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Black gold. Liquid sunlight. Texas tea. Oil remains the ur-commodity of our global era, having been distilled from ancient algae and marine life to turn modernity's wheels. Wars are fought over it. Some communities are displaced by its extraction, so that others may reap its benefits. But despite its heated history, few will ever see oil on the ground. Shrouded within a(...)
Oil
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Black gold. Liquid sunlight. Texas tea. Oil remains the ur-commodity of our global era, having been distilled from ancient algae and marine life to turn modernity's wheels. Wars are fought over it. Some communities are displaced by its extraction, so that others may reap its benefits. But despite its heated history, few will ever see oil on the ground. Shrouded within a labyrinth of oil fields, pipelines, and manufacturies, it tends to be known only through its magical effects: the thrill of the road, the euphoria of flight, and the metamorphic allure of everything from vinyl records to celluloid film and synthetic clothing. Michael Tondre shows how hydrocarbon became today's pre-eminent power. How did oil come to structure selfhood and social relations? And to what extent is oil not only a commercial product but a cultural one-something shaped by widely imagined dreams and desires? Amid a warming world unleashed by fossil fuels, oil appears as a rich resource for thinking about histories of globalization and technology no less than the energetic underpinnings of literature, film, and art.
Critical Theory
Cities of change Addis Ababa: transformation strategies for urban territories in the 21st century
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Economic strengthening and the developments associated with it, such as population growth, rural flight, and the explosive growth of cities, pose enormous challenges for city planners in urban centers throughout the world. But clumsy "test-tube" urban plans like those developed for China in part by German planners have shown that different standards and rules apply in the(...)
December 2009
Cities of change Addis Ababa: transformation strategies for urban territories in the 21st century
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Economic strengthening and the developments associated with it, such as population growth, rural flight, and the explosive growth of cities, pose enormous challenges for city planners in urban centers throughout the world. But clumsy "test-tube" urban plans like those developed for China in part by German planners have shown that different standards and rules apply in the non-European world than in Europe s organically developed urban structures. This manual analyzes contemporary urban phenomena in economic growth regions using the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Abeba as an example, and presents a catalogue of sustainable strategies for city planning practice in the Second and Third Worlds. In the process, it provides planners with generally applicable methods and tools that are usable at the design stage and equip them to develop and deploy dynamic planning and project management processes. To this end, it illuminates such topical subjects as the changing agrarian and industrial landscape, the activation of urban wastelands, and the increasing density of urban hubs. In addition, it uses real projects as examples to highlight avenues for practical implementation.
Space program
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For over a decade, Sachs has pondered the technical ingenuity and romance with the unknown that brought America the Apollo program. This publication documents the culmination of his research: the realization of his own life-size Space Program, comprised of three main sculptural elements (Lunar Module, Mission Control, and Space Suit) and a Flight Plan, all put to use(...)
Space program
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For over a decade, Sachs has pondered the technical ingenuity and romance with the unknown that brought America the Apollo program. This publication documents the culmination of his research: the realization of his own life-size Space Program, comprised of three main sculptural elements (Lunar Module, Mission Control, and Space Suit) and a Flight Plan, all put to use during a live demonstration of a lunar landing. In his exuberant manufacture of objects and scenarios, Sachs asks barbed questions of modern creativity that relate to conception, production, consumption, and circulation. Space Program features 797 full-color and 30 black-and-white images; a conversation among Buzz Aldrin, Tom Sachs, and Louise Neri; a critical essay by Arthur C. Danto, contextualizing this work among the artist’s contemporaries; and a comprehensive discussion of the work by Mark Van de Walle. These are accompanied by appendices that provide a full visual and descriptive account of the innumerable components that make up Sachs’s work and illustrate the artist’s related drawings and source materials.
Transportation, Tourism, Migration
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Though people generally do not think of them in such terms, crows are remarkably graceful: from the tip of a crow’s beak to the end of its tail is a single curve, which changes rhythmically as the crow turns its head or bends toward the ground. Foraging on their long, powerful legs, crows appear to glide over the earth; they take flight almost without effort, flapping(...)
Crow
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Though people generally do not think of them in such terms, crows are remarkably graceful: from the tip of a crow’s beak to the end of its tail is a single curve, which changes rhythmically as the crow turns its head or bends toward the ground. Foraging on their long, powerful legs, crows appear to glide over the earth; they take flight almost without effort, flapping their wings easily, ascending into the air like spirits. Nevertheless, the whiskers around their beaks and an apparent smile make crows, in a scruffy sort of way, endearingly ‘human’. In a vast range of cultures from the Chinese to the Hopi Indians, crows are bearers of prophecy. Because of their courtship dances and monogamous unions, the Greeks invoked crows at weddings as symbols of conjugal love. Crows are among the most ubiquitous of birds, yet, without being in the least exotic, they remain mysterious. This book is a survey of crows, ravens, magpies and their relatives in myth, literature and life. It ranges from the raven sent out by Noah to the corvid deities of the Eskimo, to Taoist legends, Victorian novels and contemporary films. It will be of interest to all people who have ever been intrigued, puzzled, annoyed or charmed by these wonderfully intelligent birds.
