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New ideas and concepts for urban architecture and landscape architecture from the Netherlands: this survey takes stock of the current situation. In any discussion on contemporary landscape architecture, visionary urban development or revolutionary building, it is impossible to overlook the Netherlands. The experts look to this small, flat country which constantly(...)
The Netherlands in focus : exemplary ideas and concepts for town and landscape
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New ideas and concepts for urban architecture and landscape architecture from the Netherlands: this survey takes stock of the current situation. In any discussion on contemporary landscape architecture, visionary urban development or revolutionary building, it is impossible to overlook the Netherlands. The experts look to this small, flat country which constantly seeks to exceed its narrow boundaries by creating new space. The Netherlands is crowded and so it is hardly surprising that architects endeavour to "stack" landscapes and functions as the Dutch pavilion in the Expo 2000, designed by MVRDV demonstrated. Here, new ideas and concepts in architecture and landscape design fall on the fertile ground. Rem Koolhaas had prepared the way: nothing must stay as it is, even the open countryside and the towns can be changed, moulded, shaped. The Dutch are experts at building in the sea, on polders, on man-made islands, and on former harbour areas as in Rotterdam Kop van Zuid. Architecture and landscape architecture are not only a matter of public interest but they are ongoing processes in the Netherlands, and this is reflected in many of the projects in this book which include the gardens and squares of West 8, the Museumsplein in Amsterdam, the town planning in Zutphen or Apeldoorn. The examples have all been published in different contexts in Topos, but this is the first time that they have been collated to provide an illuminating overview of contemporary Dutch landscape architecture.
Gardens
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As WWI drew to a close, change reverberated through the halls of England’s country homes. As the sun set slowly on the British Empire, the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a thousand stately homes. In The Long Weekend, historian Adrian Tinniswood introduces us to the tumultuous, scandalous and glamourous history of English country houses during the years between(...)
The long weekend: life in the English country house 1918-1939
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As WWI drew to a close, change reverberated through the halls of England’s country homes. As the sun set slowly on the British Empire, the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a thousand stately homes. In The Long Weekend, historian Adrian Tinniswood introduces us to the tumultuous, scandalous and glamourous history of English country houses during the years between World Wars. As estate taxes and other challenges forced many of these venerable houses onto the market, new sectors of British and American society were seduced by the dream of owning a home in the English countryside. Drawing on thousands of memoirs, letters, and diaries, as well as the eye-witness testimonies of belted earls and bibulous butlers, Tinniswood brings the stately homes of England to life as never before, opening the door to a world by turns opulent and ordinary, noble and vicious, and forever wrapped in myth. We are drawn into the intrigues of legendary families such as the Astors, the Churchills and the Devonshires as they hosted hunting parties and balls that attracted the likes of Charlie Chaplin, T.E. Lawrence, and royals such as Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. We waltz through aristocratic soirées, and watch as the upper crust struggle to fend off rising taxes and underbred outsiders, property speculators and poultry farmers. We gain insight into the guilt and the gingerbread, and see how the image of the country house was carefully protected by its occupants above and below stairs.
History until 1900, Great Britain
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The underground has been a dominant image of modern life since the late eighteenth century. A site of crisis, fascination, and hidden truth, the underground is a space at once more immediate and more threatening than the ordinary world above. In Subterranean Cities, David L. Pike explores the representation of underground space in the nineteenth and early twentieth(...)
