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Architect Stanley Saitowitz, based in San Francisco, is known for a practice that unites the qualities of early modern architecture with the construction techniques, materials, and urban and social attributes of the twenty-first century. Recurring themes in his work include the careful connection to time and place; the construction of spaces that allow fields of(...)
October 2005, New York
Stanley Saitowitz : buildings and projects
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Architect Stanley Saitowitz, based in San Francisco, is known for a practice that unites the qualities of early modern architecture with the construction techniques, materials, and urban and social attributes of the twenty-first century. Recurring themes in his work include the careful connection to time and place; the construction of spaces that allow fields of opportunity; the use of generative systems; the role of architecture as a support for human activity; and the visible trace of building techniques. This monograph, the first on Stanley Saitowitz office, presents fifty projects from more than thirty years of practice. The projects, divided by building type, are accompanied by a personal text in which Saitowitz plainly discusses his influences and interests. Landscape houses, often built on spectacular sites in Marin, Napa, and Sonoma, have evolved to include the noted "bar houses." Urban houses, while compact and dense, incorporate a sense of volume; similarly, multifamily housing provides indeterminate space to allow for personalization. Buildings for schools range from the riverside campus of the Oxbow School in Napa to the structurally innovative Building 23B at UCSF Mission Bay. Among the public landscapes is Mill Race Park in Columbus, Indiana, an assemblage of constructions specific to both place and function. Finally, Saitowitz has developed a series of designs that explore the formation of a Jewish architecture, notably synagogues in San Francisco and La Jolla and the Holocaust Memorial in Boston. Principal photography by Richard Barnes and Tim Griffith.
Public art New York
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A tour of the best permanent public art in all five boroughs of New York City. From outdoor sculpture in public plazas and landscapes to murals and works of art in lobbies accessible to the public, this book focuses on how exemplary works of public art enrich urban public space. Sponsored by the Municipal Art Society, Public Art New York is organized by neighborhood, with(...)
Public Space
March 2009, New York, London
Public art New York
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A tour of the best permanent public art in all five boroughs of New York City. From outdoor sculpture in public plazas and landscapes to murals and works of art in lobbies accessible to the public, this book focuses on how exemplary works of public art enrich urban public space. Sponsored by the Municipal Art Society, Public Art New York is organized by neighborhood, with maps suitable for walking tours. Architect Jean Parker Phifer specializes in planning, renovation and sustainable design projects for cultural institutions and has designed or restored numerous buildings, public spaces, and landscapes, primarily in New York.
Public Space
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In the late 1990s, three monuments -- Crab Park "Boulder," "Marker of Change," and Standing "with Courage, Strength and Pride" -- were built in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Located within a few city blocks of one another, the monuments were grassroots initiatives that challenged the norms of civic art by claiming a place in public space for society's more(...)
Speaking for a long time : public space & social memory in Vancouver
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In the late 1990s, three monuments -- Crab Park "Boulder," "Marker of Change," and Standing "with Courage, Strength and Pride" -- were built in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Located within a few city blocks of one another, the monuments were grassroots initiatives that challenged the norms of civic art by claiming a place in public space for society's more vulnerable groups, and each figured in debates about many kinds of violence. "Speaking for a Long Time" offers unique insights into the creation of memorials and the multiple, often contested meanings that can be attached to them in local communities. Part 1, "Act," explores the monuments' origin stories and highlights the distinctive perspectives of their founders. Part 2, "Frame," places these narratives in the context of modern debates and theories on public space and social memory. Part 3, "Forge," returns to the Downtown Eastside to show how the resilience and agency of grassroots activists can give the socially marginalized a visible presence in our urban landscapes. This vivid account of the creation of memory-scapes in a marginalized community asks us to reconsider what constitutes public art that will "speak for a long time."
Architecture in Canada
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This volume examines the garden as an enduring and evolving cultural resource, in two hundred works by more than one hundred artists. Prints, drawings, photographs, and paintings illuminate the changing aesthetics and uses of gardens from sixteenth-century Italian villas and Louis XIV's Versailles to urban parks like New York City's Central Park and San Francisco's Crissy(...)
The changing garden : four centuries of European and American art
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This volume examines the garden as an enduring and evolving cultural resource, in two hundred works by more than one hundred artists. Prints, drawings, photographs, and paintings illuminate the changing aesthetics and uses of gardens from sixteenth-century Italian villas and Louis XIV's Versailles to urban parks like New York City's Central Park and San Francisco's Crissy Field, adapted from a former military base. Artists' representations of gardens have been organized first to highlight design concepts and individual features, then to focus on historic gardens and parks, and finally to survey the activities within those settings. Among the earliest works included is an engraving of a drawing made in 1570 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder of a garden being vigorously cultivated by many workers. Two centuries later, Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Jean-Honore Fragonard represented the Villa d'Este at Tivoli in a state of neglected grandeur; Hubert Robert's painting of Mereville depicted a garden he helped design. By 1900 Eugene Atget's photographs of Versailles and Camille Pissarro's paintings of the Tuileries convey the enduring structure of French formal gardens. In contrast, American artists Maurice Prendergast, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeill Whistler depicted the pleasures of social activities in that setting. Photographs by Michael Kenna and Bruce Davidson offer contemporary perspectives on these issues.
