books
Arcade 20.3 spring 2002
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A hodge-podge: fiction, photos, poetry, catalogs, historical facts, a cartoon—the narrowly objective hard by the expansively subjective. The plurality of genres pleased me. Any account of our territory bereft of, say, facts, poetry, projections, wild speculation, polemics, or sketchy memory, would seem to me to be fatally compromised. As the Office for Soft Architecture(...)
Arcade 20.3 spring 2002
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A hodge-podge: fiction, photos, poetry, catalogs, historical facts, a cartoon—the narrowly objective hard by the expansively subjective. The plurality of genres pleased me. Any account of our territory bereft of, say, facts, poetry, projections, wild speculation, polemics, or sketchy memory, would seem to me to be fatally compromised. As the Office for Soft Architecture puts it in their Fourth Walk: “[We] painted the place in the polis of the sour heat and the pulse beneath our coats, the specific entry of our exhalations and words into the atmosphere…Our method was patience. We would slowly absorb each image until we were what we had deliberately chosen to become. Of course then we ourselves were the documents; we acquired a fragility. Hello my Delicate we would repeat when we met by chance in the streets under the rows of posters Hello my Delicate.” Matthew Stadler is a novelist and essayist whose writing about design has appeared in Nest magazine, Wiederhal, Frieze, The Guardian, and The Seattle Times. He is the editor of Clear Cut Press, a new publishing and distribution company based in Astoria, OR. editor@clearcutpress.com. Tae Won Yu is an artist working in Olympia, Washington. His previous projects include designs for Built To Spill, photographs for Nest magazine, and illlustrations for The Stranger.
books
March 2002, Seattle
sale books
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From April to October in 1964 and 1965, some 52 million people from around the world flocked to the New York World's Fair, an experience that lives on in the memory of many individuals and in America's collective consciousness. Lawrence R. Samuel offers a thought-provoking portrait of this seminal event and of the cultural climate that surrounded it, countering critics'(...)
October 2007, Syracuse
The end of innocence : The 1964-1965 New York world's fair
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From April to October in 1964 and 1965, some 52 million people from around the world flocked to the New York World's Fair, an experience that lives on in the memory of many individuals and in America's collective consciousness. Lawrence R. Samuel offers a thought-provoking portrait of this seminal event and of the cultural climate that surrounded it, countering critics' assessment of the Fair as the "ugly duckling" of global expositions. Although much attention has been paid to the controversial role of Fair president Robert Moses, who tried to use the event to ensure his personal legacy, the Fair itself was for the great majority of visitors an overwhelmingly positive, often inspirational, and sometimes transcendent experience that truly delivered on its theme of "peace through understanding." Much of the Fair's popularity, Samuel suggests, stemmed from its looking backward as much as forward, offering visitors sanctuary from the cultural storm that was rapidly approaching in the mid-1960s. Opening just five months after President Kennedy's assassination, the Fair allowed millions to celebrate international brotherhood while the conflict in Vietnam came to a boil. The Fair glorified the postwar American dream of limitless optimism just as a counterculture of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll was coming into being. It was, in short, the last gasp of the American Dream: The End of the Innocence.
Notes from Russia
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The world of Russian public notices is fascinating, bizarre and saturated in tragic-comedy: "An old woman. Left home and has not returned. Small, hunchbacked. Wears: a blue dress, red wool cardigan, a white handkerchief with red flowers on her head, grey slippers on her feet. Does not have memory." The authors and readers of these usually handwritten notices are members(...)
Notes from Russia
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The world of Russian public notices is fascinating, bizarre and saturated in tragic-comedy: "An old woman. Left home and has not returned. Small, hunchbacked. Wears: a blue dress, red wool cardigan, a white handkerchief with red flowers on her head, grey slippers on her feet. Does not have memory." The authors and readers of these usually handwritten notices are members of Russia's underclass, made visible by these acts of public address which so often go unread. In this secret economy of exchange and communication, you can swap a voucher for an airplane or help to find a missing earring lost "during the fireworks on the Day of Cosmonauts." All over Russia, all sorts of surfaces, stationary or mobile, have been papered over with such notices. The folklorist, lexicographer and contributor to the related publications Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia Volumes I and II, Alexei Plutser-Sarno, has been collecting these public notices from all over Russia for many years. Notes From Russia features the highlights of Plutser-Sarno's collection, which, combined with his commentaries, tells an alternative story of recent Russian culture. Designed as part of Fuel's acclaimed Russian series of books, and printed on an unusual mix of white and brown craft paper, Notes From Russia is a moving and vital contribution to the documentation of vernacular graphics.
