Moscow: the fourth Rome
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In Moscow, the Fourth Rome , Katerina Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to become a beacon for the rest of the world. Clark provides an(...)
November 2011
Moscow: the fourth Rome
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In Moscow, the Fourth Rome , Katerina Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to become a beacon for the rest of the world. Clark provides an interpretative cultural history of the city during the crucial 1930s, the decade of the Great Purge. She draws on the work of intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilya Ehrenburg to shed light on the singular Zeitgeist of that most Stalinist of periods. In her account, the decade emerges as an important moment in the prehistory of key concepts in literary and cultural studies today—transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and world literature. By bringing to light neglected antecedents, she provides a new polemical and political context for understanding canonical works of writers such as Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bakhtin.
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The Classroom shows how furniture designers from the late nineteenth century to the present have strived to enliven the classroom experience for children, telling for the first time the history of this neglected area of furniture design. The book is based on the collection of the VS school museum in Tauberbischofsheim, which houses a unique collection of school furniture(...)
Commercial interiors, Building types
March 2011
The classroom: From the late 19th Century until the present day
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The Classroom shows how furniture designers from the late nineteenth century to the present have strived to enliven the classroom experience for children, telling for the first time the history of this neglected area of furniture design. The book is based on the collection of the VS school museum in Tauberbischofsheim, which houses a unique collection of school furniture from Germany and abroad. Through this collection, it draws out the history of educational theory and school architecture over the past hundred years, tracing the ascent of a child-centered approach to education and attendant developments in design, as well as such topics as the use of propaganda in Soviet- and Nazi-era schools. Chairs, desks, classrooms and entire schools by Alvar Aalto, Arne Jacobsen, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Jean-Baptiste Mathon, Jean Prouvé, Eero + Eliel Saarinen and Bruno Taut are abundantly illustrated and examined. The Classroom looks back over this history and looks forward to possible future developments.
Commercial interiors, Building types
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From the creator of Paper Pilot and Paper Captain, Paper Astronaut is a beautifully illustrated voyage into deep space, combining stunning archival photographs and colorful technical drawings with expertly designed die-cut models that readers can actually cut out and assemble. Published for the fortieth anniversary of the moon landing in 1969—and introduced by Buzz(...)
Paper astronaut: paper spacecraft mission manual
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From the creator of Paper Pilot and Paper Captain, Paper Astronaut is a beautifully illustrated voyage into deep space, combining stunning archival photographs and colorful technical drawings with expertly designed die-cut models that readers can actually cut out and assemble. Published for the fortieth anniversary of the moon landing in 1969—and introduced by Buzz Aldrin—the book includes histories of twenty feats of aeronautic engineering drawn from half a century of space programs around the world, from Apollo 11 to the Soviet space station Mir and China’s Shenzou 7 capsule, and featuring the most iconic designs of fifty years of space exploration. Each spacecraft is accompanied by amazing stories, fascinating facts and statistics about the universe around them, and mesmerizing photographs of the vessels in space. Sixty-four pages of the book are devoted to finely crafted die-cut paper models of the featured rockets, presented with clear instructions for assembly and helpful advice for deploying your galactic fleet.
activity books
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Throughout her prolific career, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg has led the way in documenting man-made environments on the cusp of change and transition. The sites she visited were often remote and difficult to access. In 1996 and 1997 she traveled to Armenia and with a small portable camera made visual notes of remnants of Soviet architecture during her walks through the capital(...)
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg: Yerevan 1996-1997
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Throughout her prolific career, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg has led the way in documenting man-made environments on the cusp of change and transition. The sites she visited were often remote and difficult to access. In 1996 and 1997 she traveled to Armenia and with a small portable camera made visual notes of remnants of Soviet architecture during her walks through the capital city of Yerevan. She developed the films on her return to Germany and in 2001 she edited and compiled the prints into a traditional notebook used in Armenian schools which she had bought back from one of her trips. This hand-made sketchbook was then dedicated to her daughter, Julia, who was studying architecture at the time. This publication is a facsimile of the original sketchbook, an artist's book work embedded with the history of the cultural artefacts long-since disassembled and the actions of the artist in walking through time and space, documenting and compiling the material.
Photography monographs
Pro Eto: That's What
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Vladimir Mayakovsky was one of the towering literary figures of pre- and post-revolutionary Russia, speaking as much to the working man (he often employed the rough talk of the streets and revolutionary rhetoric in his poetry) as to other poets (his creative fascination with sound and form, linguistic metamorphosis and variation made him a sort of 'poet's poet', the(...)
Pro Eto: That's What
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Vladimir Mayakovsky was one of the towering literary figures of pre- and post-revolutionary Russia, speaking as much to the working man (he often employed the rough talk of the streets and revolutionary rhetoric in his poetry) as to other poets (his creative fascination with sound and form, linguistic metamorphosis and variation made him a sort of 'poet's poet', the doyen, if not the envy, of his contemporaries, Pasternak among them). His poetry, influenced by Whitman and Verhaeren and strangely akin to modern rock poetry in its erotic thrust, bluesy complaints and cries of pain, not to mention its sardonic humour, is at once aggressive, mocking and tender, and often fantastic or grotesque. "Pro Eto - That's What" is a long love poem detailing the pain and suffering inflicted on the poet by his lover and her final rejection of him. But as well as being an agonising parable of separation and betrayal, it is also a political work, highly critical of Lenin's reforms of Soviet Socialism.
