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Idealized representations of America, as both an aspiration and a menace, played an important role in shaping Russian architecture and urban design from the American Revolution until the fall of the Soviet Union. In Building a new New World, Jean-Louis Cohen traces the concept of “Amerikanizm” and its impact on Russia’s built environment from early czarist interest in(...)
Building a new New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture
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Idealized representations of America, as both an aspiration and a menace, played an important role in shaping Russian architecture and urban design from the American Revolution until the fall of the Soviet Union. In Building a new New World, Jean-Louis Cohen traces the concept of “Amerikanizm” and its impact on Russia’s built environment from early czarist interest in Revolutionary America, through the spectacular World’s Fairs of the nineteenth century, to department stores, skyscrapers, and factories built in Russia using American methods during the twentieth century. Visions of America also captivated the Russian avant-garde, from El Lissitzky to Moisei Ginzburg, and Cohen explores the ongoing artistic dialogue maintained between the two countries at the mid-century and in the late Soviet era, when the Cold War induced a strategic competition. Tracing the many journeys of Russian writers, politicians, and planners through the American territory, foregrounding the constant streams of cultural and technological transfer from the U.S.A. to Russia, and revealing the parallel fascination among Russian and American intellectuals with the ongoing pursuit of land occupation and development within their respective borders, this study of Amerikanizm in the architecture and urban design of Russia makes a timely contribution to our understanding of modern architecture and its broader geopolitics.
books
December 2019
CCA Publications
Architecture and dystopia
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As a response to the profound crisis of Western culture the emerged in the 1960s, radical artists from Italy, Austria, England and Japan called into question the foundations of modernist utopias. They transmuted the difficulties of capitalism into a repertory of startling images that revealed the disturbing realities of consumer society, even in those places still(...)
Architecture and dystopia
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As a response to the profound crisis of Western culture the emerged in the 1960s, radical artists from Italy, Austria, England and Japan called into question the foundations of modernist utopias. They transmuted the difficulties of capitalism into a repertory of startling images that revealed the disturbing realities of consumer society, even in those places still resistant to the penetration of modern architecture, such as Superstudio and Archizoom’s Florence. Their model, though exhausted in the space of experimentation, went on to inspire a generation of architects, from the High Tech movement to Rem Koolhaas.. In the light of these examples, how to define a unified 'dystopian' method of design, i.e. a common ground for an architecture that, by its very nature, seems to resist systematization? Are the most recognizable architectural expressions of this theoretical framework — characterized by brazen displays of technology and structures of overwhelming scale — merely isolated cases, albeit of particular iconic power? Or do they belong to a wider landscape of antirational architectural projects? And to what extent are these disturbing expressions premised on the utopian tradition or, better yet, the conceptual model of 'negative thought'? The goal of this book is to respond to such questions, thus initiating an open dialogue about the legitimacy of this critical category.
Architectural Theory
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Over the past twenty years, an abundance of art forms have emerged that use aesthetics to affect social dynamics. These works are often produced by collectives or come out of a community context; they emphasize participation, dialogue, and action, and appear in situations ranging from theater to activism to urban planning to visual art to health care. Engaged with the(...)
Living as form : socially engaged art from 1991-2011
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Over the past twenty years, an abundance of art forms have emerged that use aesthetics to affect social dynamics. These works are often produced by collectives or come out of a community context; they emphasize participation, dialogue, and action, and appear in situations ranging from theater to activism to urban planning to visual art to health care. Engaged with the texture of living, these art works often blur the line between art and life. This book offers the first global portrait of a complex and exciting mode of cultural production — one that has virtually redefined contemporary art practice. This publication grew out of a major exhibition at Creative Time in New York City. Like the exhibition, the book is a landmark survey of more than 100 projects selected by a thirty-person curatorial advisory team; each project is documented by a selection of color images. The artists include the Danish collective Superflex, who empower communities to challenge corporate interest; Turner Prize nominee Jeremy Deller, creator of socially and politically charged performance works; Women on Waves, who provide abortion services and information to women in regions where the procedure is illegal; and Santiágo Cirugeda, an architect who builds temporary structures to solve housing problems.
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Canada is a country whose national narrative is difficult to define, even for Canadians. This question is further complicated when looking at emerging artists who have grown up under intense globalization. In Canada, specific identities are difficult to pinpoint and, when they are, they are often portrayed as problematic stereotypes bound up in a colonialist history. (...)
Alternorthern: an exhibition of nine emerging Canadian artists
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Canada is a country whose national narrative is difficult to define, even for Canadians. This question is further complicated when looking at emerging artists who have grown up under intense globalization. In Canada, specific identities are difficult to pinpoint and, when they are, they are often portrayed as problematic stereotypes bound up in a colonialist history. “Alternorthern” was conceived in the tension that exists between nationalism, globalization, and individualism: the exhibition is a product of both cultural values and cultural hybridism. The nine artists in this exhibition function similarly in that they use their own identities to make gestures that transgress time and space. Each artist in the exhibition is Canadian, yet each creates work that speaks to issues pertinent to both Canadian and global geographic and political landscapes. The exhibition will open during the 2010 Olympics, when many of the stereotypes, symbols, themes, and political workings of Canada will be disseminated into the U.S. media. As Canada is in the throes of presenting its tourist identity on the international stage, this exhibition can function as a way of transgressing this identity. Thus, the curators see this exhibition not as a response to the event of the Olympics but as an opportunity to subvert and play with cultural dialogue that will exist during this time.
