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111 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm
Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, ©2011.
Urban code : 100 lessons for understanding the city / Anne Mikoleit, Moritz Pürckhauer.
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111 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm
books
Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, ©2011.
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Las Vegas, an artificial city brought to life in the heart of the Mojave desert, is the ultimate urban temptation: its shopping malls, theme parks and casinos offer an unceasing parade of entertainments and diversions. Its architecture combines slick, commercial seduction with a childish, cartoon-like appearance; its streets and arcades are constantly animated with(...)
Zeropolis : the experience of Las Vegas
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Las Vegas, an artificial city brought to life in the heart of the Mojave desert, is the ultimate urban temptation: its shopping malls, theme parks and casinos offer an unceasing parade of entertainments and diversions. Its architecture combines slick, commercial seduction with a childish, cartoon-like appearance; its streets and arcades are constantly animated with visitors and residents willingly submitting to the opium of this spectacular place. Las Vegas has always fascinated those who write about the American malaise, from Tom Wolfe to J. G. Ballard, but Bégout reveals the city’s other side, adding a valuable philosophical dimension to the nightmarish, fantastic visions that haunt the imagination of novelists and film-makers. The author draws minutely detailed portraits in the form of city scenes – portraits that are often tragic and sometimes extremely comic. Bégout lets himself be dragged into this party, this ‘paradise for bastards’, as Nick Tosches calls it. For Bégout, Las Vegas is the consummation of the modern city, the ultimate destination of our urban experiments, the great supermarket of the global village. "Neither near nor far, neither here nor elsewhere, Las Vegas is distinguished by nothingness. For us it is zeropolis, the non-city that is the very first city, just as zero is the very first number." Bruce Bégout is lecturer in philosophy at the University of Picardie, Amiens, France.
Urban Theory
Hannah Höch album
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As one of the protagonists of the Berlin Dada movement, Hannah Höch railed against tradition and conservatism in 1920s Germany. Höch and such cohorts as George Grosz and Raoul Hausmann raised anarchic revolution through cutting photomontage, nonsensical performance, and biting visual satire. A singular and important work in the artist's oeuvre is the so-called(...)
Hannah Höch album
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As one of the protagonists of the Berlin Dada movement, Hannah Höch railed against tradition and conservatism in 1920s Germany. Höch and such cohorts as George Grosz and Raoul Hausmann raised anarchic revolution through cutting photomontage, nonsensical performance, and biting visual satire. A singular and important work in the artist's oeuvre is the so-called "Sammelalbum," which she produced and pasted together from found imagery for her own pleasure and use, circa 1933. In it, she arranged a choice selection of newspaper and magazine photographs cut from popular German magazines of the time, such as the Berliner Illustrirte and Der Dame. A diverse, allusive group of images they are, representing everything from her favorite film stars to oddly captured animals and toy dolls, nudes, landscapes, scenic travel vistas, and synchronized dancers. By combining the collected pictures in continuous and sometimes contradictory sequences and double-page spreads, Höch created startling and often jarring photo collages. Never before published, Album can be considered to represent a heretofore unknown aspect of Höch's work, since its style of collage differs strongly from her well-known photomontages. This publication presents the entire Album in an exquisite facsimile reproduction, maintaining the filmic quality of its order and layout. In an accompanying essay, Gunda Luyken considers the content and history of the Album, locating it in the wider context of Höch’s oeuvre.
Photography monographs
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Identifying an intensified concern for place-based production in art and architecture, "Surface tension – supplements" addresses questions of site-specific art, public and architectural design, and location-based practice. With Supplement No. 1, issues of spatial practice are explored in critical essays by Jennifer Gabrys on the geographic implications of Fresh Kills(...)
Acoustics
June 2006, Copenhagen, Los Angeles
Surface tension - supplement no 1
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Identifying an intensified concern for place-based production in art and architecture, "Surface tension – supplements" addresses questions of site-specific art, public and architectural design, and location-based practice. With Supplement No. 1, issues of spatial practice are explored in critical essays by Jennifer Gabrys on the geographic implications of Fresh Kills Landfill, Scott Berzofsky, Nicholas Petr, Nicholas Wisniewski & Michael Rakowitz on artistic interventions in Baltimore, and by Claudine Isé, curator of "Vanishing Point", an exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts, which questions the aesthetics of urban non-spaces through recent photography and film. In addition field reports by Robin Wilson on public art projects in Bristol, Goto Newton on the cultures of interventionist practice in Curitiba Brazil, and Ken Ehrlich on the infrastructure of signage in Los Angeles as seen through the photographic works of Brandon Lattu complement the articles. In addition, documentation of public projects in Tijuana and Ohio by the artist groups Simparch and e-Xplo will be presented, along with projects designed specifically for the book by Sophie Warren and Jonathan Mosely, a Bristol-based team working with questions of utopian architecture, and Brandon LaBelle with a textual-photographic meditation on experimental architecture. Additional writings by Kathy Battista and Aoife O’Brien provide critical and creative perspectives on recent events, books, and exhibitions working with questions of architecture, performance, and media.
