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As Bruno Munari wrote in 1961, “The biggest hindrance to understanding a work of art is wanting to understand.” And so he has written this diminutive book of theorems, this witty, sincere book of enlightening poems, for the struggling art viewer. To excerpt from individual poems written between 1945 and 1960: if leonardo's gioconda/had legs/she would leave art/and return(...)
Bruno Munari : teoremi sull'arte / art theorems / art théorèmes
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As Bruno Munari wrote in 1961, “The biggest hindrance to understanding a work of art is wanting to understand.” And so he has written this diminutive book of theorems, this witty, sincere book of enlightening poems, for the struggling art viewer. To excerpt from individual poems written between 1945 and 1960: if leonardo's gioconda/had legs/she would leave art/and return to reality ... is the choice of subject important?/raphael's marriage of the virgin/art/john brown's marriage of the virgin/not art/art isn't the subject ... a hundred lovers can even understand realism/a million admirers/will reject concrete art/with all their might ... in italy art is supposed to be italian/in poland polish/in turkey turkish/and if a turk goes to paint in poland/what sort of art should he do?/and what if poland occupies turkey? ... ministers and dictators/noblemen/the bored rich/sportsmen/dissatisfied professionals/worldly galleries/obliging critics/welcoming newspapers/opening cocktails/lots of people/art no.
Graphic Designers, Monographs
Work: the last 1000 years
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Say the word "work," and most people think of some form of gainful employment. Yet this limited definition has never corresponded to the historical experience of most people—whether in colonies, developing countries, or the industrialized world. That gap between common assumptions and reality grows even more pronounced in the case of women and other groups excluded from(...)
Work: the last 1000 years
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Say the word "work," and most people think of some form of gainful employment. Yet this limited definition has never corresponded to the historical experience of most people—whether in colonies, developing countries, or the industrialized world. That gap between common assumptions and reality grows even more pronounced in the case of women and other groups excluded from the labour market. In this important intervention, Andrea Komlosy demonstrates that popular understandings of work have varied radically in different ages and countries. Looking at labour history around the globe from the 13th to the 21st centuries, Komlosy sheds light on both discursive concepts as well as the concrete coexistence of multiple forms of labour—paid and unpaid, free and unfree. Komlosy’s narrative adopts a distinctly global and feminist approach, revealing the hidden forms of unpaid and hyper-exploited labour which often go ignored, yet are key to the functioning of the capitalist world-system.
Critical Theory
MAP 007: Orbit
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MAP architects have been creating Manual of Architectural Possibilities since 2009. The publication aims to merge the fields of science and research on one hand, and architectural design on the other. It aims to exemplify this approach via it’s format. MAP presents itself as a folded A1, with only two pages. Research and data on one page, and architectural projects on the(...)
MAP 007: Orbit
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MAP architects have been creating Manual of Architectural Possibilities since 2009. The publication aims to merge the fields of science and research on one hand, and architectural design on the other. It aims to exemplify this approach via it’s format. MAP presents itself as a folded A1, with only two pages. Research and data on one page, and architectural projects on the other. Each issue deals with a single subject, sometimes abstract, sometimes concrete, which is placed under scrutiny through the collection of data and research from multiple perspectives. The architectural projects are a direct response to the research, sometimes pragmatic, sometimes critical or even ironic. No design is undertaken until the research phase is complete, which lasts about 3 months. MAP aims to exercise architecture in the realm of speculation, through the boundaries and directions set by research and investigations, carried out into a series of fields and themes with direct spatial implications.
Magazines
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There is hardly another topic that fascinates architects more than new materials, with their previously unimagined properties and enchanting haptic surfaces. Yet if you look at built reality, these hardly play a role. On the contrary, the international trend continues to move towards natural surfaces made of wood, brick and natural stone. As aesthetically and ecologically(...)
