$45.00
(available to order)
Summary:
This book presents a terrestrial description of the Seagram Building. It aims to describe how humans and nature interact with the thin crust of the planet. Architecture reorganizes nature and society in particular ways that today demand overt attention and new methods of description. ''The immense material, energy and labor involved in building require a fresh(...)
Unless: the Seagram building construction ecology
Actions:
Price:
$45.00
(available to order)
Summary:
This book presents a terrestrial description of the Seagram Building. It aims to describe how humans and nature interact with the thin crust of the planet. Architecture reorganizes nature and society in particular ways that today demand overt attention and new methods of description. ''The immense material, energy and labor involved in building require a fresh interpretation that better situates the ecological and social potential of design. Architecture and society would benefit from alternative descriptions of building and architecture as terrestrial activities that help imagine how to maximize the impact of architecture on its environment. I argue that the enhancement of a particular building should be inextricable from the enhancement of its world-system and construction ecology. A 'beautiful' building engendered through the vulgarity of uneven exchanges and processes of underdevelopment is no longer a tenable conceit in such a framework. Design can and should evince the inherent solidarity and reciprocity of people, places and politics involved in building architecture.''
Engineering Structures
Office (Object Lessons)
$21.95
(available to order)
Summary:
From its origins in the late 19th century to its decline in the 21st, Sheila Liming's ''Office'' narrates a cultural history of a place that has arguably been the primary site of labor in the postmodern economy. During the post-war decades of the 20th century, the office rose to prominence in culture, achieving an iconic status that is reflected in television, film,(...)
Office (Object Lessons)
Actions:
Price:
$21.95
(available to order)
Summary:
From its origins in the late 19th century to its decline in the 21st, Sheila Liming's ''Office'' narrates a cultural history of a place that has arguably been the primary site of labor in the postmodern economy. During the post-war decades of the 20th century, the office rose to prominence in culture, achieving an iconic status that is reflected in television, film, literature, and throughout the history of advertising. Most people are well versed in the clichés of office culture, despite evidence that an increasing number of us no longer work in offices. With the development of computing technology in the 1980s and 90s, the office underwent many changes. Microsoft debuted its suite of multitasking applications known as Microsoft Office in 1989, firing the first shot in the war for the office's survival. This book therefore poses the question: how did culture become organized around the idea of the office, and how will it change if the office becomes extinct?
Commercial interiors, Building types
$32.00
(available to order)
Summary:
When the “sharing economy” launched a decade ago, proponents claimed that it would transform the experience of work—giving earners flexibility, autonomy, and a decent income. It was touted as a cure for social isolation and rampant ecological degradation. But this novel form of work soon sprouted a dark side: exploited Uber drivers, neighborhoods ruined by Airbnb, racial(...)
After the gig: how the sharing economy got hijacked, and how to win it back
Actions:
Price:
$32.00
(available to order)
Summary:
When the “sharing economy” launched a decade ago, proponents claimed that it would transform the experience of work—giving earners flexibility, autonomy, and a decent income. It was touted as a cure for social isolation and rampant ecological degradation. But this novel form of work soon sprouted a dark side: exploited Uber drivers, neighborhoods ruined by Airbnb, racial discrimination, and rising carbon emissions. Several of the most prominent platforms are now faced with existential crises as they prioritize growth over fairness and long-term viability. Based on nearly a decade of pioneering research, this publication dives into what went wrong with this contemporary reimagining of labor. It examines multiple types of data from thirteen cases to identify the unique features and potential of sharing platforms that prior research has failed to pinpoint. Juliet B. Schor presents a compelling argument that we can engineer a reboot: through regulatory reforms and cooperative platforms owned and controlled by users, an equitable and truly shared economy is still possible.
Critical Theory
books
Urban centers and rural contexts in late antiquity / edited by Thomas S. Burns and John W. Eadie.
Description:
xxvii, 379 pages : illustrations, maps ; 22 cm
East Lansing : Michigan State University Press, ©2001.
Urban centers and rural contexts in late antiquity / edited by Thomas S. Burns and John W. Eadie.