subterranean cities : the world beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945
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The underground has been a dominant image of modern life since the late eighteenth century. A site of crisis, fascination, and hidden truth, the underground is a space at once more immediate and more threatening than the ordinary world above. In Subterranean Cities, David L. Pike explores the representation of underground space in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period during which technology and heavy industry transformed urban life. The metropolis had long been considered a moral underworld of iniquity and dissolution. As the complex drainage systems, underground railways, utility tunnels, and storage vaults of the modern cityscape superseded the countryside of caverns and mines as the principal location of actual subterranean spaces, ancient and modern converged in a mythic space that was nevertheless rooted in the everyday life of the contemporary city. Writers and artists from Felix Nadar and Charles Baudelaire to Charles Dickens and Alice Meynell, Gustave Doré and Victor Hugo, George Gissing and Emile Zola, and Jules Verne and H. G. Wells integrated images of the urban underworld into their portrayals of the anatomy of modern society. Illustrated with photographs, movie stills, prints, engravings, paintings, cartoons, maps, and drawings of actual and imagined urban spaces, Subterranean Cities documents the emergence of a novel space in the subterranean obsessions and anxieties within nineteenth-century urban culture. Chapters on the subways, sewers, and cemeteries of Paris and London provide a detailed analysis of these competing centers of urban modernity. A concluding chapter considers the enduring influence of these spaces on urban culture at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Urban Theory
AD : Cities of dispersal
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Questioning the traditional boundaries between cities, suburbs, countryside and wilderness, this issue of AD explores emergent types of public space in low-density environments. It describes this new form of urbanism: decentralised, in a constant process of expansion and contraction, not homogenous or necessarily low-rise, nor guided by one mode of development, typology(...)
AD : Cities of dispersal
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Questioning the traditional boundaries between cities, suburbs, countryside and wilderness, this issue of AD explores emergent types of public space in low-density environments. It describes this new form of urbanism: decentralised, in a constant process of expansion and contraction, not homogenous or necessarily low-rise, nor guided by one mode of development, typology or pattern. While functionally and programmatically dispersed, settlements operate as a form of urbanism; the place of collective spaces within them has yet to be defined and articulated. The physical transformation of the built environment on the one hand, and the change in our notion of the public on the other - due to globalisation, privatisation and segregation - call for renewed interpretations of the nature and character of public space. The concept of public space needs to be examined: replaced, re-created or adapted to fit these conditions. What is the place of the public in this form of urbanism, and how can architecture address the notion of common, collective spaces? What is the current sociopolitical role o such spaces? How does the form and use of these spaces reflect the conception of the public as a political (or non-political) body? And can architecture regain an active role in formulating the notion of the collective? These and other issues are addressed through essays, research projects and built work by distinguished writers such as Bruce Robbins, Albert Pope and Alex Wall, and Practitioners including Zvi Hecker, Vito Acconci, MUTOPIA, Manuel de Sola-Morales, Martha Rosler and Manuel Vicente in a search for new collective architectures within the dispersed city.
Urban Theory
Sprawl : a compact history
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As anyone who has flown into Los Angeles at dusk or Houston at midday knows, urban areas today defy traditional notions of what a city is. Our old definitions of urban, suburban, and rural fail to capture the complexity of these vast regions with their superhighways, subdivisions, industrial areas, office parks, and resort areas pushing far out into the countryside.(...)
Sprawl : a compact history
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As anyone who has flown into Los Angeles at dusk or Houston at midday knows, urban areas today defy traditional notions of what a city is. Our old definitions of urban, suburban, and rural fail to capture the complexity of these vast regions with their superhighways, subdivisions, industrial areas, office parks, and resort areas pushing far out into the countryside. Detractors call it sprawl and assert that it is economically inefficient, socially inequitable, environmentally irresponsible, and aesthetically ugly. Robert Bruegmann calls it a logical consequence of economic growth and the democratization of society, with benefits that urban planners have failed to recognize. In his history of the expanded city, Bruegmann overturns every assumption we have about sprawl. Taking a long view of urban development, he demonstrates that sprawl is neither recent nor particularly American but as old as cities themselves, just as characteristic of ancient Rome and eighteenth-century Paris as it is of Atlanta or Los Angeles. Nor is sprawl the disaster claimed by many contemporary observers. Although sprawl, like any settlement pattern, has undoubtedly produced problems that must be addressed, it has also provided millions of people with the kinds of mobility, privacy, and choice that were once the exclusive prerogatives of the rich and powerful. The first major book to strip urban sprawl of its pejorative connotations, Sprawl offers a completely new vision of the city and its growth. Bruegmann leads readers to the powerful conclusion that ''in its immense complexity and constant change, the city-whether dense and concentrated at its core, looser and more sprawling in suburbia, or in the vast tracts of exurban penumbra that extend dozens, even hundreds, of miles-is the grandest and most marvelous work of mankind.''
