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In postwar France, the aesthetics of appropriation and collage gave cultural form to a struggle over meaning. A new wave of avant-garde experimentation used - or stole, plagiarized, and expropriated - elements from advertising, journalism, literature, art, and other sources of common discourse (the ironically named "beautiful language" of this book's title, itself an(...)
February 2007, Cambridge (MA)
The beautiful language of my century : reinventing the language of contestation in postwar France, 1945-1968
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In postwar France, the aesthetics of appropriation and collage gave cultural form to a struggle over meaning. A new wave of avant-garde experimentation used - or stole, plagiarized, and expropriated - elements from advertising, journalism, literature, art, and other sources of common discourse (the ironically named "beautiful language" of this book's title, itself an appropriation from Guy Debord's collaged Mémoires). Redeployed, often in startling or pointed juxtapositions, these elements took on newly oppositional meanings. A famous photograph taken inside the occupied Sorbonne in May 1968, for example, shows a massive academic painting altered by a clever cartoonish speech bubble that transforms the painting into a parody of itself and memorializes an event very different from the one captured by the original artist."The beautiful language of my century" describes the various forms of critical culture that culminated in the events of May 1968, and investigates the ways those forms have come down to us today. McDonough explores the montage practice developed by Guy Debord and his situationist colleagues under the name of détournement and its expression in the later fifties as a form of cultural theft. He addresses the influence of colonialism on these practices, examining a 1961 exhibit of torn posters of the Algerian War ("La France déchirée"), Godard's early film Le Petit Soldat, and Christo's Project for a Temporary Wall of Steel Drums. He discusses the French left's adoption in the mid-sixties of the "end of art" as a theoretical position and describes the leftist idea of the fête as a Rabelaisian and revolutionary upwelling of everything that is low. This influential conception, inspired equally by the American urban revolts of the sixties and the writings of theorists Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille, coalesced into a new image of revolution, a new model of contestation, in the events of May 1968 - when the struggle over language and culture merged with a broader resistance to capitalist modernization.
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Archival power, silences, and absences profoundly shape and structure postcolonial landscapes, spaces, and urban environments by controlling bodies, histories, and interactions. This book explores pathways to dismantle these imperial entanglements by developing methodologies and plural epistemologies through an interdisciplinary dialog between history, memory politics,(...)
Environment and environmental theory
January 2024
Unearthing traces: dismantling imperialist entanglements of archives, landscapes, and the built environment
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Archival power, silences, and absences profoundly shape and structure postcolonial landscapes, spaces, and urban environments by controlling bodies, histories, and interactions. This book explores pathways to dismantle these imperial entanglements by developing methodologies and plural epistemologies through an interdisciplinary dialog between history, memory politics, critical theory, and archival practice together with the fields of the built environment, landscape, urban studies, architecture, and the arts. Unearthing traces catalyzes critical discussions that not only challenge the objectivity and dismantle the neutrality surrounding current archival practices and archival institutions, but also question what constitutes the archive itself. The book unearths potential histories and minor narratives buried by the imperial production of pasts and silences. The diverse range of contributions in the book offers original research, discussions, positions, and tools and provides a critical resource for scholars, architects, artists, activists, and archivists who want to engage with landscapes and built environments in a critical and postcolonial perspective in relation to archival materials and practices.
Environment and environmental theory
MAP 007: Orbit
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MAP architects have been creating Manual of Architectural Possibilities since 2009. The publication aims to merge the fields of science and research on one hand, and architectural design on the other. It aims to exemplify this approach via it’s format. MAP presents itself as a folded A1, with only two pages. Research and data on one page, and architectural projects on the(...)
MAP 007: Orbit
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MAP architects have been creating Manual of Architectural Possibilities since 2009. The publication aims to merge the fields of science and research on one hand, and architectural design on the other. It aims to exemplify this approach via it’s format. MAP presents itself as a folded A1, with only two pages. Research and data on one page, and architectural projects on the other. Each issue deals with a single subject, sometimes abstract, sometimes concrete, which is placed under scrutiny through the collection of data and research from multiple perspectives. The architectural projects are a direct response to the research, sometimes pragmatic, sometimes critical or even ironic. No design is undertaken until the research phase is complete, which lasts about 3 months. MAP aims to exercise architecture in the realm of speculation, through the boundaries and directions set by research and investigations, carried out into a series of fields and themes with direct spatial implications.
