books
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Picking up where his best-selling City of Bits left off, Mitchell argues that we must extend the definitions of architecture and urban design to encompass virtual places as well as physical ones, and interconnection by means of telecommunication links as well as by pedestrian (...)
E-topia : "Urban life, Jim -- but not as we know it"
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Picking up where his best-selling City of Bits left off, Mitchell argues that we must extend the definitions of architecture and urban design to encompass virtual places as well as physical ones, and interconnection by means of telecommunication links as well as by pedestrian circulation and mechanized transportation systems. He proposes strategies for the creation of cities that not only will be sustainable but will make economic, social, and cultural sense in an electronically interconnected and global world. The new settlement patterns of the twenty-first century will be characterized by live/work dwellings, 24-hour pedestrian-scale neighborhoods rich in social relationships, and vigorous local community life, complemented by far-flung configurations of electronic meeting places and decentralized production, marketing, and distribution systems. Neither digiphile nor digiphobe, Mitchell advocates the creation of e-topias--cities that work smarter, not harder.
books
October 1999, Cambridge
Urban Theory
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In the ten years since the first edition of "A Guide to Canadian Architectural Styles" was published, the heritage movement has gained strength, sensitizing many to the value of our architectural legacy. This new edition reflects an enriched understanding of architecture that focuses more on the visual and cultural setting of the built environment and less on individual(...)
Architecture in Canada
September 2003, Peterborough, Ontario
A guide to Canadian architectural styles, second edition
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In the ten years since the first edition of "A Guide to Canadian Architectural Styles" was published, the heritage movement has gained strength, sensitizing many to the value of our architectural legacy. This new edition reflects an enriched understanding of architecture that focuses more on the visual and cultural setting of the built environment and less on individual works seen in isolation. Today, we cherish the buildings that characterize the original Main Street / rue Principale - the bank building, the shops, the old hotel, the post office, the city hall. There is more recognition for older inner-city neighbourhoods, with their row housing, churches, and community halls as well as for our often romantic attachment to vernacular rural architecture. This interest in more ordinary-looking architecture marks both the democratization of Canada's heritage movement and its coming of age, for the value of these more modest structures lies in their unique ability to sustain a sense of identity. This book provides an essential profile of the origins and development of the many architectural styles across Canada, from early settlement to the postmodern period, and discusses special forms such as religious, civic, domestic, commercial, and industrial design. While remaining true to the accessible format of the first edition, the second offers updated and considerably expanded text, as well as many more illustrations.
Architecture in Canada
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Over the past decade, a seismic shift in economic and political forces has transformed life in the second-largest city on the West Coast, situated at the most heavily trafficked international border crossing in the world. Tijuana’s newfound wealth and haphazard expansion have changed patterns of migration for the city’s many artists, who once routinely moved north to Los(...)
Strange new world : art and design from Tijuana
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Over the past decade, a seismic shift in economic and political forces has transformed life in the second-largest city on the West Coast, situated at the most heavily trafficked international border crossing in the world. Tijuana’s newfound wealth and haphazard expansion have changed patterns of migration for the city’s many artists, who once routinely moved north to Los Angeles but are now staying or returning, and being joined by friends from Mexico City and beyond. This flourishing, strengthening artistic community has responded to the city’s accelerated evolution with a broad range of work, from painting to conceptually driven installations; from street-level digital video to ambitious photo-documentation, filmmaking and political work; from architectural proposals to product design associated with the "Nortec" musical movement. The work gathered in "Strange new world" embraces Tijuana as a paradigm of a new postmodern form of urbanization shaped by the pressures of economic globalization and cultural transnationalism since 1994. It struggles to make sense of new realities changing the ways in which people live in cities around the globe. Like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, it is part science fiction, part political commentary and part artistic revolution and cultural critique. Arranged around the concepts of the urban theorist Michael Smith, it features work by ERRE, Einar and Jamex de la Torre and Yvonne Venegas, among others.
Contemporary Art Monographs
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'We' takes place in a distant future, where humans are forced to submit their wills to the requirements of the state, under the rule of the all-powerful Benefactor, and dreams are regarded as a sign of mental illness. In a city of straight lines, protected by green walls and a glass dome, a spaceship is being built in order to spearhead the conquest of new planets. Its(...)
