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Los Angeles--the place without a sense of place, famous for sprawl and overdevelopment and defined by its car-clogged freeways--might seem inhospitable to efforts to connect with nature and community. But in Reinventing Los Angeles, educator and activist Robert Gottlieb describes how imaginative and innovative social movements have coalesced around the issues of water(...)
Reinventing Los Angeles : Nature and community in the global city
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Los Angeles--the place without a sense of place, famous for sprawl and overdevelopment and defined by its car-clogged freeways--might seem inhospitable to efforts to connect with nature and community. But in Reinventing Los Angeles, educator and activist Robert Gottlieb describes how imaginative and innovative social movements have coalesced around the issues of water development, cars and freeways, and land use, to create a more livable and sustainable city. Gottlieb traces the emergence of Los Angeles as a global city in the twentieth century and describes its continuing evolution today. He examines the powerful influences of immigration and economic globalization as they intersect with changes in the politics of water, transportation, and land use, and illustrates each of these core concerns with an account of grass roots and activist responses: efforts to reenvision the concrete-bound, fenced-off Los Angeles River as a natural resource; "Arroyofest," the closing of the Pasadena Freeway for a Sunday of walking and bike riding; and immigrants’ initiatives to create urban gardens and connect with their countries of origin. Reinventing Los Angeles is a unique blend of personal narrative (Gottlieb himself participated in several of the grass roots actions described in the book) and historical and theoretical discussion. It provides a road map for a new environmentalism of everyday life, demonstrating the opportunities for renewal in a global city. Robert Gottlieb is Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He is the author of Environmentalism Unbound: Exploring New Pathways for Change (MIT Press), Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement, and other books.
Urban Theory
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In the summer of 2018, Ursula Biemann was commissioned to undertake an extended field trip across the South of Colombia. Many surprising developments ensued from this initial journey in the Amazonian rainforest where the histories of colonial conquest and natural science intertwine. Forest Mind is the result of a series of territorial engagements through video-making,(...)
Forest mind: On the interconnection of all life
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In the summer of 2018, Ursula Biemann was commissioned to undertake an extended field trip across the South of Colombia. Many surprising developments ensued from this initial journey in the Amazonian rainforest where the histories of colonial conquest and natural science intertwine. Forest Mind is the result of a series of territorial engagements through video-making, photography, academic research, personal narrative, and the co-creation of an Indigenous University with the Inga people of Colombia. The explorations focus on the intelligence in nature from both shamanic and scientific perspectives. In these tropical forests, human and nonhuman territorial projects become entangled, calling for new ways of generating knowledge that spur the imagination. The Indigenous science of Ayahuasca as it is practiced by the traditional medics in Amazonia, is largely based in visions evoked by the psychoactive plant. Here, knowing does not only occur from a distance by describing, naming, and exploiting, but as an encounter between minds and worlds. The artist’s research brings to light contemporary Western science that has already been practiced by ancestral medics for millennia, allowing them to interact at the molecular level of DNA. Experimenting with new genetic technologies in collaboration with the ETH lab in Zurich, the visual universe of this project partially derives from biological materials and video-images of the rainforest which were encoded in one and the same DNA strand. In this personal quest, Swiss artist and author Ursula Biemann pursues her long-term inquiry at the intersection of art, ecology and indigenous cosmologies. The artist book presents a biosemiotics project that takes a deep dive into the mechanics of the interconnectedness of all life, and reflects on the active, performative role images play in merging mind and forest.
Contemporary Art Monographs
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Despite Bill Brandt’s fame and considerable influence on the development of modern photography, the photographs in this book are a little known body of work. The work was carried out between 1939 and 1943 when Brandt worked on a commercial assignment for the Bournville Village Trust. The prints and negatives have been with BVT for some 60 years and the work has never(...)
Photography monographs
November 2004, Birmingham
Homes fit for heroes : photographs by Bill Brandt, 1939-1943
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Despite Bill Brandt’s fame and considerable influence on the development of modern photography, the photographs in this book are a little known body of work. The work was carried out between 1939 and 1943 when Brandt worked on a commercial assignment for the Bournville Village Trust. The prints and negatives have been with BVT for some 60 years and the work has never been previously published. The photographs illustrate the living conditions in a range of housing types. For example, the back-to-back slums built in the nineteenth century through to modern municipal housing built in the 1930s. The majority of the photographs were taken in Birmingham but also some in London where he looked at ‘old residential’ properties near to his own home in Camden Hill. London was undoubtedly one of Brandt’s favourite subjects and these photographs, taken around 1943, are amongst a much larger body of work Brandt shot in the capital city during the war-years. The Bourneville Village Trust was set up by George Cadbury in 1900 to manage the Bournville Estate, the model housing development which he created near his factory on the outskirts of Birmingham. The objects of the trust included: “the amelioration of the conditions of the working class population of Birmingham and elsewhere in Great Britain”. Many books and articles published around this time sought to address the issue of the living conditions of the working classes and photography played a key role. The images form distinct picture stories where direct contrasts are made between slum and municipal housing. Brandt also uses light very carefully within these images to emphasise these contrasts. A number of the stories follow a distinct narrative sequence – through the idea of ‘a day in the life’ – a device frequently used in the influential magazine, "Picture Post", for which Brandt often worked.