Magazines
Don't build, rebuild
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As climate change has escalated into a crisis, the reuse of existing structures is the only way to even begin to preserve our wood, sand, silicon, and iron, let alone stop belching carbon monoxide into the air. Our housing crisis means that we need usable buildings now more than ever, but architect and critic Aaron Betsky shows that new construction—often seeking to(...)
Don't build, rebuild
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As climate change has escalated into a crisis, the reuse of existing structures is the only way to even begin to preserve our wood, sand, silicon, and iron, let alone stop belching carbon monoxide into the air. Our housing crisis means that we need usable buildings now more than ever, but architect and critic Aaron Betsky shows that new construction—often seeking to maximize profits rather than resources, often soulless in its feel—is not the answer. Whenever possible, it is better to repair, recycle, renovate, and reuse—not only from an environmental perspective, but culturally and artistically as well. Architectural reuse is as old as civilization itself. In the streets of Europe, you can find fragments from the Roman Empire. More recently, marginalized communities from New York to Detroit—queer people looking for places to gather or cruise, punks looking to make loud music, artists and displaced people looking for space to work and live—have taken over industrial spaces created then abandoned by capitalism, forging a unique style in the process. Their methods—from urban mining to dumpster diving—now inform architects transforming old structures today.
Architectural Theory
books
Cartographic cinema
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Cartography and cinema are what might be called locational machinery. Maps and movies tell their viewers where they are situated, what they are doing, and, to a strong degree, who they are. In this work,scholar Tom Conley establishes the ideological power of maps in classic, contemporary, and avant-garde cinema to shape the imaginary and mediated relations we hold with(...)
Cartographic cinema
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Cartography and cinema are what might be called locational machinery. Maps and movies tell their viewers where they are situated, what they are doing, and, to a strong degree, who they are. In this work,scholar Tom Conley establishes the ideological power of maps in classic, contemporary, and avant-garde cinema to shape the imaginary and mediated relations we hold with the world. "Cartographic cinema" examines the affinities of maps and movies through comparative theory and close analysis of films from the silent era to the French New Wave to Hollywood blockbusters. In doing so, Conley reveals that most of the movies we see contain maps of various kinds and almost invariably constitute a projective apparatus similar to cartography. In addition, he demonstrates that spatial signs in film foster a critical relation with the prevailing narrative and mimetic registers of cinema. Conley convincingly argues that the very act of watching films, and cinema itself, is actually a form of cartography. Unlike its function in an atlas, a map in a movie often causes the spectator to entertain broader questions—not only about cinema but also of the nature of space and being.
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December 2006, Minneapolis, London
Architectural Theory
Book of ruins
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''Book of ruins'' offers a survey – not encyclopedic, but substantial – of leading moments when the fact and idea of ruins were taken up by writers, travellers and artists: painters, film makers, landscape architects, and architects. Gathering together short texts and extracts that describe and reflect on ruins, dating from remote antiquity (Scipio shedding tears when(...)
Architectural Theory
September 2022
Book of ruins
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''Book of ruins'' offers a survey – not encyclopedic, but substantial – of leading moments when the fact and idea of ruins were taken up by writers, travellers and artists: painters, film makers, landscape architects, and architects. Gathering together short texts and extracts that describe and reflect on ruins, dating from remote antiquity (Scipio shedding tears when viewing the destruction of Carthage) to present times (the ruins of a modern city, portrayed in the film ''Requiem for Detroit''), it provides a perspective upon what the past has meant to different cultures at different times. Following an introductory essay, the book includes 70 entries, chronologically ordered, each including an indicative image (or two), an introductory commentary by the authors, and the text itself. The texts come from designers (from Bernini through Piranesi to David Chipperfield) as well as other artists (John Piper), and from literary figures (Goethe, Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley, Hugo, and Hardy). It concludes by discussing what we do with ruins by way of preservation, conservation, adaptive reuse and appropriation, and contemporary loss and ruin, as illustrated by 9/11 and the Neues Museum and highlighting the continuing relevance of the ruin.
Architectural Theory
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Jorge Otero-Pailos shows how architectural phenomenology radically transformed how architects engaged, theorized, and produced history. In the first critical intellectual account of the movement, Otero-Pailos discusses the contributions of leading members, including Jean Labatut, Charles Moore, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Kenneth Frampton. For architects maturing after(...)
