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This is the first book to show the development of Russian architecture over the past thousand years as a part of the history of Western architecture. Dmitry Shvidkovsky, Russia’s leading architectural historian, departs from the accepted notion that Russian architecture developed independent of outside cultural influences and demonstrates that, to the contrary, the(...)
History until 1900, Russia
April 2007, New Haven London
Russian architecture and the west
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This is the first book to show the development of Russian architecture over the past thousand years as a part of the history of Western architecture. Dmitry Shvidkovsky, Russia’s leading architectural historian, departs from the accepted notion that Russian architecture developed independent of outside cultural influences and demonstrates that, to the contrary, the influence of the West extends back to the tenth century and continues into the present. He offers compelling assessments of all the main masterpieces of Russian architecture and frames a radically new architectural history for Russia. The book systematically analyzes Russian buildings in relation to developments in European art, pointing out where familiar European features are expressed in Russian projects. Special attention is directed toward decorations based on Byzantine models; the heritage of Italian master builders and carvers; the impact of architects and others sent by Elizabeth I; the formation of the Russian Imperial Baroque; the Enlightenment in Russian art; and 19th- and 20th-century European influences. With over 300 specially commissioned photographs of sites throughout Russia and western Europe, this magnificent book is both beautiful and groundbreaking.
History until 1900, Russia
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The style of the medieval period, which flows through the bloodstream of western culture, was vigorously re-established in post-Enlightenment England. This one-volume history of the Medieval Revival is the first coherent account of it, especially those aspects that are expressed and reflected in literature. The book focuses on the period 1760 to 1971, with an Epilogue on(...)
Medievalism : the Middle Ages in modern England
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The style of the medieval period, which flows through the bloodstream of western culture, was vigorously re-established in post-Enlightenment England. This one-volume history of the Medieval Revival is the first coherent account of it, especially those aspects that are expressed and reflected in literature. The book focuses on the period 1760 to 1971, with an Epilogue on the reverberations of medievalism in the present day. The rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, after its destruction by fire in 1834, re-established Gothic as the national style. But medieval imitation manifests itself wherever one cares to look: in literature, architecture, the applied arts, religion, politics, and even Hollywood. In this skilled dissection of the components of this pervasive cultural movement, Michael Alexander rejects the idea that medievalism was confined to the Victorian period, and overturns the suspicion that it is by its nature escapist.
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March 2007, New Haven, London
History until 1900
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Mondes urbains du tourisme
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Ville et tourisme entretiennent une relation ancienne : le tourisme a été inventé en ville via le Grand Tour, à partir duquel les pratiques touristiques actuelles se sont forgées. A côté des villes anciennement touristiques et des formes urbaines très répandues que sont les stations touristiques, on constate que, désormais, toutes les villes ou presque optent pour un(...)
Mondes urbains du tourisme
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Ville et tourisme entretiennent une relation ancienne : le tourisme a été inventé en ville via le Grand Tour, à partir duquel les pratiques touristiques actuelles se sont forgées. A côté des villes anciennement touristiques et des formes urbaines très répandues que sont les stations touristiques, on constate que, désormais, toutes les villes ou presque optent pour un développement touristique ou pour son renforcement à travers des politiques et des événements, créant ici et là des synergies puissantes avec les loisirs et la culture des résidents. Ainsi émerge dans les villes toute une économie de la recréation et du ludique, qui s'accompagne d'un renforcement de la fréquentation pour les lieux connus depuis longtemps et d'un attrait nouveau pour des espaces urbains jusque-là ignorés. Le tourisme et les loisirs ont maintenant investi la ville et lui confèrent un supplément d'urbanité, désormais constitutif de tout fonctionnement urbain : le tourisme est bien devenu, à travers la ville et ses habitants, un genre commun. À travers les multiples exemples proposés, les auteurs se proposent d'analyser les situations passées comme les processus à l'œuvre montrant, une fois encore, que le tourisme est une clé pour mieux comprendre la ville et le Monde qui s'y façonne.
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January 2007, Paris
Urban Theory
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Vies citadines
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Cet ouvrage est le fruit, original, d'une écriture et d'une réflexion collectives de quinze chercheurs et enseignants-chercheurs de diverses disciplines et institutions, travaillant à partir de terrains très variés, du Nord comme du Sud, sur ce qui fait la ville aujourd'hui pour ceux qui l'habitent. Il entend répondre au discours commun sur l'évolution univoque des(...)