Actions:
Holdings:
Description:
xxvii, 379 pages : illustrations, maps ; 22 cm
books
East Lansing : Michigan State University Press, ©2001.
books
Seeking spatial justice
$27.50
(available to order)
Summary:
In Seeking Spatial Justice, Soja argues that justice has a geography and that the equitable distribution of resources, services, and access is a basic human right. Building on current concerns in critical geography and the new spatial consciousness, Soja interweaves theory and practice, offering new ways of understanding and changing the unjust geographies in which we(...)
Seeking spatial justice
Actions:
Price:
$27.50
(available to order)
Summary:
In Seeking Spatial Justice, Soja argues that justice has a geography and that the equitable distribution of resources, services, and access is a basic human right. Building on current concerns in critical geography and the new spatial consciousness, Soja interweaves theory and practice, offering new ways of understanding and changing the unjust geographies in which we live. After tracing the evolution of spatial justice and the closely related notion of the right to the city in the influential work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and others, he demonstrates how these ideas are now being applied through a series of case studies in Los Angeles, the city at the forefront of this movement. Soja focuses on such innovative labor–community coalitions as Justice for Janitors, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and the Right to the City Alliance; on struggles for rent control and environmental justice; and on the role that faculty and students in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning have played in both developing the theory of spatial justice and putting it into practice.
books
March 2010
Urban Theory
$225.95
(available to order)
Summary:
The current phase of capitalist development manifests itself through a very diverse range of spatial byproducts: data centers, warehouses, container terminals, logistics parks, and many others. These architectural episodes express specific power relations, exacerbate issues of labor, and generate dramatic processes of subjectivity. Most importantly, these architectures,(...)
Exteriorless architecture: Form, space, and urbanities of neoliberalism
Actions:
Price:
$225.95
(available to order)
Summary:
The current phase of capitalist development manifests itself through a very diverse range of spatial byproducts: data centers, warehouses, container terminals, logistics parks, and many others. These architectural episodes express specific power relations, exacerbate issues of labor, and generate dramatic processes of subjectivity. Most importantly, these architectures, despite their formal and typological heterogeneity, belong to a common paradigm: the exteriorless. How can an architecture of the exteriorless be defined? How does it differentiate from examples and manifestations of the past? How do notions of legibility, form versus function, typological articulation come into play? In situating the spatialities of contemporary capitalism within the larger debate on Anthropocene, Post-Anthropocene, and Capitalocene, the book attempts to answer those questions by delineating three main characteristics for an architecture of the exteriorless: its physical and symbolic role as interface; its ambiguous condition of being at the same time local and global, isolated and connected, compressed and expanded; and, lastly, its contribution to new forms of urbanity in absence of the traditional city.
Architectural Theory
$35.95
(available in store)
Summary:
No other art movement has so profoundly influenced radical politics as the Situationist International. But beyond the clichés about its purported leader Guy Debord, the "society of the spectacle," détournement and dérive, lies a more complex story about key historical shifts in the composition of capital, work, labor, art, and revolutionary theory during the 1950s and(...)
With and against: TheSituationist International in the age of automation
Actions:
Price:
$35.95
(available in store)
Summary:
No other art movement has so profoundly influenced radical politics as the Situationist International. But beyond the clichés about its purported leader Guy Debord, the "society of the spectacle," détournement and dérive, lies a more complex story about key historical shifts in the composition of capital, work, labor, art, and revolutionary theory during the 1950s and 60s. ''With and Against'' reframes the history of the Situationist International as a struggle to come to terms with the then-emerging ideologies of cybernetics and automation. Through each of the book's four chapters, Dominique Routhier dissects Situationist pamphlets, documents, artworks, and objects that refract elements of a "cybernetic hypothesis": the theoretically hyperbolic belief that technological progress, computers and automation make class struggle and the idea of revolution obsolete. With equal attention to aesthetic detail and to the broader contours of political economy, this book serves as a critical intervention in art history as well a call to reconsider, more broadly, the contemporary lessons of the most political of all artistic avantgardes.
