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Imagining MIT
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In the 1990s, MIT began a billion-dollar building program that transformed its outdated, run-down campus into an architectural showplace. Funded by the high-tech boom of the 1990s and driven by a pent-up demand for new space, MIT's ambitious rebuilding produced five major works of architecture: Kevin Roche's Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center, Steven Holl's Simmons Hall,(...)
Imagining MIT
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In the 1990s, MIT began a billion-dollar building program that transformed its outdated, run-down campus into an architectural showplace. Funded by the high-tech boom of the 1990s and driven by a pent-up demand for new space, MIT's ambitious rebuilding produced five major works of architecture: Kevin Roche's Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center, Steven Holl's Simmons Hall, Frank Gehry's Stata Center, Charles Correa's Brain and Cognitive Science Complex, and Fumihiko Maki's still-unrealized project for the Media Laboratory. In Imagining MIT, William Mitchell (who served as architectural adviser to MIT president Charles Vest) offers a critical, behind-the-scenes view of MIT's new buildings and the complex processes that produced them. The story is not simply one of commissions, projects, CAD, and hardhats; it is about all the forces that come into play--including money, politics, institutional dynamics, and ideology--when a major university campus is imagined, designed, and built. Lavishly illustrated with architectural photographs, drawings, plans, and models, with color images throughout, Imagining MIT shows both the opportunities and the obstacles facing architectural production and city building at the dawn of a new millennium.
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May 2007, Cambridge / London
Architectural Theory
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In his thoughtful collection of essays on the relationship of architecture and the arts, Giuliana Bruno addresses the crucial role that architecture plays in the production of art and the making of public intimacy. As art melts into spatial construction and architecture mobilizes artistic vision, Bruno argues, a new moving space--a screen of vital cultural memory--has(...)
Public intimacy: architecture and the visual arts
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In his thoughtful collection of essays on the relationship of architecture and the arts, Giuliana Bruno addresses the crucial role that architecture plays in the production of art and the making of public intimacy. As art melts into spatial construction and architecture mobilizes artistic vision, Bruno argues, a new moving space--a screen of vital cultural memory--has come to shape our visual culture. Taking on the central topic of museum culture, Bruno leads the reader on a series of architectural promenades from modernity to our times. Through these "museum walks," she demonstrates how artistic collection has become a culture of recollection, and examines the public space of the pavilion as reinvented in the moving-image art installation of Turner Prize nominees Jane and Louise Wilson. Investigating the intersection of science and art, Bruno looks at our cultural obsession with techniques of imaging and its effect on the privacy of bodies and space. She finds in the work of artist Rebecca Horn a notable combination of the artistic and the scientific that creates an architecture of public intimacy. Considering the role of architecture in contemporary art that refashions our "lived space"--and the work of contemporary artists including Rachel Whiteread, Mona Hatoum, and Guillermo Kuitca--Bruno argues that architecture is used to define the frame of memory, the border of public and private space, and the permeability of exterior and interior space. Architecture, Bruno contends, is not merely a matter of space, but an art of time.
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April 2007
Art Theory
Strange details
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Confronted with the intricate construction details of Italian architect Carlo Scarpa's Querini Stampalia Gallery--steel joined at odd intervals, concrete spilled out of concatenated forms, stone cut in labyrinthine patterns--Michael Cadwell abandoned his attempts to categorize them theoretically and resolved instead to appreciate their idiosyncrasies and evoke their(...)
Strange details
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Confronted with the intricate construction details of Italian architect Carlo Scarpa's Querini Stampalia Gallery--steel joined at odd intervals, concrete spilled out of concatenated forms, stone cut in labyrinthine patterns--Michael Cadwell abandoned his attempts to categorize them theoretically and resolved instead to appreciate their idiosyncrasies and evoke their all-embracing affects. What he had dismissed as a collection of fetishes he came to understand as a coherently constructed world that was nonetheless persistently strange. In Strange Details, Cadwell looks at the work of four canonical architects who "made strange" with the most resistant aspect of architecture--construction. In buildings that were pivotal in their careers, Scarpa, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn all created details that undercut our critical and analytical terra firma. Cadwell explores the strangeness in the material menagerie of Scarpa's Querini Stampalia, the wood light frame construction of Wright's Jacobs House, the welded steel frame of Mies's Farnsworth House, and the reinforced concrete of Kahn's Yale Center for British Art. Each of these architects, he finds, reconfigures the rudimentary facts of construction, creating a subtle but undeniable shift in a building’s physicality. And for each of them, nature is strange, and its strangeness infects; nature unmoors exhausted cultural ideas, constricted analytical procedures, and outmoded production techniques. An awakening to nature's strangeness forces a new sense of the world, one that we can detect in these architects' configurations of the world's materials--their strange details.