We
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'We' takes place in a distant future, where humans are forced to submit their wills to the requirements of the state, under the rule of the all-powerful Benefactor, and dreams are regarded as a sign of mental illness. In a city of straight lines, protected by green walls and a glass dome, a spaceship is being built in order to spearhead the conquest of new planets. Its chief engineer, a man called D-503, keeps a journal of his life and activities: to his mathematical mind everything seems to make sense and proceed as it should, until a chance encounter with a woman threatens to shatter the very foundations of the world he lives in. Written in a highly charged, direct and concise style, Zamyatin's 1921 seminal novel is not only an indictment of the Soviet Russia of his time and a precursor of the works of Orwell and the dystopian genre, but also a prefiguration of much of twentieth-century history and a harbinger of the ominous future that may still lay ahead of us.
Current Exhibitions
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Over the past two decades, many books and articles have explored the larger meaning of public acts of remembrance. Although these studies have brought the links between public memory, imperialism, and nation building into focus, they overlook local expressions of memory that lie at the heart of our everyday experiences and identities. This publication maps a terrain in(...)
July 2011
Placing memory and remembering place in Canada
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Over the past two decades, many books and articles have explored the larger meaning of public acts of remembrance. Although these studies have brought the links between public memory, imperialism, and nation building into focus, they overlook local expressions of memory that lie at the heart of our everyday experiences and identities. This publication maps a terrain in memory studies by shifting the focus to local places that sit at the intersection of memory making and identity formation - the main street, the city square, the village museum, internment camps, industrial wastelands, and the rural landscape. Offering a perspective on the politics of place and memory across differing chronologies and geographies, the first part of the book traces how local expressions of memory such as celebrations, museums, statues, postcards, and plaques have contributed to a sense of place and belonging in twentieth-century Canada. The second part in turn explores how ordinary Canadians have embedded their memories of place in oral stories, photographs, and the landscape itself. With its focus on the materiality of image, text, and artefact, these essays argue for an understanding of place as imagined, made, claimed, fought for, and defended - always in a state of becoming.
May our joy endure
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Céline Wachowski, internationally renowned architect and accidental digital-culture icon, unveils her plans for the Webuy Complex, her first megaproject in Montreal, her hometown. But instead of the triumph she anticipates in finally bringing her reputation to bear in her own city, the project is excoriated by critics, who accuse her of callously destroying the social(...)
May our joy endure
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Céline Wachowski, internationally renowned architect and accidental digital-culture icon, unveils her plans for the Webuy Complex, her first megaproject in Montreal, her hometown. But instead of the triumph she anticipates in finally bringing her reputation to bear in her own city, the project is excoriated by critics, who accuse her of callously destroying the social fabric of neighborhoods, ushering in a new era of gentrification, and many even deadlier sins. When she is deposed as CEO of her firm, Céline must make sense of the charges against herself and the people in her elite circle. For the first time in danger of losing their footing, what fictions must they tell themselves to justify their privilege and maintain their position in the world that they themselves have built? Moving fluidly between Céline’s perspective and the perspectives of her critics, and revealing both the ruthlessness of her methods and the brilliance of her aesthetic vision, "May our joy endure" is a shrewd examination of the microcosm of the ultra-privileged and a dazzling social novel that depicts with razor-sharp acuity the terrible beauty of wealth, influence, and art.
Literature and poetry
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Phil Frost
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Part of a whole gang of street artists--from Barry McGee to Swoon--who have broken into the art world in the last decade or so, Phil Frost's signature style is a funky tribalism--Hawaii by way of New York City--infused with a quirky sense of art history and design. In the 1990s, Frost honed his skills by painting walls, found objects and street detritus with his(...)
Contemporary Art Monographs
May 2008, Bologna
Phil Frost
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Part of a whole gang of street artists--from Barry McGee to Swoon--who have broken into the art world in the last decade or so, Phil Frost's signature style is a funky tribalism--Hawaii by way of New York City--infused with a quirky sense of art history and design. In the 1990s, Frost honed his skills by painting walls, found objects and street detritus with his intricate, compulsive and highly evolved form of tagging. Frost's gallery exhibitions are crowded affairs, filled with wildly patterned totemic objects and baseball bats while the walls are stacked with colorful mixed media paintings. He crafts his painstaking paintings by collaging layers of found imagery on grounds of symmetrical black-and-white patterning, which he paints with correction fluid, and that often morph into language-like glyphs or symbols. Frost states, "I believe [my work] is indigenous to myself. I believe that within every person there is an indigenous expression of themselves." Including an essay by New York journalist Carlo McCormick and notorious lowbrow artist Pusshead, this is Frost's first monograph, and an invaluable introduction to the evolution of his style.
books
May 2008, Bologna
Contemporary Art Monographs
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2010 marked the 50th anniversary of Brazil's capital Brasilia. Architects Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer designed what has become one of the most studied urban planning project. Niemeyer's Cathedral, his building for the National Congress and the city's 707-ft television tower are icons of modern architecture. The entire city, marked by its cross-shaped layout and vast(...)
