Constant: New Babylon
$78.00
(available to order)
Summary:
An open city without borders that is capable of flowing out in all directions to allow its residents to move freely and flexibly: this fascinating utopian conception of architectural and lifeworld growth formed the starting point for Constant’s Situationist project New Babylon. Between 1956 and 1974, the Dutch painter and cofounder of the avant-garde movements Cobra and(...)
Constant: New Babylon
Actions:
Price:
$78.00
(available to order)
Summary:
An open city without borders that is capable of flowing out in all directions to allow its residents to move freely and flexibly: this fascinating utopian conception of architectural and lifeworld growth formed the starting point for Constant’s Situationist project New Babylon. Between 1956 and 1974, the Dutch painter and cofounder of the avant-garde movements Cobra and the Situationist International worked on numerous models, paintings, drawings and collages for the purpose of depicting his vision of the nomadic city of the future. This catalogue focuses not only on New Babylon’s architectural aspects but embraces them as an artist’s synthesis of the arts. Besides the models, drawings and collages, attention is also given to the designs in order to trace Constant’s artistic process. This not only provides extensive insight into utopian urban planning, but to a greater degree into a mode of thought and imagination. The book includes an interview with Rem Koolhaas on Constant’s pioneering project.
Contemporary Art Monographs
$45.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Cookery has never been so high on the agenda of Western popular culture. And yet the endlessly-multiplying TV shows, the obsessive interest in the provenance of ingredients, and the celebration of ‘radical’ experiments in gastronomy, tell us little about the nature of the culinary. Is it possible to maintain that cookery has a philosophical pertinence without merely(...)
Collapse: philosophical research and development 2012: culinary materialism, volume VII
Actions:
Price:
$45.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Cookery has never been so high on the agenda of Western popular culture. And yet the endlessly-multiplying TV shows, the obsessive interest in the provenance of ingredients, and the celebration of ‘radical’ experiments in gastronomy, tell us little about the nature of the culinary. Is it possible to maintain that cookery has a philosophical pertinence without merely appending philosophy to our burgeoning gastroculture? How might the everyday sense of the culinary be expanded into a philosophy of ‘culinary materialism’ wherein synthesis, experimentation, and operations of mixing and blending take precedence over analysis, subtraction and axiomatisation? Drawing on resources ranging from anthropology to chemistry, from hermetic alchemy to contemporary mathematics, "Collapse VII: culinary materialism" undertakes a trans-modal experiment in culinary thinking. A wide range of contributors including philosophers, chefs, artists, historians, and synaesthetes examine the cultural, industrial, physiological, alchemical and even cosmic dimensions of cookery, and propose new models of culinary thought for the future.
Food
Edward Burtynsky: Salt pans
$95.00
(available to order)
Summary:
"Salt Pans" is Edward Burtynsky’s newest book in his acclaimed ongoing series of photographs exploring different industrialized landscapes across the world. Consisting of 31 aerial photos of the salt pans in the Little Rann of Kutch, India, the project is the result of months of intricate negotiations and preparations. These striking geometric images, taken in an intense(...)
Edward Burtynsky: Salt pans
Actions:
Price:
$95.00
(available to order)
Summary:
"Salt Pans" is Edward Burtynsky’s newest book in his acclaimed ongoing series of photographs exploring different industrialized landscapes across the world. Consisting of 31 aerial photos of the salt pans in the Little Rann of Kutch, India, the project is the result of months of intricate negotiations and preparations. These striking geometric images, taken in an intense ten-day period during which Burtynsky photographed from a helicopter, present the pans, wells and vehicle tracks as abstract, painterly patterns: subtly colored rectangles crossed by grids of gestural lines. And yet the reality behind the ironic beauty of Burtynsky’s pictures is a harsh one. Each year 100,000 poorly paid Agariya workers toil in the pans, extracting over a million tons of salt from the floodwaters of the nearby Arabian Sea. Furthermore, receding groundwater levels, combined with debt, diminishing market values as well as a lack of governmental support, threaten the future of this 400-year-old tradition and the lives dependent on it.
