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Title:
Queering architecture
Queering architecture
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Featuring contributions from a range of significant voices in the field, this volume renews the conversation around what it means to speak of the "queer" in the context of architecture, and offers a fresh take on the methodological and epistemological challenges this poses to the discipline of architectural theory. Architecture as a discipline, a profession and an applied(...)
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Featuring contributions from a range of significant voices in the field, this volume renews the conversation around what it means to speak of the "queer" in the context of architecture, and offers a fresh take on the methodological and epistemological challenges this poses to the discipline of architectural theory. Architecture as a discipline, a profession and an applied(...)
Title:
Queering architecture
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Featuring contributions from a range of significant voices in the field, this volume renews the conversation around what it means to speak of the "queer" in the context of architecture, and offers a fresh take on the methodological and epistemological challenges this poses to the discipline of architectural theory. Architecture as a discipline, a profession and an applied practice, is always subordinate to its own conceptual framework, which is one of orderliness. It refers to buildings, but also to infrastructures of thought and knowledge, to conventions and taxonomies, to structures of governance, hierarchies of power and systems of administration. How, then, can one look at queering architectural discourse when the very term "queer", celebrated for its elusive, slippery nature, resists and attacks such order? Divided into four subsections, the essays in this anthology each purse a distinct line of inquiry - methods, practices, spaces, and pedagogies - in order to help particularize the proposed queering of architecture. They demonstrate the paradoxical nature of the endeavour from a diverse range of perspectives – from the questions of mapping queer theory in architecture; to the issues of queer architectural archives, or lack thereof; to the non-Western linguistic challenges to the very term queer alongside decolonial approaches to architecture via indigeneity and landscape.
Queering architecture
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$52.50
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Summary:
Featuring contributions from a range of significant voices in the field, this volume renews the conversation around what it means to speak of the "queer" in the context of architecture, and offers a fresh take on the methodological and epistemological challenges this poses to the discipline of architectural theory. Architecture as a discipline, a profession and an applied practice, is always subordinate to its own conceptual framework, which is one of orderliness. It refers to buildings, but also to infrastructures of thought and knowledge, to conventions and taxonomies, to structures of governance, hierarchies of power and systems of administration. How, then, can one look at queering architectural discourse when the very term "queer", celebrated for its elusive, slippery nature, resists and attacks such order? Divided into four subsections, the essays in this anthology each purse a distinct line of inquiry - methods, practices, spaces, and pedagogies - in order to help particularize the proposed queering of architecture. They demonstrate the paradoxical nature of the endeavour from a diverse range of perspectives – from the questions of mapping queer theory in architecture; to the issues of queer architectural archives, or lack thereof; to the non-Western linguistic challenges to the very term queer alongside decolonial approaches to architecture via indigeneity and landscape.
Form:
books
books
Publication:
May 2024
May 2024
Subject:
Gender Theory in Architecture
Gender Theory in Architecture
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books
books
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$54.00
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The relationship between sound and space has become central to both creative practices in music and sound art and contemporary scholarship on sound. Entire subfields have emerged in connection to the spatial aspects of sound, from spatial audio and sound installation to acoustic ecology and soundscape studies. But how did our understanding of sound become spatial? In(...)
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The relationship between sound and space has become central to both creative practices in music and sound art and contemporary scholarship on sound. Entire subfields have emerged in connection to the spatial aspects of sound, from spatial audio and sound installation to acoustic ecology and soundscape studies. But how did our understanding of sound become spatial? In(...)
Title:
Stereophonica: Sound and space in science, technology and the arts
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The relationship between sound and space has become central to both creative practices in music and sound art and contemporary scholarship on sound. Entire subfields have emerged in connection to the spatial aspects of sound, from spatial audio and sound installation to acoustic ecology and soundscape studies. But how did our understanding of sound become spatial? In ''Stereophonica,'' Gascia Ouzounian examines a series of historical episodes that transformed ideas of sound and space, from the advent of stereo technologies in the nineteenth century to visual representations of sonic environments today. Developing a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective, Ouzounian draws on both the history of science and technology and the history of music and sound art. She investigates the binaural apparatus that allowed nineteenth-century listeners to observe sound in three dimensions; examines the development of military technologies for sound location during World War I; revisits experiments in stereo sound at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1930s; and considers the creation of "optimized acoustical environments" for theaters and factories. She explores the development of multichannel "spatial music" in the 1950s and sound installation art in the 1960s; analyzes the mapping of soundscapes; and investigates contemporary approaches to sonic urbanism, sonic practices that reimagine urban environments through sound.
