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The work of British architects ABK is characterised by the founding partners' belief that buildings should address far more than purely functional needs. Key issues for this practice since it was founded 40 years ago have become central concerns for architecture in the early 21st century: energy and the environment, historic context and the importance of user(...)
Architecture Monographs
April 2002, London / Basel / Boston /Berlin
Collaborations : the architecture of ABK
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The work of British architects ABK is characterised by the founding partners' belief that buildings should address far more than purely functional needs. Key issues for this practice since it was founded 40 years ago have become central concerns for architecture in the early 21st century: energy and the environment, historic context and the importance of user participation. Peter Ahrends, Richard Burton and Paul Koralek are particularly interested in the integration of art, architecture and landscape, an approach which has resulted in a series of collaborative partnerships over the course of their careers. This book traces the practice's development, from early landmark projects like the Berkeley Library at Trinity College, Dublin to the highly acclaimed British Embassy in Moscow, which opened in 2000. It also tells the full story, for the first time, behind the most notorious British architectural episode of the 1980s - how ABK won the commission to design an extension to the National Gallery in London, only to have it taken away from them when Prince Charles described the scheme as a 'monstrous carbuncle'.
Architecture Monographs
Joseph Beuys and history
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Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) was one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century—and one of the most controversial. Working in Germany in the aftermath of World War II, he explored a radically expanded concept of art through a practice that ranged from performative actions to large-scale sculptural ensembles. While some contemporaries found his claim that(...)
Joseph Beuys and history
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Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) was one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century—and one of the most controversial. Working in Germany in the aftermath of World War II, he explored a radically expanded concept of art through a practice that ranged from performative actions to large-scale sculptural ensembles. While some contemporaries found his claim that “everyone is an artist” liberating, even revolutionary, others accused him of fostering a dangerous cult of personality. In "Joseph Beuys and History", the first rigorous art historical study of the artist in English, Daniel Spaulding presents a striking new interpretation of Beuys’s work and career. By putting Beuys in the context of Germany’s postwar recovery, Spaulding shows that the artist’s superimposed biological, political, and economic metaphors offered a powerful way to think about the trajectory of human freedom, the place of art in capitalist modernity, and the possibility of an ecological aesthetics. At the same time, his oeuvre’s disquieting echoes of the Nazi past suggest that not everything could be reconciled in what Beuys called “social sculpture.”
Contemporary Art Monographs
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Gumshoe is a new series of architectural books that introduces an original approach to the writing of architectural history. Emulating the detective novel, the focus is on actual buildings rather than on speculative designs and theories. The style and form are fresh and scholarly but also easy and enjoyable to read. In Mysteries of a Communist Cave, the second book in the(...)
Mysteries of a Communist Cave, Gumshoe #2
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Gumshoe is a new series of architectural books that introduces an original approach to the writing of architectural history. Emulating the detective novel, the focus is on actual buildings rather than on speculative designs and theories. The style and form are fresh and scholarly but also easy and enjoyable to read. In Mysteries of a Communist Cave, the second book in the Gumshoe series, Lytle Shaw conducts an investigation of Oscar Niemeyer’s building for the French Communist Party’s (PCF) central committee in Paris. Designed in 1965, just as party theorists began to rethink many bedrock assumptions about representation, Oscar Niemeyer’s PCF building is a microcosm of the shifting political and architectural landscape of the 1960s. It is also a literal Marxist structure that can thus help us concretely picture just exactly what Structuralist Marxism might have been. Shaw draws out the PCF’s language and context one element at a time and puts the elegant curtain-wall building, with its cave-like assembly hall, into revelatory dialogue with interlocutors in film, philosophy, anthropology, and politics.
Architectural Theory
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Although highly regarded during his short life--and honored by artists and architects today--the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-78) has been largely ignored within the history of art. Matta-Clark is best remembered for site-specific projects known as(...)
Contemporary Art Monographs
December 1999, Cambridge, Mass.