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Trois décennies d’engagement au service de la collectivité: c’est en ces termes qu’on pourrait qualifier l’action publique de Jean-Pierre Dresco, envisagée comme le reflet d’une période où toute une génération d’architectes remet progressivement en cause les bienfaits du progrès et de la modernité et envisage son métier essentiellement sous un angle éthique, social et(...)
Architecture et patrimoine: Jean-Pierre Dresco, architecte cantonal vaudois de 1972 à 1998
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Trois décennies d’engagement au service de la collectivité: c’est en ces termes qu’on pourrait qualifier l’action publique de Jean-Pierre Dresco, envisagée comme le reflet d’une période où toute une génération d’architectes remet progressivement en cause les bienfaits du progrès et de la modernité et envisage son métier essentiellement sous un angle éthique, social et économique. Cet ouvrage collectif s’attache à retracer les principaux moments qui ont balisé sa longue carrière, tout en mettant l’accent sur la période comprise entre 1972 et 1998 où il est architecte cantonal du Canton de Vaud. On assiste alors à l’émergence «d’une ère nouvelle cadrée dans une perspective culturelle», en phase avec les multiples enjeux de l’époque, qui s’avère pourtant moins complexe que l’actuelle, comme il en ressort d’un dialogue entre l’ancien et le présent architecte cantonal. Adepte des vertus de la pluridisciplinarité, Jean-Pierre Dresco a, tout au long de son activité dans la fonction publique, porté un regard d’architecte sur les choses. En effet, intimement convaincu de la nécessité d’instaurer ce qui fait «lien» avec les autres, tant au niveau professionnel qu’avec le public, il n’a pas pour autant perdu l’intérêt pour l’art sous ses formes les plus exigeantes: l’art de bâtir, l’art de restaurer, l’art tout court.
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In landscape architecture, representation has become the subject of contention and much discussion. While computer techniques have been a catalyst for change across the field of design as a whole, nowhere have the conventions of representation been called into question more than in landscape architecture – which in itself is undergoing a process of reinvention. With the(...)
Drawing and reinventing landscape
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In landscape architecture, representation has become the subject of contention and much discussion. While computer techniques have been a catalyst for change across the field of design as a whole, nowhere have the conventions of representation been called into question more than in landscape architecture – which in itself is undergoing a process of reinvention. With the onset of rapid urbanisation and our shifting relationship with nature, landscape architecture has proved a potent lens for expressing a wider dialogue taking place in the world. It is, however, only through the introduction of innovative forms of representation – whether digital, analogue or hybrid – that one most vividly sees the emergence of the new. In this book, Diana Balmori explores notions of representation in the discipline at large and across time. She takes us back to landscape design’s roots in the seventeenth century in France and the eighteenth century in England, when it first grappled with questions of imagined exterior space. She explores the discipline’s relationship to painting and the influence of cartography with its bird's-eye views, topographic sections and perspectives. She highlights how new attempts at representation by modern landscape artists such as Patricia Johanson, Ian Hamilton Finlay and David Hockney continue to wrestle with the depiction of landscape.
Landscape Theory
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The first book to demystify the process of producing and publishing a book of photographs, ''Publish your photography book'' was first released in 2011 and subsequently sold out two editions. This highly anticipated third edition guides photo-based artists through the steps involved in publishing a book of their work. Industry insiders Darius D. Himes and Mary Virginia(...)
Theory of Photography
September 2023
Publish your photography book, 3rd edition
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The first book to demystify the process of producing and publishing a book of photographs, ''Publish your photography book'' was first released in 2011 and subsequently sold out two editions. This highly anticipated third edition guides photo-based artists through the steps involved in publishing a book of their work. Industry insiders Darius D. Himes and Mary Virginia Swanson survey the current landscape of photography-book publishing and point out the many avenues to pursue and pitfalls to avoid. This updated, expert guide covers: a history of the photobook; an overview of the publishing industry; the process of bringing your project to book form (with both traditional publishing and self-publishing options); how to market a photography book (including a dialogue with collectors on the limited edition and artist-made books); case studies with published photographers; and valuable resources on production materials, publishing and marketing timelines. Filled with educational wisdom, the book features interviews and contributions from artists, agents, editors, designers, printers, publishers, distributors, booksellers, curators and librarians who share their experiences and provide advice about each step on the path to publication and placement. A removable workbook helps readers address book preparation, draft submission guidelines, production timelines and marketing plans. With over 50 years of combined industry experience and insights, the authors also provide both historical context and contemporary expertise about the international photobook scene, including awards, fairs and grants.