Public Space
David Freund: gas stop
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In the twentieth century, any American driver or passenger would stop at gas stations at least weekly, and not just for gas. Gas stations were also oases offering food and drink, car repairs, directions, maps and, importantly, bathrooms. Yet, beyond their appreciation as roadside novelties, their offerings to American culture, landscape and history have been little(...)
David Freund: gas stop
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In the twentieth century, any American driver or passenger would stop at gas stations at least weekly, and not just for gas. Gas stations were also oases offering food and drink, car repairs, directions, maps and, importantly, bathrooms. Yet, beyond their appreciation as roadside novelties, their offerings to American culture, landscape and history have been little photographed. From 1978 to 1981, David Freund analyzed the culture, architecture and landscape of gas stations in more than forty states. The photographs show customers and workers in postures and actions peculiar to gassing up, or just hanging out. Architecture and signage, both corporate and vernacular, beckon passing drivers. Regional landscapes hold and surround gas stations, each with its own landscape of designed plantings or scrappy volunteers. Stations were also outposts for American networks other than petroleum, seen in telephone booths, mailboxes and powerlines. These and all that surrounds them spark recognition and recollection, accruing as elements of a nonlinear American narrative. While Freund’s primary concern is for his photographs to engage and surprise, he acknowledges nostalgia and uses it to imbue his subjects with a compelling sense of belonging. Of more than 200,000 gas stations in the United States at the time of this project, today they and their roles are mostly gone, existing now in memory and in this work. Four hardcover books housed in a slipcase
Photography monographs
Generation X
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"Generation X" is Douglas Coupland's acclaimed salute to the generation born in the late 1950s and 1960s - a generation known vaguely up to then as "twentysomething." Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit "pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause" in their respective hometowns and cut themselves adrift on the California desert. In search of the(...)
Generation X
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"Generation X" is Douglas Coupland's acclaimed salute to the generation born in the late 1950s and 1960s - a generation known vaguely up to then as "twentysomething." Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit "pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause" in their respective hometowns and cut themselves adrift on the California desert. In search of the drastic changes that will lend meaning to their lives, they've mired themselves in the detritus of American cultural memory. Refugees from history, the three develop an ascetic regime of story-telling, boozing, and working McJobs - "low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no-future jobs in the service industry." They create modern fables of love and death among the cosmetic surgery parlors and cocktail bars of Palm Springs, disturbingly funny tales of nuclear waste, historical overdosing, and mall culture. A dark snapshot of the trio's highly fortressed inner world quickly emerges - landscapes peopled with dead TV shows, "Elvis moments," and semi-disposable Swedish furniture. And from these landscapes, deeper portraits emerge, those of fanatically independent individuals, pathologically ambivalent about the future and brimming with unsatisfied longings for permanence, for love, and for their own home. Andy, Dag, and Claire are underemployed, overeducated, intensely private, and unpredictable. Like the group they mirror, they have nowhere to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie.
Literature and poetry
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By United Nations estimates, 60 percent of the world's population will be urban by 2030. With the increasing speed of urbanization, especially in the developing world, scholars are now rethinking standard concepts and histories of modern cities. "The Spaces of the Modern City" historicizes the contemporary discussion of urbanism, highlighting the local and global breadth(...)
Urban Theory
February 2008, Princeton, Oxford
The Spaces of the Modern city : imaginaries, politics, and everyday life
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By United Nations estimates, 60 percent of the world's population will be urban by 2030. With the increasing speed of urbanization, especially in the developing world, scholars are now rethinking standard concepts and histories of modern cities. "The Spaces of the Modern City" historicizes the contemporary discussion of urbanism, highlighting the local and global breadth of the city landscape. This interdisciplinary collection examines how the city develops in the interactions of space and imagination. The essays focus on issues such as street design in Vienna, the motion picture industry in Los Angeles, architecture in Marseilles and Algiers, and the kaleidoscopic paradox of post-apartheid Johannesburg. They explore the nature of spatial politics, examining the disparate worlds of eighteenth-century Baghdad, nineteenth-century Morelia, Cold War-era West Berlin, and postwar Los Angeles. They also show the meaning of everyday spaces to urban life, illuminating issues such as crime in metropolitan London, youth culture in Dakar, "memory projects" in Tokyo, and Bombay cinema. Informed by a range of theoretical writings, this collection offers a fresh and truly global perspective on the nature of the modern city. The contributors are Sheila Crane, Belinda Davis, Mamadou Diouf, Philip J. Ethington, David Frisby, Christina M. Jiménez, Dina Rizk Khoury, Ranjani Mazumdar, Frank Mort, Martin Murray, Jordan Sand, and Sarah Schrank.
