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A photographic survey of Soviet-era playgrounds found in former members of the USSR, such as Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Through five chapters containing more than 150 photographs, the book documents the mass-produced, yet diverse play equipment installed in the communal spaces of socialist-era housing(...)
Soviet playgrounds: Playful landscapes of the former USSR
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A photographic survey of Soviet-era playgrounds found in former members of the USSR, such as Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Through five chapters containing more than 150 photographs, the book documents the mass-produced, yet diverse play equipment installed in the communal spaces of socialist-era housing estates, such as rocket slides and earth-shaped climbers, spaceships and animal-themed ladders, cosmic roundabouts and bizarre objects that would probably raise safety concerns nowadays. From Riga to Dushanbe and all the way from Kyiv to Vladivostok, children dreamt of becoming cosmonauts, and enjoyed the many space-themed playscapes which had proliferated since the onset of the Cold War era. While some are still in use, others are slowly disappearing to make way for modern equipment, or, more recently, being destroyed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, becoming only a faint memory of a Soviet childhood. Includes a foreword by the Ukrainian urban planner Mykola Gorokhov and informative maps of the playgrounds featured in every chapter. Pictures were taken by Zupagrafika, with contributions by local photographers.
Modernism
Mamma Andersson
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The Swedish painter Karin Mamma Andersson works with a highly idiosyncratic imagery, engendered by the mysteries of dreams, fairytales and everyday life. She paints with an indefatigable passion for storytelling, spreading the paint thickly with broad, sweeping gestures, or dryly and sparsely, across the canvas. Glimmering beauty and dark maelstroms of doom are sampled(...)
Contemporary Art Monographs
May 2007, Göttingen / London
Mamma Andersson
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The Swedish painter Karin Mamma Andersson works with a highly idiosyncratic imagery, engendered by the mysteries of dreams, fairytales and everyday life. She paints with an indefatigable passion for storytelling, spreading the paint thickly with broad, sweeping gestures, or dryly and sparsely, across the canvas. Glimmering beauty and dark maelstroms of doom are sampled with elements from myths, films and dreams, the absurd and the realistic, in the same picture. Her early works feature children in vast landscapes, echoing her own childhood in northern Sweden. The figures are set, each separately, in forests, by lakes, in the countryside. This rural setting later gives way to the interiors of the art world – cluttered framers’ workshops, libraries and elegant salons with finely ornamented objects. More recently, these rooms have opened up towards new worlds, where dream and reality seem to be careening. Whatever motifs she paints, the atmosphere appears to be fairly constant: a form of serenity in between finding and forgetting. The titles underline the ambiguity, explaining nothing but running parallel with the paintings.
Contemporary Art Monographs
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This book is an early vignette from Michael Kenna's far-reaching photographic odyssey. Some of these photographs, made almost forty years ago, are familiar, even famous, but many have never been seen before. They have been lying in wait, stored in a series of negative files. Normally, Kenna travels extensively and is not able to keep up with printing his extensive(...)
Michael Kenna: Northern England
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This book is an early vignette from Michael Kenna's far-reaching photographic odyssey. Some of these photographs, made almost forty years ago, are familiar, even famous, but many have never been seen before. They have been lying in wait, stored in a series of negative files. Normally, Kenna travels extensively and is not able to keep up with printing his extensive collection of negatives. It took the Covid pandemic and lockdown for him to search through his archives, rediscover these long-forgotten images, and print them in his darkroom. These photographs reveal a Northern England from Kenna's youth that, for the most part, no longer exists. From the Introduction. Michael Kenna was born in the small industrial town of Widnes in northwest England. The youngest of six children, Kenna grew up in a poor, working-class, Irish-Catholic family. He attended a seminary school for seven years with the intention of becoming a priest, after which he studied at the Banbury School of Art and later at the London College of Printing, before moving to the USA in the late seventies.
Photography monographs
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In the middle of the salt-frosted Afghan desert, in a village so remote that Google can’t find it, a woman squats on top of a loom, making flowers bloom in the thousand threads she knots by hand. Here, where heroin is cheaper than rice, every day is a fast day. B-52s pass overhead—a sign of America’s omnipotence or its vulnerability, the villagers are unsure. They know,(...)
