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Finally, we are learning that simplicity equals sanity. We're rebelling against technology that's too complicated, DVD players with too many menus, and software accompanied by 75-megabyte "read me" manuals. The iPod's clean gadgetry has made simplicity hip. But sometimes we find ourselves caught up in the simplicity paradox: we want something that's simple and easy to(...)
The laws of simplicity : design, technology, business, life
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Finally, we are learning that simplicity equals sanity. We're rebelling against technology that's too complicated, DVD players with too many menus, and software accompanied by 75-megabyte "read me" manuals. The iPod's clean gadgetry has made simplicity hip. But sometimes we find ourselves caught up in the simplicity paradox: we want something that's simple and easy to use, but also does all the complex things we might ever want it to do. In "The laws of simplicity", John Maeda offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology, and design -guidelines for needing less and actually getting more. Maeda - a professor in MIT's Media Lab and a world-renowned graphic designer - explores the question of how we can redefine the notion of "improved" so that it doesn't always mean something more, something added on. Maeda's first law of simplicity is "Reduce." It's not necessarily beneficial to add technology features just because we can. And the features that we do have must be organized (Law 2) in a sensible hierarchy so users aren't distracted by features and functions they don't need. But simplicity is not less just for the sake of less. Skip ahead to Law 9: "Failure : accept the fact that some things can never be made simple." Maeda's concise guide to simplicity in the digital age shows us how this idea can be a cornerstone of organizations and their products -how it can drive both business and technology. We can learn to simplify without sacrificing comfort and meaning, and we can achieve the balance described in Law 10. This law, which Maeda calls "The One," tells us: "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful."
books
September 2006, Cambridge (MA)
Design Theory
A field guide to sprawl
$28.50
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Duck, ruburb, tower farm, big box, and pig-in-a-python are among dozens of zany terms invented to characterize land use practices and the physical elements of sprawl. This book provides the verbal and visual vocabulary needed by professionals, public officials, and citizens to critique uncontrolled growth in the American landscape.
A field guide to sprawl
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Duck, ruburb, tower farm, big box, and pig-in-a-python are among dozens of zany terms invented to characterize land use practices and the physical elements of sprawl. This book provides the verbal and visual vocabulary needed by professionals, public officials, and citizens to critique uncontrolled growth in the American landscape.
Urban Theory
$26.95
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This new edition of Mike Davis’s work gives an update on Los Angeles as the city hits the 21st century. No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, “Los Angeles brings it all together.” To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where “you can rot without feeling it.” To Mike Davis, the author of this wide-ranging work of social history, Los(...)
City of quartz : excavating the future in Los Angeles, new edition
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This new edition of Mike Davis’s work gives an update on Los Angeles as the city hits the 21st century. No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, “Los Angeles brings it all together.” To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where “you can rot without feeling it.” To Mike Davis, the author of this wide-ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias. In "City of quartz", Davis reconstructs LA’s shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West—a city in which we may glimpse our own future mirrored with terrifying clarity. In this new edition, Davis provides an update on the city’s current status.
Urban Theory
$40.00
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Europan is a biennial competition for architects and architecture students under the age of 40 that looks for innovative housing designs for real, specific sites across Europe. Guidelines encourage participants to address social and economic changes occurring around their sites, and, for this eighth Europan, that’s 74 properties across the continent. This year’s theme of(...)
Urban Theory
January 1900, Rotterdam
Europan 8 in the Netherland : European urbanity and strategic projects
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Europan is a biennial competition for architects and architecture students under the age of 40 that looks for innovative housing designs for real, specific sites across Europe. Guidelines encourage participants to address social and economic changes occurring around their sites, and, for this eighth Europan, that’s 74 properties across the continent. This year’s theme of "European urbanity and strategic projects" drew, for the six sites in the Netherlands alone, nearly 160 designs. Europan 8 offers a complete overview of the winning plans for the Dutch sites, including models, plans, sketches and interviews with the designers. The project section is complemented by descriptions of the six sites, an essay about the central theme, and a critique of the entries from a European perspective. An additional CD-ROM contains all other entries along with the prizewinning designs.
Urban Theory
Le goût des jardins
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Métaphysiques, à la française, anglais, artificiels, de curés, de paradis, d'éternité, de fiction ou d'images...Les jardins sont multiples. D'Homère à Marguerite Duras, de Virgile à Marcel Proust, de Gustave Flaubert à Amélie Nothomb, de Mme de Sévigné à Renaud Camus, ils sont omniprésents dans la littérature, toutes époques et genres confondus. Imaginaires pour les uns(...)
Le goût des jardins
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Métaphysiques, à la française, anglais, artificiels, de curés, de paradis, d'éternité, de fiction ou d'images...Les jardins sont multiples. D'Homère à Marguerite Duras, de Virgile à Marcel Proust, de Gustave Flaubert à Amélie Nothomb, de Mme de Sévigné à Renaud Camus, ils sont omniprésents dans la littérature, toutes époques et genres confondus. Imaginaires pour les uns (la Génèse, Esope, La Fontaine), objets de traités savants pour d'autres (Walopole), mais aussi lieux affectifs (Chateaubriand, George Sand, Colette), moyens d'expression et de pouvoir (Louis XIV), de connaissance (Jardin des Plantes), de loisir (parc des Buttes-Chaumont), ils suscitent l'engouement et parfois la passion. Structurés ou fous, ils ont tous un même goût de liberté qui nous accroche plus ou moins consciemment à notre enfance, et à celle de l'humanité...