Urban Theory
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The "ruins" of the modern era are the landmarks of recent art’s turn toward site and situation, history and memory. The abiding interest of artists in ruination and decay has led in particular to the concept of the modern ruin - an ambiguous site of artistic and architectural modernism, personal and collective memories, and the cultural afterlife of eras such as those of(...)
Ruins
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The "ruins" of the modern era are the landmarks of recent art’s turn toward site and situation, history and memory. The abiding interest of artists in ruination and decay has led in particular to the concept of the modern ruin - an ambiguous site of artistic and architectural modernism, personal and collective memories, and the cultural afterlife of eras such as those of state communism and colonialism. Contemporary art’s explorations of the ruin can evoke on the one hand diverse experiences of nostalgia and on the other a ceaselessly renewed encounter with catastrophes of the recent past and apprehensions of the future. For every relic of a harmonious era or utopian dream stands another recalling industrial decline, environmental disaster, and the depredations of war. This anthology provides a comprehensive survey of the contemporary ruin in cultural discourse, aesthetics, and artistic practice. It examines the development of ruin aesthetics from the early modern era to the present; the ruin as a privileged emblem of modernity’s decline; the relic as a portal onto the political history of the recent past; the destruction and decline of cities and landscapes, with the emergence of "non-places" and “drosscape”; the symbolism of the entropic and decayed in critical environmentalism; and the confusing temporalities of the ruin in recent art - its involution of timescales and perspectives as it addresses not just the past but the future.
Art Theory
audio
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1 online resource.
[Place of publication not identified] : Lateral Addition, 2018.
audio
[Place of publication not identified] : Lateral Addition, 2018.
Black landscapes matter
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The question "Do black landscapes matter?" cuts deep to the core of American history. From the plantations of slavery to contemporary segregated cities, from freedman villages to northern migrations for freedom, the nation’s landscape bears the detritus of diverse origins. Black landscapes matter because they tell the truth. In this vital new collection, acclaimed(...)
Black landscapes matter
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The question "Do black landscapes matter?" cuts deep to the core of American history. From the plantations of slavery to contemporary segregated cities, from freedman villages to northern migrations for freedom, the nation’s landscape bears the detritus of diverse origins. Black landscapes matter because they tell the truth. In this vital new collection, acclaimed landscape designer and public artist Walter Hood assembles a group of notable landscape architecture and planning professionals and scholars to probe how race, memory, and meaning intersect in the American landscape. Essayists examine a variety of U.S. places— ranging from New Orleans and Charlotte to Milwaukee and Detroit— exposing racism endemic in the built environment and acknowledging the widespread erasure of black geographies and cultural landscapes. Through a combination of case studies, critiques, and calls to action, contributors reveal the deficient, normative portrayals of landscape that affect communities of color and question how public design and preservation efforts can support people in these places. In a culture in which historical omissions and specious narratives routinely provoke disinvestment in minority communities, creative solutions by designers, planners, artists, and residents are necessary to activate them in novel ways. Black people have built and shaped the American landscape in ways that can never be fully known. ''Black landscapes matter'' is a timely and necessary reminder that without recognizing and reconciling these histories and spaces, America’s past and future cannot be understood.
Landscape Theory
Forensic architecture
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In recent years, the group Forensic Architecture began using novel research methods to undertake a series of investigations into human rights abuses. Today, the group provides crucial evidence for international courts and works with a wide range of activist groups, NGOs, Amnesty International, and the UN. Forensic Architecture has not only shed new light on human rights(...)
Forensic architecture
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In recent years, the group Forensic Architecture began using novel research methods to undertake a series of investigations into human rights abuses. Today, the group provides crucial evidence for international courts and works with a wide range of activist groups, NGOs, Amnesty International, and the UN. Forensic Architecture has not only shed new light on human rights violations and state crimes across the globe, but has also created a new form of investigative practice that bears its name. The group uses architecture as an optical device to investigate armed conflicts and environmental destruction, as well as to cross-reference a variety of evidence sources, such as new media, remote sensing, material analysis, witness testimony, and crowd-sourcing. In "Forensic architecture", Eyal Weizman, the group’s founder, provides, for the first time, an in-depth introduction to the history, practice, assumptions, potentials, and double binds of this practice. The book includes an extensive array of images, maps, and detailed documentation that records the intricate work the group has performed. Traversing multiple scales and durations, the case studies in this volume include the analysis of the shrapnel fragments in a room struck by drones in Pakistan, the reconstruction of a contested shooting in the West Bank, the architectural recreation of a secret Syrian detention center from the memory of its survivors, a blow-by-blow account of a day-long battle in Gaza, and an investigation of environmental violence and climate change in the Guatemalan highlands and elsewhere.
Architectural Theory