Gardens
Elvis road
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This long, speechless comic is read as one 20-ft fold-out page; it's half Saul Steinberg on drugs, half insane doodle. Porn shops, playgrounds and sports arenas mix in the crowded urban scene, where everyone seems to be going somewhere, really desperate, or about to do something wicked and fun. Strange vehicles crowd the road, which serves up race cars, tanks, and a huge(...)
Elvis road
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This long, speechless comic is read as one 20-ft fold-out page; it's half Saul Steinberg on drugs, half insane doodle. Porn shops, playgrounds and sports arenas mix in the crowded urban scene, where everyone seems to be going somewhere, really desperate, or about to do something wicked and fun. Strange vehicles crowd the road, which serves up race cars, tanks, and a huge "parfum" tanker truck in one long traffic jam. The simple line drawings use images from World War II, as well as from underground comics of the late '60s through to the present (any references to superheroes and Disney-like characters are purely ironic). The depictions of Klansmen and Nazis seem part of the social critique, perhaps reinforcing the underlying idea that life stuffed to the gills with items that fulfill our every need is itself a form of fascism. There's always something new to see, and much occurs in the cramped spaces, such as when a happy cop ushers small creatures into a theme park called "Cuteland," or when fascist worshipers are hit by a flaming asteroid that leaves a trail of yogurt in which people drown. A strong art-book that's actually a lot of fun.
Graphic Design and Typography
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Asymptote : flux
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"Asymptote", an award-winning New York City-based architectural firm, expands the boundaries of traditional practice with work that ranges from buildings and urban design to computer-generated environments. Recognized internationally as both cutting-edge architects and virtual-reality artists, Asymptote partners Lise Anne Couture and Hani Rashid have designed and written(...)
Architecture Monographs
May 2002, Londres
Asymptote : flux
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"Asymptote", an award-winning New York City-based architectural firm, expands the boundaries of traditional practice with work that ranges from buildings and urban design to computer-generated environments. Recognized internationally as both cutting-edge architects and virtual-reality artists, Asymptote partners Lise Anne Couture and Hani Rashid have designed and written the first book to document their ‘real world’ (as opposed to virtual) projects completed since 1995. It includes work as diverse as a trading floor for the New York Stock Exchange; a multimedia research park in Kyoto, Japan; a modular furniture system for Knoll; and a centre for art and technology for the Guggenheim Museum in Soho, New York. Rashid and Couture’s work is intriguing because it draws inspiration from a wide range of sources not traditionally associated with architecture – among them the design of airline interiors, sporting equipment, and organic systems like seashells and honeycombs; and various means of communicating and disseminating information. Asymptote presents a seamless trajectory of projects organized in a non-linear fashion and illustrated with installation photographs, collaged photographs, and computer-generated diagrams and environments. The projects are interspersed with descriptive text and the speculative writing that Asymptote is known for. Both partners combine architectural practice with teaching, Rashid at Columbia University and Couture at Columbia and Parsons School of Design.
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May 2002, Londres
Architecture Monographs
Zero yen houses
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A lean-to in an urban park, featuring a blue tarpaulin roof, a hinged door, and a bamboo blind. A car-shaped cardboard hut, lashed together with rope and sitting on a dolly. Temporary lodging under a bridge, incorporating a piece of playground equipment into its design. Each of these structures is an example of what Japanese artist and architect Kyohei Sakaguchi calls a(...)
Zero yen houses
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A lean-to in an urban park, featuring a blue tarpaulin roof, a hinged door, and a bamboo blind. A car-shaped cardboard hut, lashed together with rope and sitting on a dolly. Temporary lodging under a bridge, incorporating a piece of playground equipment into its design. Each of these structures is an example of what Japanese artist and architect Kyohei Sakaguchi calls a "zero-yen house".Built by the homeless of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, zero-yen houses employ discarded and found materials, including pieces of wood and corrugated roofing, temple ornaments, blankets, shipping pallets, an umbrella, and those ubiquitous blue tarps. They also incorporate into their assembly the imminence of their disassembly: at any moment, they may have to be taken apart and moved.Since his days as a university student at the turn of the millennium, Sakaguchi has been studying the kinds of shelters that street people have created for themselves in Japan's three largest cities. Based in Tokyo, he appears to be obsessed with this peculiar and transient form of "vernacular architecture". Sakaguchi uses images, descriptions, and even facsimiles of the improvised homes of the homeless as a way of celebrating human resourcefulness and ingenuity. These dwellings, he tells us, are worthy of our interest and admiration rather than our indifference, our scorn, or even our pity. They can instruct us on an approach to architecture that is the reverse of overconsumption and resource depletion.
Residential Architecture
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The Nature of Landscape offers an inspiring, personal account of a quest into the meaning and background of the term ‘landscape’. The author, a landscape planner and designer currently teaching at Eindhoven University of Technology, researches the origins of landscape in our civilization and describes different points of view that have helped shape our opinions on(...)