Architectural Theory
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Amid the cultural and political ferment of 1960s France, a group of avant-garde architects, artists, writers, theorists, and critics known as "spatial urbanists" envisioned a series of urban utopias, phantom cities of a possible future. The utopian "spatial" city most often took the form of a massive grid or mesh suspended above the ground, all of its parts (and(...)
Topologies : The urban utopia in France, 1960-1970
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Amid the cultural and political ferment of 1960s France, a group of avant-garde architects, artists, writers, theorists, and critics known as "spatial urbanists" envisioned a series of urban utopias, phantom cities of a possible future. The utopian "spatial" city most often took the form of a massive grid or mesh suspended above the ground, all of its parts (and inhabitants) circulating in a smooth, synchronous rhythm, its streets and buildings constituting a gigantic work of plastic art or interactive machine. In this new urban world, technology and automation were positive forces, providing for material needs as well as time and space for leisure. In this first study of the French avant-garde tendency known as spatial urbanism, Larry Busbea analyzes projects by artists and architects (including the most famous spatial practitioner, Yona Friedman) and explores texts (many of which have never before been translated from the French) by Michel Ragon, the influential founder of the Groupe International d'Architecture Prospective (GIAP), Victor Vasarely, and others.
Urban Theory
Domesticity at War
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In the years immediately following World War II, America embraced modern architecture--not as something imported from Europe, but as an entirely new mode of operation, with original and captivating designs made in the USA. Beatriz Colomina shows how postwar American architecture adapted the techniques and materials that were developed for military applications to domestic(...)
Domesticity at War
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In the years immediately following World War II, America embraced modern architecture--not as something imported from Europe, but as an entirely new mode of operation, with original and captivating designs made in the USA. Beatriz Colomina shows how postwar American architecture adapted the techniques and materials that were developed for military applications to domestic use. Just as manufacturers were turning wartime industry to peacetime productivity--going from missiles to washing machines--American architects and cultural institutions were, in Buckminster Fuller’s words, turning "weaponry into livingry." This new form of domesticity itself turned out to be a powerful weapon. Images of American domestic bliss--suburban homes, manicured lawns, kitchen accessories--went around the world as an effective propaganda campaign. Cold War anxieties were masked by endlessly repeated images of a picture-perfect domestic environment. Even the popular conception of the architect became domesticated, changing from that of an austere modernist to a plaid-shirt wearing homebody. Domesticity at War itself has a distinctive architecture. Housed within the case are two units: one book of text, and one book of illustrations--most of them in color, including advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles, architectural photographs, and more.
Architectural Theory
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The cinematic
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The cinematic has been a springboard for the work of many influential artists, including Victor Burgin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Stan Douglas, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Wall, among others. Much recent cinema, meanwhile, is rich with references to contemporary photography. Video art has taken a photographic turn into pensive slowness; photography(...)
March 2007, London / Cambridge
The cinematic
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The cinematic has been a springboard for the work of many influential artists, including Victor Burgin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Stan Douglas, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Wall, among others. Much recent cinema, meanwhile, is rich with references to contemporary photography. Video art has taken a photographic turn into pensive slowness; photography now has at its disposal the budgets and scale of cinema. This addition to Whitechapel’s Documents of Contemporary Art series surveys the rich history of creative interaction between the moving and the still photograph, tracing their ever-changing relationship since early modernism.
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March 2007, London / Cambridge
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This reader in Whitechapel's Documents of Contemporary Art series investigates the interchange between art and design. Since the Pop and Minimalist eras--as the work of artists ranging from Andy Warhol to Dan Graham demonstrates--the traditional boundaries between art and architectural, graphic, and product design have dissolved in critically significant ways. Design and(...)
