Building for hope
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Summary:
This new book by Syrian architect Marwa al-Sabouni, seeks to understand how cities and buildings- scarred by conflict, blight, and pandemic- can be healed through design and urban mindfulness. When Marwa al-Sabouni published Battle for Home in 2016, she was a little-known architect, living in battle-ravaged Homs, Syria, unable to practice her profession. She turned her(...)
Building for hope
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$39.95
(available to order)
Summary:
This new book by Syrian architect Marwa al-Sabouni, seeks to understand how cities and buildings- scarred by conflict, blight, and pandemic- can be healed through design and urban mindfulness. When Marwa al-Sabouni published Battle for Home in 2016, she was a little-known architect, living in battle-ravaged Homs, Syria, unable to practice her profession. She turned her fierce intelligence to chronicling how her city and country were undone through decades of architectural mismanagement and mistakes. Once published, Marwa al-Sabouni’s book and story attracted the attention of international media- CNN, The New York Times- and received critical acclaim worldwide. The United Nations called on her for insights and expertise. She became a TED fellow, was invited to speak to audiences around the world, and some suggested she be nominated for architecture’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize. Al-Sabouni’s deep understanding of Middle Eastern heritage and architecture gives her insight into a wide range of cities, informing her views on how cities work best, how they might fail, and what can be done to harmonize the lives of all their inhabitants. In this new book, al-Sabouni draws together several narratives: her personal and professional observations of some of the world’s most fascinating cities, from Detroit to Helsinki; the lessons that Western societies might learn from Islamic culture and design; and philosophical reflections on how our personal and communal spaces can provide the basic foundations for happiness. Through this tapestry of personal experience, unblinking perspective, and insight, al-Sabouni offers real-world solutions- and hope- for how peace might be created through mindful urban planning.
Architectural Theory
Well-kept ruins
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In the Lower Saxony region of northwestern Germany sits the city of Osnabrück. This is where, in 1648, the Peace of Westphalia was signed, bringing the Thirty Years’ War and one of the most calamitous periods of European history to an end. But the city was later to witness another calamity. Today, as one walks through Old Synagogue Street in a rich neighborhood of(...)
Well-kept ruins
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In the Lower Saxony region of northwestern Germany sits the city of Osnabrück. This is where, in 1648, the Peace of Westphalia was signed, bringing the Thirty Years’ War and one of the most calamitous periods of European history to an end. But the city was later to witness another calamity. Today, as one walks through Old Synagogue Street in a rich neighborhood of Osnabrück, one might miss noticing a pile of pale stones held together by chicken wire that sits between two fashionable homes. These are the well-kept ruins from behind which stares a gaping space—a place of memory and oblivion. Four polished plaques tell the tale of the horror-filled night of November 9, 1938—today known as Kristallnacht—when the synagogue that had stood on this spot was desecrated, looted, set on fire, and eventually demolished by Hitler’s forces. On the same day, ninety parishioners were imprisoned by the Gestapo and eventually sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Osnabrück was also home to Eve Klein, a member of the city’s early-twentieth-century Jewish community and the mother of author Hélène Cixous. In Well-Kept Ruins, Cixous returns to the historic city in 2019 and reflects on the remains of the synagogue that “express the life lost, the life kept.” Walking the streets of the city, plumbing the depths of the past along with her own family’s history, looking deep into the future, and punctuating her poetic prose with haunting photographs, Cixous explores the ruins at the heart of humanity. Part memoir, part philosophical meditation, ''Well-kept ruins'' is a genre-defying and timely reflection of the contemporary human condition.
Literature and poetry
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London the biography
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Novelist and biographer Ackroyd (The Plato Papers; T.S. Eliot; etc.) offers a huge, enthralling "biography" of the city of London. The reader segues through this litany of lists and anthology of anecdotes via the sketchiest of topical linkages, but no matter not a page is dull, until brief closing chapters in which Ackroyd succumbs to bathos, for which he's(...)
