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Powerless under the country's constitution, Canadian municipal governments often find themselves in conflict with their provincial masters. In 2002, the Province of Quebec forcibly merged all cities on the Island of Montreal into a single municipality - a decision that was partially reversed in 2006. The first book-length study of the series of mergers imposed by the(...)
Merger delusion : how swallowing its suburbs made an even bigger mess of Montreal
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Powerless under the country's constitution, Canadian municipal governments often find themselves in conflict with their provincial masters. In 2002, the Province of Quebec forcibly merged all cities on the Island of Montreal into a single municipality - a decision that was partially reversed in 2006. The first book-length study of the series of mergers imposed by the Parti Québécois government, The Merger Delusion is a critique by a key player in anti-merger politics. Peter Trent, mayor of the City of Westmount, Quebec, foresaw the numerous financial and institutional problems posed by amalgamating municipalities into megacities. Here, he presents a stirring and detailed account of the battle he led against the provincial government, the City of Montreal, the Board of Trade, and many of his former colleagues. Describing how he took the struggle all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, Trent demonstrates the ways in which de-mergers resonated with voters and eventually helped the Quebec Liberal Party win the 2003 provincial election. As the cost and pitfalls of forced mergers become clearer in hindsight, The Merger Delusion recounts a compelling case study with broad implications for cities across the globe.
Architecture de Montréal
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The sites and stories of this publication shift our perception of what defines New York, placing the passion, determination, defeats, and victories of its people at the core. Delving into the histories of New York's five boroughs, you will encounter enslaved Africans in revolt, women marching for equality, workers on strike, musicians and performers claiming streets for(...)
City Guides
December 2022
A people's guide to New York City
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The sites and stories of this publication shift our perception of what defines New York, placing the passion, determination, defeats, and victories of its people at the core. Delving into the histories of New York's five boroughs, you will encounter enslaved Africans in revolt, women marching for equality, workers on strike, musicians and performers claiming streets for their art, and neighbors organizing against landfills and industrial toxins and in support of affordable housing and public schools. The streetscapes that emerge from these groups' struggles bear the traces, and this book shows you where to look to find them. This book expands the scope and scale of traditional guidebooks, providing an equitable exploration of the diverse communities throughout the city. Through the stories of over 150 sites across the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island as well as thematic tours and contemporary and archival photographs, a people’s New York emerges, one in which collective struggles for justice and freedom have shaped the very landscape of the city.
City Guides
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Known for their in-depth research and innovative, inventive, and meticulously constructed architecture, KieranTimberlake Assoicates put its ideas about streamlining the making of architecture to the test. The results took the form of a fully modular and award-winning house, featuring an active and adjustable double-skin facade so advanced that no client would consider it.(...)
Architecture Monographs
June 2008, New York
Loblolly House: elements of a new architecture
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Known for their in-depth research and innovative, inventive, and meticulously constructed architecture, KieranTimberlake Assoicates put its ideas about streamlining the making of architecture to the test. The results took the form of a fully modular and award-winning house, featuring an active and adjustable double-skin facade so advanced that no client would consider it. KieranTimberlake Assoicates boldly took the project upon themselves, using partner Stephen Kieran's own summer house as a laboratory. Situated on idyllic Taylors Island, off the coast of Maryland's Chesapeake Bay, Loblolly House inaugurates a truly new, more efficient way of building. Through the use of state-of-the-art building information modeling (BIM), the architects were able to streamline the design-build process. Thousands of parts were collapsed and integrated into a few dozen panels and blocks that slid into an aluminum frame set on wooden pylons. Consisting of 70 percent prefabricated components, the kit-of-parts house was assembled (mostly with a wrench) and lifted into place on-site in less than six weeks. Unlike most houses, even those built with sustainability in mind, Loblolly disassembles as easily as it assembles, making it an ecologically sound structure with a manageable environmental footprint. Focusing on a single built project and illustrated with extensive photographic documentation and numerous detailed drawings, Loblolly House is the manual for componentized prefab. The book includes a DVD of the film "A House in the Trees" by producers Rick Deppe and Kathleen Blake, a real-time documentary of the design, fabrication, and assembly of Loblolly House.
Architecture Monographs
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Scott Ruff’s studio, 'Gullah/Geechee Institute', investigated architecture’s role as a cultural signifier in the African-American Gullah–Geechee community off the South Carolina coast. It challenged students to translate cultural ideas into tectonic and spatial strategies for a monument, museum, and memorial that serves as a gateway to the Gullah–Geechee corridor,(...)