Object to be destroyed : the work of Gordon Matta-Clark
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Although highly regarded during his short life--and honored by artists and architects today--the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-78) has been largely ignored within the history of art. Matta-Clark is best remembered for site-specific projects known as "building cuts." Sculptural transformations of architecture produced through direct cuts into buildings scheduled for demolition, these works now exist only as sculptural fragments, photographs, and film and video documentations. Matta-Clark is also remembered as a catalytic force in the creation of SoHo in the early 1970s. Through loft activities, site projects at the exhibition space 112 Greene Street, and his work at the restaurant Food, he participated in the production of a new social and artistic space. In this first critical account of Matta-Clark's work, Lee considers it in the context of the art of the 1970s--particularly site-specific, conceptual, and minimalist practices--and its confrontation with issues of community, property, the alienation of urban space, the "right to the city," and the ideologies of progress that have defined modern building programs.
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December 1999, Cambridge, Mass.
Contemporary Art Monographs
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The dominant architectures in our culture of development consist of generic protocols for building offices, airports, houses, and highways. For Keller Easterling these organizational formats are not merely the context of design efforts. They are the design. Bridging the gap between architecture and infrastructure, Easterling views architecture as part of an ecology of(...)
Organization space : landscapes, highways, and houses in America
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The dominant architectures in our culture of development consist of generic protocols for building offices, airports, houses, and highways. For Keller Easterling these organizational formats are not merely the context of design efforts. They are the design. Bridging the gap between architecture and infrastructure, Easterling views architecture as part of an ecology of interrelationships and linkages, and she treats the expression of organizational character as part of the architectural endeavor. Easterling also makes the case that these organizational formats are improvisational and responsive to circumstantial change, to mistakes, anomalies, and seemingly illogical market forces. By treating these irregularities opportunistically, she offers architects working within the customary development protocols new sites for making and altering space. By showing the reciprocal relations between systems of thinking and modes of designing, Easterling establishes unexpected congruencies between natural and built environments, virtual and physical systems, highway and communication networks, and corporate and spatial organizations. She frames her unconventional notion of site not in terms of singular entities, but in terms of relationships between multiple sites that are both individually and collectively adjustable.
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November 1999, Cambridge
Architectural Theory
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Only in the last decade have climatologists developed an accurate picture of yearly climate conditions in historical times. This development confirmed a long-standing suspicion: that the world endured a 500-year cold snap -- The Little Ice Age -- that lasted roughly from A.D. 1300 until 1850. "The little ice age" tells the story of the turbulent, unpredictable and often(...)
The little ice age: How climate made history 1300-1850
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Only in the last decade have climatologists developed an accurate picture of yearly climate conditions in historical times. This development confirmed a long-standing suspicion: that the world endured a 500-year cold snap -- The Little Ice Age -- that lasted roughly from A.D. 1300 until 1850. "The little ice age" tells the story of the turbulent, unpredictable and often very cold years of modern European history, how climate altered historical events, and what they mean in the context of today's global warming. With its basis in cutting-edge science, "The little ice age" offers a new perspective on familiar events. Renowned archaeologist Brian Fagan shows how the increasing cold affected Norse exploration; how changing sea temperatures caused English and Basque fishermen to follow vast shoals of cod all the way to the New World; how a generations-long subsistence crisis in France contributed to social disintegration and ultimately revolution; and how English efforts to improve farm productivity in the face of a deteriorating climate helped pave the way for the Industrial Revolution and hence for global warming.
Current Exhibitions
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Catastrophes, bombed-out cities, large-scale political transformations: “Image complexes” of humanitarian and ecological upheaval document the world as a sequence of catastrophes. But who decides how events are presented, determines the resolution of our visual worlds, and controls the circulation or censorship of images? Eyal and Ines Weizman trace the history of the(...)
Before & After: The architecture of disaster
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Catastrophes, bombed-out cities, large-scale political transformations: “Image complexes” of humanitarian and ecological upheaval document the world as a sequence of catastrophes. But who decides how events are presented, determines the resolution of our visual worlds, and controls the circulation or censorship of images? Eyal and Ines Weizman trace the history of the before-and-after image from nineteenth-century photography to contemporary satellite images and discover a gap that not only conceals the devastating event: it is the human subject itself that is in danger of disappearing from the images. Does humanitarian work, the documentation and reconstruction of war crimes, in which people’s fates and rights should be at the center of attention, paradoxically enter a post-human phase? How can the gap between images become a site of critical counter-reading rather than a symbol of erasure? In the context of their current research, Eyal and Ines Weizman discuss the history, present, and future of the paradigm of the before-and-after image in an exclusive conversation with Marie Glassl.
