A culture of stone
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A major contribution to both art history and Latin American studies, A Culture of Stone offers new insights into Inka culture and the interpretation of non-Western art. Carolyn Dean focuses on rock outcrops masterfully integrated into Inka architecture, exquisitely worked masonry, and freestanding sacred rocks, explaining how certain stones took on lives of their own and(...)
A culture of stone
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A major contribution to both art history and Latin American studies, A Culture of Stone offers new insights into Inka culture and the interpretation of non-Western art. Carolyn Dean focuses on rock outcrops masterfully integrated into Inka architecture, exquisitely worked masonry, and freestanding sacred rocks, explaining how certain stones took on lives of their own and played a vital role in the unfolding of Inka history. Examining the multiple uses of stone, she argues that the Inka understood building in stone as a way of ordering the chaos of unordered nature, converting untamed spaces into domesticated places, and laying claim to new territories. Dean contends that understanding what the rocks signified requires seeing them as the Inka saw them: as potentially animate, sentient, and sacred. Through careful analysis of Inka stonework, colonial-period accounts of the Inka, and contemporary ethnographic and folkloric studies of indigenous Andean culture, Dean reconstructs the relationships between stonework and other aspects of Inka life, including imperial expansion, worship, and agriculture. She also scrutinizes meanings imposed on Inka stone by the colonial Spanish and, later, by tourism and the tourist industry.
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In this publication, Daniel Purdy surveys the volatile state of architectural theory in the Enlightenment, brought on by the newly emerged scientific critiques of Renaissance cosmology, then shows how German writers redeployed Renaissance terminology so that "harmony," "unity," "synthesis," "foundation," and "orderliness" became states of consciousness, rather than(...)
On the ruins of Babel : architectural metaphor in German thought
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In this publication, Daniel Purdy surveys the volatile state of architectural theory in the Enlightenment, brought on by the newly emerged scientific critiques of Renaissance cosmology, then shows how German writers redeployed Renaissance terminology so that "harmony," "unity," "synthesis," "foundation," and "orderliness" became states of consciousness, rather than terms used to describe the built world. Purdy's distinctly new interpretation of German theory reveals how metaphors constitute interior life as an architectural space to be designed, constructed, renovated, or demolished. He elucidates the close affinity between Hegel's Romantic aesthetic of space and Daniel Libeskind's deconstruction of monumental architecture in Berlin's Jewish Museum. Through a careful reading of Walter Benjamin's writing on architecture as myth, Purdy details how classical architecture shaped Benjamin's modernist interpretations of urban life, particularly his elaboration on Freud's archaeology of the unconscious. Benjamin's essays on dreams and architecture turn the individualist sensibility of the Enlightenment into a collective and mythic identification between humans and buildings.
Architectural Theory
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Si on comprend aisément que les concepteurs de formes et d’espaces aient quotidiennement recours aux figures de l’analogie pour imaginer leurs projets, on sait moins que de nombreuses théories et doctrines de l’architecture lui sont tout autant redevables. Sorte de secret mal gardé, l’analogie serait de fait une des grandes matrices de l’architecture. Examinant(...)
Analogie et théorie en architecture : de la vie, de la ville et de la conception, même
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Si on comprend aisément que les concepteurs de formes et d’espaces aient quotidiennement recours aux figures de l’analogie pour imaginer leurs projets, on sait moins que de nombreuses théories et doctrines de l’architecture lui sont tout autant redevables. Sorte de secret mal gardé, l’analogie serait de fait une des grandes matrices de l’architecture. Examinant rigoureusement la portée pratique et théorique de cette hypothèse, les études d’histoire critique rassemblées dans ce premier ouvrage se consacrent à trois registres de la modernité qui éclairent l’architecture contemporaine : les conceptions de la vie et de la biologie (des images du corps aux principes de la génétique),les conceptions de la ville (en reconstituant les contours et les enjeux de ce que l’architecte Aldo Rossi appelait une « ville analogue »), et les conceptions mêmes de la conception (dont les modèles analogiques permettent de rendre compte des circonvolutions de l’imagination et de la réflexion architecturale).
Architectural Theory
Technics & civilization
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Technics and Civilization first presented its compelling history of the machine and critical study of its effects on civilization in 1934 —before television, the personal computer, and the Internet even appeared on our periphery. Drawing upon art, science, philosophy, and the history of culture, Lewis Mumford explained the origin of the machine age and traced its(...)
Technics & civilization
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Technics and Civilization first presented its compelling history of the machine and critical study of its effects on civilization in 1934 —before television, the personal computer, and the Internet even appeared on our periphery. Drawing upon art, science, philosophy, and the history of culture, Lewis Mumford explained the origin of the machine age and traced its social results, asserting that the development of modern technology had its roots in the Middle Ages rather than the Industrial Revolution. Mumford sagely argued that it was the moral, economic, and political choices we made, not the machines that we used, that determined our then industrially driven economy. Equal parts powerful history and polemic criticism, this book was the first comprehensive attempt in English to portray the development of the machine age over the last thousand years — and to predict the pull the technological still holds over us today.