The nature of landscape : a personal quest
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The Nature of Landscape offers an inspiring, personal account of a quest into the meaning and background of the term ‘landscape’. The author, a landscape planner and designer currently teaching at Eindhoven University of Technology, researches the origins of landscape in our civilization and describes different points of view that have helped shape our opinions on landscape. For the author, our notion of landscape is focused around the terms 'nature versus culture' and 'native versus foreign'. These counterparts make up his 'mindscape diamond', a modified matrix that not only explains trends in landscape perception and design, but also helps to define developments in land use, architecture, urban planning and environmental art. On a more metaphorical level, the author's abundantly illustrated quest is symbolized by a number of personal impressions, such as the discovery of a stone circle in the desert, a lesson in the peculiarities of the Russian language, a journey along the industrial heritage of the German Ruhrgebiet and a visit to a town where ‘Bavaria comes to Washington’. Offering an unexpected reading experience, these and other descriptions demonstrate how varied ‘landscape’ can be. In a worldwide overview of 30 landscape related artworks and 30 park designs, the author discusses landscape attitudes past and present. In a final chapter, he brings together recent developments in society, architecture and art to make a forecast of landscape trends in the near future. Themes such as man-made nature and reinvented heritage conclude this unusual book on the essence of landscape.
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March 2001, Rotterdam
Landscape Theory
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The Pan Am Building and the reaction to it signalled the end of an era. Begun when the modernist aesthetic and the architectural star system ruled architectural theory and practice, the completed building became a symbol of modernism's fall from grace. In “The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream”, Meredith Clausen tells the story as both history and(...)
Architecture since 1900, Europe
December 2004, Cambridge, Mass.
The Pan Am building and the shattering of the modernist dream
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The Pan Am Building and the reaction to it signalled the end of an era. Begun when the modernist aesthetic and the architectural star system ruled architectural theory and practice, the completed building became a symbol of modernism's fall from grace. In “The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream”, Meredith Clausen tells the story as both history and cautionary tale -- a case study of how not to plan and execute a large-scale urban project that seems especially relevant in light of the World Trade Center and the ongoing discussions over what should be built in its place. The Pan Am Building was despised by many as soon as the plans were announced in 1958. The star power of the celebrity architects -- those deans of modernism, Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi -- overrode critics' objections. When construction was completed in 1963, it became more than an architectural question; this "mute, massive, over-scaled octagonal slab," as Clausen describes it, built over Grand Central Terminal, blocked the view down Park Avenue, created deep shadows where there had been sunlight, and poured 25,000 office workers on the sidewalks each morning and evening. As Clausen tells it, the story of the building -- which was undistinguished architecturally but important because of its location and its moment in history -- encompasses the end of modernism's social idealism, the decline of Gropius's and Belluschi's reputations, the victory of private interests over public good, the revival of architectural criticism in the press (both Ada Louise Huxtable and Jane Jacobs emerged as prominent and influential critics), the birth of the historic preservation movement, and the changing culture and politics of New York City.
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December 2004, Cambridge, Mass.
Architecture since 1900, Europe
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"Last Landscapes" is an exploration of the cult and celebration of death, loss and memory. It traces the history and design of burial places throughout Europe and the USA, ranging from the picturesque tradition of the village churchyard to tightly packed ‘cities of the dead’, such as the Jewish Cemetery in Prague and Père Lachaise in Paris. Other landscapes that feature(...)
Last landscapes : the architecture of the cemetery in the west
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"Last Landscapes" is an exploration of the cult and celebration of death, loss and memory. It traces the history and design of burial places throughout Europe and the USA, ranging from the picturesque tradition of the village churchyard to tightly packed ‘cities of the dead’, such as the Jewish Cemetery in Prague and Père Lachaise in Paris. Other landscapes that feature in this book include the war cemeteries of northern France, Viking burial islands in central Sweden, Etruscan tombs and early Christian catacombs in Italy, the 17th-century Portuguese–Jewish cemetery 'Beth Haim' at Ouderkerk in the Netherlands, Forest Lawns in California, Derek Jarman’s garden in Kent and the Stockholm Woodland Cemetery. It is a fact that architecture ‘began with the tomb', yet, as Ken Worpole shows us in Last Landscapes, many historic cemeteries have been demolished or abandoned in recent times (notably the case with Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe), and there has been an increasing loss of inscription and memorialization in the modern urban cemetery. Too often cemeteries today are both poorly designed and physically and culturally marginalized. Worse, cremation denies a full architectural response to the mystery and solemnity of death. The author explores how modes of disposal – burial, cremation, inhumation in mausoleums and wall tombs – vary across Europe and North America, according to religious and other cultural influences. And Last Landscapes raises profound questions as to how, in an age of mass cremation, architects and landscape designers might create meaningful structures and settings in the absence of a body, since for most of history the human body itself has provided the fundamental structural scale. This evocative book also contemplates other forms of memorialization within modern societies, from sculptures to parks, most notably the extraordinary Duisberg Park, set in a former giant steelworks in Germany’s Ruhr Valley.
Gardens