Fauna and flora
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Measures are the subject of this unusual book, in which Robert Tavernor offers a fascinating account of the various measuring systems human beings have devised over two millennia. Tavernor urges us to look beyond the notion that measuring is strictly a scientific activity, divorced from human concerns. Instead, he sets measures and measuring in cultural context and shows(...)
August 2007
Smoot's Ear : The measure of humanity
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Measures are the subject of this unusual book, in which Robert Tavernor offers a fascinating account of the various measuring systems human beings have devised over two millennia. Tavernor urges us to look beyond the notion that measuring is strictly a scientific activity, divorced from human concerns. Instead, he sets measures and measuring in cultural context and shows how deeply they are connected to human experience and history. The book explores changing attitudes toward measure, focusing on key moments in art, sculpture, architecture, philosophy, and the development of scientific thought. It encompasses the journey of Western civilization from the construction of the Great Pyramid to the first manned flight to the moon. Beginning with a review of early measuring standards that referred to the feet and inches of ideal bodies, the book then tracks how Enlightenment interest in a truly scientific system of measure led to the creation of the metric system. This “rational” approach to measure in turn has inspired artists, architects, writers, and others to seek a balance that takes the human story into account. Tavernor concludes with a discussion of measure in our own time, when space travel presents to humankind a direct encounter with the unfathomable measure of the universe.
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DVD Release Date: June 21, 2009. Kamecke's film could be placed in a time capsule and removed some time in the distant future as an exact record of our feelings at the time." So said Kathleen Carroll of the New York Daily News in 1972. NASA commissioned director Theo Kamecke to make the documentary only six weeks before Apollo 11 s flight to the Moon in July 1969. But(...)
Moonwalk one, the director's cut
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DVD Release Date: June 21, 2009. Kamecke's film could be placed in a time capsule and removed some time in the distant future as an exact record of our feelings at the time." So said Kathleen Carroll of the New York Daily News in 1972. NASA commissioned director Theo Kamecke to make the documentary only six weeks before Apollo 11 s flight to the Moon in July 1969. But instead of a simple documentary film, what transpired was a philosophical and poetic record of Man s first attempt to walk on another world. Opening dramatically with another of mankind s great achievements Stonehenge the film puts the triumph of the Moon shot into its proper historical context. Filmed across the World as the mission unfolded, Moonwalk One uniquely captured the essence of Apollo 11 in a way that subsequent documentaries could only mimic. Combined with Charles Morrow s breathtaking, avant-garde score and Laurence Luckinbill s inspiring narration this is a classic film for all time and makes for fascinating viewing today from the perspective of the early 21st Century. As Joseph Gelmis of the New York daily Newsday declared in 1969; Moonwalk One deserves to be a companion piece to Stanley Kubrik s masterwork 2001: A Space Odyssey .
DVDs
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Although a few among us are intrepid architectural tourists, visiting buildings and landscapes our cameras at the ready, most of us experience architecture through the windshield of a moving vehicle, the architectural experience reduced to a blurry and momentary drive-by. And the rest of our architectural "tourism" is through the images of cameras, movies, and television(...)
Architecture and Film, Set Design
May 2004, New York
Zoomscape : architecture and motion in media
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Although a few among us are intrepid architectural tourists, visiting buildings and landscapes our cameras at the ready, most of us experience architecture through the windshield of a moving vehicle, the architectural experience reduced to a blurry and momentary drive-by. And the rest of our architectural "tourism" is through the images of cameras, movies, and television programs—that is, through the lens of another's eye. Architectural historian Mitchell Schwarzer calls this new mediated architectural experience the "zoomscape." In this thought-provoking book, he argues that the perception of architecture has been fundamentally altered by the technologies of transportation and the camera - we now look at buildings, neighborhoods, cities, and even entire continents as we ride in trains, cars, and planes, and/or as we view photographs, movies, and television. "Zoomscape" shows how we now perceive buildings and places at high speeds, across great distances, through edited and multiple reproductions. Nowadays, our views of the architectural landscape are modulated by the accelerator pedal and the remote control, by studio production techniques and airplane flight paths. Using examples from high art and popular culture - from the novels of Don DeLillo to the opening credits of "The Sopranos" - Mitchell Schwarzer shows that the zoomscape has brought about unprecedented and often marvelous new ways of perceiving the built environment.
Architecture and Film, Set Design
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American cities, once economic and social launch pads for their residents, are all too often plagued by poverty and decay. One need only to look at the ruins of Detroit to see how far some once-great cities have fallen, or to Boston and San Francisco for evidence that such decline is reversible. In Boom Towns, Stephen J.K. Walters diagnoses the root causes of urban(...)
