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Some central questions in the natural and social sciences can’t be answered by controlled laboratory experiments, often considered to be the hallmark of the scientific method. This impossibility holds for any science concerned with the past. In addition, many manipulative experiments, while possible, would be considered immoral or illegal. One has to devise other methods(...)
Natural experiments of history
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Some central questions in the natural and social sciences can’t be answered by controlled laboratory experiments, often considered to be the hallmark of the scientific method. This impossibility holds for any science concerned with the past. In addition, many manipulative experiments, while possible, would be considered immoral or illegal. One has to devise other methods of observing, describing, and explaining the world. In the historical disciplines, a fruitful approach has been to use natural experiments or the comparative method. This book consists of eight comparative studies drawn from history, archeology, economics, economic history, geography, and political science. The studies cover a spectrum of approaches, ranging from a non-quantitative narrative style in the early chapters to quantitative statistical analyses in the later chapters. The studies range from a simple two-way comparison of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola, to comparisons of 81 Pacific islands and 233 areas of India. The societies discussed are contemporary ones, literate societies of recent centuries, and non-literate past societies. Geographically, they include the United States, Mexico, Brazil, western Europe, tropical Africa, India, Siberia, Australia, New Zealand, and other Pacific islands. In an Afterword, the editors discuss how to cope with methodological problems common to these and other natural experiments of history.
Urban Theory
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9/10 Stock Orchard Street, colloquially known as the Straw House, is a house and an office designed by two architects for their own use. Completed in 2000, the buildings were experimental in design, execution and inhabitation, and have resisted categorization, challenged received wisdom and provoked debate, especially among architectural critics. With access to all(...)
Around & About: Stock Orchard Street
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9/10 Stock Orchard Street, colloquially known as the Straw House, is a house and an office designed by two architects for their own use. Completed in 2000, the buildings were experimental in design, execution and inhabitation, and have resisted categorization, challenged received wisdom and provoked debate, especially among architectural critics. With access to all the material records of the project, this book responds to that debate by presenting multi-faceted narratives from a wide range of writers that have been invited to reflect both positively and negatively on what the buildings represent and how they have performed. Using the buildings as the central case study, it situates them in a broader cultural context, revealing the breadth of conversations and issues engaged by architecture. Highly illustrated with original material, including the authors’ own drawings and with specially-commissioned photographs, this book discusses theory, practice, ethics, material culture, the media, narrative, feminism, sustainability and construction, offering illuminating and sometimes surprising conclusions relevant to lay, professional and academic readers. While offering a wide ranging set of approaches and critiques of its subject, this book provides a unique insight into a building’s conception, construction and reception, and in turn facilitates the engagement with the issues facing architectural practice today.
Architecture Monographs
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"The Unseen Eye" presents a idiosyncratic and compelling collection of photographs assembled around a particular theme: in each image, the gaze of the subject is averted, the face obscured or the eyes firmly closed. The pictures present a catalog of anti-portraiture, characterized at first glance by what its subjects conceal, not by what the camera reveals. Amassed over(...)
The unseen eye: photographs from the unconscious
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"The Unseen Eye" presents a idiosyncratic and compelling collection of photographs assembled around a particular theme: in each image, the gaze of the subject is averted, the face obscured or the eyes firmly closed. The pictures present a catalog of anti-portraiture, characterized at first glance by what its subjects conceal, not by what the camera reveals. Amassed over the course of 30 years by New York collector W.M. Hunt, the collection includes works by masters such as Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Imogen Cunningham, William Klein, Robert Mapplethorpe and Robert Frank, as well as works by lesser-known artists and vernacular images. Hunt's instinctive pursuit of striking images has resulted in a collection that manages to evoke a picture of humanity from birth to death, with all the associated nuances of memory, wit, eroticism, fear, grief and horror. More than 350 evocative and frequently surreal images are brilliantly sequenced in this volume; the cumulative effect is unnerving and riveting. Most critically, the images are drawn together by the narrative of the collector himself, in a highly personal monologue that weaves throughout the book, in which Hunt offers his own perceptive responses to the images he has gathered over many years. The result is a series of surprising epiphanies about how and why one collects.
Photography Collections
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Why Don't American Cities Burn? traces the collision of urban transformation with the rightward-moving social politics of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America. He shows how the bifurcation of black social structures produced a new African American inequality and traces the shift from images of a pathological black "underclass" to praise of the(...)
Why don't American cities burn?