Stereophonica: Sound and space in science, technology and the arts
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The relationship between sound and space has become central to both creative practices in music and sound art and contemporary scholarship on sound. Entire subfields have emerged in connection to the spatial aspects of sound, from spatial audio and sound installation to acoustic ecology and soundscape studies. But how did our understanding of sound become spatial? In ''Stereophonica,'' Gascia Ouzounian examines a series of historical episodes that transformed ideas of sound and space, from the advent of stereo technologies in the nineteenth century to visual representations of sonic environments today. Developing a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective, Ouzounian draws on both the history of science and technology and the history of music and sound art. She investigates the binaural apparatus that allowed nineteenth-century listeners to observe sound in three dimensions; examines the development of military technologies for sound location during World War I; revisits experiments in stereo sound at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1930s; and considers the creation of "optimized acoustical environments" for theaters and factories. She explores the development of multichannel "spatial music" in the 1950s and sound installation art in the 1960s; analyzes the mapping of soundscapes; and investigates contemporary approaches to sonic urbanism, sonic practices that reimagine urban environments through sound.
Form:
books
books
Publication:
February 2021
February 2021
Subject:
Acoustics
Acoustics
Form:
books
books
Price:
$60.00
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Summary:
In the 1950s, the figure of the arrow had a strange kind of ubiquity in architectural drawings, publications, and advertisements, symbolizing everything from the circulation of cold and warm air in a kitchen fridge to the flow of traffic in assorted New Towns. Twenty-five years earlier there were barely any arrows within architectural publications, and 15 years later they(...)
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In the 1950s, the figure of the arrow had a strange kind of ubiquity in architectural drawings, publications, and advertisements, symbolizing everything from the circulation of cold and warm air in a kitchen fridge to the flow of traffic in assorted New Towns. Twenty-five years earlier there were barely any arrows within architectural publications, and 15 years later they(...)
Title:
On arrows: Essays in British architecture and its environments
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In the 1950s, the figure of the arrow had a strange kind of ubiquity in architectural drawings, publications, and advertisements, symbolizing everything from the circulation of cold and warm air in a kitchen fridge to the flow of traffic in assorted New Towns. Twenty-five years earlier there were barely any arrows within architectural publications, and 15 years later they had all but disappeared. In ''On Arrows'', Laurent Stalder looks back at the near past to trace the idea of performance in architecture by following this pervasive yet relatively unnoticed figure within the history of British architecture. During its short, intense period of use, the arrow pointed beyond any one singular author, typology, or scale, to the operative dimension of architecture and its environments, working both as an appropriate representational technique and a concrete tool for design. Stalder uses the arrow to move through the different dimensions of performance, mapping out the changing set of constellations that made up postwar British architecture and its environments: the constructive aspects, structural properties, infrastructural innovations, spatial challenges as well as their aesthetic and practical consequences. It is the arrow, he writes, that brings together debates from within different disciplines—from building physics, to sociology, structural design, and historiography, inscribed as they are in the materials, spaces, and buildings that are all too often considered in isolation from one another.