Acoustics
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Public toilets provide a unique opportunity for interrogating how conventional assumptions about the body, sexuality, privacy, and technology are formed in public spaces and inscribed through design across cultures. This collection of original essays from international scholars is the first to explore the cultural meanings, histories, and ideologies of public toilets as(...)
Ladies and gents ; public toilets and gender
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Public toilets provide a unique opportunity for interrogating how conventional assumptions about the body, sexuality, privacy, and technology are formed in public spaces and inscribed through design across cultures. This collection of original essays from international scholars is the first to explore the cultural meanings, histories, and ideologies of public toilets as gendered spaces. The publication consists of two sets of essays. The first, "Potty Politics: Toilets, Gender and Identity," establishes the importance of accessible, secure public toilets to the creation of inclusive cities, work, and learning environments. The second set of essays, "Toilet Art : Design and Cultural Representations," discusses public toilets as spaces of representation and representational spaces, with reference to architectural design, humor, film, theater, art, and popular culture. Visual materials and original artwork are included throughout, depicting subjects as varied as female urinals, art installations sited in public restrooms, and the toilet in contemporary art. Taken together, these seventeen essays demonstrate that public toilets are often sites where gendered bodies compete for resources and recognition — and the stakes are high. Contributors include: Nathan Abrams, Jami L. Anderson, Johan Andersson, Kathryn H. Anthony, Kathy Battista, Andrew Brown-May, Ben Campkin, Meghan Dufresne, Peg Fraser, Deborah Gans, Clara Greed, Robin Lydenberg, Claudia Mitchell, Alison Moore, Frances Pheasant-Kelly, Bushra Rehman, Alex Schweder, Naomi Stead, and the editors.
Urban Theory
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"Impossible histories" is the first critical survey of the extraordinary experiments in the arts that took place in the former Yugoslavia from the country's founding in 1918 to its breakup in 1991. The combination of Austro-Hungarian, French, German, Italian, and Turkish influences gave Yugoslavia's avant-gardes a distinct character unlike those of other Eastern and(...)
Modernism
July 2003, Cambridge / London
Impossible histories : historical avant-gardes, neo-avant-gardes, and post-avant-gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991
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"Impossible histories" is the first critical survey of the extraordinary experiments in the arts that took place in the former Yugoslavia from the country's founding in 1918 to its breakup in 1991. The combination of Austro-Hungarian, French, German, Italian, and Turkish influences gave Yugoslavia's avant-gardes a distinct character unlike those of other Eastern and Central European avant-gardes. Censorship and suppression kept much of the work far from the eyes and ears of the Yugoslav people, while language barriers and the inaccessibility of archives caused it to remain largely unknown to Western scholars. Even at this late stage in the scholarly investigation of the avant-garde, few Westerners have heard of the movements Belgrade surrealism, signalism, Yugo-Dada, and zenitism; the groups Alfa, Exat 51, Gorgona, OHO, and Scipion Nasice Sisters Theater; or the magazines Danas, Red Pilot, Tank, Vecnost, and Zvrk. The pieces in this collection offer comparative and interpretive accounts of the avant-gardes in the former Yugoslavian countries of Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia. The book is divided into four sections : art and politics; literature; visual art and architecture; and art in motion (covering theater, dance, music, film, and video). All of the contributors live in the region and many of them participated in the movements discussed. The book also reprints a selection of the most important manifestos generated by all phases of Yugoslav avant-garde activity.
Modernism
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In 1988, photographer Sandy Sorlien set out on a series of journeys to document the rich architectural heritage that America is losing to the cheap and banal design aesthetic of tract housing, strip malls, and big-box stores. Her eight-year odyssey took her over ninety thousand miles of back roads to every state in the Union in search of homes that reflect and define the(...)
Fifty houses : images from the American road
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In 1988, photographer Sandy Sorlien set out on a series of journeys to document the rich architectural heritage that America is losing to the cheap and banal design aesthetic of tract housing, strip malls, and big-box stores. Her eight-year odyssey took her over ninety thousand miles of back roads to every state in the Union in search of homes that reflect and define the region in which they stand. After making over a thousand "house portraits," Sorlien has chosen one representative image from each state and collected them in Fifty Houses. Shot with black-and-white infrared film, the homes captured through Sorlien's lens range from the grand to the humble, from the historic to the commonplace. Included here are a classic saltbox in Newtown, Connecticut; the House on the Rocks in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay; a mobile home in Bushnell, Florida; a Stick-style folk Victorian in Biloxi, Mississippi; a limestone cottage in Fredericksburg, Texas; a false-front house in Rollins, Montana; a log cabin in Dubois, Wyoming; an adobe dwelling in Sante Fe, New Mexico; and a platform tent in Healy, Alaska. Each image is accompanied by a vignette from Sorlien's road journal, offering details of the house depicted, its owners and history, other houses in the region, or her travel experiences in the state.