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Why Don't American Cities Burn? traces the collision of urban transformation with the rightward-moving social politics of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America. He shows how the bifurcation of black social structures produced a new African American inequality and traces the shift from images of a pathological black "underclass" to praise of the entrepreneurial poor who take advantage of new technologies of poverty work to find the beginning of the path to the middle class. He explores the reasons American cities since the early 1970s have remained relatively free of collective violence while black men in bleak inner-city neighborhoods have turned their rage inward on one another rather than on the agents and symbols of a culture and political economy that exclude them. The book ends with a meditation on how the political left and right have come to believe that urban transformation is inevitably one of failure and decline abetted by the response of government to deindustrialization, poverty, and race. How, Katz asks, can we construct a new narrative that acknowledges the dark side of urban history even as it demonstrates the capacity of government to address the problems of cities and their residents? How can we create a politics of modest hope?
Urban Theory
Francesca Woodman's notebook
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The American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) spent a brief portion of her childhood in the countryside around Florence, living with her parents in an old farm whose dilapidated interiors were later to influence the backdrops of her mesmerizing self-portraits. In 1977 she returned to Italy, studying in Rome on a year-long RISD honors program. During this tenure,(...)
Francesca Woodman's notebook
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The American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) spent a brief portion of her childhood in the countryside around Florence, living with her parents in an old farm whose dilapidated interiors were later to influence the backdrops of her mesmerizing self-portraits. In 1977 she returned to Italy, studying in Rome on a year-long RISD honors program. During this tenure, Woodman found five tattered school exercise books, printed in 1906, side-stapled and inscribed in fine cursive penmanship with notes from physics lectures or poems in English and Italian. To these evocative objects, Woodman--already fully formed as the photographer we recognize and admire today--added her characteristic black-and-white photographs, either as small paper prints or as prints made on transparent film that allows the writing beneath to show through, further embellishing them with her own captions or remarks. This facsimile edition of one of these notebooks was selected for publication by Woodman's mother and father as an artist's book of particular beauty and revelatory content that provides unprecedented insight into the emphatically narrative logic of Woodman's photography. Housed in a lightweight printed box, it includes an afterword by George Woodman, Francesca's father, that contextualizes the work within the photographer's artist's book production.
Contemporary Art Monographs
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Today, R. M. Schindler's Kings Road House is celebrated as an icon of early modern architecture, but this wasn't the case when it was finished in 1922. Though Schindler and his wife Pauline recognized its genius early on, its radical appearance was - and remains - incomprehensible to many. This book is an incisive examination of the house, placing it in the context of the(...)
Schindler, Kings Road, and Southern California modernism
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Today, R. M. Schindler's Kings Road House is celebrated as an icon of early modern architecture, but this wasn't the case when it was finished in 1922. Though Schindler and his wife Pauline recognized its genius early on, its radical appearance was - and remains - incomprehensible to many. This book is an incisive examination of the house, placing it in the context of the architect's career and clarifying its influence on modern architecture and its practitioners. Little-known aspects of Schindler's life, his relationship with his mentors, and the development of his unique theories about space enrich the narrative. Robert Sweeney focuses on the construction of the house and the people who lived, worked, and performed there, demonstrating the building's significance in the social history of Southern California. He includes new research on Schindler's educational and personal background in Vienna and a discussion of the critical influence of Pauline Schindler in formulating the social underpinnings of the house. Judith Sheine's essay places the house in the context of Schindler's career, in which it established the basis of the spatial development of his work. She also examines the influence of the house on the work of numerous architects from Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry.
Architecture Monographs
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In the dazzling global metropolis of Shanghai, what has it meant to call this city home? In this account—part microhistory, part memoir—Jie Li salvages intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai alleyways from the Republican, Maoist, and post-Mao eras. Exploring three dimensions of private life—territories,(...)
Shanghai homes: palimpsests of private life
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In the dazzling global metropolis of Shanghai, what has it meant to call this city home? In this account—part microhistory, part memoir—Jie Li salvages intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai alleyways from the Republican, Maoist, and post-Mao eras. Exploring three dimensions of private life—territories, artifacts, and gossip—Li re-creates the sounds, smells, look, and feel of home over a tumultuous century. First built by British and Japanese companies in 1915 and 1927, the two homes at the center of this narrative were located in an industrial part of the former "International Settlement." Before their recent demolition, they were nestled in Shanghai's labyrinthine alleyways, which housed more than half of the city's population from the Sino-Japanese War to the Cultural Revolution. Through interviews with her own family members as well as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers, Li weaves a complex social tapestry reflecting the lived experiences of ordinary people struggling to absorb and adapt to major historical change. These voices include workers, intellectuals, Communists, Nationalists, foreigners, compradors, wives, concubines, and children who all fought for a foothold and haven in this city, witnessing spectacles so full of farce and pathos they could only be whispered as secret histories.