Architectural Theory
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Comparing the work of ''Archigram'' and ''High-Tech'' architects thematically, this book explores the historical and cultural context of London to reveal their influences and interconnections and why two such radical groups emerged from a seemingly conservative city. This book examines the relationships between the work of ''Archigram'' and that of the British(...)
Architectures of the technopolis: Archigram and the British high tech
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Comparing the work of ''Archigram'' and ''High-Tech'' architects thematically, this book explores the historical and cultural context of London to reveal their influences and interconnections and why two such radical groups emerged from a seemingly conservative city. This book examines the relationships between the work of ''Archigram'' and that of the British ''High-Tech'' architects, groups that were based in London and developing in the 1960s and 70s. While one group consisted of academics and artists known for their humour and eccentricity and the other were a group of deadly serious architects emerging to international proliference, this book argues that they shared uncannily similar impulses. There is the self-evident commonality of language: overblown machines, kits-of-parts of pieces and components, and a disintegration of building as object in favour of the constituent elements. Underlying both movements is a mutual, undying optimism in technological process and technological expression. Set within the rich history and culture of London, the book makes its comparisons by exploring central shared ideas: utopia, engineering, theatricality, infrastructure and narrative, and the iconography of war machinery.
Architecture Monographs
Modernism in late-Mao China
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This book investigates the architectural history of China in the Mao era (1949–1976), focusing on the rise of modernism in the last seven years of the Cultural Revolution from 1969 to 1976. It highlights the new architecture of this period, exemplified by three clusters of buildings for foreign affairs, namely buildings for foreign diplomacy in Beijing, buildings for(...)
Modernism in late-Mao China
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This book investigates the architectural history of China in the Mao era (1949–1976), focusing on the rise of modernism in the last seven years of the Cultural Revolution from 1969 to 1976. It highlights the new architecture of this period, exemplified by three clusters of buildings for foreign affairs, namely buildings for foreign diplomacy in Beijing, buildings for foreign trade in Guangzhou and China’s foreign aid projects overseas. The emergence of new architecture in the early 1970s is closely associated with China’s political and diplomatic shift of the time, from a radical emphasis on ideological struggle to a dynamic balance between leftist ideology and pragmatic concerns. In this context, China’s relations with the West quickly improved, culminating with American president Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. The increasing foreign affairs brought new opportunities to Chinese architects who referenced both Western modernism and Chinese architectural traditions to create a new version of Chinese modernism. The book brings dimensions of form, politics and knowledge to the analysis of architecture, to construct an understanding of architectural design as an aesthetic, political and intellectual practice.
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The book offers for the first time the translation of two surveys conducted by the leading Danish modern architect Kay Fisker and the students of his classes. The two texts are reproduced as a facsimile edition, so the scope has maintained the original layout along with critical examinations, diagrams, and an impressive quantity of comparative drawings. The book is not(...)
Copenhagen Housing Types (1936) Row-House Types (1941)
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The book offers for the first time the translation of two surveys conducted by the leading Danish modern architect Kay Fisker and the students of his classes. The two texts are reproduced as a facsimile edition, so the scope has maintained the original layout along with critical examinations, diagrams, and an impressive quantity of comparative drawings. The book is not solely the translation of the two analyses; it delves into the main features of Fisker’s works of architecture and the cultural context within which the explorations on housing types were conducted at the School of Architecture of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. The systematic approach, the richness of selected examples, as well as the analytic content, make this book valuable beyond its historic and geographic limits. Due to the topical interest in the field of housing studies, the translation of Copenhagen Housing Types (1936) and Row-House Types (1941) will provide students and professionals a clear and useful instrument for comprehending the evolution of the cities, as well as for housing design from an architectural and urban perspective.
Residential Architecture