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This book celebrates, by way of a dual narrative, the Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm, designed and furnished by Gio Ponti to a commission from Carlo Maurilio Lerici. The essays aim to examine the events linked to the commission of the project itself, and to the planning and realization of the building together with its interior design. The volume contains a(...)
Enchanting architecture: Gio Ponti's Italian Cultural institute in Stockholm
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This book celebrates, by way of a dual narrative, the Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm, designed and furnished by Gio Ponti to a commission from Carlo Maurilio Lerici. The essays aim to examine the events linked to the commission of the project itself, and to the planning and realization of the building together with its interior design. The volume contains a selection of images taken from the Institute's historical archive, as well as a new photographic reportage on the architectural and design elements featured in this building. It is well-known that Ponti took a great interest in Sweden (suffice it to think of all the space that was devoted to Swedish design in the pages of the magazine Domus from the early 1950s), yet it is fascinating to learn more and find answers regarding the dynamics that lay behind the making of this structure. Indeed, Gio Ponti managed to surpass the Swedish architect Ture Wennerholm's original idea, to breathe life into a project where the spaces, albeit organized according to function, succeed one another in a harmonious play of broken lines and different hues. Assisting him in the task were Pier Luigi Nervi and Ferruccio Rossetti. Gio Ponti gave life to a "classical modern" project in which art and architecture merge, proof that he had overcome the limits that were set by the trends characterizing that day and age. In so doing, he laid the groundwork for a new course in the cultural relations between Italy and Sweden.
Architecture Monographs
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This is the first installation of Forensic Architecture Reports, a series of books each dedicated to a single FA investigation, with insights into the agency’s research methodologies, additional texts from and interviews with collaborators, and dossiers of documents that shaped the investigation in question. On the evening of 4 August 2011, Mark Duggan was shot and(...)
Forensic Architecture, reports #1: The police shooting of Mark Duggan
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This is the first installation of Forensic Architecture Reports, a series of books each dedicated to a single FA investigation, with insights into the agency’s research methodologies, additional texts from and interviews with collaborators, and dossiers of documents that shaped the investigation in question. On the evening of 4 August 2011, Mark Duggan was shot and killed by the police in the north London neighbourhood of Tottenham after the minicab in which he was traveling was pulled over by a team of undercover officers. The team had begun following Duggan shortly after receiving intelligence that he was in possession of a gun, and the officer who shot him testified that he had seen, for a ‘split second’, Duggan aiming the gun at him after he had exited the minicab. However, the gun was not found next to Duggan’s body on the pavement. According to the police, they discovered it in a patch of grass some seven meters away. After a coroner’s inquest ruled Duggan’s killing ‘lawful’ and the police watchdog organisation issued a report siding with the officers’ version of events, the Duggan family’s legal team commissioned Forensic Architecture to conduct an investigation into the critical question at the heart of the case: How did the gun end up in the grass? ?With no video footage of the shooting itself, Forensic Architecture had to rely primarily on the written and oral testimony of the officers involved to develop a spatial investigation designed to test the plausibility of the police’s narrative and to examine whether the officers themselves could have planted the gun...
Social
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The narrative of the artist's life and work is one of the oldest models in the Western literature of the visual arts. In "Art as existence", Gabriele Guercio investigates the metamorphosis of the artist's monograph, tracing its formal and conceptual trajectories from Vasari's sixteenth-century "Lives of the painters, sculptors, and architects" (which provided the model(...)
Art as existence : the artist's monograph and its project
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The narrative of the artist's life and work is one of the oldest models in the Western literature of the visual arts. In "Art as existence", Gabriele Guercio investigates the metamorphosis of the artist's monograph, tracing its formal and conceptual trajectories from Vasari's sixteenth-century "Lives of the painters, sculptors, and architects" (which provided the model and source for the genre) through its apogee in the nineteenth century and decline in the twentieth. He looks at the legacy of the life-and-work model and considers its prospects in an intellectual universe of deconstructionism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonialism. Since Vasari, the monograph has been notable for its fluidity and variety; it can be scrupulous and exact, probing and revelatory, poetic and imaginative, or any combination of these. In the nineteenth century, the monograph combined art-historical, biographical, and critical methods, and even added elements of fiction. Guercio explores some significant books that illustrate key phases in the model's evolution, including works by Gustav Friedrich Waagen, A. C. Quatremère de Quincy, Johann David Passavant, Bernard Berenson, and others. The hidden project of the artist's monograph, Guercio claims, comes from a utopian impulse; by commuting biography into art and art into biography, the life-and-work model equates art and existence, construing otherwise distinct works of an artist as chapters of a life story. Guercio calls for a contemporary reconsideration of the life-and-work model, arguing that the ultimate legacy of the artist's monograph does not lie in its established modes of writing but in its greater project and in the intimate portrait that we gain of the nature of creativity.