Contemporary Asian Architecture
What is landscape?
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Landscape, John Stilgoe tells us, is a noun. From the old Frisian language (once spoken in coastal parts of the Netherlands and Germany), it meant shoveled land: landschop. Sixteenth-century Englishmen misheard or mispronounced this as landskep, which became landskip, then landscape, designating the surface of the earth shaped for human habitation. In What Is Landscape?(...)
What is landscape?
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Landscape, John Stilgoe tells us, is a noun. From the old Frisian language (once spoken in coastal parts of the Netherlands and Germany), it meant shoveled land: landschop. Sixteenth-century Englishmen misheard or mispronounced this as landskep, which became landskip, then landscape, designating the surface of the earth shaped for human habitation. In What Is Landscape? Stilgoe maps the discovery of landscape by putting words to things, zeroing in on landscape’s essence but also leading sideways expeditions through such sources as children’s picture books, folklore, deeds, antique terminology, out-of-print dictionaries, and conversations with locals. (“What is that?” “Well, it’s not really a slough, not really, it’s a bayou . . .”) He offers a written narrative lexicon of landscape as word, concept, and path to discoveries. What Is Landscape? is an invitation to walk, to notice, to ask: to see a sandcastle with a pinwheel at the beach and think of Dutch windmills—icons of triumph, markers of territory won from the sea; to walk in the woods and be amused by the Elizabethans’ misuse of the Latin silvaticus (people of the woods) to coin the word savages; to see in a suburban front lawn a representation of the meadow of a medieval freehold.
Landscape Theory
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This book, conceived as a project at the Architectural Association in London, leads a narrative through a series of architectural drawings, texts and images. At its core lies an urban proposal for the transformation of one of London's biggest and most congested traffic intersections,(...)
Yellow rhythms : a roundabout for London
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This book, conceived as a project at the Architectural Association in London, leads a narrative through a series of architectural drawings, texts and images. At its core lies an urban proposal for the transformation of one of London's biggest and most congested traffic intersections, Vauxhall Cross, into a giant cross-Thames roundabout. In this book episodes of urban life, political measures and financial strategies contrast with the architectural and urban proposals that are weaved into its form. An allegorical reading of the rhythm of the junction's traffic control system structures the book: green, yellow and red episodes alternate with one another in a repetitive succession and use Levebre's analytical system of 'Rhythmanalysis' to interpret contemporary London as a force-field of rhythms with different scales and durations. Those rhythms, by which the social, political and economic powers manifest themselves, are shown to act upon the site and the individuals within it. If the rhythm of the traffic lights stands for a system of successive incidents, the transformation of the site into a roundabout suggests continuous flow capable of liberating and utilizing these urban forces. The book ends therefore by suggesting a strategic proposal in which the inner area of the roundabout becomes a laboratory, a speculative arena for the testing of alternative urban futures.
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October 1999, Rotterdam
Urban Theory
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Contemporary engagements with documentary are multifaceted and complex, reaching across disciplines to explore the intersections of politics and aesthetics, representation and reality, truth and illusion. Discarding the old notions of “fly on the wall” immediacy or quasi-scientific aspirations to objectivity, critics now understand documentary not as the neutral picturing(...)
Documentary Across Disciplines
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Contemporary engagements with documentary are multifaceted and complex, reaching across disciplines to explore the intersections of politics and aesthetics, representation and reality, truth and illusion. Discarding the old notions of “fly on the wall” immediacy or quasi-scientific aspirations to objectivity, critics now understand documentary not as the neutral picturing of reality but as a way of coming to terms with reality through images and narrative. This book collects writings by artists, filmmakers, art historians, poets, literary critics, anthropologists, theorists, and others, to investigate one of the most vital areas of cultural practice: documentary. Their investigations take many forms—essays, personal memoirs, interviews, poetry. Contemporary art turned away from the medium and toward the world, using photography and the moving image to take up global perspectives. Documentary filmmakers, meanwhile, began to work in the gallery context. The contributors consider the hybridization of art and film, and the “documentary turn” of contemporary art. They discuss digital technology and the “crisis of faith” caused by manipulation and generation of images, and the fading of the progressive social mandate that has historically characterized documentary. They consider invisible data and visible evidence; problems of archiving; and surveillance and biometric control, forms of documentation that call for “informatic opacity” as a means of evasion.