The Sweetsburg archives
$25.00
(available in store)
Summary:
Jonathan Reid Sévigny was born and raised in Cowansville, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, a culture so unique and full of rare and local treasures that become significant to those who grew up there but perhaps seem completely foreign and often tacky to outsiders. It isn’t the most glamorous town, nor does it have any particular sites or landmarks that one would go out(...)
The Sweetsburg archives
Actions:
Price:
$25.00
(available in store)
Summary:
Jonathan Reid Sévigny was born and raised in Cowansville, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, a culture so unique and full of rare and local treasures that become significant to those who grew up there but perhaps seem completely foreign and often tacky to outsiders. It isn’t the most glamorous town, nor does it have any particular sites or landmarks that one would go out of his / her way to visit. In The Sweetsburg Archives Sévigny is attempting to use his Quebeçois boyhood as an archetype for the relationship between the individual, the hometown, and the bewildering beauty that connects the two. As adults, we tend to romanticize our youth, we try and remember the best things about our coming of age, but we’re also scarred by certain events which we wish we could go back and change; fight back, kiss back. At a glance Sévigny’s depictions of Cowansville seem crisply utopian, a neat little playground of nice boys and girls. However, a closer look reveals their human forms are corrupt, splayed, eaten, and absorbed by animal fraternities, by swords of ritualistic death, by minute veils of the macrocosmic sky in all its unknown intricacies. The scene becomes otherworldly in the kid’s play, pushing us to remember that what is around and inside is both innocent and dirty, violent and soft, and constantly revised.
Illustration
journals and magazines
The senses and society.
Description:
1 online resource (volumes) : illustrations
Oxford : Berg Publishers, ©2006-
journals and magazines
Oxford : Berg Publishers, ©2006-
journals and magazines
journals and magazines
Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press.
journals and magazines
journals and magazines
Thousand Oaks, CA : Sage Publications, 2001-
$58.95
(available in store)
Summary:
"In 2005, more than ever, architecture is annihilating places, banalizing them, violating them. Sometimes it replaces the landscape, creates it in its own image, which is nothing but another way of effacing it÷ At a time when we rush across the world faster and faster, when we listen to and watch the same global networks, share feelings about the same disasters, when we(...)
Jean Nouvel: Louisiana museum of modern art
Actions:
Price:
$58.95
(available in store)
Summary:
"In 2005, more than ever, architecture is annihilating places, banalizing them, violating them. Sometimes it replaces the landscape, creates it in its own image, which is nothing but another way of effacing it÷ At a time when we rush across the world faster and faster, when we listen to and watch the same global networks, share feelings about the same disasters, when we dance to the same hits, watch the same matches, when they flood us with the same films, in which the star is global, when the president of one country wants to rule the world, when we shop in cloned shopping centers, work behind the same eternal curtain walls÷and when whatever good might come of this forms no part of global priorities÷the global economy is accentuating the effects of the dominant architecture, the type that claims Îwe don't need context.' And yet debate on this galloping frenzy does not exist: architectural criticism, invoking the limits of the discipline, is content with aesthetic and stylistic reflections devoid of any analysis of the real, and ignores the crucial historical clash that--more insistently every day--sets a global architecture against an architecture of situations, generic architecture against an architecture of specificity." So says the international architecture star Jean Nouvel in his manifesto, published here in 12 languages, along with images of his recently completed Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark.
Architecture Monographs
$123.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Architecture critic Paul Goldberger tells the story of an extraordinary house on the Atlantic Double Dunes in East Hampton-- ''Blue dream,'' the result of a collaboration between collectors Julie Reyes Taubman and Robert Taubman, architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, builder Ed Bulgin, landscape architect Michael Boucher and designer Michael Lewis, who sought to renew the(...)
Blue dream and the legacy of modernism in the Hamptons. Diller + Scofidio + Renfro
Actions:
Price:
$123.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Architecture critic Paul Goldberger tells the story of an extraordinary house on the Atlantic Double Dunes in East Hampton-- ''Blue dream,'' the result of a collaboration between collectors Julie Reyes Taubman and Robert Taubman, architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, builder Ed Bulgin, landscape architect Michael Boucher and designer Michael Lewis, who sought to renew the legacy of modernist architecture and art in the Hamptons. Goldberger offers insight into the complex process by which an architectural idea generated a work that stands as the most striking addition of our time to the roster of architecturally ambitious modernist houses on Long Island. As he notes, "There are relatively few books devoted to the architecture of a single house, but what is clear if you read any of them is that they are stories about clients as much as about architects." So it is with ''Blue dream.'' The Taubmans were inspired by the avant-garde spirit of artists and architects who settled and worked in the Hamptons and set out to create a house like no other, a house whose complex curving forms could only be built using the composite material used to make fighter jets. Iwan Baan's photographic portfolio documents ''Blue dream'' across four seasons. Goldberger’s text is illustrated with images of earlier modernist houses that inspired the project, as well as documentation of the design process involved in the making of ''Blue dream'' itself.
Architecture Monographs
$39.95
(available to order)
Summary:
"Substance over Spectacle" presents the best and brightest architectural work in Canada in the last ten years, providing a representative sample of Canadian architectural practice since the early nineties, and demonstrating a specific Canadian sensibility that is unlike any architectural trend elsewhere in the world. The book also explores issues of viability,(...)