Architecture's historical turn: phenomenology and the rise of the postmodern
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Jorge Otero-Pailos shows how architectural phenomenology radically transformed how architects engaged, theorized, and produced history. In the first critical intellectual account of the movement, Otero-Pailos discusses the contributions of leading members, including Jean Labatut, Charles Moore, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Kenneth Frampton. For architects maturing after World War II, Otero-Pailos contends, architectural history was a problem rather than a given. Paradoxically, their awareness of modernism’s historicity led some of them to search for an ahistorical experiential constant that might underpin all architectural expression. They drew from phenomenology, exploring the work of Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Ricoeur, which they translated for architectural audiences. Initially, the concept that experience could be a timeless architectural language provided a unifying intellectual basis for the stylistic pluralism that characterized postmodernism. It helped give theory—especially the theory of architectural history—a new importance over practice. However, as Otero-Pailos makes clear, architectural phenomenologists could not accept the idea of theory as an end in itself. In the mid-1980s they were caught in the contradictory and untenable position of having to formulate their own demotion of theory.
Architectural Theory
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Jordan Weitzman’s Participation is a riot of off-kilter perspective and weird synchronicities, a book of photography where people, places, and things casually tangle up into beautifully baffling configurations. Through the power of close observation, Weitzman captures the world at a slant where naked bodies form sultry architecture and everyday clutter assembles into fine(...)
Jordan Weitzman: Participation
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Jordan Weitzman’s Participation is a riot of off-kilter perspective and weird synchronicities, a book of photography where people, places, and things casually tangle up into beautifully baffling configurations. Through the power of close observation, Weitzman captures the world at a slant where naked bodies form sultry architecture and everyday clutter assembles into fine art. Complimented by a Louis Fratino dust jacket of half-etched figures and mysterious symbols, the book’s sequence is intimate and playful while never spelling itself out. Participation is the product of the photographer fully embedding in his circumstances and locating with an exacting compositional eye where the goofiness and boredom of everyday life drift into formal complexity and undefinable emotional states. The title is an invitation as much as it is a challenge, not only descriptive of Weitzman’s willingness to get in and meet his subjects head, waist, or side-on but for the viewer to crane their neck and pick apart his gorgeously twisted poetry of the strange ways people come together.
Photography monographs
books
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The Zurich architect couple Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer are known for creating places for intense contemplation. After the Kirchner Museum at Davos, the extension of the Winterthur art museum, the renovation of the Winterthur collection Oskar Reinhart, their new(...)
Gigon & Guyer : Museum Liner Appenzell
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The Zurich architect couple Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer are known for creating places for intense contemplation. After the Kirchner Museum at Davos, the extension of the Winterthur art museum, the renovation of the Winterthur collection Oskar Reinhart, their new museum project at Appenzell also exhibits a powerful, idiosyncratic sense of aesthetics. The Museum Liner, dedicated to the Appenzell painters Carl August and Carl Walter Liner, father and son, presents itself as a sculptural design: the very antithesis to descriptive postmodern architecture that threatens to draw attention away from the exhibits, this museum by Gigon and Guyer rests on the imperative of clear stereometrics and neutral spaces. In a rather subtle way, the architects succeeded in both integrating the new structure into the rural surroundings and the surroundings into the building. The fragile balance of mutual integration and partial participation may well serve as a metaphor for the difficult relationship between life and art. This book features the building, completed in 1998, in a photographic sequence by Gaston Wicky and textual essays by Hubertus Adam and Peter Dering.
books
January 2001, Bregenz
small format
James Welling : glass house
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Over the course of three years, from 2006 to 2009, James Welling (born 1951) photographed the Glass House, the architectural landmark estate that Philip Johnson built in New Canaan, Connecticut, in 1949. Welling's photos offer a decided departure from the familiar views of the house and grounds: using digital cameras set on a tripod and holding a variety of filters in(...)
James Welling : glass house
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Over the course of three years, from 2006 to 2009, James Welling (born 1951) photographed the Glass House, the architectural landmark estate that Philip Johnson built in New Canaan, Connecticut, in 1949. Welling's photos offer a decided departure from the familiar views of the house and grounds: using digital cameras set on a tripod and holding a variety of filters in front of the lens, he created tinted veils and distortions that transformed the image at the moment of exposure, endowing it with swells of glowing color. As Welling described it in an interview with Artforum, the use of filters enabled his project to become "a laboratory for ideas about transparency, reflectivity and color." The 45 images presented here, which invite the viewer to draw associations between the camera's lens and the glass surfaces of the house itself, oscillate before our very eyes between photographic abstraction - a recurrent preoccupation for Welling - and depictions of architecture. With this body of work, Welling has located a wholly new approach to, and blend of, both genres.
Photography monographs