Gisela Erlacher: Superblocks
$88.00
(available to order)
Summary:
With the municipal buildings of "Red Vienna," the utopia of enabling weaker individuals in society to also have a good life was realized. Originally erected in the 1920s to provide affordable living space for the working class as well as urban infrastructure, communal ownership of housing also makes it possible today to integrate people who would otherwise have limited(...)
Gisela Erlacher: Superblocks
Actions:
Price:
$88.00
(available to order)
Summary:
With the municipal buildings of "Red Vienna," the utopia of enabling weaker individuals in society to also have a good life was realized. Originally erected in the 1920s to provide affordable living space for the working class as well as urban infrastructure, communal ownership of housing also makes it possible today to integrate people who would otherwise have limited opportunities in neoliberal society. The relevance of municipal ownership to the current situation consists as well of the possibility to exert an attenuating influence on real estate speculation and rising rents. With her camera, Gisela Erlacher follows the parcours through the archways of "superblocks" such as the Sandleiten-Hof, Goethe-Hof, and Karl-Marx-Hof. She portrays residents and visitors in all their diversity and gives them space to present themselves beyond stereotyped depictions.
Photography monographs
$31.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Since the middle of the eighteenth century, political thinkers of all kinds--radical and reactionary, professional and amateur--have been complaining about “bureaucracy.” But what, exactly, are they complaining about? In The Demon of Writing, Ben Kafka offers a critical history and theory of one of the most ubiquitous, least understood forms of media: paperwork.(...)
The demon of writing: powers and failures of paperwork
Actions:
Price:
$31.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Since the middle of the eighteenth century, political thinkers of all kinds--radical and reactionary, professional and amateur--have been complaining about “bureaucracy.” But what, exactly, are they complaining about? In The Demon of Writing, Ben Kafka offers a critical history and theory of one of the most ubiquitous, least understood forms of media: paperwork. States rely on records to tax and spend, protect and serve, discipline and punish. But time and again, this paperwork proves to be unreliable. Examining episodes that range from the story of a clerk who lost his job and then his mind in the French Revolution to an account of Roland Barthes’s brief stint as a university administrator, Kafka reveals the powers, the failures, and even the pleasures of paperwork. Many of its complexities, he argues, have been obscured by the comic-paranoid style that characterizes much of our criticism of bureaucracy. Kafka proposes a new theory of what Karl Marx called the “bureaucratic medium.”
Architectural Theory
Architecture and abstraction
$45.95
(available in store)
Summary:
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(...)
Architecture and abstraction
Actions:
Price:
$45.95
(available in store)
Summary:
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, Architecture and Abstraction 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.
Architectural Theory