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Measures are the subject of this unusual book, in which Robert Tavernor offers a fascinating account of the various measuring systems human beings have devised over two millennia. Tavernor urges us to look beyond the notion that measuring is strictly a scientific activity, divorced from human concerns. Instead, he sets measures and measuring in cultural context and shows(...)
August 2007
Smoot's Ear : The measure of humanity
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Measures are the subject of this unusual book, in which Robert Tavernor offers a fascinating account of the various measuring systems human beings have devised over two millennia. Tavernor urges us to look beyond the notion that measuring is strictly a scientific activity, divorced from human concerns. Instead, he sets measures and measuring in cultural context and shows how deeply they are connected to human experience and history. The book explores changing attitudes toward measure, focusing on key moments in art, sculpture, architecture, philosophy, and the development of scientific thought. It encompasses the journey of Western civilization from the construction of the Great Pyramid to the first manned flight to the moon. Beginning with a review of early measuring standards that referred to the feet and inches of ideal bodies, the book then tracks how Enlightenment interest in a truly scientific system of measure led to the creation of the metric system. This “rational” approach to measure in turn has inspired artists, architects, writers, and others to seek a balance that takes the human story into account. Tavernor concludes with a discussion of measure in our own time, when space travel presents to humankind a direct encounter with the unfathomable measure of the universe.
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In "The Zone," Justinien Tribillon takes the reader on a tour of an eponymous Parisian hinterland. The site of dreams and nightmares, from Van Gogh’s paintings to the cinematic violence of La Haine, the Zone, so often misunderstood, is the key to understanding today’s Paris, and even France itself. Originally the site of defensive walls, alongside which mushroomed(...)
The zone: An alternative history of Paris
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In "The Zone," Justinien Tribillon takes the reader on a tour of an eponymous Parisian hinterland. The site of dreams and nightmares, from Van Gogh’s paintings to the cinematic violence of La Haine, the Zone, so often misunderstood, is the key to understanding today’s Paris, and even France itself. Originally the site of defensive walls, alongside which mushroomed makeshift housing, allotments, and dancehalls in the nineteenth century, the Zone has performed many functions and been a place of contention for two centuries. Dismantled in the 1920s, the fortifications were first replaced with gardens, stadia and homes. After the war came the Boulevard Périphérique, a ring road promising seamless travel in a futuristic car-centric Paris. With the ring road came new dreams of modernity in reinvented suburbs: new towns, high-rise architecture and social housing built at record speed. Yesterday’s Paris made way for tomorrow’s banlieue. But the metropolitan dream was never realised. The Zone became a symbol of division: between inner and outer cities; between the bourgeois centre and the working-class immigrant outskirts; between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The Zone, both a physical space and a powerful myth, came to crystallise the social, spatial and ethno-racial differences between Paris and the banlieue.
Urban Theory
Gabriele Rossi : The Lizard
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Making photographs as a way of "feeling at home without being at home." That’s how Gabriele Rossi describes the process that led to "The Lizard", his new monograph with Deadbeat Club. "I looked for the edge of the city, went to the shore at Rockaway, the houses, anything that could remind me of where I’m from," Rossi says. This approach drove him to consider his(...)
Gabriele Rossi : The Lizard
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Making photographs as a way of "feeling at home without being at home." That’s how Gabriele Rossi describes the process that led to "The Lizard", his new monograph with Deadbeat Club. "I looked for the edge of the city, went to the shore at Rockaway, the houses, anything that could remind me of where I’m from," Rossi says. This approach drove him to consider his definition of "home" – the place where he could ultimately feel comfortable – and to return to the U.S. twice more to explore this compulsion across more than ten states in the Midwest and West. At the same time, he was interested in responding as an outsider to the structures of classic American photography, like that of Robert Adams. When the pandemic interrupted further travel, Rossi set about thinking through the pictures that he had amassed, trying to find common forms and themes – the connections that built the story about his being away from home. His effort was to understand why he was making the pictures, and not just to present a lot of pictures "about" America. As a result, "The Lizard" is a strange and uncanny atlas of the familiar transformed into the unfamiliar through the vision of a stranger who's only looking for some sort of home.
Photography monographs
Chris Marker Staring Back
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This title features photographs by one of French cinema's most influential and enigmatic artists.Any new film and any new book by French filmmaker Chris Marker is an event. Marker gave film lovers one of their most memorable experiences with "La Jetee" (1962) - a time-travel montage set after a nuclear war that inspired Terry Gilliam's "Twelve Monkeys" (1995). His still(...)