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November 2004, Birmingham
Photography monographs
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"Sowing Empire" identifies the cultivation and landscaping of colonies as one of the primary ways imperial nations justified their empires. Planting and transplanting, seeding and reshaping - the landscaping practices that emerged in the eighteenth century - are inextricable from the contested terrain of empire within which they operated. From the plantations of the(...)
Sowing empire : landscape and colonization
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"Sowing Empire" identifies the cultivation and landscaping of colonies as one of the primary ways imperial nations justified their empires. Planting and transplanting, seeding and reshaping - the landscaping practices that emerged in the eighteenth century - are inextricable from the contested terrain of empire within which they operated. From the plantations of the “nabobs” to the island gardens of narrative fiction, from William Beckford’s estate at Fonthill to Marie Antoinette’s ornamented farm, "Sowing Empire" considers imperial relandscaping - its patriarchal organization, heterosexual reproduction, and slavery - and how it contributed to the construction of imperial power. At the same time, the book shows how these picturesque landscapes and sugar plantations contained within them the seeds of resistance - how, for instance, slave gardens and the Afro-Caribbean practice of Vodou threatened authority and created new possibilities for once again transforming the landscape. In an ambitious work of wide-ranging literary, visual, and historical allusion, Jill H. Casid examines how landscaping functioned in an imperial mode that defined and remade the “heartlands” of nations as well as the contact zones and colonial peripheries in the West and East Indies. Revealing the colonial landscape as far more than an agricultural system - as a means of regulating national, sexual, and gender identities - Casid also traces how the circulation of plants and hybridity influenced agriculture and landscaping on European soil and how colonial contacts materially shaped what we take as “European.” Utilizing a wide range of both visual and written sources - maps, literature, and travel writing - this book is interdisciplinary in its methodology and in its scope. Sowing Empire explores how postcolonial and queer studies can alter art history and visual studies and, in turn, what close attention to the visual may offer to both postcolonial theorizing and historically and materially based colonial cultural studies.
Landscape Theory
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"Fuel" is an idiosyncratic, speculative dictionary of fuels, real and imagined, historical and futuristic, hopeless and utopian. Drawing on literature, film, and scientific treatises--most produced long before "climate change" was in circulation--"Fuel" argues for a distinction between energy (a system of power) and fuel (a substance, which can be thought of as(...)
Fuel : a speculative dictionary
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"Fuel" is an idiosyncratic, speculative dictionary of fuels, real and imagined, historical and futuristic, hopeless and utopian. Drawing on literature, film, and scientific treatises--most produced long before "climate change" was in circulation--"Fuel" argues for a distinction between energy (a system of power) and fuel (a substance, which can be thought of as "potentiality") as it endeavors to undo the dream that we can simply switch to renewables and all will be golden. From "Air" to "Zyklon B," entries in this unusual "dictionary" include Algae, Clathrates, Dilithium, Fleece, Goats, Theology, Whale Oil, and many, many more. The tone of the entries ranges as widely as the topics: from historical anecdotes (the Ford Fiesta "boozemobile") to eccentric readings of the classics of "energy lit" ( Germinal and Oil! ); from literary observations (a high octane Odyssey ?) to excursions into literary theory. The dictionary draws from an eccentric canon, including works by Jules Verne, George Eliot's Silas Marner , Paolo Bacigalupi's Windup Girl , and the Tom Cruise vehicle Oblivion , among others. A message from this ambitious project is that energy can be understood as a heterogeneous set of self-mystifying systems or machines that block access to thought as they fascinate us. Fuels emerge as more primal elements that the audience can grasp at various points along the way to consumption/combustion. This dictionary can help scramble our thinking about fuel--not in order to demonize energy and not in order to create a new hierarchy in which certain renewables take over from fossil fuels but instead to open up potential ways of interacting with real and imaginary substances, by wrenching them out of narrative and placing them into an idiosyncratic dictionary to be applied by readers into new narratives.
