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Off the Grid confronts the ecological and cultural problems associated with the way we get and use energy, and explains how it is possible to live in a beautifully designed home using much less--no matter where your home is located. Our homes are connected by a nearly invisible grid of infrastructure that binds us together. It is a system of electrical poles, wire,(...)
Modern homes + alternative energy
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Off the Grid confronts the ecological and cultural problems associated with the way we get and use energy, and explains how it is possible to live in a beautifully designed home using much less--no matter where your home is located. Our homes are connected by a nearly invisible grid of infrastructure that binds us together. It is a system of electrical poles, wire, substations, hydroelectric dams, telecommunication towers, and water extraction and sewage systems. From within this system we work, play, and raise families. We have also created one of the greatest environmental challenges known to modern civilization. The signs of our impact upon the world can be recognized in the reports of environmental changes occurring across the earth, and they can also be seen in the growing failures of the energy grids across the world as the current system is stressed beyond its capacity.
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November 2005, Layton
Green Architecture
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The advent of the oil economy and its subsequent industrial narrative has overwritten previous traditions of landscape and territory in the Arabian Peninsula. This is evident in the long spans of highways that disinterestedly cut across the Arabian desert, the vast reclamation of the sea along the Gulf Coast and the clearing away of agricultural land to build cities.(...)
Arch Southwest Asia & North Africa
October 2025
Two thousand years of non-urban history
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The advent of the oil economy and its subsequent industrial narrative has overwritten previous traditions of landscape and territory in the Arabian Peninsula. This is evident in the long spans of highways that disinterestedly cut across the Arabian desert, the vast reclamation of the sea along the Gulf Coast and the clearing away of agricultural land to build cities. Technocratic solutions to the problems of living in an arid climate have replaced practices entrenched in land knowledge, and the availability of desalinated water and imported food has oriented the economy toward rent-based urban development, backed by oil revenues. ''Two Thousand Years of Non-Urban History'' acts as a primer to an alternative architecture of the Arabian Peninsula through the work of the Bahrain- and Kuwait-based firm Civil Architecture. Its case studies pair examples of pre-oil formal planning and ecological practice with design interventions and proposals for the region.
Arch Southwest Asia & North Africa
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Conventional representations reinforce its reading as an urban condition resulting from neoliberal capitalism. These forces have expanded the city grid and extruded its architectures as a laboratory of urban ideas. Yet, like many other coastal and insular conditions, twenty-first century Manhattan faces adverse Anthropogenic climate change. Stronger storm surges and sea(...)
New York geologics: Representations of Manhattan from the anthropocene
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Conventional representations reinforce its reading as an urban condition resulting from neoliberal capitalism. These forces have expanded the city grid and extruded its architectures as a laboratory of urban ideas. Yet, like many other coastal and insular conditions, twenty-first century Manhattan faces adverse Anthropogenic climate change. Stronger storm surges and sea level rise now demand that the island recalibrates its social and environmental positions. The city needs to consider once again its fluid archipelagic conditions inherited from glacial dynamics. With a focus on iconic city representations, the book examines distinct logics that try to make capitalist progress compatible with its territorial conditions. Even though these logics of land, water and ground – here called geologics – are perhaps less dominant than the dense urban culture and, therefore, less predominant in the representation of the city, they are still important to explain why Manhattan evolved to its current condition.
Architecture ecologies
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''Africa-Arctic Flyway: Physiocratic states'' gathers documents of Peter Fend's efforts through Ocean Earth for a planet organized according to hydrology—water basins—rather than national and colonial borders. It lays out tools and technologies derived from art, architecture, and science to replace fossil fuels, dams, nuclear industry, and industrial farming. The ensuing(...)
Africa-Arctic Flyway: Physiocratic states
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''Africa-Arctic Flyway: Physiocratic states'' gathers documents of Peter Fend's efforts through Ocean Earth for a planet organized according to hydrology—water basins—rather than national and colonial borders. It lays out tools and technologies derived from art, architecture, and science to replace fossil fuels, dams, nuclear industry, and industrial farming. The ensuing proposal for governance builds on what is identified as the first school of economic thought: physiocracy. Here, via satellite-aided eco-taxation, governance pursues an increase in the numbers of fish, marine mammals, migratory birds, and insects. For instance, ideas from Earth art are applied to restoring wetlands and flyways in three swaths—the Americas, East Asia, and Eurafrica—converging on the Arctic. This book focuses on the Eurafrica flyway and surveys four decades of work. It asks, ''How do we go from visual art to reality?'' Fend answers: ''Through architecture.''
Environment and environmental theory
Glacier: nature and culture
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As major actors in the unfolding drama of climate change, glaciers feature prominently in Earth’s past and its future. Wherever on the planet we live, glaciers affect each of us directly. They control the atmospheric and ocean circulations that drive the weather; they supply drinking and irrigation water to millions of people; and they protect us from catastrophic(...)
Glacier: nature and culture
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As major actors in the unfolding drama of climate change, glaciers feature prominently in Earth’s past and its future. Wherever on the planet we live, glaciers affect each of us directly. They control the atmospheric and ocean circulations that drive the weather; they supply drinking and irrigation water to millions of people; and they protect us from catastrophic sea-level rise. The very existence of glaciers affects our view of the planet and of ourselves, but it is less than two hundred years since we first realized that ice ages come and go and that glaciers once covered much more of the planet’s surface than they do now. An inspiration to artists and a challenge for engineers, glaciers mean different things to different people. Crossing the boundaries between art, environment, science, nature, and culture, this book considers glaciers from myriad perspectives, revealing their complexity, majesty, and importance—but also their fragility.