Photography monographs
$25.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name means a trial, effort or attempt. An ancient form with an eye on the future, a genre poised between tradition and experiment. The essay wants above all to wander, but also to arrive at symmetry and wholeness; it nurses competing urges to integrity and disarray, perfection and fragmentation, confession and(...)
Essayism
Actions:
Price:
$25.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name means a trial, effort or attempt. An ancient form with an eye on the future, a genre poised between tradition and experiment. The essay wants above all to wander, but also to arrive at symmetry and wholeness; it nurses competing urges to integrity and disarray, perfection and fragmentation, confession and invention. How to write about essays and essayists while staying true to these contradictions? "ESSAYISM" is a personal, critical and polemical book about the genre, its history and contemporary possibilities. It's an example of what it describes: an essay that is curious and digressive, exacting yet evasive, a form that would instruct, seduce and mystify in equal measure. Among the essayists to whom he pays tribute - from Virginia Woolf to Georges Perec, Joan Didion to Sir Thomas Browne - Brian Dillon discovers a path back into his own life as a reader, and out of melancholia to a new sense of writing as adventure.
Literature and poetry
$89.95
(available in store)
Summary:
The Viipuri Library has international reputation as a seminal early work of Alvar Aalto, and is a key example of modern architecture. Simultaneously, the meanings associated with it stem from its geopolitical location: the library was originally opened to the Finnish city of Viipuri, but at the end of the World War II the city was annexed to the Soviet Union. Since 1991(...)
The building that disappeared: the Viipuri library by Alvar Aalto
Actions:
Price:
$89.95
(available in store)
Summary:
The Viipuri Library has international reputation as a seminal early work of Alvar Aalto, and is a key example of modern architecture. Simultaneously, the meanings associated with it stem from its geopolitical location: the library was originally opened to the Finnish city of Viipuri, but at the end of the World War II the city was annexed to the Soviet Union. Since 1991 the building has been located in modern day Russia. The title of the book reflects the widely spread misunderstanding that the Library has been lost at war, and future generations can learn about it only from drawings and images. This work unfolds its 'life’ in four thematic chapters, each presenting a totally different perspective to what this building is all about: First, the context of the city of Viipuri, second, the Library as a work of Aalto, third, the time period of the Second World War and the Soviet Union, and last, the international restoration project.
Architecture Monographs
$49.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Although Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) was not an active member of the Bauhaus, his name is often mentioned in connection with the art school. Mondrian, cofounder of the De Stijl movement in the Netherlands, called for a strict reduction of visual language to orthogonal composition and primary colors, which met with great approval in Bauhaus circles. It is therefore not(...)
Piet Mondrian: New design. Bauhausbücher 5
Actions:
Price:
$49.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Although Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) was not an active member of the Bauhaus, his name is often mentioned in connection with the art school. Mondrian, cofounder of the De Stijl movement in the Netherlands, called for a strict reduction of visual language to orthogonal composition and primary colors, which met with great approval in Bauhaus circles. It is therefore not surprising that Mondrian’s essays on art theory, most of them written for the De Stijl journal, were translated into German and published as number five in the Bauhausbücher series. “New Design” starts with a philosophical foray into art, which Mondrian describes as a figurative expression of human existence—an expression which will find its natural conclusion in his own concept of a “New Design.” Mondrian then considers the relationship between painting and architecture and dares to take a far-reaching look at the future of Neoplasticism, which he imagines revolutionizing design and architecture around the world.
Modernism
books
$65.99
(available to order)
Summary:
Despite the intolerable costs of climate change and inevitably declining oil, natural gas and uranium reserves, the vast majority of cities and urban communities are planned and managed as if such existential crises did not exist. Hence the transition from fossil fuel dominated cities to an urban future marked by a radically new, renewable energy infrastructure requires(...)