London the biography
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Novelist and biographer Ackroyd (The Plato Papers; T.S. Eliot; etc.) offers a huge, enthralling "biography" of the city of London. The reader segues through this litany of lists and anthology of anecdotes via the sketchiest of topical linkages, but no matter not a page is dull, until brief closing chapters in which Ackroyd succumbs to bathos, for which he's instantaneously redeemed by the preceding chapters. He admits to using no original research, openly crediting his printed sources. Ackroyd examines London from its pre-history through today, artfully selecting, organizing and pacing stories, and rendering the past in witty and imaginative ways. "The opium quarter of Limehouse," he tells readers, for example, "is now represented by a Chinese take-away." Fast food, it seems, was always part of the London scene. When poet Thomas Southey asked a pastry cook why she kept her shop open in the worst weather, she told him that otherwise she would lose business, "so many were the persons who took up buns or biscuits as they passed by and threw their pence in, not allowing themselves time to enter." Ackroyd covers unrest and peace, fires and ruins, river and rail transport, crime and punishment, wealth and poverty, markets and churches, uncontrolled growth and barely controlled filth. If there is a hero among the throngs, it may be engineer Joseph Bazalgette, who in 1855 began building 1,265 miles of sewers to contain the Stygian odor of progress and keep the huge, ugly metropolis livable. No one should mind the extraordinary price of this extraordinary achievement. B illus., maps not seen by PW. (On sale Oct. 16)Forecast: Published to acclaim in England, this is virtually guaranteed major review coverage here, and the publisher will also shoot for national media. Anglophiles and others will rejoice.
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September 2001, London
Urban Theory
Alphabet city 10 : suspects
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What is the condition of the suspect in a post-9/11 world? Do perpetual detention, ubiquitous surveillance cameras, and the legal apparatus of the USA Patriot Act target suspects accurately or generate suspicion indiscriminately? "Suspect", the latest in a series from Alphabet City and the first in its new format of topical book-length magazines, gathers hard evidence(...)
Alphabet city 10 : suspects
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What is the condition of the suspect in a post-9/11 world? Do perpetual detention, ubiquitous surveillance cameras, and the legal apparatus of the USA Patriot Act target suspects accurately or generate suspicion indiscriminately? "Suspect", the latest in a series from Alphabet City and the first in its new format of topical book-length magazines, gathers hard evidence about the fate of the suspect in a culture of suspicion with contributions from writers, artists, and filmmakers. Their testimony takes a multiplicity of forms and formats. Among them:a 24-page color comic by graphic novelist Joey Dubuc asks the reader to make narrative choices in a web of surveillance, suspicion, and fear. Harper's contributor Mark Kingwell observes that while suspicion tries to isolate the suspect, in fact we are all the suspect. Slavoj Zizek reflects on the new cultural status of the suspect after Abu Ghraib. Philosopher George Bragues argues that even as the United Nations looks for ways to discipline "suspect nations," it simply cannot succeed under current international conditions. Alphabet City editor John Knechtel interviews Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, about the legal and political strategies of the Bush administration. Sylwia Chrostowska describes what happens, in the the 1970 Italian film Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, when a corrupt official investigates himself. Screenwriter Timothy Stock and illustrator Warren Heise create a documentary in comic form about Critical Ensemble artist Steve Kurtz, charged under the bioterrorism provisions of the Patriot Act. Novelist Camilla Gibb portrays, in "Things Collapse," the terrifying effects of a "separating sickness" of unknown origin, which perhaps exists only in the fears of the population it strikes. And novelist Diana Fitzgerald Bryden follows her character Rafa Ahmed, a PFLP hijacker from the 1970s, as, many years later, she is to appear at a peace conference. Filmmaker Patricia Rozema, director of Mansfield Park and other films, contributes a 16-page film-in-a-book, "Suspect." Suspect is a non-partisan handbook on the mechanisms and machinations of suspicion for the twenty-first century national security state.
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