest research into microbes to rethink the past and possible futures of the built environment. The book explores the intimate entanglements of the microbes within bodies and buildings over the last 10,000 years, culminating in the antibiotic philosophy of contemporary architecture. The diseases of our time are diseases of the built environment. The deadly combination of rapidly declining microbial diversity and rising antibiotic-resistant bacteria is as great a threat as climate change. Hostility to bacteria has to give way to new forms of hospitality from a more symbiotic architecture that learns from bacteria, embracing them and reconnecting with soil, plants and other species. Buildings based on fear of bacteria, which is to say fear of life itself, must give way to buildings learning from models of coexistence based on bacteria themselves. The main goal of the book is to rethink the very idea of shelter in terms of forms of inclusion rather than prophylactic forms of exclusion.

Title:
Sick Architecture

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Illnesses, wellness, and architecture are inseparable. Medical professionals and architects have always been in a kind of dance, often influencing one another, though the dance is not always synchronized. Drawing from a wide range of historical and contemporary case studies from ancient Greece to twentieth-century India to present-day New York City, Sick Architecture highlights a topic that has shaped our lives from the very beginnings of architecture to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. "Sick Architecture" goes beyond the sicknesses recognized by the medical profession to ask: What aspects of society may be ill, in need of care, or subject to pathologization? Similarly the book goes beyond physical buildings and cities to interrogate architecture’s policy protocols and spatial logics.

Title:
Domesticity at War

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In the years immediately following World War II, America embraced modern architecture--not as something imported from Europe, but as an entirely new mode of operation, with original and captivating designs made in the USA. Beatriz Colomina shows how postwar American architecture adapted the techniques and materials that were developed for military applications to domestic use. Just as manufacturers were turning wartime industry to peacetime productivity--going from missiles to washing machines--American architects and cultural institutions were, in Buckminster Fuller’s words, turning "weaponry into livingry." This new form of domesticity itself turned out to be a powerful weapon. Images of American domestic bliss--suburban homes, manicured lawns, kitchen accessories--went around the world as an effective propaganda campaign. Cold War anxieties were masked by endlessly repeated images of a picture-perfect domestic environment. Even the popular conception of the architect became domesticated, changing from that of an austere modernist to a plaid-shirt wearing homebody. Domesticity at War itself has a distinctive architecture. Housed within the case are two units: one book of text, and one book of illustrations--most of them in color, including advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles, architectural photographs, and more.

Title:
Dan Graham

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Dan Graham is among the most influential of the Conceptual artists who emerged in America during the mid 1960s. A pioneer in performance and video art in the 1970s, Graham later turned his attention to architectural projects designed for social interaction in public spaces, among them The Children’s Pavilion (1989) with Jeff Wall. Writing has always been a major aspect of Graham’s work. His texts range from early Conceptual art pieces inserted in mass-market magazines, to writing on his fellow artists, to analyses of popular culture, from Dean Martin to the post-Punk era. Well-known also among architects and urban theorists, during the 1990s Graham has been offered major public commissions throughout North America and Europe. London-based curator Mark Francis discusses with the artist how his public participation-based work has evolved. Brussels-based critic Birgit Pelzer draws on her extensive knowledge of Graham’s work and writings. New York-based architectural theorist Beatriz Colomina focuses on Graham’s Alteration to a Suburban House (1978). The artist has chosen an extract from the science fiction novel Ubik by Philip K Dick, whose writings were a formative influence. A substantial Artist’s Writings section, key to understanding Dan Graham, completes the book.

Title:
Sexuality and space

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This collection of interdisciplinary essays addresses gender in relation to architectural discourse and critical theory, focusing on finding the close relationships between sexuality and space hidden within everyday practices. The contributors are Jennifer Bloomer, Victor Burgin, Beatriz Colomina, Elizabeth Grosz, Catherine Ingraham, Meaghan Morris, Laura Mulvey, Molly Nesbit, Alessandra Ponte, Lynn Spigel, Patricia White, and Mark Wigley.

Title:
Privacy and publicity : modern architecture as mass media

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$62.00
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Through a series of close readings of two major figures of the modern movement, Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, Beatriz Colomina argues that architecture only becomes modern in its engagement with the mass media, and that in so doing it radically displaces the traditional sense of space and subjectivity. "Privacy and Publicity" questions certain ideological assumptions underlying the received view of modern architecture and reconsiders the methodology of architectural criticism itself. Where conventional criticism portrays modern architecture as a high artistic practice in opposition to mass culture, Colomina sees the emerging systems of communication that have come to define twentieth-century culture -- the mass media -- as the true site within which modern architecture was produced. She considers architectural discourse as the intersection of a number of systems of representation such as drawings, models, photographs, books, films, and advertisements. This does not mean abandoning the architectural object, the building, but rather looking at it in a different way. The building is understood here in the same way as all the media that frame it, as a mechanism of representation in its own right.

Title:
Global design

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$60.00
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This volume surveys the ways in which our globalized world has manifested itself in design since ca 1970, and the ways in which design has evolved to serve a globalized world. The point of departure is a conception of design which encompasses -architecture, graphics, the media, fashion, product and industrial design, as well as the shaping of the manmade environment and of production processes. The focus is on the formation of global networks in the areas of communication, production, commerce, finance, and mobility. The diverse phenomena of globalization are visualized through film, products, clothing, images, and models by well-known artists such as Armin Linke, Fischli Weiss, Didier Faustino, and Thomas Demand. Alongside the shipping container, an indispensable element of globalization, the presentation provides insights into cultural transfer both in the present day and historically, and presents -globalization in relationship to regionalism as well as to worldwide trends.

Title:
La pelouse américaine en guerre de Pearl Harbour à la Crise des Missiles, 1941-1961

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Du gazon "américain"?! Une pelouse en guerre?! De Pearl Harbor à la Crise des missiles cubains?! Pour Beatriz Colomina, historienne de l'architecture à l'université de Princeton, le mythe patriotique du carré de pelouse (lawn) et le combat jardinier quotidien pour le maintien et l'embellissement de cette interface domestique de la famille et de la communauté reflètent une certaine conception du sol américain et de son paysage. Mais ils révèlent surtout une conception de la démocratie et de ses valeurs associées : libertés fondamentales, propriété privée et poursuite du bonheur, trilogie littéralement boostée durant la phase d'émergence de l'Americain Way of Life et de la Cold War. En menant une enquête visuelle et culturelle aussi serrée que passionnante, l'historienne répond à ces trois questions.