Detail 11 2017: materials and finishes
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There is hardly another topic that fascinates architects more than new materials, with their previously unimagined properties and enchanting haptic surfaces. Yet if you look at built reality, these hardly play a role. On the contrary, the international trend continues to move towards natural surfaces made of wood, brick and natural stone. As aesthetically and ecologically meaningful as they may be, this development becomes alarming when buildings and interiors in southern China, Paris or Copenhagen become indistinguishable. The examples in this issue show, however, that individual solutions are still possible even within a narrow range of materials and colours. Just a few years ago, natural stone and solid wood – building materials used today by the luxury sector – were cheaper than concrete and veneer in countries like Portugal, as the Pritzker Prize winner Eduardo Souto de Moura explains to us in an interview. In his eyes, the design elements of architecture remain the same throughout history, only the materials change.
Magazines
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The artists’ books made in Russia between 1910 and 1915 are like no others. Unique in their fusion of the verbal, visual, and sonic, these books are meant to be read, looked at, and listened to. Painters and poets—including Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Mayakovsky— collaborated to fabricate hand-lithographed(...)
Explodity: sound, image, and word in Russian Futurist book art
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The artists’ books made in Russia between 1910 and 1915 are like no others. Unique in their fusion of the verbal, visual, and sonic, these books are meant to be read, looked at, and listened to. Painters and poets—including Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Mayakovsky— collaborated to fabricate hand-lithographed books, for which they invented a new language called zaum (a neologism meaning “beyond the mind”), which was distinctive in its emphasis on “sound as such” and its rejection of definite logical meaning. At the heart of this volume are close analyses of two of the most significant and experimental futurist books: Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards) and Vzorval’ (Explodity). In addition, Nancy Perloff examines the profound differences between the Russian avant-garde and Western art movements, including futurism, and she uncovers a wide-ranging legacy in the midcentury global movement of sound and concrete poetry (the Brazilian Noigandres group, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Henri Chopin), contemporary Western conceptual art, and the artist’s book.
Book Design
Zoe Leonard: photographs
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Zoe Leonard’s practice involves a type of cerebral roaming combined with carefully considered observation. For more than 20 years she has criss-crossed nature and culture, cityscapes and museums, always searching for signs that say something about structures, about natural and cultural conditions and the contradictions, parallels and connections among them. Leonard's(...)
Zoe Leonard: photographs
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Zoe Leonard’s practice involves a type of cerebral roaming combined with carefully considered observation. For more than 20 years she has criss-crossed nature and culture, cityscapes and museums, always searching for signs that say something about structures, about natural and cultural conditions and the contradictions, parallels and connections among them. Leonard's photographs – of anatomical wax figures, fashion shows, trees and fences – present figures in sparse black-and-white images that open up a visual field of thought and reveal within it our visible world, that is, the concrete and established structures that make up our reality. At documenta 9 in Kassel Leonard created a stir with her placement of black-and-white photographs of female genitalia in the context of a male-dominated museum. The political aspects of her work form the backdrop of her constant struggle with shape, with imagery, with the union of symbols and content. This is the first book encompassing her complete oeuvre.
Photography monographs
Barcelona: 1000 graffiti
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Barcelona 1000 Graffiti is a photo-essay by Rosa Puig about graffiti in Barcelona, a city that's become a meeting place and 'concrete canvas' for graffitists from all over the world. The wide range of graffiti documented in this work is scattered throughout the city, a cause of astonishment and admiration for some, of concern for the authorities, and of despair for the(...)
Barcelona: 1000 graffiti
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Barcelona 1000 Graffiti is a photo-essay by Rosa Puig about graffiti in Barcelona, a city that's become a meeting place and 'concrete canvas' for graffitists from all over the world. The wide range of graffiti documented in this work is scattered throughout the city, a cause of astonishment and admiration for some, of concern for the authorities, and of despair for the owners of facades irreverently invaded under cover of darkness. The graffiti collected in this book are found in different areas of Barcelona - from the very central to the most far-flung - and offer very diverse topics and tones - by turns poetic, socially aware, dissenting - while competing with the customary visual pollution of the city and helping to enrich its landscape. The photographs reflect the surprised gaze of their author, at once captivated by 'graphic pieces' that, as she says, she 'would rip off the walls and hang in my house.'