History until 1900
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In this second volume in the Chora series, contributing authors take an interdisciplinary approach to architecture and other cultural concerns, challenging readers to consider alternatives to conventional aesthetic and technological reductions. Karsten Harris provides a new and long-overdue reading of Martin Heidegger's well-known(...)
Architectural Theory
September 1996, Montréal
Chora 2 : intervals in the philosophy of architecture
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In this second volume in the Chora series, contributing authors take an interdisciplinary approach to architecture and other cultural concerns, challenging readers to consider alternatives to conventional aesthetic and technological reductions. Karsten Harris provides a new and long-overdue reading of Martin Heidegger's well-known essay "Building Dwelling Thinking." Donald Kunze and Stephen Parcell consider possibilities of meaningful architectural space for a visual culture, continuing themes they addressed in Chora 1. Further reflections on the spaces of literature, cinema, and architecture include an interview with French writer and film maker Alain Robbe-Grillet and articles by Dagmar Motycka Weston on the surrealist city, Tracey Eve Winton on the museum as a paradigmatic modern building, and Terrance Galvin on spiritual space in the works of Jean Cocteau. Jean-Pierre Chupin and Bram Ratner explore historical themes in their essays on French Renaissance architect Philibert de l'Orme and the Jewish myth of the Golem. Gregory Caicco addresses ethical questions in his essay on the Greek agora and the death of Socrates, as does Lily Chi in her meditation on the critical issue of use in architectural works. A concern with architectural representation and generative strategies for the making of architecture is present throughout, especially in the essay by Joanna Merwood on the provocative House by British artist Rachel Whiteread.
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September 1996, Montréal
Architectural Theory
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Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens reassesses the explosive growth of postwar Athens through its most distinctive building type, the polykatoikía, and its different connotations through the decades: from a monotonous and ugly element of the city to the role it might play in the urban sustainability. Sprawling beneath the Acropolis, modern Athens(...)
Builders, housewives, and the construction of modern Athens
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Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens reassesses the explosive growth of postwar Athens through its most distinctive building type, the polykatoikía, and its different connotations through the decades: from a monotonous and ugly element of the city to the role it might play in the urban sustainability. Sprawling beneath the Acropolis, modern Athens is commonly viewed in negative terms: congested, ugly and monotonous. Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens questions this stereotype, reassessing the explosive growth of postwar Athens through its most distinctive building type: the polykatoikía (a small-scale multistory apartment block). Theocharopoulou re-evaluates the polykatoikía as a low-tech, easily constructible innovation that stimulated the postwar urban economy, triggering the city's social mid-twentieth-century transformation. The interiors of the polykatoikía apartments reflect a desire for modernity as marketed to housewives through film and magazines. Regular builders became unlikely allies in designing these polykatoikía interiors, enabling inhabitants to exert agency over their daily lives and the shape of the postwar city. This revised edition of Theocharopoulou's study draws on popular media as well as urban and regional planning theory, cultural studies and anthropology to examine the evolution of this phenomenon. Written in the light of Greece's recent financial crisis, the book's updated Postscript considers the role polykatoikía might play in building an equitable and sustainable twenty-first-century city.
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September 2022
Urban Theory
Walking between slums and skycrapers: illusions of open space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai
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The book is concerned with the effects of globalization on living space focusing specifically on East Asian metropolises, such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai. Globalization has given rise to accessible catch-phrases such as the 'global village' and 'this is a small world.' In each part of the book the author juxtaposes a 'social' account of the city's urban space as it(...)
April 2004, Hong Kong
Walking between slums and skycrapers: illusions of open space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai
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The book is concerned with the effects of globalization on living space focusing specifically on East Asian metropolises, such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai. Globalization has given rise to accessible catch-phrases such as the 'global village' and 'this is a small world.' In each part of the book the author juxtaposes a 'social' account of the city's urban space as it has been reshaped by the process of globalization with a 'private' account of the urban landscape as experienced by its walkers. Rather than rest here, the author wishes to show that for many of the inhabitants of the new global city, the 'shrinking world' phenomenon is deeply literal: the 'lived' space of everyday life is shrinking to make room for rezoning, construction of new infrastructure, and space modification - all in the name of urban development. Tsung-yi Michelle Huang received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her works on cinema, literature, cultural studies, global cities, and Hong Kong culture have been published in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Narrative Theory, among others. Recently she has been working in a project that defines and examines specific East Asian metropolises as both 'linked' cities and distinctive global centers, mapping the tension within these domains. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English Literature at National Taiwan Normal University.