The World is a Carpet: Four seasons in an afghan village
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In the middle of the salt-frosted Afghan desert, in a village so remote that Google can’t find it, a woman squats on top of a loom, making flowers bloom in the thousand threads she knots by hand. Here, where heroin is cheaper than rice, every day is a fast day. B-52s pass overhead—a sign of America’s omnipotence or its vulnerability, the villagers are unsure. They know, though, that the earth is flat—like a carpet. Anna Badkhen first traveled to this country in 2001, as a war correspondent. She has returned many times since, drawn by a land that geography has made a perpetual battleground, and by a people who sustain an exquisite tradition there. Through the four seasons in which a new carpet is woven by the women and children of Oqa, she immortalizes their way of life much as the carpet does—from the petal half-finished where a hungry infant needs care to the interruptions when the women trade sex jokes or go fill in for wedding musicians scared away by the Taliban.
Literature and poetry
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''Making space'' is a pioneering work first published in 1984 which challenges us to look at how the built environment impacts on women’s lives. It exposes the sexist assumptions on gender and sexuality that have a fundamental impact on the way buildings are designed and our cities are planned. Written collaboratively by the feminist collective Matrix, the book(...)
Making space: Women and the manmade environment
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''Making space'' is a pioneering work first published in 1984 which challenges us to look at how the built environment impacts on women’s lives. It exposes the sexist assumptions on gender and sexuality that have a fundamental impact on the way buildings are designed and our cities are planned. Written collaboratively by the feminist collective Matrix, the book provide a full blown critique of the patriarchal built environment both in the home and in public space, and outline alternative forms of practice that are still relevant today. ''Making space'' remains a path breaking book pointing to possibilities of a feminist future. Some authors worked for the London-based Matrix Feminist Architect’s collective, an architectural practice set up in 1980 seeking to establish a feminist approach to design. They worked on design projects—such as community, children and women’s centres. Others were engaged in building work, teaching and research. The new edition comes with a new introduction examining the context, process and legacy of ''Making space'' written by leading feminists in architecture.
Gender Theory in Architecture
Notes from an island
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In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunström, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless island in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, where for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the visual artist, Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä, lived, painted, and wrote, energized by the solitude and shifting seascapes. The(...)
Notes from an island
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In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunström, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless island in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, where for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the visual artist, Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä, lived, painted, and wrote, energized by the solitude and shifting seascapes. The island’s flora, fauna, and weather patterns provided deep inspiration which can be seen reflected in all of Jansson’s work, most famously in her bestselling novel ''The Summer Book'' and her longstanding comic strip and novels for children, ''Moomin''. Tove’s signature spare, quirky prose, and Tooti’s subtle ink washes and aquatints combine to form a work of meditative beauty, a chronicle of living peacefully in nature and observing the island’s ecology and character. ''Notes from an Island'' is both a work of artistic collaboration and an homage to the deep love the two women shared. One feels as if Jansson’s journal, with Tooti’s sketches tucked inside, has been unearthed like a treasure from under a pile of old quilts in the back of their rustic cabin.
Literature and poetry
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'Lee and I have shared a number of unconventionally interesting friends during our five decades together, people who show us an unusual way of living a life. I would put Raoul Hague on that list, maybe at the top. Beginning in the mid 1960s and continuing for more than 25 years, Lee and I and our children visited him at the Woodstock, New York, cabin where he lived and(...)
Lee Friedlander: witness number six
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'Lee and I have shared a number of unconventionally interesting friends during our five decades together, people who show us an unusual way of living a life. I would put Raoul Hague on that list, maybe at the top. Beginning in the mid 1960s and continuing for more than 25 years, Lee and I and our children visited him at the Woodstock, New York, cabin where he lived and worked. To enter Hague's cabin was entering his universe. It was not simply a dwelling and a studio but a carefully organized way of life, a reflection of an esthetic ideal. All he did, whether work or pleasure, was driven by this ideal, which he created for himself and carried out without compromise. Hague was the quintessential storybook artist'. - from the text by Maria Friedlander. Witness Number 6 provides a portrait - in 157 photographs by Lee Friedlander, and accompanying essay by Maria Friedlander - of the sculptor Raoul Hague. The Friedlanders knew Hague for over two and a half decades, and their deep fondness for, and mutual trust with, the Armenian-born sculptor comes through in every image and word of this gorgeous addition to JGS s Witness series.