The petropolis of tomorrow
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In recent years, Brazil has discovered vast quantities of petroleum deep within its territorial waters, inciting the construction of a series of cities along its coast and in the ocean. We could term these developments as Petropolises, or cities formed from resource extraction. The Petropolis of Tomorrow is a design and research project, originally undertaken at Rice(...)
The petropolis of tomorrow
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In recent years, Brazil has discovered vast quantities of petroleum deep within its territorial waters, inciting the construction of a series of cities along its coast and in the ocean. We could term these developments as Petropolises, or cities formed from resource extraction. The Petropolis of Tomorrow is a design and research project, originally undertaken at Rice University that examines the relationship between resource extraction and urban development in order to extract new templates for sustainable urbanism. Organized into three sections: Archipelago Urbanism, Harvesting Urbanism, and Logistical Urbanism, which consist of theoretical, technical, and photo articles as well as design proposals, The Petropolis of Tomorrow elucidates not only a vision for water-based urbanism of the floating frontier city, it also speculates on new methodologies for integrating infrastructure, landscape, urbanism and architecture within the larger spheres of economics, politics, and culture that implicate these disciplines.
Urban Theory
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Vern Blosum does not exist. The story can be told in just a few lines: in 1961 an artist paints five canvases inspired by pages in a horticulture book; then came parking meters bearing temporal commentaries, water hydrants, and animals. Some of them were shown at Leo Castelli Gallery, sold to collectors and public institutions, included in seminal exhibitions or books on(...)
Vern Blosum : planned obsolescence
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Vern Blosum does not exist. The story can be told in just a few lines: in 1961 an artist paints five canvases inspired by pages in a horticulture book; then came parking meters bearing temporal commentaries, water hydrants, and animals. Some of them were shown at Leo Castelli Gallery, sold to collectors and public institutions, included in seminal exhibitions or books on Pop art: a seemingly normal progression in an artist’s career, were it not for a rumor that emerged regarding his true identity. Alfred H. Barr, the director of MoMA, started to worry about it in 1964 and, after extensive inquiries, came to the conclusion that Vern Blosum did not exist. His paintings were taken down or sent back to storage, and the artist’s name fell into oblivion. Vern Blosum does not exist, but his work does. And that is precisely what this book aims to reveal.
Contemporary Art Monographs
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Architects today incorporate principles of sustainable design as a matter of necessity. But the challenge of unifying climate control and building functionality, of securing a managed environment within a natural setting--and combating the harsh forces of wind, water, and sun--presented a new set of obstacles to architects and engineers in the mid-twentieth(...)
Design with climate: bioclimatic approach to architectural regionalism
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Architects today incorporate principles of sustainable design as a matter of necessity. But the challenge of unifying climate control and building functionality, of securing a managed environment within a natural setting--and combating the harsh forces of wind, water, and sun--presented a new set of obstacles to architects and engineers in the mid-twentieth century. First published in 1963, Design with Climate was one of the most pioneering books in the field and remains an important reference for practitioners, teachers, and students, over fifty years later. In this book, Victor Olgyay explores the impact of climate on shelter design, identifying four distinct climatic regions and explaining the effect of each on orientation, air movement, site, and materials. He derives principles from biology, engineering, meteorology, and physics, and demonstrates how an analytical approach to climate management can merge into a harmonious and aesthetically sound design concept.
Green Architecture
books
Description:
192 p. : illustrations ; 23 cm
Rotterdam : AIR, ©2007.
Laboratorium Rotterdam: Decode Space : nieuwe perspectieven op de publieke ruimte / [red. Elma van Boxel en Kristian Koreman ; tekstred. Sandra van Noord].
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192 p. : illustrations ; 23 cm
books
Rotterdam : AIR, ©2007.
Larry Sultan: The swimmers
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Between 1978 and 1982, in a departure from the collaborative conceptual work that he had become known for, Larry Sultan photographed people learning to swim in public pools in San Francisco. Initially inspired by black-and-white documentary photograhs he found in a Red Cross swimming manual, Sultan soon began exploring an urge to create pictures that were physical,(...)
Larry Sultan: The swimmers
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Between 1978 and 1982, in a departure from the collaborative conceptual work that he had become known for, Larry Sultan photographed people learning to swim in public pools in San Francisco. Initially inspired by black-and-white documentary photograhs he found in a Red Cross swimming manual, Sultan soon began exploring an urge to create pictures that were physical, sensual, immersive, and painterly. The resulting work is saturated with colour and inflected by the unpredictable forms and chance abstractions which emerge through the distorted refractions of the water as a second lens. Often beautiful and regularly unsettling in their ambiguity, the series builds to create a feeling of sensory immersion alive with the fluid and uncertain atmospheres to which Sultan was drawn. This collection presents all the pictures from the series Sultan himself chose and exhibited, and expands to include additional images he marked on contact sheets as well as further selections from his archive which he likely never even reviewed.
Photography monographs