On arrows: Essays in British architecture and its environments
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Summary:
In the 1950s, the figure of the arrow had a strange kind of ubiquity in architectural drawings, publications, and advertisements, symbolizing everything from the circulation of cold and warm air in a kitchen fridge to the flow of traffic in assorted New Towns. Twenty-five years earlier there were barely any arrows within architectural publications, and 15 years later they had all but disappeared. In ''On Arrows'', Laurent Stalder looks back at the near past to trace the idea of performance in architecture by following this pervasive yet relatively unnoticed figure within the history of British architecture. During its short, intense period of use, the arrow pointed beyond any one singular author, typology, or scale, to the operative dimension of architecture and its environments, working both as an appropriate representational technique and a concrete tool for design. Stalder uses the arrow to move through the different dimensions of performance, mapping out the changing set of constellations that made up postwar British architecture and its environments: the constructive aspects, structural properties, infrastructural innovations, spatial challenges as well as their aesthetic and practical consequences. It is the arrow, he writes, that brings together debates from within different disciplines—from building physics, to sociology, structural design, and historiography, inscribed as they are in the materials, spaces, and buildings that are all too often considered in isolation from one another.
Form:
books
books
Publication:
January 2025
January 2025
Subject:
Architectural Theory
Architectural Theory
Form:
books
books
Title:
Walking between slums and skycrapers: illusions of open space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai
Walking between slums and skycrapers: illusions of open space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai
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The book is concerned with the effects of globalization on living space focusing specifically on East Asian metropolises, such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai. Globalization has given rise to accessible catch-phrases such as the 'global village' and 'this is a small world.' In each part of the book the author juxtaposes a 'social' account of the city's urban space as it(...)
$24.95
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Summary:
The book is concerned with the effects of globalization on living space focusing specifically on East Asian metropolises, such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai. Globalization has given rise to accessible catch-phrases such as the 'global village' and 'this is a small world.' In each part of the book the author juxtaposes a 'social' account of the city's urban space as it(...)
Publication:
April 2004, Hong Kong
April 2004, Hong Kong
Title:
Walking between slums and skycrapers: illusions of open space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai
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Summary:
The book is concerned with the effects of globalization on living space focusing specifically on East Asian metropolises, such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai. Globalization has given rise to accessible catch-phrases such as the 'global village' and 'this is a small world.' In each part of the book the author juxtaposes a 'social' account of the city's urban space as it has been reshaped by the process of globalization with a 'private' account of the urban landscape as experienced by its walkers. Rather than rest here, the author wishes to show that for many of the inhabitants of the new global city, the 'shrinking world' phenomenon is deeply literal: the 'lived' space of everyday life is shrinking to make room for rezoning, construction of new infrastructure, and space modification - all in the name of urban development. Tsung-yi Michelle Huang received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her works on cinema, literature, cultural studies, global cities, and Hong Kong culture have been published in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Narrative Theory, among others. Recently she has been working in a project that defines and examines specific East Asian metropolises as both 'linked' cities and distinctive global centers, mapping the tension within these domains. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English Literature at National Taiwan Normal University.
Walking between slums and skycrapers: illusions of open space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai
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$24.95
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Summary:
The book is concerned with the effects of globalization on living space focusing specifically on East Asian metropolises, such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai. Globalization has given rise to accessible catch-phrases such as the 'global village' and 'this is a small world.' In each part of the book the author juxtaposes a 'social' account of the city's urban space as it has been reshaped by the process of globalization with a 'private' account of the urban landscape as experienced by its walkers. Rather than rest here, the author wishes to show that for many of the inhabitants of the new global city, the 'shrinking world' phenomenon is deeply literal: the 'lived' space of everyday life is shrinking to make room for rezoning, construction of new infrastructure, and space modification - all in the name of urban development. Tsung-yi Michelle Huang received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her works on cinema, literature, cultural studies, global cities, and Hong Kong culture have been published in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Narrative Theory, among others. Recently she has been working in a project that defines and examines specific East Asian metropolises as both 'linked' cities and distinctive global centers, mapping the tension within these domains. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English Literature at National Taiwan Normal University.
Form:
books
books
Publication:
April 2004, Hong Kong
April 2004, Hong Kong
Form:
books
books
Price:
$38.99
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Summary:
It is perhaps the eighth wonder of our world that despite modern mapping and satellite photography our planet continues to surprise us. Hidden lairs beneath layers of rock, forgotten cities rising out of deserted lands and even mankind's own feats of engineering eccentricity lie in the most unusual of destinations. Travis Elborough goes in search of the obscure and(...)