Design and art: Documents of contemporary art
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This reader in Whitechapel's Documents of Contemporary Art series investigates the interchange between art and design. Since the Pop and Minimalist eras--as the work of artists ranging from Andy Warhol to Dan Graham demonstrates--the traditional boundaries between art and architectural, graphic, and product design have dissolved in critically significant ways. Design and Art traces the rise of the "design-art" phenomenon through the writings of critics and practitioners active in both fields. The texts include writings by Paul Rand, Hal Foster, Miwon Kwon, and others that set the parameters of the debate; utopian visions, including those of architect Peter Cook and writer Douglas Coupland; project descriptions by artists (among them Tobias Rehberger and Jorge Pardo) juxtaposed with theoretical writings; surveys of group practices by such collectives as N55 and Superflex; and views of the artist as mediator--a role assumed in the past to be the province of the designer--as seen in work by Frederick Kiesler, Ed Ruscha, and others. Finally, a book that doesn't privilege either the art world or the design world but puts them in dialogue with each other.
Art Theory
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Studies of rituals in sacred gardens and landscapes offer tantalizing insights into the significance of gardens and landscapes in the societies of India, ancient Greece, Pre-Columbian Mexico, medieval Japan, post-Renaissance Europe, and America. Sacred gardens and landscapes engaged their visitors into three specific modes of agency: as anterooms spurring encounters with(...)
Sacred gardens and landscapes : ritual and agency
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Studies of rituals in sacred gardens and landscapes offer tantalizing insights into the significance of gardens and landscapes in the societies of India, ancient Greece, Pre-Columbian Mexico, medieval Japan, post-Renaissance Europe, and America. Sacred gardens and landscapes engaged their visitors into three specific modes of agency: as anterooms spurring encounters with the netherworld; as journeys through mystical lands; and as a means of establishing a sense of locality, metaphorically rooting the dweller's own identity in a well-defined part of the material world. Each section of this book is devoted to one of these forms of agency. Together the essays reveal a profound cultural significance of gardens previously overlooked by studies of garden styles.
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March 2007, Washington, D.C., Cambridge
Landscape Theory
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Breaking with the idea that gardens are places of indulgence and escapism, these studies of ritualized practices reveal that gardens in Europe, Asia, the United States, and the Caribbean have in fact made significant contributions to cultural change. This book demonstrates methods and the striking results of garden reception studies. The first section explores how(...)
Performance and appropriation : profane rituals in gardens and landscapes
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Breaking with the idea that gardens are places of indulgence and escapism, these studies of ritualized practices reveal that gardens in Europe, Asia, the United States, and the Caribbean have in fact made significant contributions to cultural change. This book demonstrates methods and the striking results of garden reception studies. The first section explores how cultural changes occur, and devotes chapters to public landscapes in the Netherlands, seventeenth-century Parisian gardens, Freemason gardens in Tuscany, nineteenth-century Scottish kitchen gardens, and the public parks of Edo and modern Tokyo. The second part provides striking examples of construction of self in vernacular gardens in Guadeloupe and American Japanese-style gardens in California. Finally, the third section analyzes struggles for political change in gardens of Yuan China and modern Britain.
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March 2007, Washington, D.C., Cambridge
Landscape Theory
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The present renewal of garden art demands a new approach to garden aesthetics. This book considers exceptional creations around the world and proposes new forms of garden experience. Using a variety of critical perspectives, the authors demonstrate a renewal of garden design and new directions for garden aesthetics, analyzing projects by Fernando Chacel (Brazil), Andy(...)
Contemporary garden aesthetics, creations and interpretations
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The present renewal of garden art demands a new approach to garden aesthetics. This book considers exceptional creations around the world and proposes new forms of garden experience. Using a variety of critical perspectives, the authors demonstrate a renewal of garden design and new directions for garden aesthetics, analyzing projects by Fernando Chacel (Brazil), Andy Goldsworthy (Great Britain), Charles Jencks (Great Britain), Patricia Johanson (U.S.), Dieter Kienast (Switzerland), Bernard Lassus (France), and Mohammed Shaheer (India). The first half of the volume begins with an argument for a return to John Dewey's focus on "Art as Experience", while the second half concludes with a debate on the respective roles of cognition and the senses, and of science and the visual arts.
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March 2007, Washington, D.C., Cambridge
Landscape Theory