Theory of Photography
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A revelatory conversation between two major figures in visual culture. What is a singular object? An idea, a building, a color, a sentiment, a human being. Each in turn comes under scrutiny in this exhilarating dialogue between two of the most interesting thinkers working in philosophy and architecture today. From such singular objects, Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel(...)
Architectural Theory
October 2005, Minneapolis, London
Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel : the singular objects of architecture
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A revelatory conversation between two major figures in visual culture. What is a singular object? An idea, a building, a color, a sentiment, a human being. Each in turn comes under scrutiny in this exhilarating dialogue between two of the most interesting thinkers working in philosophy and architecture today. From such singular objects, Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel move on to fundamental problems of politics, identity, and aesthetics as their exchange becomes an imaginative exploration of the possibilities of modern architecture and the future of modern life. Among the topics the two speakers take up are the city of tomorrow and the ideal of transparency, the gentrification of New York City and Frank Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. As Nouvel prompts Baudrillard to reflect on some of his signature concepts (the virtual, transparency, fatal strategies, oblivion, and seduction, among others), the confrontation between such philosophical concerns and the specificity of architecture gives rise to novel and striking formulations-and a new way of establishing and understanding the connections between the practitioner and the philosopher, the object and the idea. This wide-ranging conversation builds a bridge between the fields of architecture and philosophy. At the same time it offers readers an intimate view of the meeting of objects and ideas in which the imagined, constructed, and inhabited environment is endlessly changing, forever evolving.
Architectural Theory
A meaningful order: OK-RM
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Across its 328 pages it holds a new history of the distributed realities of design. It depicts designed objects on their own terms to give an account of vision, material, and curiosity—representing a selection of the vast archive of more than 16 years of work from OK-RM through an orchestration of the lithographic process with a special set of colours. It is a site for(...)
Graphic Designers, Monographs
July 2025
A meaningful order: OK-RM
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Across its 328 pages it holds a new history of the distributed realities of design. It depicts designed objects on their own terms to give an account of vision, material, and curiosity—representing a selection of the vast archive of more than 16 years of work from OK-RM through an orchestration of the lithographic process with a special set of colours. It is a site for committed study and experimentation, away from the structures of academe. It generates examples, prototypes, and models. It stages a dialogue rendered in a designerly writing through 26 alphabetised chapters (A–Z). It is unashamedly performative in its play with language, direction, and story. It captures the ongoing, open-ended conversation between the editors, who are makers and thinkers of design, including a long form discussion in the form of an interview with long term collaborator Jack Self and is introduced by poet Lila Matsumoto. In this social arena, the book is considered as everyday object and object of art. It examines designed objects and their meanings, which emerge from the interplay of form and context. What does it do? Why does it do it? How does it do it? It lays out new ideas about how designed objects relate to the cultures that they are borne from and the cultures they can create. It strives for transparency, but not at the cost of transcendence.
Graphic Designers, Monographs
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La violence des villes
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Au Nord comme au Sud, nous aimons les grandes villes, mais nous n'en aimons pas la violence. Une tendance lourde est d'en attribuer les causes aux habitants les plus pauvres, puis d'adopter, pour les combattre, des stratégies sécuritaires : nos sociétés se transforment vite en sociétés de la peur. L'urbanisme, déjà, divise l'espace en forteresses et bidonvilles. On ne(...)
Urban Theory
September 2005, Paris, Tunis, Abidjan, Montréal, Lausanne, Conakry
La violence des villes
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Au Nord comme au Sud, nous aimons les grandes villes, mais nous n'en aimons pas la violence. Une tendance lourde est d'en attribuer les causes aux habitants les plus pauvres, puis d'adopter, pour les combattre, des stratégies sécuritaires : nos sociétés se transforment vite en sociétés de la peur. L'urbanisme, déjà, divise l'espace en forteresses et bidonvilles. On ne peut pas continuer à penser l'urbanisation depuis les commissariats de police : une lecture alternative des phénomènes de violence et d'insécurité urbaines est nécessaire. Elle ne peut se faire qu'en les resituant dans le contexte de la violence de l'urbanisation et de la globalisation. En prenant en compte, aussi, le point de vue des pauvres et en privilégiant, d'entre les pauvres, les «méchants», les outsiders, les illégaux, les bandits, les membres des gangs. Quand tout paraît fermé, la «vision du pauvre» ouvre des pistes pour une pacification des territoires urbains. Contre l'actuelle dérive sécuritaire, un dialogue créatif s'impose avec ceux que le pouvoir diabolise. Ce livre s'adresse à tous ceux qui cherchent à saisir le sens de la ville, ceux qu'elle effraie et ceux qui l'aiment et ne veulent pas y renoncer, mais également aux habitants des quartiers extrêmes, même s'ils sont pauvres et «méchants», même si la ville les détruit plus qu'elle ne les protège. Pour reconstruire des villes habitables, il faut désobéir aux modèles.
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September 2005, Paris, Tunis, Abidjan, Montréal, Lausanne, Conakry
Urban Theory