$38.99
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Summary:
It is perhaps the eighth wonder of our world that despite modern mapping and satellite photography our planet continues to surprise us. Hidden lairs beneath layers of rock, forgotten cities rising out of deserted lands and even mankind's own feats of engineering eccentricity lie in the most unusual of destinations. Travis Elborough goes in search of the obscure and(...)
Title:
Atlas of improbable places: a journey to the world's most unusual corners
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It is perhaps the eighth wonder of our world that despite modern mapping and satellite photography our planet continues to surprise us. Hidden lairs beneath layers of rock, forgotten cities rising out of deserted lands and even mankind's own feats of engineering eccentricity lie in the most unusual of destinations. Travis Elborough goes in search of the obscure and bizarre, the beautiful and estranged. Taking in the defiant relics of ancient cities such as Ani, a once thriving metropolis lost to conquered lands, and the church tower of San Juan Parangaricuto, that miraculously stands as the sole survivor of a town sunk by lava. Through the labyrinths of Berlin and Beijing - underground realms dug for refuge, espionage and even, as Canada's Moose Jaw, used as the playground for gangsters trading liquor and money over cards. Never forgetting the freaks and wonders of nature's own unusual masterpieces: the magical underground river shaped like a dragon's mouth in the Philippines and the floating world of Palmerston. With beautiful maps and stunning photography illustrating each destination, Atlas of Improbable Places is a fascinating voyage to the world's most incredible destinations. As the Island of Dolls and the hauntingly titled Door to Hell - an inextinguishable fire pit - attest, mystery is never far away. The truths and myths behind their creation are as varied as the destinations themselves. Standing as symbols of worship, testaments to kingships or even the strange and wonderful traditions of old and new, these curious places are not just extraordinary sights but reflections on man's own relationship with the world around us
Atlas of improbable places: a journey to the world's most unusual corners
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Price:
$38.99
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Summary:
It is perhaps the eighth wonder of our world that despite modern mapping and satellite photography our planet continues to surprise us. Hidden lairs beneath layers of rock, forgotten cities rising out of deserted lands and even mankind's own feats of engineering eccentricity lie in the most unusual of destinations. Travis Elborough goes in search of the obscure and bizarre, the beautiful and estranged. Taking in the defiant relics of ancient cities such as Ani, a once thriving metropolis lost to conquered lands, and the church tower of San Juan Parangaricuto, that miraculously stands as the sole survivor of a town sunk by lava. Through the labyrinths of Berlin and Beijing - underground realms dug for refuge, espionage and even, as Canada's Moose Jaw, used as the playground for gangsters trading liquor and money over cards. Never forgetting the freaks and wonders of nature's own unusual masterpieces: the magical underground river shaped like a dragon's mouth in the Philippines and the floating world of Palmerston. With beautiful maps and stunning photography illustrating each destination, Atlas of Improbable Places is a fascinating voyage to the world's most incredible destinations. As the Island of Dolls and the hauntingly titled Door to Hell - an inextinguishable fire pit - attest, mystery is never far away. The truths and myths behind their creation are as varied as the destinations themselves. Standing as symbols of worship, testaments to kingships or even the strange and wonderful traditions of old and new, these curious places are not just extraordinary sights but reflections on man's own relationship with the world around us
Form:
books
books
Publication:
October 2016
October 2016
Subject:
Architectural Plans and Cartography
Architectural Plans and Cartography
Form:
books
books
Title:
The city reader 4th edition
The city reader 4th edition
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Summary:
The fourth edition of the highly successful The City Reader brings together the very best of publications on the city. Classic writings by such authors as Lewis Mumford, Ernest W. Burgess, LeCorbusier, Lewis Wirth, Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch meet the best contemporary writings of, among others, Sir Peter Hall, Richard Florida, Mike Davis, Michael Porter, Robert Putnam,(...)
$83.95
(available to order)
Summary:
The fourth edition of the highly successful The City Reader brings together the very best of publications on the city. Classic writings by such authors as Lewis Mumford, Ernest W. Burgess, LeCorbusier, Lewis Wirth, Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch meet the best contemporary writings of, among others, Sir Peter Hall, Richard Florida, Mike Davis, Michael Porter, Robert Putnam,(...)
