$54.00
(available to order)
Summary:
We tend to think of architecture as a practice in permanence, but what if we looked instead for an architecture of transience? In "Things that move," Tim Anstey does just that: rather than assuming that architecture is, at a certain level, stationary, he considers how architecture moves subjects (referring to its emotive potential in the experience it creates); how it(...)
Things that move: A hinterland in architectural history
Actions:
Price:
$54.00
(available to order)
Summary:
We tend to think of architecture as a practice in permanence, but what if we looked instead for an architecture of transience? In "Things that move," Tim Anstey does just that: rather than assuming that architecture is, at a certain level, stationary, he considers how architecture moves subjects (referring to its emotive potential in the experience it creates); how it moves objects (referring to how it choreographs bodies in motion); and how it is itself moved (referring to the mixture of materials, laws, affordances, and images that introduce movement into any architectural condition). The first of the book's three sections, "Cargoes," highlights the mobile peripheries of architectural history through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It asks what kinds of knowledge can be included in a discussion of architecture, noting the connections between discourses of the lithe and the technical, on the one hand, and those associated with the production of monumental, static compositions on the other. The second section, “Dispatches,” reinterprets early architectural theory by examining the Renaissance ideal of decorum, the nature of the architectural work, and the ways in which architects are constituted as authors. The last part of the book, “Vehicles,” considers building in terms of literal and metaphorical movement, using two cases from the twentieth century that investigate the relationship between architecture and cultural memory. Using a broadly forensic approach to connect details in otherwise disparate cases, "Things that move" is a breathtakingly capacious architectural account that will change the way readers understand buildings, their becoming, and their significance.
Architectural Theory
Architecture goes wild
$29.95
(available to order)
Summary:
In his writings, architect Kas Oosterhuis bridges the gap between theory and practice. His observations are based on the principle of concrete science fiction. He is convinced that every construct - hardware or software - that can be formulated as a consistent set of rules is realizable within the social constraints of our present-day culture. In his essay(...)
Architecture goes wild
Actions:
Price:
$29.95
(available to order)
Summary:
In his writings, architect Kas Oosterhuis bridges the gap between theory and practice. His observations are based on the principle of concrete science fiction. He is convinced that every construct - hardware or software - that can be formulated as a consistent set of rules is realizable within the social constraints of our present-day culture. In his essay 'Space_Time_Volume' Kas Oosterhuis places himself in the local and temporary delamination point between the micro- and macroworlds. He speculates on a seamless continuity of these worlds where the instrumental human position is only one of many possible positions. Our perception of the universe is based on observations made by instruments. Language is seen as such an instrument. In 'Wild Bodies' Oosterhuis asserts that all true architecture inevitably will be programmed to perform in real time. This point of view is based on the observation that traditional fixed and static architecture is a highly unlikely state among all possible ones. An architectural construct is regarded as a body with real-time behaviour that is always in motion. Computer programs speak the new instrumental language in which potential new worlds are described. 'Automotive Styling' declares the human driver of the automobile to be the voluntary prisoner of the physical car-road communications network. In 'Vectorial Bodies' the human driver is nothing less than fuzzy software programming the car to lead it to his destinations. There is no place for romantic ideas such as freedom of movement, but there is the overwhelming desire of carbon-based life forms to exchange data with industrial and digital life forms.
Architectural Theory
$25.95
(available to order)
Summary:
We surround ourselves with material things that are invested with memories but can only stand for what we have lost. Physical objects—such as one’s own body—situate and define us; yet at the same time they are fundamentally indifferent to us. The melancholy of this rift is a rich source of inspiration for artists. Peter Schwenger deftly weaves together philosophical(...)