René Burri, Brasilia: photographs 1960-1993
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2010 marked the 50th anniversary of Brazil's capital Brasilia. Architects Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer designed what has become one of the most studied urban planning project. Niemeyer's Cathedral, his building for the National Congress and the city's 707-ft television tower are icons of modern architecture. The entire city, marked by its cross-shaped layout and vast open spaces, was named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987. The author of this publication visited Brasilia's vast building sites for the first time in 1958. He returned many times over the years, documenting with his camera growth and further development of this built Utopia. Besides documenting the buildings in various stages of completion, Burri took portraits of Niemeyer and his workers and photographed Brasilia's street scenes and people and aerial views of the city's first slums. His images capture the strong sense of a new era and a vibrant atmosphere of hard work and strain; they reflect the huge dimensions of the landscape and the great scale of this project and its ambition to design and build a new capital. This book presents a large selection from hundreds of colour and black-and-white photographs, the majority of them published in this book for the first time.
Photography monographs
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In 1956, Time magazine called him one of the “form-givers of the 20th century“: with his invention of steel-tube furniture, Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) has made his mark in the history of design at the tender age of 23. He started his architectural career as one of the Bauhaus’s most influential architects with the 1932 Harnischmacher House. Even Breuer’s earliest work was(...)
Breuer : 1902-1981 Createur de formes du XXe siecle
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In 1956, Time magazine called him one of the “form-givers of the 20th century“: with his invention of steel-tube furniture, Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) has made his mark in the history of design at the tender age of 23. He started his architectural career as one of the Bauhaus’s most influential architects with the 1932 Harnischmacher House. Even Breuer’s earliest work was marked by the search for a symbiosis between local and global, big and small, smooth and rough. His sparse use of materials emphasized the balance among textures, colors, and shapes. In 1943, he conceived the “binuclear” house concept—the splitting of living and sleeping areas into separate wings—which he first applied to the Geller House I (1944-1946), and which would attain great popularity. After designing the UNESCO headquarters in Paris (1953-1958), reinforced concrete, with its formal plasticity und structural elasticity, continued to give monumental character to buildings such as the Abbey and Campus of St. John’s University in Minnesota (1953-1961), the IBM Research Center in France (1960-1962), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1963-1966) in New York City. With his keen sense of proportion, shape, and material, Breuer is one of the most important Modernists and is still very much central in the discussion of contemporary architecture.
Architecture Monographs
journals and magazines
Quaderns 229 : borders
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Issue 229 of the magazine Quaderns explores the theme of the border in its literal sense -the border as a political and cultural separation between countries or geographical areas- but also as a place which gives rise to cultural crossovers alongside its function as separator. This issue looks firstly at the transformation of two formerly divided(...)
Magazines
June 2001, Barcelona
Quaderns 229 : borders
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Issue 229 of the magazine Quaderns explores the theme of the border in its literal sense -the border as a political and cultural separation between countries or geographical areas- but also as a place which gives rise to cultural crossovers alongside its function as separator. This issue looks firstly at the transformation of two formerly divided cities, Berlin and Beirut, which are currently undergoing processes of integration of what used to be opposing sectors and of recovery as city-centre spaces of the wastelands generated by division. Then it analyses the present-day situation in two border areas characterised by strong economic and cultural contrasts between the two sides of the dividing line: the border between the United States and Mexico, and the Strait of Gibraltar. The works of architects and artists who have recently worked in these places are taken as a starting point for debate about the strategies brought to bear in frontier territory by urbanism, art and architecture. The issue includes an introductory text by Saskia Sassen and features Mathias Sauerbruch on Berlin, Álvaro Siza on Ceuta, Rafael Moneo and Ousama Kabbani on Beirut, and Gloria Anzaldúa on the border between Mexico and the United States. It also presents a series of works actually carried out in these cities by Sauerbruch & Hutton, Álvaro Siza and Rafael Moneo, along with projects by Berger-Parkinnen, Kollhof & Kollhoff, Gustav Lange, OMA/Rem Koolhaas and Peter Zumthor, among others, and features a dossier with projects carried out in other countries by Catalan architects, including works by Miralles-Tagliabue, J. Ll. Mateo and Elías Torres. The theme is completed by an extensive photo reportage by Camilo José Vergara about the Mexican border.
journals and magazines
June 2001, Barcelona
Magazines