Substance over spectacle : contemporary Canadian architecture
Actions:
Price:
$39.95
(available to order)
Summary:
"Substance over Spectacle" presents the best and brightest architectural work in Canada in the last ten years, providing a representative sample of Canadian architectural practice since the early nineties, and demonstrating a specific Canadian sensibility that is unlike any architectural trend elsewhere in the world. The book also explores issues of viability, sustainability, community, and utility as they relate to the Canadian architectural experience. Included is the work of twenty-five architects from every area of the country, each represented by an installation of their own design and construction. In addition to photographs of the finished projects, "Substance over Spectacle" also features images of models and architectural drawings, together with analytical/critical text demonstrating the architectural ideas embedded in the work. Five essays deal with different aspects of contemporary Canadian architecture, written by some of Canada’s leading thinkers on architecture: George Baird, Sherry McKay, Marco Polo, Georges Adamczyk, and Andrew Gruft. Publication of the book coincides with an exhibition of the same name mounted by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia, in April 2005, during the international conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, which is taking place at UBC. "Substance over Spectacle", the first national critical overview of Canadian architecture in some eighteen years, offers fresh new perspectives on how our architecture defines us as we approach the first mid-decade of the new century.
Architecture in Canada
$23.95
(available to order)
Summary:
More than ever, architectural design is seen as a means to promote commercial goals rather than as an end in itself. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, for example, simply cannot be considered apart from its intended role as a catalyst for the economic revitalization of Bilbao and its ability to attract tourist dollars, regardless of its architectural merits. A(...)
Architectural Theory
November 2005, Minneapolis, London
Commodification and spectacle in architecture
Actions:
Price:
$23.95
(available to order)
Summary:
More than ever, architectural design is seen as a means to promote commercial goals rather than as an end in itself. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, for example, simply cannot be considered apart from its intended role as a catalyst for the economic revitalization of Bilbao and its ability to attract tourist dollars, regardless of its architectural merits. A built environment intended to seduce consumers is more likely to offer instant gratification than to invite independent thought and reflection. But how harmful, if at all, is this unprecedented commercialization of architecture? Framed with an introduction by Kenneth Frampton, the contributions to "Commodification and spectacle in architecture" stake out a variety of positions in the debate over the extent to which it is possible—or desirable—to escape from, resist, or suggest plausible alternatives to the dominant culture of consumer capitalism. Rejecting any dreamy nostalgia for an idealized present or past in which design is completely divorced from commerce—and, in some cases, celebrating the pleasures of spectacle—the individual essays range from indictments of particular architects and critiques of the profession to broader concerns about what the phenomenon of commodification means for the practice of democracy and the health of society. Bringing together an impressive and varied group of critics and practitioners, "Commodification and spectacle in architecture" will help to sharpen the discussion of how design can respond to our hypercommodified culture.
Architectural Theory
Obsidian situations
$20.00
(available in store)
Summary:
Tricia Middleton’s debut verse-novel brings the artist’s genius for summoning the psychic life of the object world to the page, here trading in the resonant material vocabulary that she has honed to perfection conjuring the wayward spirits of late-stage capitalism in sculptural form, for the equally resplendent wordplay of incisive observational poetry. Ostensibly set(...)
Obsidian situations
Actions:
Price:
$20.00
(available in store)
Summary:
Tricia Middleton’s debut verse-novel brings the artist’s genius for summoning the psychic life of the object world to the page, here trading in the resonant material vocabulary that she has honed to perfection conjuring the wayward spirits of late-stage capitalism in sculptural form, for the equally resplendent wordplay of incisive observational poetry. Ostensibly set in present-day Paris, ''Obsidian situations'' spans centuries, telling a story about the epigenetics of suffering, survival, and redemption in social and cultural form. Alternating between myriad personae—sometimes artist or artwork, poet or amorphous cloud—the anonymous, decidedly female, narrator that serves as our guide to the city of light channels the souls of works of art and ideas, of artists, philosophers, courtesans and, most heartrending of all, des Enfants-Trouvés through incantatory soliloquies that call to account the half-life of Enlightenment ideals propping up the soft and saggy moral economy of the L’age Anthropocentric. As a force of self-definition and a body objectified—and so subject to the same degradation as any and all things—our champion encounters ‘situations’ that are in equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, horrifying and wretched, breathtakingly beautiful, poignant, and mad. It’s a world of museums and collectors, artists and curators, lovers and mothers, daughters and others, charged with desire and repulsion, longing and rejection, death and devastation that, ironically, can only be transformed in art and in poetry and in dreams.
Literature and poetry
$79.95
(available to order)
Summary:
This book reveals that historic sites and buildings have much to tell us about women's history. It documents women's contributions to the historic preservation movement at places such as Mount Vernon and explores women's history at several existing landmarks such as historic homes, as wells as in a wider array of cultural landscapes ranging from nurses' residences in(...)
Architectural Theory
November 2002, Baltimore
Restoring womens' history through historic preservation
Actions:
Price:
$79.95
(available to order)
Summary:
This book reveals that historic sites and buildings have much to tell us about women's history. It documents women's contributions to the historic preservation movement at places such as Mount Vernon and explores women's history at several existing landmarks such as historic homes, as wells as in a wider array of cultural landscapes ranging from nurses' residences in Montreal to prostitutes' quarters in Los Angeles. The book includes essays on six exemplary projects that have advanced the integration of women's history into historic preservation and closes with three perspectives on preservation policy and practice. National in scope but applicable in any locality, Restoring Women's History through Historic Preservation combines the most important recently published information with the best new research and covers many national, state, and local initiatives of the past decade. It collects in one volume the seminal work of twenty academic historians, preservationists, and professionals at parks and monuments throughout the country who examine practical ways to represent women's history through historic preservation programs. Over the past several decades, work in the areas of women's history and historic preservation has done much to change not only how we regard history but also how we might broaden the very notion of what we consider historical. This volume reflects a growing commitment to historic preservation and shows how practitioners in both fields can benefit from an exchange of insights and create more effective public history.
Architectural Theory