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January 2009
Photography monographs
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In the last twenty years, thousands upon thousands of the upper and middle classes have retreated into gated communities. In 2002 it is estimated that one in eight Americans will live in these exclusive neighborhoods. What has sparked this alarming trend? Behind the Gates is Low's revealing account of what life is like inside these suburban fortresses. After years(...)
Behind the gates : life, security, and the pursuit of happiness in fortress America
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In the last twenty years, thousands upon thousands of the upper and middle classes have retreated into gated communities. In 2002 it is estimated that one in eight Americans will live in these exclusive neighborhoods. What has sparked this alarming trend? Behind the Gates is Low's revealing account of what life is like inside these suburban fortresses. After years researching and interviewing families in Long Island, New York and San Antonio, Texas, Low provides an inside view of gated communities to help explain why people flee to these enclaves. Parents with children, young married couples, "empty-nesters," and retirees express their need for safety, their secret fears of a more ethnically diverse America, and their desire to recapture the close-knit, picket-fenced communities of their childhood. Ironically, she shows, gated neighborhoods are in fact no safer than other suburbs, and many who move there are disheartened by the insularity and restrictive rules of the community. Low probes the hopes, dreams, and fears of her subjects to portray the subtle change in American middle-class values marked by the emergence of enclosed communities in the suburbs.
Urban Theory
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When we think of the gardens of Southern California, we tend to think of the enormous semiarid landscapes of the Huntington and Rancho Los Alamitos, often built on the sprawling grounds of former ranches. But there is another garden tradition in Southern California: the modest, rectangular suburban plots designed by the most famous architects of mid-century modernism:(...)
Private landscapes : modernist gardens in Southern California
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When we think of the gardens of Southern California, we tend to think of the enormous semiarid landscapes of the Huntington and Rancho Los Alamitos, often built on the sprawling grounds of former ranches. But there is another garden tradition in Southern California: the modest, rectangular suburban plots designed by the most famous architects of mid-century modernism: Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, Gregory Ain, Raphael Soriano, Harwell Hamilton Harris, A. Quincy Jones, and John Lautner. These architects saw the garden as an outdoor extension of the space of the houses they designed, rather than a neo-Spanish fantasy to be added later by a "landscapist." Their modern gardens made use of low-maintenance, drought-resistant plants, and made room for informal outdoor living by children and adults with an emphasis on recreation and exercise. «Private Landscapes» profiles twenty significant gardens-and their accompanying houses-by these celebrated architects. Using contemporary photographs by Julius Shulman and newly commissioned color images, along with plans and plant lists, «Private Landscapes» provides a never-before-seen look at these gardens. As beautiful and practical now as they were 50 years ago, these designs continue to provide inspiration for gardeners and designers everywhere.
Gardens
The Playground Project
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Until sometime in the 1980s, playgrounds were places for social experiments, risky projects and spectacular sculptures. Architects, urban planners, artists, parents and children were invited to leave their comfort zones and to venture something new in the design and use of playgrounds. The Playground Project explores these exemplary initiatives, pioneering acts and(...)
The Playground Project
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Until sometime in the 1980s, playgrounds were places for social experiments, risky projects and spectacular sculptures. Architects, urban planners, artists, parents and children were invited to leave their comfort zones and to venture something new in the design and use of playgrounds. The Playground Project explores these exemplary initiatives, pioneering acts and adventures in designing modern childhood. Examples from Europe, the US, Japan and India are discussed in depth and illustrated with numerous images. Truly a comprehensive overview, this volume includes works by artists, architects and landscape architects such as Marjory Allen, Joseph Brown, Riccardo Dalisi, Richard Dattner, Aldo van Eyck, M. Paul Friedberg, Group Ludic (Xavier de la Salle, Simon Koszel, David Roditi), Alfred Ledermann and Alfred Trachsel, Palle Nielsen, Egon Møller-Nielsen, Isamu Noguchi, Joseph Schagerl, Mitsuru Senda and Carl Theodor Sørensen. Swiss political scientist and urban planner Gabriela Burkhalter contributes an introduction, and essays by Xavier de la Salle, Sreejata Roy and Vincent Romagny investigate the stakes of the architectural and artistic experiments surveyed. The first comprehensive overview of this kind, The Playground Project addresses laymen as well as experts who want to do more on the playground than just seesaw and swing.
Commercial interiors, Building types