Literature and poetry
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One of the delights of Russian literature, a tour de force that has been compared to the best of Nabokov and Bulgakov, Yuri Olesha's novella ''Envy'' brings together cutting social satire, slapstick humor, and a wild visionary streak. Andrei is a model Soviet citizen, a swaggeringly self-satisfied mogul of the food industry who intends to revolutionize modern life with(...)
Envy
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One of the delights of Russian literature, a tour de force that has been compared to the best of Nabokov and Bulgakov, Yuri Olesha's novella ''Envy'' brings together cutting social satire, slapstick humor, and a wild visionary streak. Andrei is a model Soviet citizen, a swaggeringly self-satisfied mogul of the food industry who intends to revolutionize modern life with mass-produced sausage. Nikolai is a loser. Finding him drunk in the gutter, Andrei gives him a bed for the night and a job as a gofer. Nikolai takes what he can, but that doesn't mean he's grateful. Griping, sulking, grovelingly abject, he despises everything Andrei believes in, even if he envies him his every breath. Producer and sponger, insider and outcast, master and man fight back and forth in the pages of Olesha's anarchic comedy. It is a contest of wills in which nothing is sure except the incorrigible human heart.
Current Exhibitions
Moon: architectural guide
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In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first man on the moon, this book for the first time ever looks at the artifacts left behind on the moon from the perspective of architecture. The book looks at every single mission – manned and unmanned – that has actually landed on the moon. It covers the time of the beginning of the Soviet and American space race with the(...)
Moon: architectural guide
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In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first man on the moon, this book for the first time ever looks at the artifacts left behind on the moon from the perspective of architecture. The book looks at every single mission – manned and unmanned – that has actually landed on the moon. It covers the time of the beginning of the Soviet and American space race with the landing of Luna 2 in 1959, to the present with China’s Chang’e 3 moon rover. This architectural guide differentiates itself from other scientific and educational books through its abstract approach to the topic of architecture on the moon. The content does not feature science fiction, but rather the question of what exists and what implications these bizarre structures hold for the future of architecture on other planets – as these topics are quite pertinent in today’s world of the commercialization of spaceflight, with SpaceX and NASA planning to take humans to Mars in the next 15 years.
City Guides
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Tracing the shifting meanings of photography in the early Soviet Union, Aglaya K. Glebova reconsiders the relationship between art and politics during what is usually considered the end of the critical avant-garde. Aleksandr Rodchenko, a versatile Russian artist and one of Constructivism’s founders, embraced photography as a medium of revolutionary modernity. Yet his(...)
Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the time of Stalin
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Tracing the shifting meanings of photography in the early Soviet Union, Aglaya K. Glebova reconsiders the relationship between art and politics during what is usually considered the end of the critical avant-garde. Aleksandr Rodchenko, a versatile Russian artist and one of Constructivism’s founders, embraced photography as a medium of revolutionary modernity. Yet his photographic work between the late 1920s and the end of the 1930s exhibits an expansive search for a different pictorial language. In the context of the extreme transformations carried out under the first Five-Year Plans, Rodchenko’s photography questioned his own modernist commitments. At the heart of this book is Rodchenko’s infamous 1933 photo-essay on the White Sea–Baltic Canal, site of one of the first gulags. Glebova’s careful reading of Rodchenko’s photography reveals a surprisingly heterodox practice and brings to light experiments in adjacent media, including the collaborative design work he undertook with Varvara Stepanova, Rodchenko’s partner in art and life.
Photography monographs
books
Description:
171 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 28 cm
Milano : Charta, ©1995.
Il tempo delle illusioni : arte russa degli anni Venti.
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171 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 28 cm
books
Milano : Charta, ©1995.
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The extensive range of posters, collages, maquettes, postcards, magazines, and books featured in this exhibition catalogue attests to the enormous influence of photomontage in politics, social protest, and advertising, while also demonstrating the popularity of the technique among avant-garde artists during these two decades. Essays in this publication examine(...)
Photomontage between the wars : 1918-1939
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The extensive range of posters, collages, maquettes, postcards, magazines, and books featured in this exhibition catalogue attests to the enormous influence of photomontage in politics, social protest, and advertising, while also demonstrating the popularity of the technique among avant-garde artists during these two decades. Essays in this publication examine contemporary texts that the practice of photomontage inspired, and explore those qualities of photomontage that led to what was arguably the most important exhibition devoted to this artistic technique at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin in 1931. The present volume includes a facsimile reproduction and translation of the catalogue published on the occasion of that exhibition. In addition to a brief chronology, the interested reader will also find a selection of text - some scarcely familiar today - by authors of various nationalities that sheds further light on the practice. Produced to accompany the exhibition in Spain and available in North America for the first time, this entirely English-language publication offers an overview of the birth of the photomontage process specifically in Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1920s.
Photography Collections