Public Space
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The urban and cultural climate of Rotterdam changed radically between 1970 and 2000. Opinions differ about what the most important changes were, and when they occurred. "Imagine a metropolis" shows that it was first and foremost a new perspective on Rotterdam that stimulated the development of the city during this period. If the Rotterdam of 1970 was still a city with an(...)
Architecture since 1900, Europe
October 2007, Rotterdam
Imagine a metropolis : Rotterdam's creative class, 1970-2000
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The urban and cultural climate of Rotterdam changed radically between 1970 and 2000. Opinions differ about what the most important changes were, and when they occurred. "Imagine a metropolis" shows that it was first and foremost a new perspective on Rotterdam that stimulated the development of the city during this period. If the Rotterdam of 1970 was still a city with an identity crises that wanted to be small rather than large and cosy rather than commercial, by 2000 Rotterdam had the image of the most metropolitan of all Dutch cities. Artists and other cultural practitioners – a group these days termed the ‘creative class’ – were the first to advance this metropolitan vision, thereby paving the way for the New Rotterdam that would begin to take concrete shape at the end of the 1980s. "Imagine a metropolis" goes on to show that this New Rotterdam is returning to its nineteenth-century identity and the developments of the inter-war years and the period of post-war reconstruction.
Architecture since 1900, Europe
Britain's Lost Cities
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The destruction meted out on Britain's city center during the 20th century, by the combined efforts of the Luftwaffe and brutalist city planners, is legendary. Medieval churches, Tudor alleyways, Georgian terraces, and Victorian theatres vanished forever, to be replaced by a gruesome landscape of concrete office blocks and characterless shopping malls. Now, for the first(...)
Britain's Lost Cities
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The destruction meted out on Britain's city center during the 20th century, by the combined efforts of the Luftwaffe and brutalist city planners, is legendary. Medieval churches, Tudor alleyways, Georgian terraces, and Victorian theatres vanished forever, to be replaced by a gruesome landscape of concrete office blocks and characterless shopping malls. Now, for the first time, architectural historian Gavin Stamp shows exactly what has been lost. Reproduced in this haunting volume are hundreds of top-quality photographs of cities, showing streets and buildings that are gone forever. The accompanying text traces their creation and destruction, remembering the massive campaign to save the Euston Arch, wantonly demolished in 1962, and mourning the loss of lovely medieval Coventry, which was already doomed by the city planners even before German air raids intervened. Alternately fascinating, enraging, and heartbreaking, this is an extraordinary evocation of Britain's architectural past, and a much-needed reminder of the importance of preserving heritage.
Architecture since 1900, Europe
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Upon completing the eponymous Le Corbusier Building in Berlin in 1958, the pioneering Modernist architect Le Corbusier described the building as rising up to, a monumental size without taking from any of its parts their respect for the individual, physical and subjective dimension. Le Corbusier had confronted Berliners, in their divided city, with his concept of communal(...)
Typ Berlin: Le Corbusier's building in Charlottenburg
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Upon completing the eponymous Le Corbusier Building in Berlin in 1958, the pioneering Modernist architect Le Corbusier described the building as rising up to, a monumental size without taking from any of its parts their respect for the individual, physical and subjective dimension. Le Corbusier had confronted Berliners, in their divided city, with his concept of communal living--a 17-story reinforced-concrete building containing 557 apartments, with only nine corridors to provide access to all of them. Le Corbusier's "machine for living" still influences the inhabitants of the building, yet no matter the architect's intention, it is ultimately the building's residents that give a house its life. Ethnologist and photographer Bärbel Högner was well aware of this when she moved into the Le Corbusier building as artist-in-residence in 2007. Her findings are published in this stunning volume, which features images of the interplay between residents and Le Corbusier's architectural masterwork.
Architecture Monographs