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The Ravestijn Gallery brings together new work by Dutch artists Ruth van Beek and Mariken Wessels. Their mutual interest in exploring the act of creation and their interventions in existing material overlap to form a powerful reflection on the female artist. In Van Beek’s spatial installation of collages, ordinary objects take on a body and life of their own. She explores(...)
Contemporary Art Monographs
January 2023
Ruth van Beek & Mariken Wessels - Fruits of Labor
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The Ravestijn Gallery brings together new work by Dutch artists Ruth van Beek and Mariken Wessels. Their mutual interest in exploring the act of creation and their interventions in existing material overlap to form a powerful reflection on the female artist. In Van Beek’s spatial installation of collages, ordinary objects take on a body and life of their own. She explores the thin borders between studio and domestic life, the repetition of daily tasks, and the origins of her interest in manuals and household books. In the new series of sculptures and collage works by Wessels, it is the female body that becomes matter. With poems by Basje Boer and an essay by Robert Petzoldt.
Contemporary Art Monographs
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Bringing together accounts written by those who practice assemblies, and contributions from artists, activists, historians, philosophers, and social scientists, as well as three architectural experiments that attempt to imagine models for a future assembly, the book proposes a critical inquiry into the potential of assemblies to shape political subjects. What Makes An(...)
February 2023
What makes an assembly: stories, experiments and inquiries
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Bringing together accounts written by those who practice assemblies, and contributions from artists, activists, historians, philosophers, and social scientists, as well as three architectural experiments that attempt to imagine models for a future assembly, the book proposes a critical inquiry into the potential of assemblies to shape political subjects. What Makes An Assembly? examines the tensions that exist in all assemblies between the need for form and the danger of formalization; between the scripts, rituals, and architectural settings from which they derive, and their capacity to erupt and emerge anew.
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Nearly 50 years after its inception, Italian photographer Fulvio Ventura’s "Sagacity" is finally seeing the light of day. Begun in 1975 and originally scheduled for publication in 1978 by Luigi Ghirri’s short-lived Punto e Virgola imprint, Ventura continued to amass his photographic archive organically for the next four decades as an open-ended project called "Sagacity,(...)
Sagacity
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Nearly 50 years after its inception, Italian photographer Fulvio Ventura’s "Sagacity" is finally seeing the light of day. Begun in 1975 and originally scheduled for publication in 1978 by Luigi Ghirri’s short-lived Punto e Virgola imprint, Ventura continued to amass his photographic archive organically for the next four decades as an open-ended project called "Sagacity, Sunstar and Salamandra" (a title copied from a portentous inscription discovered by chance on a brass plate in the window of a typesetter). This was Ventura’s living body of work, inspired by an evolving passion for esoteric philosophies, the mysteries of happenstance, the sound of jazz, and the literature of surrealism and mythology. The images in this volume, gathered over many years in various locations around Europe, are spontaneous yet full of intention, cryptic but playful, and often strikingly cinematic – an altogether cohesive and self-contained psychic world, bound by visible and invisible energies.
Photography monographs
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How human behavior brought our world to the brink, and how human behavior can save us. The world is a mess. Our dire predicament, from collapsing social structures to the climate crisis, has been millennia in the making and can be traced back to the erroneous belief that the earth's resources are infinite. The key to change, says Don Norman, is human behavior, covered(...)
Design for a better world: meaningful, sustainable, humanity centered
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How human behavior brought our world to the brink, and how human behavior can save us. The world is a mess. Our dire predicament, from collapsing social structures to the climate crisis, has been millennia in the making and can be traced back to the erroneous belief that the earth's resources are infinite. The key to change, says Don Norman, is human behavior, covered in the book's three major themes: meaning, sustainability, and humanity-centeredness. Emphasize quality of life, not monetary rewards; restructure how we live to better protect the environment; and focus on all of humanity. ''Design for a better world'' presents an eye-opening diagnosis of where we've gone wrong and a clear prescription for making things better. Norman proposes a new way of thinking, one that recognizes our place in a complex global system where even simple behaviors affect the entire world. He identifies the economic metrics that contribute to the harmful effects of commerce and manufacturing and proposes a recalibration of what we consider important in life. His experience as both a scientist and business executive gives him the perspective to show how to make these changes while maintaining a thriving economy. Let the change begin with this book before it's too late.
Design Theory
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In 1976, Sol LeWitt made a large group of pencil drawings on the internal walls of the Vecchia Torre, a medieval tower in the Umbrian town of Spoleto, Italy. These fragile drawings, made on walls that are susceptible to degradation, have rarely been seen and never been documented, yet they represent one of LeWitt's major works and a milestone in American conceptual art.(...)
Sol Lewitt's studio drawings in the Vecchia Torre
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In 1976, Sol LeWitt made a large group of pencil drawings on the internal walls of the Vecchia Torre, a medieval tower in the Umbrian town of Spoleto, Italy. These fragile drawings, made on walls that are susceptible to degradation, have rarely been seen and never been documented, yet they represent one of LeWitt's major works and a milestone in American conceptual art. This groundbreaking volume brings together an extended essay on LeWitt's work by art historian Rye Dag Holmboe and a series of 60 photographic plates of the drawings by artist Joschi Herczeg, giving readers an intimate experience of this singular, site-specific work. A visual archive, this book situates LeWitt's provisional, material, bodily, and highly personal drawings in their historical, biographical, and theoretical contexts. The result is nothing less than a reconsideration of LeWitt's lifework. At once a work of conservation and a reflection on the relationship between drawing and architecture, the volume sheds new and welcome light on an unseen masterpiece.