Within or without (Louis I. Kahn assistant professorship)
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Scott Ruff’s studio, 'Gullah/Geechee Institute', investigated architecture’s role as a cultural signifier in the African-American Gullah–Geechee community off the South Carolina coast. It challenged students to translate cultural ideas into tectonic and spatial strategies for a monument, museum, and memorial that serves as a gateway to the Gullah–Geechee corridor, incorporating public interpretive and historical programs. In Florencia Pita and Jackilin Bloom’s studio, 'Easy Office', students experimented with ways of generating new spatial, formal, material, and narrative ideas through the processes of collecting, collaging, and casting everyday objects. The studio considered notions of the creative office and the workplace based on the unexpected space, form, and materiality that emerged from these processes. Students in Omar Gandhi’s studio, 'Where the Wild Things Are', designed a campus of creatures for Rabbit Snare Gorge on the north coast of Cape Breton Island. They focused on a series of interventions that used vernacular approaches to produce specific functions, develop a process or ideology, and frame sensory experience. The students explored how Nova Scotia’s regional architecture takes advantage of phenomenological opportunities available on the site and inspires new responses to climate and geography.
Architectural Theory
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For as long as humans have gathered in cities, those cities have had their shining—or shadowy—counterparts. Imaginary cities, potential cities, future cities, perfect cities. It is as if the city itself, its inescapable gritty reality and elbow-to-elbow nature, demands we call into being some alternative, yearned-for better place. This book is about those cities. It’s(...)
Imaginary cities: a tour of dream cities, nightmare cities and everywhere in between
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For as long as humans have gathered in cities, those cities have had their shining—or shadowy—counterparts. Imaginary cities, potential cities, future cities, perfect cities. It is as if the city itself, its inescapable gritty reality and elbow-to-elbow nature, demands we call into being some alternative, yearned-for better place. This book is about those cities. It’s neither a history of grand plans nor a literary exploration of the utopian impulse, but rather something different, hybrid, idiosyncratic. It’s a magpie’s book, full of characters and incidents and ideas drawn from cities real and imagined around the globe and throughout history. Thomas More’s allegorical island shares space with Soviet mega-planning; Marco Polo links up with James Joyce’s meticulously imagined Dublin; the medieval land of Cockaigne meets the hopeful future of Star Trek. With Darran Anderson as our guide, we find common themes and recurring dreams, tied to the seemingly ineluctable problems of our actual cities, of poverty and exclusion and waste and destruction. And that’s where Imaginary Cities becomes more than a mere—if ecstatically entertaining—intellectual exercise: for, as Anderson says, “If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined.” Every architect, philosopher, artist, writer, planner, or citizen who dreams up an imaginary city offers lessons for our real ones; harnessing those flights of hopeful fancy can help us improve the streets where we live.
Urban Theory
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In 2007, Orkin, a middle-aged Jewish guy from Long Island, did something crazy. In the food-zealous, insular megalopolis of Tokyo, Ivan opened a ramen shop. He was a "gaijin" (foreigner), trying to make his name in a place that is fiercely opinionated about ramen. At first, customers came because they were curious, but word spread quickly about Ivan’s handmade noodles,(...)
Ivan Ramen: love, obsession, and recipes from Tokyo's most unlikely noodle joint
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In 2007, Orkin, a middle-aged Jewish guy from Long Island, did something crazy. In the food-zealous, insular megalopolis of Tokyo, Ivan opened a ramen shop. He was a "gaijin" (foreigner), trying to make his name in a place that is fiercely opinionated about ramen. At first, customers came because they were curious, but word spread quickly about Ivan’s handmade noodles, clean and complex broth, and thoughtfully prepared toppings. Soon enough, Ivan became a celebrity—a fixture of Japanese TV programs and the face of his own best-selling brand of instant ramen. Ivan opened a second location in Tokyo, and has now returned to New York City to open his first US branch. Ivan Ramen is essentially two books in one: a memoir and a cookbook. In these pages, Ivan tells the story of his ascent from wayward youth to a star of the Tokyo restaurant scene. He also shares more than forty recipes, including the complete, detailed recipe for his signature Shio Ramen; creative ways to use extra ramen components; and some of his most popular ramen variations. Written with equal parts candor, humor, gratitude, and irreverence, Ivan Ramen is the only English-language book that offers a look inside the cultish world of ramen making in Japan. It will inspire you to forge your own path, give you insight into Japanese culture, and leave you with a deep appreciation for what goes into a seemingly simple bowl of noodles.
Food
Campo Santo
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This brief volume is the latest and reportedly last collection of essays by German novelist and critic Sebald, who has seemed more prolific since his death in 2001 than in life. Despite the masterful translation, these essays fail to cohere, though they contain elements common to most of Sebald's work: an integration of art, politics and memory, framed by the writer's own(...)
Campo Santo
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This brief volume is the latest and reportedly last collection of essays by German novelist and critic Sebald, who has seemed more prolific since his death in 2001 than in life. Despite the masterful translation, these essays fail to cohere, though they contain elements common to most of Sebald's work: an integration of art, politics and memory, framed by the writer's own curmudgeonly presence. The essays, however, feel unfinished, lacking polish and structural integrity. The collection is split into two parts, "Prose" and "Essays," with the first—a series of considerations of the landscape, history and social milieu of the island of Corsica—by far the more successful. The second, longer section contains an assortment of literary critical pieces, some detailed, such as a long essay about novelists writing about the destruction of German cities during WWII; others discursive, such as an apparently unfinished review of a book about Kafka's relationship with film that wanders from films Sebald himself viewed to films Kafka may or may not have seen. Although Sebald was a beautiful and intelligent writer, it's hard to see how these essays will appeal to anyone outside of scholars and already committed Sebald fans eager to read every word he ever set to paper.