Renewable city : a comprehensive guide to an urban revolution
Actions:
Price:
$65.99
(available to order)
Summary:
Despite the intolerable costs of climate change and inevitably declining oil, natural gas and uranium reserves, the vast majority of cities and urban communities are planned and managed as if such existential crises did not exist. Hence the transition from fossil fuel dominated cities to an urban future marked by a radically new, renewable energy infrastructure requires entirely new tools and frames of decision-making. This is an original guide to an entirely unprecedented urban transformation, to cities and towns powered by renewable energy. Squarely focused on action, it supports design, planning and management decisions and serves as a practical guide to practitioners, academics and political leaders in communities and cities worldwide, as a useful and well-structured reference text. It is built on the most successful of past and present urban sustainability trends and emerging infrastructure directions, presenting renewable energy applications as offering new and inevitable approaches to urban infrastructure planning and the design of cities.
books
January 2007, Chichester
Green Architecture
$21.50
(available to order)
Summary:
In the Bubble is about a world based less on stuff and more on people. Thackara describes a transformation that is taking place now -- not in a remote science fiction future; it's not about, as he puts it, "the schlock of the new" but about radical innovation already emerging in daily life. We are regaining respect for what people can do that technology can't. In the(...)
In the bubble : designing in a complex world
Actions:
Price:
$21.50
(available to order)
Summary:
In the Bubble is about a world based less on stuff and more on people. Thackara describes a transformation that is taking place now -- not in a remote science fiction future; it's not about, as he puts it, "the schlock of the new" but about radical innovation already emerging in daily life. We are regaining respect for what people can do that technology can't. In the Bubble describes services designed to help people carry out daily activities in new ways. Many of these services involve technology -- ranging from body implants to wide-bodied jets. But objects and systems play a supporting role in a people-centered world. The design focus is on services, not things. And new principles -- above all, lightness -- inform the way these services are designed and used. At the heart of In the Bubble is a belief, informed by a wealth of real-world examples, that ethics and responsibility can inform design decisions without impeding social and technical innovation.
Interior Design
$45.50
(available to order)
Summary:
Saarinen's buildings are famous worldwide: the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the TWA terminal in JFK Airport, Dulles Airport, outside Washington D.C., the CBS Building in New York, the General Motors Technical Center in Michigan, the US Embassy in London, and many other landmarks. Equally celebrated are his furniture designs, including the Tulip Table and Womb Chair. While(...)
Eero Saarinen : an architecture of multiplicity
Actions:
Price:
$45.50
(available to order)
Summary:
Saarinen's buildings are famous worldwide: the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the TWA terminal in JFK Airport, Dulles Airport, outside Washington D.C., the CBS Building in New York, the General Motors Technical Center in Michigan, the US Embassy in London, and many other landmarks. Equally celebrated are his furniture designs, including the Tulip Table and Womb Chair. While Saarinen's exuberant, even expressionistic, forms were lightning rods for many critics, his unique personal style is now much admired, making him a key figure for many designers practicing today. Saarinen's was a career of innovation. His airport terminals combined the poetry of sculpture with daring structural feats and raganizational genius; his pioneering industrial complexes for GM, IBM, and Bell Labs brought rational modernism to corporate America; and his furniture and residential buildings conveyed an optimistic, humane vision for the future. This illustrated monograph spans Saarinen's entire career, including his drawings, models, most important built works, and furniture.
Architecture Monographs
$57.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Published on the occasion of the exhibition at National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, March 27, 2009–August 2, 2009 Foreword by Martin E. Sullivan Although scholars have explored Duchamp's use of aliases, little attention has been paid to how this work played into, and against, existing portrait conventions. Nor has any study yet compared these(...)
Inventing Marcel Duchamp: the dynamics of portraiture
Actions:
Price:
$57.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Published on the occasion of the exhibition at National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, March 27, 2009–August 2, 2009 Foreword by Martin E. Sullivan Although scholars have explored Duchamp's use of aliases, little attention has been paid to how this work played into, and against, existing portrait conventions. Nor has any study yet compared these explicitly self-constructed projects with the large body of portraits of Duchamp by others. Inventing Marcel Duchamp showcases approximately one hundred never-before-assembled portraits and self-portraits of Duchamp. The (broadly defined) self-portraits and self-representations include the famous autobiographical suitcase Boîte-en-Valise and Self-Portrait in Profile, a torn silhouette that became very influential for future generations of artists. The portraits by other artists include works by Duchamp's contemporaries Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, Francis Picabia, Beatrice Wood, and Florine Stettheimer as well as portraits by more recent generations of artists, including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Sturtevant, Yasumasa Morimura, David Hammons, and Douglas Gordon.
Contemporary Art Monographs