Architectural Theory
The first six books of the elements of Euclid : facsimile of the famous first edition of 1847
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Red, yellow, blue – and of course black – are the colours that Oliver Byrne employs for the figures and diagrams in his most unusual 1847 edition of Euclid, published by William Pickering and printed by Chiswick Press, and which prompt the surprised reader to think of Mondrian. The author makes it clear in his subtitle that this is a didactic measure intended to(...)
The first six books of the elements of Euclid : facsimile of the famous first edition of 1847
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Red, yellow, blue – and of course black – are the colours that Oliver Byrne employs for the figures and diagrams in his most unusual 1847 edition of Euclid, published by William Pickering and printed by Chiswick Press, and which prompt the surprised reader to think of Mondrian. The author makes it clear in his subtitle that this is a didactic measure intended to distinguish his edition from all others: "The Elements of Euclid in which coloured diagrams and symbols are used instead of letters for the greater ease of learners." Byrne is not content to trust solely in the supposed intuitive "logical" structure of Euclid's axioms and theorems – who doesn't know the first famous sentences of Euclid's Elements: "I. A point is that which has no parts. II. A line is length without breadth"? –, but translates them into colourful diagrams and symbols. He thereby thinks in terms of the school classroom : he compares his colours to the dyed chalks in which figures are drawn on the blackboard.
Architectural Theory
The politics of the impure
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This publication explores how the desire for "the pure" ultimately manifested as an economic process, advocating a need for technology to become an agent for the impure and the imperfect.
The politics of the impure
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This publication explores how the desire for "the pure" ultimately manifested as an economic process, advocating a need for technology to become an agent for the impure and the imperfect.
Architectural Theory
Objectivity
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Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences—and show how the concept differs from its alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific(...)
October 2010
Objectivity
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Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences—and show how the concept differs from its alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images. From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences—from anatomy to crystallography—are those featured in scientific atlases, the compendia that teach practitioners what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology.
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This compilation of texts written since 1986 reveals a parallel activity to Alejandro Zaera-Polo's professional life. The book is like a sniper's log, a register of events for the purpose of accumulating experience for future missions, be it academic or professional, trying to identify tendencies and to assess performances, rather than to establish truth. Written for(...)
July 2012
The sniper's log : architectural chronicles of Generation X
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This compilation of texts written since 1986 reveals a parallel activity to Alejandro Zaera-Polo's professional life. The book is like a sniper's log, a register of events for the purpose of accumulating experience for future missions, be it academic or professional, trying to identify tendencies and to assess performances, rather than to establish truth. Written for different media and formats (professional magazines, speaking engagements, and academic presentations), the texts are thread together as part of a biographical experience that reveals that theory is here primarily instrumental and seeks efficiency rather than truth. We do not theorise because we want to understand the deep truths of the world, but because we need to organise the realm where we operate, understand how reality works and find an effective way to perform within it.
Who is architecture? The 2009 Domus China interviews : conversations on the borders of building
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Architecture is a collaborative art, calling on the efforts of not only architects but also engineers, developers, plumbers, electricians and others. The production process must balance individual empowerment and general management to allow for meaningful dialogue between diverse professionals. This publication explores these interactions through ten interviews with(...)
Who is architecture? The 2009 Domus China interviews : conversations on the borders of building
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Architecture is a collaborative art, calling on the efforts of not only architects but also engineers, developers, plumbers, electricians and others. The production process must balance individual empowerment and general management to allow for meaningful dialogue between diverse professionals. This publication explores these interactions through ten interviews with professionals who contribute to architecture in various ways. Conducted by writer and editor Brendan McGetrick, and originally published as a series for the Chinese edition of Domus magazine, these conversations illustrate the many facets of architectural practice. Interview subjects include : Michael Rock (Founder of the graphic design firm 2x4), Lu Zhenggang (Founder of the digital rendering company Crystal CG), Barry Bergdoll (Curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Mark Wigley (Dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation) and Tan Xiaochun (Chief of Construction for China's National Stadium).
Architectural Theory
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Addressing the scientific methodology of experimental architecture, the essays on art and architectural theory collected in this volume explore what a scientifically led experimental architecture might look like. Examples from current architectural practices, art production and case studies supplement the essays.
Architectural Theory
November 2010
Experiments: Architecture between sciences and the arts
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Addressing the scientific methodology of experimental architecture, the essays on art and architectural theory collected in this volume explore what a scientifically led experimental architecture might look like. Examples from current architectural practices, art production and case studies supplement the essays.
Architectural Theory