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As with the compass needle, so people have always been most powerfully attracted northwards; everyone carries within them their own concept of north. The Idea of North is a study, ranging widely in time and place, of some of the ways in which these ideas have found expression. Peter Davidson explores the topography of north as represented in images and literature, taking(...)
The idea of north, 2nd edition
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As with the compass needle, so people have always been most powerfully attracted northwards; everyone carries within them their own concept of north. The Idea of North is a study, ranging widely in time and place, of some of the ways in which these ideas have found expression. Peter Davidson explores the topography of north as represented in images and literature, taking in Netherlandic winter paintings of the Renaissance, German Romantic landscapes, Scandinavian Biedermeyer and twentieth-century topographical painting and printmaking. He examines a bewildering diversity of mythologies and imaginings of north, including The Snow Queen; Scandinavian Sagas; ghost-stories; Moomintrolls, Arctic exploration; the fictitious snowy kingdoms of Zembla and Naboland; Nabokov's nostalgias; Baltic midsummer; rooms in winter light; compasses and star-stones; hoar-frost; ice; and glass. The book also traces a northward journey, describing northern rural England, industrial sites, and the long emptiness of the borders, Scotland and the Highlands. He looks at the region far north of Scotland, then moves to the Northern Netherlands and Scandinavia to explore their identifiable northernness.The last visited place is Iceland, identified by W. H. Auden and Louis McNeice in 1936 as 'furthest, most remote, most distant, most northerly'. An engaging meditation on solitude, absence and stillness, The Idea of North shows north to be a goal rather than a destination, a place of revelation that is always somewhere ultimate and austere.
Architectural Theory
The city as a project
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What if the city can be seen differently than as a sort of self-organising chaos? Shaped not only by material forces, but also by cultural and didactic visions, the city may instead result from political intention in the form of architectural projects. This collection of eight essays, edited by Pier Vittorio Aureli, examines a fascinating set of urban conditions across(...)
The city as a project
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What if the city can be seen differently than as a sort of self-organising chaos? Shaped not only by material forces, but also by cultural and didactic visions, the city may instead result from political intention in the form of architectural projects. This collection of eight essays, edited by Pier Vittorio Aureli, examines a fascinating set of urban conditions across more than two millennia of history, from the political theology of the Islamic city to the political economy of Renaissance architecture, and from the planned Mesoamerican metropolis to the Fordist factory floor, revealing the ways in which the city arises from the constant interaction between ideas and spatial conditions.
Urban Theory
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Notre habitation, notre habitat, l'espace où nous évoluons est un médium que nous croyons façonner selon notre désir, selon l'image que nous voulons donner de nous-même selon notre ego. En fait, il restitue nos craintes et nos joies, qui ressurgissent du plus lointain de notre mémoire génétique. Notre habitation n'est que le reflet de nous-mêmes. Ce n'est pas seulement(...)
Les origines symboliques de notre habitat
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Notre habitation, notre habitat, l'espace où nous évoluons est un médium que nous croyons façonner selon notre désir, selon l'image que nous voulons donner de nous-même selon notre ego. En fait, il restitue nos craintes et nos joies, qui ressurgissent du plus lointain de notre mémoire génétique. Notre habitation n'est que le reflet de nous-mêmes. Ce n'est pas seulement l'architecture sacrée qui véhicule des symboles mais la plus simple demeure reflète aussi des archétypes qui proviennent de la tradition primordiale. Des premières croyances humaines pour les déesses mères, comme Gaia, la terre nourricière jusqu'à la Sophia, la sagesse grecque. vénérée encore par les hermétistes de la Renaissance, la lignée ininterrompue des bâtisseurs qui ont construit selon les principes de la géométrie sacrée, du mythe osirien au corpus hermeticum, issu de l'Hermès trismégiste, il y a eu un fil conducteur pour que l'union du ciel et de la terre puisse se réaliser. Il y a eu une transmission du savoir de constructeurs initiés, qui n'ont cessé, à travers des civilisations très éloignées, semble-t-il, les unes des autres, de rassembler ce qui était épars, qui nous vient encore de la nature et qui n'a pas été inventé par l'homme mais seulement réappris et réutilisé. Suivons l'auteur à la découverte de nos racines profondes et dont le développement s'est fait identiquement et analogiquement à celles de l'Asie, de l'Orient ou du Nouveau Monde.
Architectural Theory
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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