Chris Marker Staring Back
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This title features photographs by one of French cinema's most influential and enigmatic artists.Any new film and any new book by French filmmaker Chris Marker is an event. Marker gave film lovers one of their most memorable experiences with "La Jetee" (1962) - a time-travel montage set after a nuclear war that inspired Terry Gilliam's "Twelve Monkeys" (1995). His still camerawork is not as well known, but Marker has been taking photographs as long as he has been making films. "Staring Back" presents 200 black-and-white photographs from Marker's personal archives, taken from 1952 to 2006. Some of the photographs are related to his classic films (which include "Le Jetee", "Sans Soleil", "Cuba Si!", and "The Case of the Grinning Cat"), others are portraits of famous faces (Simone Signoret, Akira Kurosawa), but most are pictures of people Marker has encountered as he has traveled the world (an extra who appeared in Kurosawa's "Ran", a woman seen on a street in Siberia).The central section of the book contains a series of photographs documenting political protests Marker has witnessed, including the march on the Pentagon in 1967, the events of May 1968 in Paris, and the tumultuous 2006 demonstrations protesting the French government's proposed employment policies.
Photography monographs
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Nicholas Howe contemplates how places create and gather their stories and how, in turn, a sense of place locates the stories of our own lives. Howe begins with a description of Buffalo, that city on an inland sea where he grew up. He gives us a fresh Paris, viewed from the river below. And he depicts Oklahoma as a site of open lands and dislocation--a place of coming(...)
Across an inland sea : writing in place form Buffalo to Berlin
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Nicholas Howe contemplates how places create and gather their stories and how, in turn, a sense of place locates the stories of our own lives. Howe begins with a description of Buffalo, that city on an inland sea where he grew up. He gives us a fresh Paris, viewed from the river below. And he depicts Oklahoma as a site of open lands and dislocation--a place of coming and going. Howe then turns to Chartres, a traditional location of pilgrimage, to ask what other sites might still be capable of compelling visitors in secular time. He portrays Berlin as a scene of twentieth-century history--and a city that helped him make sense of his American life. Finally, he writes about Columbus, Ohio, as home. Vividly rendering the places he has known, Howe meditates on the weight of home, the temptations of the metropolis, the fact of dislocation, the unraveling of history, the desire to remake ourselves through voyage, and the wonder of the familiar. In ways that too often elude travel writers, it is place that holds our imagination, that inspires much of our art and literature. Across an Inland Sea evokes the various senses of place that can fill and haunt a life--and ultimately give life its form and meaning.
Architectural Theory
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This researched and illustrated study catalogs all of Latrobe's domestic commissions, offering an authoritative treatment of the concepts, designs, and unique interior and exterior features of his houses. Benjamin Henry Latrobe, an English émigré and the first professional architect of international stature to practice in the United States, invented an American house(...)
Architecture Monographs
March 2006, Baltimore
The domestic architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe
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This researched and illustrated study catalogs all of Latrobe's domestic commissions, offering an authoritative treatment of the concepts, designs, and unique interior and exterior features of his houses. Benjamin Henry Latrobe, an English émigré and the first professional architect of international stature to practice in the United States, invented an American house type for the new democratic republic. Calling upon his diverse education and travel experiences in Europe and his training with eminent architects and engineers in London, Latrobe responded to American manners and climate by producing what he called his "rational house," an application of Enlightenment thinking to the design of a proper living environment for the citizens of the world's most recent democracy. Establishing a new benchmark in Latrobe studies, Michael W. Fazio and Patrick A. Snadon extend their analysis to Latrobe's training and career in England and Europe, his principles of design, and his methods of architectural practice. The authors trace the evolution of his design thinking through analytical essays on all of his major domestic commissions and conclude with a summary discussion of his position within the international architectural scene, his design theories, the integration of interior design and engineering into his architectural practice, and the preservation of his houses.
Architecture Monographs
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''Ad Astra'' is an artist book created as part of a public art project commissioned for the medical library of the University of Montreal Health Center (CHUM), in Montréal, Quebec. Involving the arts, science, and public participation, ''Ad Astra'' consists of an archive of messages that are poetically sent to the stars and to the future. The messages, collected from the(...)
September 2021
Ad Astra
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''Ad Astra'' is an artist book created as part of a public art project commissioned for the medical library of the University of Montreal Health Center (CHUM), in Montréal, Quebec. Involving the arts, science, and public participation, ''Ad Astra'' consists of an archive of messages that are poetically sent to the stars and to the future. The messages, collected from the hospital community, are transformed by means of a collaboration between art and neuroscience to generate astral images, and ultimately, a collective artwork representing a collection of prayers, hopes and fears. Rooted in deep human experiences,''Ad Astra'' gives voice to the range of emotions and the cycle of life and death that the hospital context is witness to daily. In compliment to the permanent multimedia artwork installed in the library, the book presents a tightly knit set of relationships among the various elements that compose the project, including messages, portraits, neurological diagrams, video-stills, citations, and texts. An introductory essay by Claire Moeder creatively illuminates the core interests of the project while the graphic design by Criterium echoes the installation with material means. The book is a nomadic archive and tactile object that was created to travel beyond the primary site of medical library, and ultimately towards the stars.