Boom towns: restoring the urban american dream
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American cities, once economic and social launch pads for their residents, are all too often plagued by poverty and decay. One need only to look at the ruins of Detroit to see how far some once-great cities have fallen, or to Boston and San Francisco for evidence that such decline is reversible. In Boom Towns, Stephen J.K. Walters diagnoses the root causes of urban decline in order to prescribe remedies that will enable cities to thrive once again. Arguing that commonplace explanations for urban decay misunderstand the nature our towns, Walters reconceives of cities as dense accumulations of capital in all of its forms — places that attract people by making their labor more productive and their leisure more pleasurable. Policymakers, therefore, must properly define and enforce property rights in order to prevent the flight of capital and the resulting demise of urban centers. Using vivid evocations of iconic towns and the people who crucially affected their destinies, Walters shows how public policy measures which aim to revitalize often do more harm than good. He then outlines a more promising set of policies to remedy the capital shortage that continues to afflict many cities and needlessly limit their residents' opportunities. With its fresh interpretation of one of the American quandaries of our day, Boom Towns offers a novel contribution to the debate about American cities and a program for their restoration.
Urban Theory
books
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The Space Race was an exhilirating moment in history, alternately frighten-ing, thrilling, awe-inspiring, and ultimately, sublime. Its most enigmatic element was the competition. The Soviets seemed less technologically sophisticated (at least from the American perspective) but in fact won many of the races: first satellite to orbit the earth; first man in space; first(...)
Kosmos: a portrait of the Russian Space Age
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The Space Race was an exhilirating moment in history, alternately frighten-ing, thrilling, awe-inspiring, and ultimately, sublime. Its most enigmatic element was the competition. The Soviets seemed less technologically sophisticated (at least from the American perspective) but in fact won many of the races: first satellite to orbit the earth; first man in space; first unmanned landings on Mars, Venus, and the Moon; first woman in space; most powerful rockets; and, until its recent fiery death, the most long-lived space station to name but a few. The inherent contradictions of the age--the mixture of technologies high and low, of nostalgia and progress, of pathos and promise--are revealed in Kosmos, Adam Bartos's astonishing photographic survey of the Soviet space program. Bartos' fascination with this subject led him to seek out places like the bedroom where Yuri Gagarian slept the night before his history-making flight into space, located in the Baiknour Cosmodrome, the one-time top-secret space complex in the Kazakh desert. Bartos also takes us inside the cockpit of the Merkur space capsule, used to ferry crew members and supplies to the super-secret Almaz orbital space stations, and behind the changing screens cosmonauts used before being fitted for their space suits at Zvezda, the chief manufacturer of Soviet life-support systems. In total, Kosmos presents over 100 of Bartos's photographs, rich with the incongruities of the history, science, culture, and politics of the Space Age.
books
November 2001
Photography monographs
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The book reproduces a series of the collages made by David Wild. Their subject is modern architecture in the first half of the twentieth century: in the Netherlands, in Russia, and in the work of Le Corbusier. The method of the book is to show a collage on a right-hand page; then on the facing page is a (...)
Fragments of utopia: collage reflections of heroic modernism
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The book reproduces a series of the collages made by David Wild. Their subject is modern architecture in the first half of the twentieth century: in the Netherlands, in Russia, and in the work of Le Corbusier. The method of the book is to show a collage on a right-hand page; then on the facing page is a prose commentary by Wild and supporting smaller images. Introducing the book, David Wild explains that the impulse for this work lies in the aftermath of a fire in his house: his scorched books lent themselves to collage. He goes on to sketch the cultural-political climate in Britain over the last 40 years: the backdrop to his work as an architect and (less directly) to this book. In the opening section on the Netherlands, the leading theme is an architecture of social equity and continuity. Rooted in old cultural traditions, and in the particular ‘football-pitch’ landscape of the country, modern architecture could realise some of its dreams in everyday buildings. Postage stamps play an active part in many of the book’s collages, and especially in this section: the design of stamps flourished in the Netherlands, through the enlightened patronage of the Dutch post office — with several architects designing stamps too. Politics and history come to prominence in the Russian section, as a motivating force in the work of the early 1920s, and then as a heavy burden — with the onset of totalitarian control and repression. At the centre of the discussion here is the architecture of constructivism: formally brilliant, but with a clear social programme. Flight and the exploration of space are recurring topics in this section, as another and particularly Russian dimension of utopian striving The work of Le Corbusier, in Europe, North and South America, Russia and India, is treated in the third section. Le Corbusier is presented as a brilliant artist, a master architect of the greatest skill and the greatest ambition — and without scruple in pursuing commissions. The images and text follow him into the years after the Second World War, culminating in the work in India. Here there is a vision of another kind of politics, of co-operation and non-violence.
books
January 1900, London
Graphic Designers, Monographs