Critical Theory
$78.00
(available in store)
Summary:
"You gotta love it", says 65-year-old Bill Delaney, beauty salesman in the greater Los Angeles area. Yes, you gotta love it. You gotta love the hustle, the getting-up-and-going-out, the repeating sales pitches, the flirting and the haggling; the unending calls, all week, Monday to Sunday, all day, morning till night. You gotta love the dance, the rush, and the territory.(...)
Too Many Products Too Much Pressure
Actions:
Price:
$78.00
(available in store)
Summary:
"You gotta love it", says 65-year-old Bill Delaney, beauty salesman in the greater Los Angeles area. Yes, you gotta love it. You gotta love the hustle, the getting-up-and-going-out, the repeating sales pitches, the flirting and the haggling; the unending calls, all week, Monday to Sunday, all day, morning till night. You gotta love the dance, the rush, and the territory. In 1980, as a young photographer just beginning her MFA in San Francisco and developing a keen interest in documenting labor, Janet Delaney embarked for a week on the job with her soon-to-retire father. The days are long and exhausting, but there is, in the incessant driving, carrying and chatting, a restless, pulsing energy streaming from Delaney’s photographs. Picturing the beauty parlors with a critical distance (she did, after all, grow up in a time of questioning constricted gender roles and capitalist consumer culture), using frontal, wide shots and often harsh flash, Delaney created a witty documentation of a day in the life of a salesman.
Photography monographs
$37.95
(available to order)
Summary:
In "The politics of collecting," Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of US museum collections and conceptual art forms. Investigating historical legal and property claims, she argues that regimes of expropriation--rather than merit or good taste--are responsible for popular ideas of formal innovation and artistic genius. In doing so,(...)
The politics of collecting: Race and the aestheticization of property
Actions:
Price:
$37.95
(available to order)
Summary:
In "The politics of collecting," Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of US museum collections and conceptual art forms. Investigating historical legal and property claims, she argues that regimes of expropriation--rather than merit or good taste--are responsible for popular ideas of formal innovation and artistic genius. In doing so, she details how Marcel Duchamp's canonization has more to do with his patron's donations to museums than it does the quality of Duchamp's work, and she uncovers the racialized and financialized logic behind the Archive of New Poetry's collecting practices. Ranging from the conception of philanthropy devised by the robber barons of the late nineteenth century to ongoing digitization projects, Kim provides a new history of contemporary art that accounts for the complicated entanglement of race, capital, and labor behind storied art institutions and artists. Drawing on history, theory, and economics, Kim challenges received notions of artistic success and talent and calls for a new vision of art beyond the cultural institution.
Archive, library and the digital
Mythologies
$14.50
(available to order)
Summary:
"Mythologies" illustrates the beautiful generosity of Barthes's progressive interest in the meaning (his word is signification) of practically everything around him, not only the books and paintings of high art, but also the slogans, trivia, toys, food, and popular rituals (cruises, striptease, eating, wrestling matches) of contemporary life . . . For Barthes, words and(...)
Mythologies
Actions:
Price:
$14.50
(available to order)
Summary:
"Mythologies" illustrates the beautiful generosity of Barthes's progressive interest in the meaning (his word is signification) of practically everything around him, not only the books and paintings of high art, but also the slogans, trivia, toys, food, and popular rituals (cruises, striptease, eating, wrestling matches) of contemporary life . . . For Barthes, words and objects have in common the organized capacity to say something; at the same time, since they are signs, words and objects have the bad faith always to appear natural to their consumer, as if what they say is eternal, true, necessary, instead of arbitrary, made, contingent. Mythologies finds Barthes revealing the fashioned systems of ideas that make it possible, for example, for 'Einstein's brain' to stand for, be the myth of, 'a genius so lacking in magic that one speaks about his thought as a functional labor analogous to the mechanical making of sausages.' Each of the little essays in this book wrenches a definition out of a common but constructed object, making the object speak its hidden, but ever-so-present, reservoir of manufactured sense." -Edward W. Said
Critical Theory