Manufacturing national park nature: photography, ecology, and the wilderness industry of paper
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Jasper National Park is an international travel destination, world heritage site, and icon of Canadian identity. Although national parks occupy a prominent place in the Canadian imagination, we are only beginning to understand how their visual imagery has shaped and continues to inform our perception of the natural world, ecological issues, and ourselves. In this(...)
Manufacturing national park nature: photography, ecology, and the wilderness industry of paper
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Jasper National Park is an international travel destination, world heritage site, and icon of Canadian identity. Although national parks occupy a prominent place in the Canadian imagination, we are only beginning to understand how their visual imagery has shaped and continues to inform our perception of the natural world, ecological issues, and ourselves. In this publication, J. Keri Cronin draws on postcards, illustrated brochures, tourist snapshots, and other forms of visual culture to show how popular forms of picturing nature can have ecological implications that extend far beyond the frame of the image. Adopting an ecocritical approach to visual culture, Cronin focusses on four themes - wilderness, recreation, wildlife, and fake nature - to trace how park and government officials, railway companies, journalists, and environmentalists package Jasper as a series of breathtaking vistas where adorable-looking animals live. In the process, they sever the scenes from their larger contexts and mask the real threats to the park’s ecosystems. In telling the story of how various groups and the tourism industry have used photographic representations of national parks to shape our ideas about nature, this book sets the stage for a re-examination of protection policies and acknowledgment of environmental damage in national parks.
Architecture in Canada
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Once the province of film and media scholars, today the moving image is of broad concern to historians of art and architecture and designers of everything from websites to cities. As museums and galleries devote increasing space to video installations which no longer presuppose a fixed viewer, urban space becomes envisioned and planned through "fly throughs," and(...)
The moving eye: film, television, architecture, visual art, and the modern
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Once the province of film and media scholars, today the moving image is of broad concern to historians of art and architecture and designers of everything from websites to cities. As museums and galleries devote increasing space to video installations which no longer presuppose a fixed viewer, urban space becomes envisioned and planned through "fly throughs," and technologies such as GPS add data to the experience of travel, moving images have captured the attention of geographers and scholars across the humanities and social sciences. Their practice of "mobility studies" is remaking how we understand a contemporary world in relentless motion. Media theorist and historian Anne Friedberg (1952-2009) was among the first practitioners of visual studies to theorize the experience of vision in motion. Her books have become key points of reference in the discussion of the windows that frame images and the viewers in motion who perceive them. Although widely influential beyond her own discipline, Friedberg's work has never been the subject of an extended study. "The Moving Eye" gathers together essays by renowned thinkers in media studies, art history, architecture, and museum studies to consider the rich implications of her work for understanding film and video, new media, visual art, architecture, exhibition design, urban space, and virtual reality.
Architecture and Film, Set Design
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A member of the famous artist-owned photo agency Magnum Photos, Swiss photographer René Burri (1933–2014) found himself wherever history was happening during the late twentieth century. His countless travels took him across Europe and the Americas to the Middle East to Japan and China to document the twentieth century’s major events. His extraordinary sense for people and(...)
René Burri: explosions of sight
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A member of the famous artist-owned photo agency Magnum Photos, Swiss photographer René Burri (1933–2014) found himself wherever history was happening during the late twentieth century. His countless travels took him across Europe and the Americas to the Middle East to Japan and China to document the twentieth century’s major events. His extraordinary sense for people and their personalities resulted in remarkably candid portraits of celebrities, such as architects Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, and Luis Barragán; artists Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Tinguely; and Che Guevara, whose 1963 portrait with a cigar is one of the world’s most famous and widely reproduced photographic portraits. Published to coincide with a major exhibition at Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, 'René Burri: Explosions of Sight' draws from Burri’s vast archive. With the museum, Burri staged both his first exhibition and his first major retrospective and maintained a close relationship throughout his life, entrusting it also with the conservation of his estate. The book brings together for the first time Burri’s entire body of work, both photographic and nonphotographic, including previously unpublished archival documents, as well as book designs, exhibition projects, travel diaries, collages, watercolors, and objects Burri collected. In doing so, it offers a new and uniquely intimate view of one of the world’s greatest photographers.
Photography monographs