The tears of things : Melancholy and physical objects
Actions:
Price:
$25.95
(available to order)
Summary:
We surround ourselves with material things that are invested with memories but can only stand for what we have lost. Physical objects—such as one’s own body—situate and define us; yet at the same time they are fundamentally indifferent to us. The melancholy of this rift is a rich source of inspiration for artists. Peter Schwenger deftly weaves together philosophical and psychoanalytical theory with artistic practice. Concerned in part with the act of collecting, The Tears of Things is itself a collection of exemplary art objects—literary and cultural attempts to control and possess things—including paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and René Magritte; sculpture by Louise Bourgeois and Marcel Duchamp; Joseph Cornell’s boxes; Edward Gorey’s graphic art; fiction by Virginia Woolf, Georges Perec, and Louise Erdrich; the hallucinatory encyclopedias of Jorge Luis Borges and Luigi Serafini; and the corpse photographs of Joel Peter Witkin. However, these representations of objects perpetually fall short of our aspirations. Schwenger examines what is left over—debris and waste—and asks what art can make of these. What emerges is not an art that reassembles but one that questions what it means to assemble in the first place. Contained in this catalog of waste is that ultimate still life, the cadaver, where the subject-object dichotomy receives its final ironic reconciliation. Peter Schwenger is professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning, Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word, and Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature.
Architectural Theory
The gothic
$23.95
(available to order)
Summary:
This collection of writings examines the pervasive and influential role of "the Gothic" in contemporary visual culture. The contemporary Gothic in art is informed as much by the stock themes of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic novel as it is by more recent permutations of the Gothic in horror film theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Goth subcultures. This(...)
The gothic
Actions:
Price:
$23.95
(available to order)
Summary:
This collection of writings examines the pervasive and influential role of "the Gothic" in contemporary visual culture. The contemporary Gothic in art is informed as much by the stock themes of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic novel as it is by more recent permutations of the Gothic in horror film theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Goth subcultures. This reader from London's Whitechapel Gallery brings together artists as different as Matthew Barney, Gregor Schneider, Louise Bourgeois, and Douglas Gordon; its intent is not to use "the Gothic" to group together dissimilar artists but rather to shed light on a particular understanding of their practice. Anthony Vidler looks at ideas of the uncanny to explore Rachel Whiteread's House, and Jeff Wall uses the motif of vampirism to analyze fellow artist Dan Graham's Kammerspell; Hal Foster considers Robert Gober's recent work--laden with Christian symbolism, criticism of America as a nexus of power, and fragmented bodies--as an updated American Gothic, and Kobena Mercer examines the Gothic's depiction of the Other in relation to Michael Jackson's pop video Thriller. Texts by artists including Mike Kelley, Damien Hirst, Tacita Dean, Jonathan Meese, and Catherine Sullivan are complemented by extracts from Walpole's genre-establishing gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, William Gibson, Bret Easton Ellis, and Stephen King, among others, and theoretical writings by such key thinkers as Carol Clover, Beatriz Colomina, Julia Kristeva, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Marina Warner, and Slavoj Zizek. The Gothic provides the first comprehensive overview of the uses of Gothic in contemporary visual culture.
Art Theory
$34.95
(available to order)
Summary:
In this wide-ranging book, renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk examines art in all its rich and varied forms: from music to architecture, light to movement, and design to typography. Moving between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, his analyses span the centuries, from ancient civilizations to contemporary Hollywood.(...)
The aesthetic imperative: writings on art
Actions:
Price:
$34.95
(available to order)
Summary:
In this wide-ranging book, renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk examines art in all its rich and varied forms: from music to architecture, light to movement, and design to typography. Moving between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, his analyses span the centuries, from ancient civilizations to contemporary Hollywood. With great verve and insight he considers the key issues that have faced thinkers from Aristotle to Adorno, looking at art in its relation to ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, society, politics, anthropology and the subject.Sloterdijk explores a great variety of topics, including the Greek-Roman invention of postcards, medieval barter with purgatory and relics, the capitalist art market, the black boxes and white cubes of modernism, the rise of world’s fairs in the 19th century, the growth of museum and memorial culture, images of the city and the role of creativity. In doing so, Sloterdijk extends his characteristic method of defamiliarisation to transform the way we look at works of art and movements. His bold and original approach leads us away from the well-trodden paths of conventional art history to develop a theory of aesthetics which rejects strict categorisation, emphasising instead the crucial importance of individual subjectivity as a counter to the latent dangers of collective culture.This sustained collection of reflections, at once playful, serious and provocative, goes to the very heart of Sloterdijk’s enduring philosophical preoccupation with the aesthetic. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and aesthetics and will appeal to anyone interested in culture and the arts more generally.