Vies citadines
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Cet ouvrage est le fruit, original, d'une écriture et d'une réflexion collectives de quinze chercheurs et enseignants-chercheurs de diverses disciplines et institutions, travaillant à partir de terrains très variés, du Nord comme du Sud, sur ce qui fait la ville aujourd'hui pour ceux qui l'habitent. Il entend répondre au discours commun sur l'évolution univoque des organismes urbains dans le contexte de la mondialisation, comme à l'inquiétude suscitée par ce que seront les villes du XXIe siècle. Les textes présentés analysent, à travers l'observation des vies citadines, les interactions contemporaines entre les recompositions spatiales et sociales urbaines. Ils proposent des éléments de réponse aux débats actuels se rapportant à la question de la dissolution de la ville dans l'urbain, à la déconnexion, annoncée par certains, des liens entre citadinité et urbanité, ainsi qu'à la notion de fragmentation urbaine. À l'image de certaines rues de nos villes, le plan de l'ouvrage invite plutôt à la flânerie. À chacun donc son itinéraire citadin au fil des pages. Ce qui fait le lien d'un texte à l'autre, c'est la recherche commune de ce qui fait ville malgré tout, pour le meilleur ou pour le pire.
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March 2007, Paris
Urban Theory
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Depuis 2004, Odile Coplin réalise une mission photographique pour la ville de Valenciennes. Les grands chantiers lui permettent d'engager une réflexion sur les bouleversements de sa ville et la façon d'en conserver la trace.
Visages de ville / Town Faces
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Depuis 2004, Odile Coplin réalise une mission photographique pour la ville de Valenciennes. Les grands chantiers lui permettent d'engager une réflexion sur les bouleversements de sa ville et la façon d'en conserver la trace.
Photography monographs
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This imaginative study of American visual culture reveals how the political predicaments of a few small bureaucracies once fostered pictures of an extraordinary style. U.S. geographical and geological surveys of the late nineteenth century produced photographs and drawings of topography, American Indians, geologic features, botanical specimens, and specialists at work in(...)
Theory of Photography
June 2007, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London
Archive style : photographs & illustrations for U.S. surveys, 1850-1890
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This imaginative study of American visual culture reveals how the political predicaments of a few small bureaucracies once fostered pictures of an extraordinary style. U.S. geographical and geological surveys of the late nineteenth century produced photographs and drawings of topography, American Indians, geologic features, botanical specimens, and specialists at work in the field. Some of these pictures have long been celebrated for their anticipation of a modernist aesthetic, but Robin Kelsey, in this abundantly illustrated volume, traces their modernistic qualities to archival ingenuity. The technical and promotional needs of surveys, Kelsey argues, fostered the emergence of a taut, graphic pictorial style that imitated the informational clarity of diagrams and maps. As this book demonstrates, these pictures became sites of struggle as well as innovation when three brilliant survey artists and photographers subtly resisted the programs they were hired to serve. Discovering a politics of style behind the modernist look of survey pictures, Kelsey offers a fresh interpretation of canonical western expedition photographs by Timothy H. O'Sullivan and introduces two exceptional but largely forgotten sets of pictures: views of the U.S.-Mexico boundary from the 1850s by Arthur Schott and photographs of the Charleston earthquake of 1886 by C. C. Jones.
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June 2007, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London
Theory of Photography
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Modernism in architecture and urban design has failed the American city. This is the decisive conclusion that renowned public intellectual Nathan Glazer has drawn from two decades of writing and thinking about what this architectural movement will bequeath to future generations. In From a Cause to a Style, he proclaims his disappointment with modernism and its impact on(...)
From a cause to a style : modernist architecture's encounter with the american city
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Modernism in architecture and urban design has failed the American city. This is the decisive conclusion that renowned public intellectual Nathan Glazer has drawn from two decades of writing and thinking about what this architectural movement will bequeath to future generations. In From a Cause to a Style, he proclaims his disappointment with modernism and its impact on the American city. Writing in the tradition of legendary American architectural critics Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, Glazer contends that modernism, this new urban form that signaled not just a radical revolution in style but a social ambition to enhance the conditions under which ordinary people lived, has fallen short on all counts. The articles and essays collected here--some never published before, all updated--reflect his ideas on subjects ranging from the livable city and public housing to building design, public memorials, and the uses of public space. Glazer, an undisputed giant among public intellectuals, is perhaps best known for his writings on ethnicity and social policy, where the unflinching honesty and independence of thought that he brought to bear on tough social questions has earned him respect from both the Left and the Right. Here, he challenges us to face some difficult truths about the public places that, for better or worse, define who we are as a society. From a Cause to a Style is an exhilarating and thought-provoking book that raises important questions about modernist architecture and the larger social aims it was supposed to have addressed-and those it has abandoned.
Urban Theory
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Media art histories
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Digital art has become a major contemporary art form, but it has yet to achieve acceptance from mainstream cultural institutions; it is rarely collected, and seldom included in the study of art history or other academic disciplines. In MediaArtHistories, leading scholars seek to change this. They take a wider view of media art, placing it against the backdrop of art(...)