Environment and environmental theory
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From total look to total living: Alchimia, Tadao Ando, Armani, Vanessa Beecroft, Benetton, Pierre Cardin, CP Company, Courrèges, Diesel, Diller & Scofidio, Droog Design, Final Home, Dan Flavin, Tom Ford, Future Systems, Eileen Gray, Gucci, Andreas Gursky, Halston, Herzog & De Meuron, Tommy Hilfiger, Damien Hirst, Ikea, Philip Johnson, Rei Kawakubo, Calvin Klein, Rem(...)
Interior Design
January 1900, Milan
Total living : fashion, architecture, design, art, communication
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From total look to total living: Alchimia, Tadao Ando, Armani, Vanessa Beecroft, Benetton, Pierre Cardin, CP Company, Courrèges, Diesel, Diller & Scofidio, Droog Design, Final Home, Dan Flavin, Tom Ford, Future Systems, Eileen Gray, Gucci, Andreas Gursky, Halston, Herzog & De Meuron, Tommy Hilfiger, Damien Hirst, Ikea, Philip Johnson, Rei Kawakubo, Calvin Klein, Rem Koolhaas, Helmut Lang, Le Corbusier, Levi's, Mandarina Duck, Marni, Steven Meisel, Alessandro Mendini, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Issey Miyake, Moschino, Helmut Newton, Nike, NL Architects, Ora-Ito Studio, John Powson, Prada, Emilio Pucci, Ralph Lauren, Claudio Silvestrin, Hedi Slimane, Paul Smith, Ettore Sottsass, Philippe Starck, Versace, Louis Vuitton, Bruce Weber, Yves Saint Laurent. Styles and lifestyles are fast becoming uniform under labels and definitions of fashion, and as an industry and a cultural form. Total Living is the point of no return in a project which, step-by-step, develops strategies whose goal it is to offer an even more sophisticated and targeted lifestyle. It is a place where there are definitions for clothes, behavior modes, and even the atmoshpheres and spaces in which one moves. Assuming the contours of a landscape of the future, this scenario raises topical themes and problems connected with the overwhelming power of consumerism. Accompanying scholarly essays consider the thematic universes of fashion designers and brands; models of total living in 20th century history; references to total living in mass culture; living and eating; arty fashion and fashionable art; the world of fashion design; the languages of shopping; urban fashion districts; and advertising as a narrative. A rich and interconnected iconographic passage visually narrates the various forms and ramifications of total living today and in the recent past through a succession of utopias, life-projects, urban visions, architecture, special homes, stores, art galleries, museums, and editorial pages and ads from fashion and lifestyle magazines. With texts by Papla Antonelli, Francesco Bonami, Michele Ciavarella, Emanuela de Cecco, Riccardo Dirindin, Roberto Monelli, Herbert Muschamp, Chee Pearlman, Michele Sernini, Dietmar Steiner, and Deyan Sudjic.
Interior Design
Alphabet city 10 : suspects
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What is the condition of the suspect in a post-9/11 world? Do perpetual detention, ubiquitous surveillance cameras, and the legal apparatus of the USA Patriot Act target suspects accurately or generate suspicion indiscriminately? "Suspect", the latest in a series from Alphabet City and the first in its new format of topical book-length magazines, gathers hard evidence(...)
Alphabet city 10 : suspects
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What is the condition of the suspect in a post-9/11 world? Do perpetual detention, ubiquitous surveillance cameras, and the legal apparatus of the USA Patriot Act target suspects accurately or generate suspicion indiscriminately? "Suspect", the latest in a series from Alphabet City and the first in its new format of topical book-length magazines, gathers hard evidence about the fate of the suspect in a culture of suspicion with contributions from writers, artists, and filmmakers. Their testimony takes a multiplicity of forms and formats. Among them:a 24-page color comic by graphic novelist Joey Dubuc asks the reader to make narrative choices in a web of surveillance, suspicion, and fear. Harper's contributor Mark Kingwell observes that while suspicion tries to isolate the suspect, in fact we are all the suspect. Slavoj Zizek reflects on the new cultural status of the suspect after Abu Ghraib. Philosopher George Bragues argues that even as the United Nations looks for ways to discipline "suspect nations," it simply cannot succeed under current international conditions. Alphabet City editor John Knechtel interviews Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, about the legal and political strategies of the Bush administration. Sylwia Chrostowska describes what happens, in the the 1970 Italian film Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, when a corrupt official investigates himself. Screenwriter Timothy Stock and illustrator Warren Heise create a documentary in comic form about Critical Ensemble artist Steve Kurtz, charged under the bioterrorism provisions of the Patriot Act. Novelist Camilla Gibb portrays, in "Things Collapse," the terrifying effects of a "separating sickness" of unknown origin, which perhaps exists only in the fears of the population it strikes. And novelist Diana Fitzgerald Bryden follows her character Rafa Ahmed, a PFLP hijacker from the 1970s, as, many years later, she is to appear at a peace conference. Filmmaker Patricia Rozema, director of Mansfield Park and other films, contributes a 16-page film-in-a-book, "Suspect." Suspect is a non-partisan handbook on the mechanisms and machinations of suspicion for the twenty-first century national security state.
small format
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German culture in the twentieth century moved quickly and intensely, bound up with the politics of the country. Paul Renner (1878—1956) lived and worked through constituent episodes of this history, both embodying the patterns of his times and providing a critical commentary on them. In this book(...)