Art Theory
The ecstasy of communication
$16.95
(available to order)
Summary:
First published in France in 1987, The Ecstasy of Communication was Baudrillard’s summarization of his work for a postdoctoral degree at the Sorbonne : a dense, poetically crystalline essay that boiled down two decades of radical, provocative theory into an aphoristically eloquent swan song to twentieth-century alienation. Baudrillard’s quixotic effort to be recognized by(...)
The ecstasy of communication
Actions:
Price:
$16.95
(available to order)
Summary:
First published in France in 1987, The Ecstasy of Communication was Baudrillard’s summarization of his work for a postdoctoral degree at the Sorbonne : a dense, poetically crystalline essay that boiled down two decades of radical, provocative theory into an aphoristically eloquent swan song to twentieth-century alienation. Baudrillard’s quixotic effort to be recognized by the French intellectual establishment may have been doomed to failure, but this text immediately became a pinnacle to his work, a mid-career assessment that looked both forward and back. By carefully distilling the most radical elements of his previous books, Baudrillard constructed the skeleton key to all of the work that was to come in the second half of his career, and set the scene for what he termed the “obscene”: a world in which alienation has been succeeded by ceaseless communication and information. The Ecstasy of Communication is a decisive, compact description of what it means to be “wired” in our braver-than-brave new world, where sexuality has been superseded by pornography, knowledge by information, hysteria by schizophrenia, subject by object, and violence by terror. The Ecstasy of Communication is an anti-manifesto that confronted and dispensed with such influences as Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord, and Georges Bataille. It is an essential crib-book, lexicon, and companion piece to any and all of Baudrillard’s books. Twenty-five years after its original publication, it remains not only a prescient portrait of our contemporary condition, but also a dark mirror into which we have not yet dared to look.
Critical Theory
books
Description:
xiii, 202 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, ©1996.
The rational factory : architecture, technology, and work in America's age of mass production / Lindy Biggs.
Actions:
Holdings:
Description:
xiii, 202 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
books
Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, ©1996.
books
Description:
92 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 28 cm + 1 audio disc (digital ; 4 3/4 in.)
Philadelphia, Pa. : Running Press, ©2004.
Frank Lloyd Wright : the interactive portfolio : rare removable treasures, hand-drawn sketches, original letters, and more from the official archives / Margo Stipe.
Actions:
Holdings:
Description:
92 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 28 cm + 1 audio disc (digital ; 4 3/4 in.)
books
Philadelphia, Pa. : Running Press, ©2004.
books
Description:
xxx, 331 pages : illustrations, map ; 26 cm
Cambridge ; New York, NY, USA ; Melbourne, Australia : Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Robert Maillart : builder, designer, and artist / David P. Billington.
Actions:
Holdings:
Description:
xxx, 331 pages : illustrations, map ; 26 cm
books
Cambridge ; New York, NY, USA ; Melbourne, Australia : Cambridge University Press, 1997.
books
$96.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Recognized in his own time for extraordinary architectural achievements, Leon Battista Alberti (14041472) five hundred years after his death continues to influence the practice and theory of architecture. This book is the first full-scale study of Alberti's life and architecture in more than a quarter century. Robert Tavernor provides a biographical account of the(...)
On Alberti and the art of building
Actions:
Price:
$96.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Recognized in his own time for extraordinary architectural achievements, Leon Battista Alberti (14041472) five hundred years after his death continues to influence the practice and theory of architecture. This book is the first full-scale study of Alberti's life and architecture in more than a quarter century. Robert Tavernor provides a biographical account of the Italian architect and a detailed consideration of each of the building projects with which he was involved. With new reconstructions of Alberti's buildings and new interpretations of his design intentions, this book will fascinate every reader with an interest in Renaissance architecture. From Alberti's supreme knowledge of the thought and buildings of antiquity, he developed a set of writings on science and the visual arts, including his important treatise on architecture, De re aedificatoria. In this volume, Tavernor examines Alberti's architectural writings and his practical example, his relations with his patrons, how he extended his theory into practice through major building projects across Italy, and how he succeeded in raising the status of architecture to an art-one that sought harmony with the natural world. Focusing on the analysis of Alberti's buildings, the author sets each in historical context; provides a building history; and considers source material, proportional systems, and iconography. He concludes the book with a fresh view of Alberti's theory and practice and a summary of his design process.
books
December 1998, New Haven
Treatises