Urban Theory
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Roger Fenton (1819-1869) was England’s most celebrated and influential photographer during the 1850s, the “golden age” of this radically new medium. Fenton’s majestic pictures of cathedrals, country houses, and varied countryside were without peer in England--as were his views of the royal castles and Houses of Parliament that embodied Britain’s power. But Fenton’s(...)
Photography monographs
November 2004, New Haven, London
All the mighty world : the photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852-1860
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Roger Fenton (1819-1869) was England’s most celebrated and influential photographer during the 1850s, the “golden age” of this radically new medium. Fenton’s majestic pictures of cathedrals, country houses, and varied countryside were without peer in England--as were his views of the royal castles and Houses of Parliament that embodied Britain’s power. But Fenton’s choice of subjects ranged more widely still: he was among the first to photograph the Kremlin and other landmarks of Moscow and Kiev; he was commissioned in 1855 to document the Crimean War, producing early war photographs; and he created theatrical Orientalist costume pictures and a startling series of lush still lifes. Fenton had first studied law and painting, but soon after he took up the camera he was making photographs that were technically superb and highly original in their handling of composition, perspective, atmosphere, and light. Always he strove to demonstrate that photography could equal the art of painting and even surpass it. He was the force behind the founding of the Photographic Society (later the Royal Photographic Society), which worked to advance the profession and encouraged the exhibition of members’ works throughout Britain. In a career of a single decade, Fenton did much to transform photography into a medium of powerful expression and visual delight. This exquisitely produced book--the first comprehensive publication on Fenton in almost twenty years--presents eighty-five of the artist’s finest photographs and discusses every aspect of his work and his remarkable career. This catalogue accompanies an exhibition on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (October 17, 2004, to January 2, 2005); the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (February 1 to April 25, 2005); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (May 16 to August 14, 2005); and Tate Britain, London (September 25, 2005, to January 2, 2006).
Photography monographs
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In "The Geography of Nowhere", James Howard Kunstler declared suburbia "a tragic landscape of cartoon architecture, junked cities, and ravaged countryside" and put himself at the heart of a fierce debate over how we will live in twenty-first century America. Now, Kunstler turns his eye on urban life both in America and across the world. From classical Rome to the(...)
The city in mind : notes on the urban condition
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In "The Geography of Nowhere", James Howard Kunstler declared suburbia "a tragic landscape of cartoon architecture, junked cities, and ravaged countryside" and put himself at the heart of a fierce debate over how we will live in twenty-first century America. Now, Kunstler turns his eye on urban life both in America and across the world. From classical Rome to the "gigantic hairball" of contemporary Atlanta, he offers a far-reaching discourse on the history and current state of urban life. "The City in Mind" tells the story of urban design and how the architectural makeup of a city directly influences its culture as well as its success. From the ingenious architectural design of Louis-Napoleon's renovation of Paris to the bloody collision of cultures that occurred when Cortés conquered the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, from the grandiose architectural schemes of Hitler and Albert Speer to the meanings behind the ludicrous spectacle of Las Vegas, Kunstler opens up a new dialogue on the development and effects of urban construction. In his investigations, he discovers American communities in the Sunbelt and Southwest alienated from each other and themselves, Northeastern cities caught between their initial civic construction and our current car-obsessed society, and a disparate Europe with its mix of pre-industrial creativity, and war-marked reminders of the twentieth century. Expanding on ideas first discussed in Jane Jacobs' seminal work, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", Kunstler looks to Europe to discover what is constant and enduring in cities at their greatest, and at the same time, how a city's design can be directly linked to its decline. In these excursions he finds the reasons that America got lost in its suburban wilderness and locates the pathways in culture that might lead to a civic revival here. Kunstler's examination of these cities is at once a concise history of their urban lives and a detailed criticism of how those histories have either aided or hindered the social and civil progress of the cities' occupants. By turns dramatic and comic, and always authoritative, "The City in Mind", is an exceptional glimpse into the urban condition.
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January 2002, New York
Urban Theory