Subject:
Urban Theory
Urban Theory
Publication:
August 2007, London New York
August 2007, London New York
Title:
The city reader 4th edition
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$83.95
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Summary:
The fourth edition of the highly successful The City Reader brings together the very best of publications on the city. Classic writings by such authors as Lewis Mumford, Ernest W. Burgess, LeCorbusier, Lewis Wirth, Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch meet the best contemporary writings of, among others, Sir Peter Hall, Richard Florida, Mike Davis, Michael Porter, Robert Putnam, Andrus Duany, Saskia Sassen, and Manuel Castells. New to the fourth edition are important classic writings on urban economics by Wilbur Thomson and on bosses and machines by James Bryce, Jane Addams, and William L. Riordan, and new contemporary material on sustainable urban development , the creative class, metropolitics, occidentalism, Asian megacities, and urban futurism by The Bruntland Commission, Richard Florida, Myron Orfield, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Aprodicio Laquian, and Joel Kotkin. Fifty-seven generous selections are included: a combination of forty-six readings from the third edition and eleven entirely new selections. Structured to aid student understanding, the anthology features main and part Introductions, as well as individual introductions to the selected articles. Each selection is introduced with a brief intellectual biography and a review of the author s writings and related literature, an explanation of how the piece fits into the broader context of urban history and practice, competing ideological perspectives on the city, and the major current debates concerning race and gender, globalization, terrorism, the impact of information technology on cities, civic engagement, and postmodernism. The City Reader provides the comprehensive mapping of the terrain of Urban Studies, old and new. It is illustrated with over forty photographs and is essential reading for anyone interested in the city.
The city reader 4th edition
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Price:
$83.95
(available to order)
Summary:
The fourth edition of the highly successful The City Reader brings together the very best of publications on the city. Classic writings by such authors as Lewis Mumford, Ernest W. Burgess, LeCorbusier, Lewis Wirth, Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch meet the best contemporary writings of, among others, Sir Peter Hall, Richard Florida, Mike Davis, Michael Porter, Robert Putnam, Andrus Duany, Saskia Sassen, and Manuel Castells. New to the fourth edition are important classic writings on urban economics by Wilbur Thomson and on bosses and machines by James Bryce, Jane Addams, and William L. Riordan, and new contemporary material on sustainable urban development , the creative class, metropolitics, occidentalism, Asian megacities, and urban futurism by The Bruntland Commission, Richard Florida, Myron Orfield, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Aprodicio Laquian, and Joel Kotkin. Fifty-seven generous selections are included: a combination of forty-six readings from the third edition and eleven entirely new selections. Structured to aid student understanding, the anthology features main and part Introductions, as well as individual introductions to the selected articles. Each selection is introduced with a brief intellectual biography and a review of the author s writings and related literature, an explanation of how the piece fits into the broader context of urban history and practice, competing ideological perspectives on the city, and the major current debates concerning race and gender, globalization, terrorism, the impact of information technology on cities, civic engagement, and postmodernism. The City Reader provides the comprehensive mapping of the terrain of Urban Studies, old and new. It is illustrated with over forty photographs and is essential reading for anyone interested in the city.
Form:
books
books
Publication:
August 2007, London New York
August 2007, London New York
Subject:
Urban Theory
Urban Theory
Form:
books
books
Title:
Thirtyfour campgrounds
Thirtyfour campgrounds
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Summary:
Camping can make us feel a powerful connection to nature and our rugged backwoods forebears. Campers once confronted the elemental facts of life, but now, the millions of Americans taking to the road on camping trips are more likely to drive to a campground, hook up service conduits, connect to WiFi, drop their awnings, and set out patio chairs. It is as if, Martin Hogue(...)
$51.00
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Summary:
Camping can make us feel a powerful connection to nature and our rugged backwoods forebears. Campers once confronted the elemental facts of life, but now, the millions of Americans taking to the road on camping trips are more likely to drive to a campground, hook up service conduits, connect to WiFi, drop their awnings, and set out patio chairs. It is as if, Martin Hogue(...)