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Never built New York
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New York towers among world capitals, but the city we know might have reached even more stellar heights, or burrowed into more destructive depths, had the ideas of its greatest dreamers progressed beyond the drawing board. What is wonderfully grand might easily have been ingloriously grandiose; equally, what is blandly unremarkable might have become delightfully(...)
Never built New York
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New York towers among world capitals, but the city we know might have reached even more stellar heights, or burrowed into more destructive depths, had the ideas of its greatest dreamers progressed beyond the drawing board. What is wonderfully grand might easily have been ingloriously grandiose; equally, what is blandly unremarkable might have become delightfully provocative.Nearly 200 proposals spanning 200 years encompass bridges, skyscrapers, master plans, parks, transit schemes, amusements, airports, plans to fill in rivers and extend Manhattan, and much, much more. Included are alternate visions for Central Park, Columbus Circle, Lincoln Center, MoMA, the UN, Grand Central Terminal, the World Trade Center site and other highlights such as: Alfred Ely Beach’s system of airtight subway cars propelled via atmospheric pressure; Frank Lloyd Wright’s last project, his Key Plan for Ellis Island, on which he would have developed his dream city; Buckminster Fuller’s design for Brooklyn’s Dodger Stadium, complete with giant geodesic dome to shield players and fans from the rain; developer William Zeckendorf’s Rooftop Airport, perched on steel columns 200 feet above street level, spanning from 24th to 71st Street, Ninth Avenue to the Hudson River; John Johansen’s Leapfrog City proposal to create an entirely new neighborhood atop the tenements of East Harlem; and Stephen Holl’s Bridge of Houses, offering options from SROs to modest studios to luxury apartments on a segment of what is now the High Line.
Contemporary Architecture
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Imagine a world without things. There would be nothing to describe, nothing to explain, remark, interpret, or complain about. Without things, we would stop speaking; we would become as mute as things are alleged to be. In nine original essays, internationally renowned historians of art and of science seek to understand how objects become charged with significance without(...)
Things that talk : Object lessons from art and science
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Imagine a world without things. There would be nothing to describe, nothing to explain, remark, interpret, or complain about. Without things, we would stop speaking; we would become as mute as things are alleged to be. In nine original essays, internationally renowned historians of art and of science seek to understand how objects become charged with significance without losing their gritty materiality. True to the particularity of things, each of the essays singles out one object for close attention: a Bosch drawing, the freestanding column, a Prussian island, soap bubbles, early photographs, glass flowers, Rorschach blots, newspaper clippings, paintings by Jackson Pollock. Each is revealed to be a node around which meanings accrete thickly. But not just any meanings: what these things are made of and how they are made shape what they can mean. Neither the pure texts of semiotics nor the brute objects of positivism, these things are saturated with cultural significance. Things become talkative when they fuse matter and meaning; they lapse into speechlessness when their matter and meanings no longer mesh. Each of the nine objects examined in this book had its historical moment, when the match of this thing to that thought seemed irresistible. At these junctures, certain things become objects of fascination, association, and endless consideration; they begin to talk. Things that talk fleetingly realize the dream of a perfect language, in which words and world merge.
Critical Theory
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Following on from his internationally bestselling books on Rome and Egypt, illustrator Stephen Biesty brings his magic touch to the cradle of civilization - classical Greece. The year is 436 BCE - Olympic year - and 11-year-old Neleus is about to embark on the journey of a lifetime. Setting off from his home in Miletus with his father and brother, our young hero's(...)
Greece in spectacular cross-section
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Following on from his internationally bestselling books on Rome and Egypt, illustrator Stephen Biesty brings his magic touch to the cradle of civilization - classical Greece. The year is 436 BCE - Olympic year - and 11-year-old Neleus is about to embark on the journey of a lifetime. Setting off from his home in Miletus with his father and brother, our young hero's final destination is the great games at Olympia, but he has many adventures and sees many sights along the way : fearsome Athenian warships at the sacred island of Delos; the rich silver mines of Laurion; the hurly-burly of the port and streets of Athens; the splendour of the Agora and the Acropolis; and a visit to the sacred oracle at Delphi. Biesty's Greece is an illustrated tour-de-force, featuring a stunning array of cross-sections, cutaways and explosions. Each drawing highlights Biesty's trademark attention to detail and is backed up by authoritative text and annotations. Biesty's eye for the quirky details of daily life combines with a witty and engaging text to provide an unforgettable window into the world of ancient Greece. Pitched at the 9-12-year-old, this book is destined to bring the ancient world to life for a wide range of readers. No aspect of Greek life is left out... domestic life, religion and the gods, the role of women, children and education, philosophy and learning, myths and legends, government, politics and law, economy and trade, warfare and slavery, the Olympic Games, music and drama, painting, pottery and sculpture, building and architecture, ships and seafaring.
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September 2006, Oxford, New York
Children's Books