Media art histories
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Digital art has become a major contemporary art form, but it has yet to achieve acceptance from mainstream cultural institutions; it is rarely collected, and seldom included in the study of art history or other academic disciplines. In MediaArtHistories, leading scholars seek to change this. They take a wider view of media art, placing it against the backdrop of art history. Their essays demonstrate that today's media art cannot be understood by technological details alone; it cannot be understood without its history, and it must be understood in proximity to other disciplines--film, cultural and media studies, computer science, philosophy, and sciences dealing with images. Contributors trace the evolution of digital art, from thirteenth-century Islamic mechanical devices and eighteenth-century phantasmagoria, magic lanterns, and other multimedia illusions, to Marcel Duchamp's inventions and 1960s kinetic and op art. They reexamine and redefine key media art theory terms--machine, media, exhibition--and consider the blurred dividing lines between art products and consumer products and between art images and science images. Finally, MediaArtHistories offers an approach for an interdisciplinary, expanded image science, which needs the "trained eye" of art history.
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March 2007, Cambridge
Architectural Theory
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Why does technology change over time, how does it change, and what difference does it make? In this sweeping, ambitious look at a thousand years of Western experience, Robert Friedel argues that technological change comes largely through the pursuit of improvement--the deep-rooted belief that things could be done in a better way. What Friedel calls the "culture of(...)
A culture of improvement : technology and the western millennium
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Why does technology change over time, how does it change, and what difference does it make? In this sweeping, ambitious look at a thousand years of Western experience, Robert Friedel argues that technological change comes largely through the pursuit of improvement--the deep-rooted belief that things could be done in a better way. What Friedel calls the "culture of improvement" is manifested every day in the ways people carry out their tasks in life--from tilling fields and raising children to waging war. Improvements can be ephemeral or lasting, and one person’s improvement may not always be viewed as such by others. Friedel stresses the social processes by which we define what improvements are and decide which improvements will last and which will not. These processes, he emphasizes, have created both winners and losers in history. Friedel presents a series of narratives of Western technology that begin in the eleventh century and stretch into the twenty-first. Familiar figures from the history of invention are joined by others--the Italian preacher who described the first eyeglasses, the dairywomen displaced from their control over cheesemaking, and the little-known engineer who first suggested a grand tower to Gustav Eiffel. Friedel traces technology from the plow and the printing press to the internal combustion engine, the transistor, and the space shuttle. Friedel also reminds us that faith in improvement can sometimes have horrific consequences: improved weaponry makes warfare ever more deadly and the drive for improving human beings can lead to eugenics and even genocide. The most comprehensive attempt to tell the story of Western technology in many years, engagingly written and lavishly illustrated, A Culture of Improvement documents the ways in which the drive for improvement has shaped our modern world.
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May 2007, Cambridge / London
Engineering Structures
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For Sherry Turkle, "We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with." In "Evocative objects", Turkle collects writings by scientists, humanists, artists, and designers that trace the power of everyday things. These essays reveal objects as emotional and intellectual companions that anchor memory, sustain relationships, and provoke new ideas. This(...)
Evocative objects : things we think with
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For Sherry Turkle, "We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with." In "Evocative objects", Turkle collects writings by scientists, humanists, artists, and designers that trace the power of everyday things. These essays reveal objects as emotional and intellectual companions that anchor memory, sustain relationships, and provoke new ideas. This volume's special contribution is its focus on everyday riches: the simplest of objects - an apple, a datebook, a laptop computer - are shown to bring philosophy down to earth. The poet contends, "No ideas but in things." The notion of evocative objects goes further : objects carry both ideas and passions. In our relations to things, thought and feeling are inseparable. Whether it's a student's beloved 1964 Ford Falcon (left behind for a station wagon and motherhood), or a cello that inspires a meditation on fatherhood, the intimate objects in this collection are used to reflect on larger themes -the role of objects in design and play, discipline and desire, history and exchange, mourning and memory, transition and passage, meditation and new vision. In the interest of enriching these connections, Turkle pairs each autobiographical essay with a text from philosophy, history, literature, or theory, creating juxtapositions at once playful and profound. So we have Howard Gardner's keyboards and Lev Vygotsky's hobbyhorses; William Mitchell's Melbourne train and Roland Barthes' pleasures of text; Joseph Cevetello's glucometer and Donna Haraway's cyborgs. Each essay is framed by images that are themselves evocative. Essays by Turkle begin and end the collection, inviting us to look more closely at the everyday objects of our lives, the familiar objects that drive our routines, hold our affections, and open out our world in unexpected ways.
Design Theory