Title:
Thirtyfour campgrounds
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$51.00
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Camping can make us feel a powerful connection to nature and our rugged backwoods forebears. Campers once confronted the elemental facts of life, but now, the millions of Americans taking to the road on camping trips are more likely to drive to a campground, hook up service conduits, connect to WiFi, drop their awnings, and set out patio chairs. It is as if, Martin Hogue observes, each campsite functions as a stage upon which campers perform a series of ritualized activities (pitching the tent, building a fire, cooking over flames). In Thirtyfour Campgrounds, Hogue investigates these sites, individually and in multiples, offering a photographic and typological survey of nearly 6,500 American campsites, mapping subtle differences within the apparently identical. The central part of the book consists of color photographs of individual campsites, downloaded from such online reservation websites as reserveamerica.com and recreation.gov, organized by zip code, and arranged in grids across the pages. Hogue nods to artist Ed Ruscha's Thirtyfour Parking Lots for his title and its attitude, and to the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher for the serial arrangement of images in grids. The campsite pictures seem at first endlessly repetitious; but then the repetition makes way for difference. Time reveals itself in fading light and passing clouds, the weather changes between photographs of neighboring sites, leaves turn color and fall, in an unexpected kind of time-lapse photography. This is a book that was made so seriously that it must (not) be taken too seriously. More scientific than any campground literature, Thirtyfour Campgrounds calls the very nature of scientific survey, research, and publication into question.
Thirtyfour campgrounds
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Summary:
Camping can make us feel a powerful connection to nature and our rugged backwoods forebears. Campers once confronted the elemental facts of life, but now, the millions of Americans taking to the road on camping trips are more likely to drive to a campground, hook up service conduits, connect to WiFi, drop their awnings, and set out patio chairs. It is as if, Martin Hogue observes, each campsite functions as a stage upon which campers perform a series of ritualized activities (pitching the tent, building a fire, cooking over flames). In Thirtyfour Campgrounds, Hogue investigates these sites, individually and in multiples, offering a photographic and typological survey of nearly 6,500 American campsites, mapping subtle differences within the apparently identical. The central part of the book consists of color photographs of individual campsites, downloaded from such online reservation websites as reserveamerica.com and recreation.gov, organized by zip code, and arranged in grids across the pages. Hogue nods to artist Ed Ruscha's Thirtyfour Parking Lots for his title and its attitude, and to the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher for the serial arrangement of images in grids. The campsite pictures seem at first endlessly repetitious; but then the repetition makes way for difference. Time reveals itself in fading light and passing clouds, the weather changes between photographs of neighboring sites, leaves turn color and fall, in an unexpected kind of time-lapse photography. This is a book that was made so seriously that it must (not) be taken too seriously. More scientific than any campground literature, Thirtyfour Campgrounds calls the very nature of scientific survey, research, and publication into question.
Form:
books
books
Publication:
September 2016
September 2016
Subject:
Landscape Theory
Landscape Theory
Form:
books
books
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$56.50
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Summary:
The single-screen movie theaters that punctuated small-town America's main streets and city neighborhoods since the 1920s are all but gone. The well-dressed throng of moviegoers has vanished; the facades are boarded. In "Silent Screens", photographer Michael Putnam captures these once(...)
$56.50
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Summary:
The single-screen movie theaters that punctuated small-town America's main streets and city neighborhoods since the 1920s are all but gone. The well-dressed throng of moviegoers has vanished; the facades are boarded. In "Silent Screens", photographer Michael Putnam captures these once(...)