Landscape Theory
$33.95
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La multiplicité des regards s'impose face à un objet de recherche aussi polymorphe et polysémique que le paysage. C'est à décloisonner les approches théoriques et à rapprocher les champs empiriques que le Groupe de recherche en sociologie de l'art et de la culture (Gresac) de l'université libre de Bruxelles et l'Association universitaire de recherche sur l'action(...)
Landscape Theory
June 2006, Bruxelles
Le paysage à la croisée des regards
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La multiplicité des regards s'impose face à un objet de recherche aussi polymorphe et polysémique que le paysage. C'est à décloisonner les approches théoriques et à rapprocher les champs empiriques que le Groupe de recherche en sociologie de l'art et de la culture (Gresac) de l'université libre de Bruxelles et l'Association universitaire de recherche sur l'action publique (Aurap) de l'université catholique de Louvain se sont employés en organisant à Bruxelles, en 2004, un colloque intitulé " Le paysage : définition, protection et gestion " dont ce volume constitue les actes. Cette rencontre a réuni des spécialistes internationaux de différentes disciplines afin de confronter leurs définitions, leurs modes d'interprétation et leurs analyses des enjeux de la gestion du paysage.
Landscape Theory
L'urbanisation du monde
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Le monde ne cesse de s'urbaniser. Les pays développés sont très largement urbains, les trois quarts de leurs habitants vivant dans des villes. Si les taux d'urbanisation des pays en développement sont bien moindres, ces pays abritent plus de deux milliards de citadins, sur les quelque trois milliards que compte la planète. Croissance urbaine et développement économique(...)
L'urbanisation du monde
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Le monde ne cesse de s'urbaniser. Les pays développés sont très largement urbains, les trois quarts de leurs habitants vivant dans des villes. Si les taux d'urbanisation des pays en développement sont bien moindres, ces pays abritent plus de deux milliards de citadins, sur les quelque trois milliards que compte la planète. Croissance urbaine et développement économique sont longtemps allés de pair. Aujourd'hui, les interactions ne sont plus toujours positives, en particulier dans les pays pauvres, où l'urbanisation semble un phénomène largement autonome. Un développement durable de la planète suppose certes de meilleures conditions de vie en milieu urbain mais aussi d'autres modes de vie, plus respectueux de l'environnement tant local que global. C'est une des conditions d'existence de " villes durables ".
Urban Theory
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"Picturing the city" takes a look at the group of urban realists known as the Ashcan School, and at the booming cultures of vision and representation in early twentieth-century New York. Offering insights into the development of modern cities and modern art in America, Rebecca Zurier considers what it meant to live in a city where strangers habitually watched each other(...)
Urban Theory
June 2006, Berkeley / Los Angeles / London
Picturing the city : urban vision and the Ashcan school
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"Picturing the city" takes a look at the group of urban realists known as the Ashcan School, and at the booming cultures of vision and representation in early twentieth-century New York. Offering insights into the development of modern cities and modern art in America, Rebecca Zurier considers what it meant to live in a city where strangers habitually watched each other and public life seemed to consist of continual display, as new classes of immigrants and working women claimed their places in the metropolis. Through her study of six artists - George Bellows, William Glackens, Robert Henri, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan, Zurier illuminates the quest for new forms of realism to describe changes in urban life, commercial culture, and codes of social conduct in the early 1900s. Synthesizing visual and literary analysis with urban cultural history, "Picturing the city" focuses new attention on the materiality and design process of pictures. The author scrutinizes many manner of visual activity, from the pandemonium of comics to the mise-en-scene of early movies, from the mark of an individual pen stroke to a glance on the street, from illustrators' manuals to ambitious paintings that became icons of American art.
Urban Theory
Here is Tijuana !
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Tijuana is a border-town in all respects. It hovers between Mexico and the United States, not just physically, but psychologically. On the one hand it maintains its reputation as a sleezy centre for booze, sex and crime, and on the other it aspires to, and is slowly achieving, the sophistication and affluence of California–just a few miles and another world away.(...)
Urban Theory
October 2006, London
Here is Tijuana !
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Tijuana is a border-town in all respects. It hovers between Mexico and the United States, not just physically, but psychologically. On the one hand it maintains its reputation as a sleezy centre for booze, sex and crime, and on the other it aspires to, and is slowly achieving, the sophistication and affluence of California–just a few miles and another world away. Divided into three sections, "Here is Tijuana !" deals with the socio-cultural issues, the morality and the urban development of the city. Photographic essays accompany the text and bring the city to life.
Urban Theory
$47.75
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Comment comprendre l'architecture? Comment rendre compte de ce qui est à la fois expérience perceptive, projet artistique, décision d'urbanisme et choix politique? " Le plan et le détail " expose la philosophie d'un nouvel esprit architectural, déconstruit et remodèle les convictions et les notions sur lesquelles se fonde le travail de l'architecte : la valeur du plan,(...)
Le plan et le détail : une philosophie de l'architecture et de la ville
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Comment comprendre l'architecture? Comment rendre compte de ce qui est à la fois expérience perceptive, projet artistique, décision d'urbanisme et choix politique? " Le plan et le détail " expose la philosophie d'un nouvel esprit architectural, déconstruit et remodèle les convictions et les notions sur lesquelles se fonde le travail de l'architecte : la valeur du plan, la construction du cadre de l'habitat, l'insertion du bâti dans le tissu urbain, la relation de l'architecture et de l'urbanisme, le rationalisme technique, l'invention du détail. L'auteur permet de repenser les problèmes généraux de l'espace urbain aujourd'hui - dans un dialogue serré et fécond avec de grands créateurs du XX°siècle, et avec leurs oeuvres : Loos et Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman, et Rem Koolhaas. Fortement documenté, et illustré (52 illustrations et photographies noir et blanc; 8 planches couleurs).
Architectural Theory