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Unknown Fields is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on expeditions into the shadows cast by the contemporary city, to uncover the industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness its technology and culture set in motion. "Tales from the dark side of the city" is a book series that forms an atlas to the territories and stories of a city that stretches across the(...)
Tales from the dark side of the city, box set
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Unknown Fields is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on expeditions into the shadows cast by the contemporary city, to uncover the industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness its technology and culture set in motion. "Tales from the dark side of the city" is a book series that forms an atlas to the territories and stories of a city that stretches across the entire planet, a city that sits between documentary and fiction, a city of dislocated sites, of drone footage and hidden-camera investigations, of interviews and speculative narratives, of toxic objects and distributed matter from distant grounds. They are a collection of tales from the constellation of elsewheres that are conjured into being by the city’s wants and needs, fears and dreams. The series includes stories developed from expeditions through Bolivia and the Atacama Desert, the Western Australian Outback, the South China Sea and Inner Mongolia, the gemfields of Madagascar, Far North Alaska and the black sites of the United States.
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In November 2022, the water level of the Great Salt Lake fell to its lowest on record. Diverted water supply from its feeding rivers, pollution from nearby extraction plants and ravaging droughts have brought this landmark to a crisis point. As the lake reached its lowest ebb, photographer Fazal Sheikh (born 1965), together with writer Terry Tempest Williams (born 1955),(...)
Fazal Sheikh: Thirst, Great Salt Lake
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In November 2022, the water level of the Great Salt Lake fell to its lowest on record. Diverted water supply from its feeding rivers, pollution from nearby extraction plants and ravaging droughts have brought this landmark to a crisis point. As the lake reached its lowest ebb, photographer Fazal Sheikh (born 1965), together with writer Terry Tempest Williams (born 1955), walked the shoreline, awed by its epic beauty while recording the destruction of its natural habitats. As Utah native Williams writes in her essay, "Retreat," she is witnessing the death of a lake that has been a constant presence in her life. Meanwhile, Sheikh documents the shrinking salt basin from above, revealing how the lake has been exploited: plundered for its natural salts, dissected by concrete highways, discolored by toxic waste, depleted by evaporation. His images hold a mirror to the lake’s surface, charting its destruction while demanding the viewer’s visceral response.
Photography monographs
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A manifesto for a radically different philosophy and practice of manufacture and environmentalism. "Reduce, reuse, recycle" urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. As William McDonough and Michael Braungart argue in their provocative, visionary book, however, this approach perpetuates a one-way, "cradle to grave"(...)
Green Architecture
January 1900, New York
Cradle to cradle : remaking the way we make things
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A manifesto for a radically different philosophy and practice of manufacture and environmentalism. "Reduce, reuse, recycle" urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. As William McDonough and Michael Braungart argue in their provocative, visionary book, however, this approach perpetuates a one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model that dates to the industrial revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. Why not challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world, they ask. In fact, why not take nature itself as our model? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we do not consider its abundance wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective; hence, "waste equals food" is the first principle the book sets forth. Products might be designed so that, after their useful life, they provide nourishment for something new-either as "biological nutrients" that safely re-enter the environment or as "technical nutrients" that circulate within closed-loop industrial cycles, without being "downcycled" into low-grade uses (as most "recyclables" now are). Elaborating their principles from experience (re)designing everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, the authors make an exciting and viable case for change.
Green Architecture
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"Filth" is concerned with what waste reveals about the culture that creates it. From floating barges of urban refuse to dung-encrusted works of art, from toxic landfills to dirty movies, filth has become a major presence and a point of volatile contention in modern life. This book explores the question of what filth has to do with culture: what critical role the lost,(...)
Architectural Theory
January 2005, Minneapolis
Filth : dirt, disgust, and modern life
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"Filth" is concerned with what waste reveals about the culture that creates it. From floating barges of urban refuse to dung-encrusted works of art, from toxic landfills to dirty movies, filth has become a major presence and a point of volatile contention in modern life. This book explores the question of what filth has to do with culture: what critical role the lost, the rejected, the abject, and the dirty play in social management and identity formation. It suggests the ongoing power of culturally mandated categories of exclusion and repression. Focusing on filth in literary and cultural materials from London, Paris, and their colonial outposts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essays in "Filth" - all but one previously unpublished - range over topics as diverse as the building of sewers in nineteenth-century European metropolises, the link between interior design and bourgeois sanitary phobias, the fictional representation of labouring women and foreigners as polluting, and relations among disease, disorder, and sexual-racial disharmony. "Filth" provides the first sustained consideration, both theoretical and historical, of a subject whose power to horrify, fascinate, and repel is as old as civilization itself. Contributors: David S. Barnes, Neil Blackadder, Joseph Bristow, Joseph W. Childers, Eileen Cleere, Natalka Freeland, Pamela K. Gilbert, Christopher Hamlin, William Kupinse, Benjamin Lazier, David L. Pike, David Trotter.