Title:
Silent screens : the decline and transformation of the American movie theater
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The single-screen movie theaters that punctuated small-town America's main streets and city neighborhoods since the 1920s are all but gone. The well-dressed throng of moviegoers has vanished; the facades are boarded. In "Silent Screens", photographer Michael Putnam captures these once prominent cinemas in decline and transformation. His photographs of abandoned movie houses and forlorn marquees are an elegy to this disappearing cultural icon. In the early 1980s, Putnam began photographing closed theaters, theaters that had been converted to other uses (a church, a swimming pool), theaters on the verge of collapse, theaters being demolished, and even vacant lots where theaters once stood. The result is an archive of images, large in quantity and geographically diffuse. Here is what has become of the Odeons, Strands, and Arcadias that existed as velvet and marble outposts of Hollywood drama next to barbershops, hardware stores, and five-and-dimes. Introduced by Robert Sklar, the starkly beautiful photographs are accompanied by original reminiscences on moviegoing by Peter Bogdanovich, Molly Haskell, Andrew Sarris, and Chester H. Liebs as well as excerpts from the works of poet John Hollander and writers Larry McMurtry and John Updike. Sklar begins by mapping the rise and fall of the local movie house, tracing the demise of small-town theaters to their role as bit players in the grand spectacle of Hollywood film distribution. "Under standard distribution practice," he writes, "a new film took from six months to a year to wend its way from picture palace to Podunk (the prints getting more and more frayed and scratched along the route). Even though the small-town theaters and their urban neighborhood counterparts made up the majority of the nation's movie houses, their significance, in terms of revenue returned to the major motion-picture companies that produced and distributed films, was paltry." In his essay, "Old Dreams," Last Picture Show director Peter Bogdanovich recalls the closing of New York City's great movie palaces -- the mammoth Roxy, the old Paramount near Times Square, the Capitol, and the Mayfair -- and the more innocent time in which they existed "when a quarter often bought you two features, a newsreel, a comedy short, a travelogue, a cartoon, a serial, and coming attractions." While the images in Putnam's book can be read as a metaphor for the death of many downtowns in America, "Silent Screens" goes beyond mere nostalgia to tell the important story of the disappearance of the single-screen theater, illuminating the layers of cultural and economic significance that still surround it.
Silent screens : the decline and transformation of the American movie theater
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Summary:
The single-screen movie theaters that punctuated small-town America's main streets and city neighborhoods since the 1920s are all but gone. The well-dressed throng of moviegoers has vanished; the facades are boarded. In "Silent Screens", photographer Michael Putnam captures these once prominent cinemas in decline and transformation. His photographs of abandoned movie houses and forlorn marquees are an elegy to this disappearing cultural icon. In the early 1980s, Putnam began photographing closed theaters, theaters that had been converted to other uses (a church, a swimming pool), theaters on the verge of collapse, theaters being demolished, and even vacant lots where theaters once stood. The result is an archive of images, large in quantity and geographically diffuse. Here is what has become of the Odeons, Strands, and Arcadias that existed as velvet and marble outposts of Hollywood drama next to barbershops, hardware stores, and five-and-dimes. Introduced by Robert Sklar, the starkly beautiful photographs are accompanied by original reminiscences on moviegoing by Peter Bogdanovich, Molly Haskell, Andrew Sarris, and Chester H. Liebs as well as excerpts from the works of poet John Hollander and writers Larry McMurtry and John Updike. Sklar begins by mapping the rise and fall of the local movie house, tracing the demise of small-town theaters to their role as bit players in the grand spectacle of Hollywood film distribution. "Under standard distribution practice," he writes, "a new film took from six months to a year to wend its way from picture palace to Podunk (the prints getting more and more frayed and scratched along the route). Even though the small-town theaters and their urban neighborhood counterparts made up the majority of the nation's movie houses, their significance, in terms of revenue returned to the major motion-picture companies that produced and distributed films, was paltry." In his essay, "Old Dreams," Last Picture Show director Peter Bogdanovich recalls the closing of New York City's great movie palaces -- the mammoth Roxy, the old Paramount near Times Square, the Capitol, and the Mayfair -- and the more innocent time in which they existed "when a quarter often bought you two features, a newsreel, a comedy short, a travelogue, a cartoon, a serial, and coming attractions." While the images in Putnam's book can be read as a metaphor for the death of many downtowns in America, "Silent Screens" goes beyond mere nostalgia to tell the important story of the disappearance of the single-screen theater, illuminating the layers of cultural and economic significance that still surround it.
Form:
books
books
Publication:
June 2000, Baltimore
June 2000, Baltimore
Subject:
Architecture and Film, Set Design
Architecture and Film, Set Design