Graphic Designers, Monographs
January 1999, New York
Paul Renner : the art of typography
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German culture in the twentieth century moved quickly and intensely, bound up with the politics of the country. Paul Renner (1878—1956) lived and worked through constituent episodes of this history, both embodying the patterns of his times and providing a critical commentary on them. In this book Christopher Burke provides the first extended account of an essential and still underrated figure. Beginning his career in the thick of the Munich cultural renaissance, Paul Renner worked as a ‘book artist’, applying values he had learnt as a painter to this everyday item of multiple production. An early and prominent member of the Deutscher Werkbund, he was committed to the values of quality in design, always tempered by a certain sobriety of attitude and style. In the 1920s Renner engaged with the radical modernism of that time, briefly in Frankfurt, and then in a more extended phase at the printing school at Munich. Under Renner’s leadership, and with teachers such as Georg Trump and Jan Tschichold, the school produced work of quiet significance. In those years Renner undertook the design of the now ubiquitous typeface Futura. Christopher Burke’s analysis of the design process reveals the characteristic Renner approach: he took up with current tendencies, but through an extended process of finely judged development, helped to deliver a product that has long-lasting quality. In the Nazi seizure of power of 1933, Renner was dismissed from his teaching post — in days recounted here in dramatic detail — and entered a state of ‘inner emigration’. Burke’s account of the Nazi years shows Renner negotiating events with dignity. After 1945, Renner lived in retirement, but entered public discussion of design issues as a voice of experience and sanity. "Paul Renner" is a work of discovery. As part of its fresh narrative and analysis, it includes much new illustrative material and the first full bibliography of Renner’s writings.
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January 1999, New York
Graphic Designers, Monographs
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1 online resource.
[Place of publication not identified] : Lateral Addition, 2016.
A Partial Exegesis of Cricket, its Laws and Rituals.
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[Place of publication not identified] : Lateral Addition, 2016.
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The rivalry between the brilliant seventeenth-century Italian architects Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini is the stuff of legend. Possessed of enormous talent and ambition, these two artists -- one trained as a sculptor, the other as a stonecutter -- met as contemporaries in the building yards of St. Peter's in Rome and ended their lives as bitter enemies. Over(...)
The genius in the design : Bernini, Borromini, and the rivalry that transformed Rome
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The rivalry between the brilliant seventeenth-century Italian architects Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini is the stuff of legend. Possessed of enormous talent and ambition, these two artists -- one trained as a sculptor, the other as a stonecutter -- met as contemporaries in the building yards of St. Peter's in Rome and ended their lives as bitter enemies. Over the course of their careers they became the most celebrated architects of their era, designing some of the most beautiful buildings in the world and transforming the city of Rome. “The Genius in the Design” is an extraordinary tale of how these two men plotted, schemed, and intrigued to get the better of each other. Full of dramatic tension and great insight into personalities, acclaimed writer Jake Morrissey's engrossing and impeccably researched account also shows that this legendary rivalry defined the Baroque style that immediately succeeded the Renaissance and created the spectacular Roman cityscape of today. Almost exactly the same age -- Bernini was born at the end of 1598, Borromini nine months later -- they were as alike and as different as any two men could be, each a potent combination of passion and enterprise, energy and imperfection. Bernini was a precocious talent who as a youth caught the attention of Pope Paul V and became Rome's most celebrated artist, whose patrons included the wealthiest families in Europe. The city's greatest sculptor -- the creator of such masterpieces as Apollo and Daphne and the Ecstasy of St. Teresa -- Bernini would also have been Rome's pre-eminent architect had it not been for Francesco Borromini, the one man whose talent and virtuosity rivalled his own. In contrast to Bernini's easy grace, Borromini was an introvert with a fiery temper who bristled when anyone interfered with his vision; his temperament alienated him from prospective patrons and precipitated his tragic end. Like Mozart and Salieri, these two masters were inextricably linked, their dazzling work prodding the other to greater achievement while taking merciless advantage of each other's missteps. “The Genius in the Design” is their story, a fascinating narrative of beauty and tragedy marked at turns by personal animosity and astonishing artistic achievement.
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March 2005, New York
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