Architectural Theory
Shaping things
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Sterling offers a brilliant, often hilarious history of shaped things. We have moved from an age of artefacts, made by hand, through complex machines, to the current era of "gizmos." New forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lack historical precedent, he writes; but the production methods, using archaic forms of energy and materials that are finite and toxic,(...)
Shaping things
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Sterling offers a brilliant, often hilarious history of shaped things. We have moved from an age of artefacts, made by hand, through complex machines, to the current era of "gizmos." New forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lack historical precedent, he writes; but the production methods, using archaic forms of energy and materials that are finite and toxic, are not sustainable. The future will see a new kind of object - we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable - that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable. Sterling coins the term "spime" for them, these future manufactured objects with informational support so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time. They are made of substances that can be folded back into the production stream of future spimes, challenging all of us to become involved in their production. Spimes are coming, says Sterling. We will need these objects in order to live; we won't be able to surrender their advantages without awful consequences. The vision of ‘Shaping Things’ is given material form by the intricate design of Lorraine Wild. ‘Shaping Things’ is for designers and thinkers, engineers and scientists, entrepreneurs and financiers - and anyone who wants to understand and be part of the process of techno-social transformation.
Design Theory
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"Worldchanging : a User's guide for the 21st century " proposes innovative solutions, ideas and inventions emerging today for building a sustainable, livable, prosperous future. From consumer consciousness to a new vision for industry; non-toxic homes to refugee shelters; microfinance to effective philanthropy; socially responsible investing to starting a green business;(...)
Worldchanging : a user's guide for the 21st century
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"Worldchanging : a User's guide for the 21st century " proposes innovative solutions, ideas and inventions emerging today for building a sustainable, livable, prosperous future. From consumer consciousness to a new vision for industry; non-toxic homes to refugee shelters; microfinance to effective philanthropy; socially responsible investing to starting a green business; citizen media to human rights; ecological economics to climate change, this is a comprehensive, cutting-edge overview. The book contains 7 sections which include those topics - from eco-building to responsible shopping, political action to humanitarian relief : stuff : green design, biomimicry, sustainable food, clothing, trade and technology ; shelter : green building and landscaping, clean energy, water, disaster relief and humanitarian design ; cities : smart growth, sustainable communities, transportation, greening infrastructure, product-service systems, leapfrogging and megacity challenges ; community : education, women's rights, public health, holistic approaches to community development, South-South science, social entrepreneurship and micro-lending, and philanthropy ; business : socially responsible investment, worldchanging start-ups, ecological economics, corporate social responsibility and green business ; politics : networked politics, new media, transparency, human rights, non-violent revolution and peacemaking ; planet : big picture -- everything from placing oneself in a bioregion to climate foresight to environmental history to green space exploration. Brought together by Alex Steffen, co-founder of the web site Worldchanging.com, this team of writers includes Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture for Humanity, Geekcorps founder Ethan Zuckerman, sustainable food expert Anna Lappé, and many others. With foreword by Al Gore. Design by Sagmeister.
Green Architecture
$49.50
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Once symbols of the past, ruins have become ubiquitous signs of our future. Americans today encounter ruins in the media on a daily basis - images of abandoned factories and malls, toxic landscapes, devastating fires, hurricanes, and floods. In this sweeping study, Miles Orvell offers a new understanding of the spectacle of ruins in US culture, exploring how(...)
Empire of ruins: American culture, phptography, and the spectacle of destruction
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Once symbols of the past, ruins have become ubiquitous signs of our future. Americans today encounter ruins in the media on a daily basis - images of abandoned factories and malls, toxic landscapes, devastating fires, hurricanes, and floods. In this sweeping study, Miles Orvell offers a new understanding of the spectacle of ruins in US culture, exploring how photographers, writers, painters, and filmmakers have responded to ruin and destruction, both real and imaginary, in an effort to make sense of the past and envision the future. ''Empire of ruins'' explains why Americans in the nineteenth century yearned for the ruins of Rome and Egypt and how they portrayed a past as ancient and mysterious in the remains of Native American cultures. As the romance of ruins gave way to twentieth-century capitalism, older structures were demolished to make way for grander ones, a process interpreted by artists as a symptom of America's "creative destruction." In the late twentieth century, Americans began to inhabit a perpetual state of ruins, made visible by photographs of decaying inner cities, derelict factories and malls, and the waste lands of the mining industry. This interdisciplinary work focuses on how visual media have transformed disaster and decay into spectacles that compel our moral attention even as they balance horror and beauty. Looking to the future, Orvell considers the visual portrayal of climate ruins as we face the political and ethical responsibilities of our changing world. A wide-ranging work by an acclaimed urban, cultural, and photography scholar, ''Empire of ruins'' offers a provocative and lavishly illustrated look at the American past, present, and future.
Theory of Photography