Contemporary Art Monographs
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The tracking of our personal information, activities, and medical data through our digital devices is an increasingly recognizable field in which the lines between caretaking and control have blurred. In this age of surveillance, mothers' behaviors and bodies are observed, made public, exposed, scrutinized, and policed like never before. This volume gathers together the(...)
Supervision: On motherhood and surveillance
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The tracking of our personal information, activities, and medical data through our digital devices is an increasingly recognizable field in which the lines between caretaking and control have blurred. In this age of surveillance, mothers' behaviors and bodies are observed, made public, exposed, scrutinized, and policed like never before. This volume gathers together the work of fifty contributors from diverse disciplines that include the visual arts, legal scholarship, ethnic studies, sociology, gender studies, poetry, and activism to ask what the relationship is between how we watch and how we are watched, and how the attention that mothers pay to their children might foster a kind of counterattention to the many ways in which mothers are scrutinized. A groundbreaking collection, thisis a project about vision (and supervision), and all the ways in which vision intersects with surveillance and politics, through motherhood and personal history as well as through the histories and relations of the societies in which we live.
Art Theory
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Situated at the intersection of architecture, art, public culture, and political theory, ''Socializing architecture'' urges architects and urbanists to intervene in the contested space between public and private interests, to design political and civic processes that mediate top-down and bottom-up urban resources, and to mobilize a new public imagination toward a more(...)
March 2023
Socializing architecture: Top-down/bottom-up
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Situated at the intersection of architecture, art, public culture, and political theory, ''Socializing architecture'' urges architects and urbanists to intervene in the contested space between public and private interests, to design political and civic processes that mediate top-down and bottom-up urban resources, and to mobilize a new public imagination toward a more just and equitable urbanization. Drawn from decades of lived experience, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman engage the San Diego–Tijuana border region as a global laboratory to address the central challenges of urbanization today: deepening social and economic inequality, dramatic migratory shifts, explosive urban informality, climate disruption, the thickening of border walls, and the decline of public thinking. ''Socializing architecture'' follows ''Spatializing justice'' (Cruz and Forman, 2022). It is organized into two main sections—essays and projects—and continues to build a compelling case for architects and urban designers to do more than design buildings and physical systems. Through analysis and diverse case studies, the authors show architects and urbanists how to alter the exclusionary policies that produce public crisis and instead realize new political and economic strategies that advance a more equitable and convivial architecture.
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Part of the Chapters series developed by the Belgian architects 51N4E, this third instalment tells the story of two office towers from the 1970s that have been transformed according to the principles of reduce/reuse/recycle. Against all odds, the former World Trade Centre in Brussels is being repurposed in a previously unimaginable way. After many years of vacancy, the(...)
How to not demolish a building
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Part of the Chapters series developed by the Belgian architects 51N4E, this third instalment tells the story of two office towers from the 1970s that have been transformed according to the principles of reduce/reuse/recycle. Against all odds, the former World Trade Centre in Brussels is being repurposed in a previously unimaginable way. After many years of vacancy, the building now represents a new approach to urban development and a showcase for dealing in a more sustainable way with older buildings threatened with demolition. And although the adaptive reuse of this building is unique, the underlying concepts and processes are not – a lesson on how not to demolish a building.
Architecture Monographs
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Establishing an ethics of spatial justice to lead architecture forward, Dana Cuff shows why the discipline requires critical examination—in relation to not only buildings and the capital required to realize them but privilege, power, aesthetics, and sociality. The book draws on studies of architectural projects from around the world, with instructive case studies from(...)
Architectures of spatial justice
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Establishing an ethics of spatial justice to lead architecture forward, Dana Cuff shows why the discipline requires critical examination—in relation to not only buildings and the capital required to realize them but privilege, power, aesthetics, and sociality. The book draws on studies of architectural projects from around the world, with instructive case studies from Chile, Mexico, Japan, and the United States that focus in particular on urban centers, where architecture is most directly engaged with social justice issues. Emerging from more than two decades of the author's own project-based research, the volume examines ethically driven practices that break with professional conventions to correct long-standing inequities in the built environment, uncovering architecture's limits—and its potential.
Architecture and abstraction
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In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecture—the first of its kind—Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms—the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials—Aureli shows that abstraction instead arises from(...)
Architecture and abstraction
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In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecture—the first of its kind—Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms—the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials—Aureli shows that abstraction instead arises from the material conditions of building production. In a lively study informed by Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and other social theorists, Architecture and Abstraction presents abstraction in architecture not as an aesthetic tendency but as a movement that arises from modern divisions of labor and consequent social asymmetries. These divisions were anticipated by the architecture of antiquity, which established a distinction between manual and intellectual labor, and placed the former in service to the latter. Further abstractions arose as geometry, used for measuring territories, became the intermediary between land and money and eventually produced the logic of the grid. In our own time, architectural abstraction serves the logic of capitalism and embraces the premise that all things can be exchanged—even experience itself is a commodity. To resist this turn, Aureli seeks a critique of architecture that begins not by scaling philosophical heights, but by standing at the ground level of material practice.
Architectural Theory