Art Theory
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Today, the physical scale model is a centrepiece for design education, celebrated practices and architecture’s public relations. The development of digital fabrication devices has made model manufacture even more pervasive. The physical model is the most accessible form of architectural communication. Clients and the general public seem to immediately respond to and(...)
Architecture and the miniature : models
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Today, the physical scale model is a centrepiece for design education, celebrated practices and architecture’s public relations. The development of digital fabrication devices has made model manufacture even more pervasive. The physical model is the most accessible form of architectural communication. Clients and the general public seem to immediately respond to and understand the model, over blueprints and computer simulations. Many architects use finished models for presentations, competitions and exhibitions. Others also embrace sketch models as quick, economic and flexible generative tools. It is only with the rise of the virtual that the advantages and disadvantages of more traditional models can be fully evaluated. As attested by this book, we are now at an important watershed for the model in architecture. Practitioners and educators alike are seeking to fully understand the multiplicity of model types and how they might be strategically deployed at appropriate stages in the design process. The historic role that the model has played is outlined with attention paid to Alberti, John Soane, the Bauhaus and education reforms. A cultural history is offered by examining models in the guise of toys, food, cinema, product design, souvenirs, narrative and art. Model theories are considered and tied to specific examples in the field. New technologies and creative combinations of traditional model-making techniques are evaluated. Kinetic, multi-media, nightscape and interdisciplinary models reveal the broad scope and exceptional versatility offered by this important tool. Models: Architecture and the Miniature focuses on current model use and experimentation by architects across the globe including David Chipperfield, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Daniel Libeskind, Greg Lynn and UN Studio.
Models
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Who are you? And how can you prove it? How were individuals described and identified by people who had never seen them before, in the centuries before photography and fingerprinting, in a world without centralized administrations, where names and addresses were constantly changing? In "Who are you?", Valentin Groebner traces the early modern European history of(...)
Who are you? : identification, deception, and surveillance in early modern Europe
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Who are you? And how can you prove it? How were individuals described and identified by people who had never seen them before, in the centuries before photography and fingerprinting, in a world without centralized administrations, where names and addresses were constantly changing? In "Who are you?", Valentin Groebner traces the early modern European history of identification practices and identity papers. The documents, seals, stamps, and signatures were — and are — powerful tools that created the double of a person in writ and bore the indelible signs of bureaucratic authenticity. Ultimately, as Groebner lucidly explains, they revealed as much about their makers’ illustory fantasies as they did about their bearers’ actual identity. The bureaucratic desire to register and control the population created, from the sixteenth century onward, an intricate administrative system for tracking individual identities. Most important, the proof of one’s identity was intimately linked and determined by the identification papers the authorities demanded and endlessly supplied. At the same time, these papers and practices gave birth to two uncanny doppelgängers of administrative identity procedures : the spy who craftily forged official documents and passports, and the impostor who dissimulated and mimed any individual he so disired. Through careful research and powerful narrative, Groebner recounts the complicated and bizarre stories of the many ways in which identities were stolen, created, and doubled. Groebner argues that identity papers cannot be interpreted literally as pure and simple documents. They are themselves pieces of history, histories of individuals and individuality, papers that both document and transform their owner’s identity — from Renaissance vagrants and gypsies to the illegal immigrants of today who remain "sans papiers", without papers.
Architectural 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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"The Artist as Producer" reshapes our understanding of the fundamental contribution of the Russian avant-garde to the development of modernism. Focusing on the single most important hotbed of Constructivist activity in the early 1920s - the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) in Moscow - Maria Gough offers a powerful reinterpretation of the work of the first group of(...)
The artist as producer : Russian Constructivism in revolution
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"The Artist as Producer" reshapes our understanding of the fundamental contribution of the Russian avant-garde to the development of modernism. Focusing on the single most important hotbed of Constructivist activity in the early 1920s - the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) in Moscow - Maria Gough offers a powerful reinterpretation of the work of the first group of artists to call themselves Constructivists. Her lively narrative ranges from famous figures such as Aleksandr Rodchenko to others who are much less well known, such as Karl Ioganson, a key member of the state-funded INKhUK whose work paved the way for an eventual dematerialization of the integral art object. Through the mining of untapped archives and collections in Russia and Latvia and a close reading of key Constructivist works, Gough highlights fundamental differences among the Moscow group in their handling of the experimental new sculptural form - the spatial construction - and of their subsequent shift to industrial production. "The Artist as Producer" upends the standard view that the Moscow group's formalism and abstraction were incompatible with the sociopolitical imperatives of the new Communist state. It challenges the common equation of Constructivism with functionalism and utilitarianism by delineating a contrary tendency toward non-determinism and an alternate orientation to process rather than product. Finally, the book counters the popular perception that Constructivism failed in its ambition to enter production by presenting the first-ever case study of how a Constructivist could, and in fact did, operate within an industrial environment. "The Artist as Producer" offers provocative new perspectives on three critical issues - formalism, functionalism, and failure - that are of central importance to our understanding not only of the Soviet phenomenon but also of the European vanguards more generally.
Architecture since 1900, Europe
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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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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