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The crackling of a campfire. The scratch, hiss, and pop of a vinyl record. The first glug of wine as it is poured from a bottle. These are just a few of writer Caspar Henderson’s favorite sounds. In ''A book of noises,'' Henderson invites readers to use their ears a little better—to tune in to the world in all its surprising noisiness. Describing sounds from around(...)
A book of noises: Notes on the auraculous
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The crackling of a campfire. The scratch, hiss, and pop of a vinyl record. The first glug of wine as it is poured from a bottle. These are just a few of writer Caspar Henderson’s favorite sounds. In ''A book of noises,'' Henderson invites readers to use their ears a little better—to tune in to the world in all its surprising noisiness. Describing sounds from around the natural and human world, the forty-eight essays that make up A Book of Noises are a celebration of all things ''auraculous.'' Henderson calls on his characteristic curiosity to explore sounds related to humans (anthropophony), other life (biophony), the planet (geophony), and space (cosmophony). Henderson finds the beauty in everyday sounds, like the ringing of a bell, the buzz of a bee, or the ''earworm'' songs that get stuck in our heads.''A book of noises'' also explores the marvelous, miraculous sounds we may never get the chance to hear, like the deep boom of a volcano or the quiet, rustling sound of the Northern Lights. ''A book of noises'' will teach readers to really listen to the sounds of the world around them, to broaden and deepen their appreciation of the humans, animals, rocks, and trees simultaneously broadcasting across the whole spectrum of sentience.
Acoustics
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Although others have written eloquently on the relationship of water to built form, until now no one has investigated the swimming pool as a quintessentially modern and American space, reflecting America's infatuation with hygiene, skin, and recreation. In The Springboard in the (...)
Commercial interiors, Building types
April 2000, Cambridge, London
The Springboard in the Pond: an intimate history of the swimming pool
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Although others have written eloquently on the relationship of water to built form, until now no one has investigated the swimming pool as a quintessentially modern and American space, reflecting America's infatuation with hygiene, skin, and recreation. In The Springboard in the Pond, Thomas van Leeuwen looks at a familiar hole--the domestic swimming pool--and discovers an icon indispensable to the reading of twentieth-century modernism. At one level, the book is a rereading of modern architecture that will leave that story permanently altered. At another level, it is the story of the origin and evolution of the private swimming pool as a building type and cultural artifact. At still another level, it is a material philosophy of water. Van Leeuwen explores the human relationship to water from a variety of viewpoints: social, religious, artistic, sexual, psychological, technical, and above all architectural. Throughout the book, he weaves a series of analogies to three emblematic animals--frog, swan, and penguin--that represent the three prevailing human attitudes toward water: hydrophilia, hydrophobia, and ambivalence. The books many illustrations--drawings, plans, and photographs--come from an unusual variety of sources, creating what is surely the most provocative visual archive of the swimming pool ever assembled.
Commercial interiors, Building types
books
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'' Imagine feeling 100% alive every moment of every minute of the day! Maybe that’s how animals live. Or trees, even. I sometimes stare at the plastic bag tree visible from my apartment window and marvel that both it and I are equally alive and that there’s no sliding scale of life. You’re either alive, or you’re not. Or you’re dead or you’re not.'' Thirty years after(...)
Binge
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'' Imagine feeling 100% alive every moment of every minute of the day! Maybe that’s how animals live. Or trees, even. I sometimes stare at the plastic bag tree visible from my apartment window and marvel that both it and I are equally alive and that there’s no sliding scale of life. You’re either alive, or you’re not. Or you’re dead or you’re not.'' Thirty years after Douglas Coupland broke the fiction mould and defined a generation with ''Generation X,'' he is back with ''Binge,'' 60 stories laced with his observational profundity about the way we live and his existential worry about how we should be living: the very things that have made him such an influential and bestselling writer. Not to mention that he can also be really funny. Here the narrators vary from story to story as Doug catches what he calls “the voice of the people,” inspired by the way we write about ourselves and our experiences in online forums. The characters, of course, are Doug’s own: crackpots, cranks and sweetie-pies, dad dancers and perpetrators of carbecues. People in the grip of unconscionable urges; lonely people; dying people; silly people. If you love Doug’s fiction, this collection is like rain on the desert.
books
October 2021
Current Exhibitions
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
Hannah Höch album
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As one of the protagonists of the Berlin Dada movement, Hannah Höch railed against tradition and conservatism in 1920s Germany. Höch and such cohorts as George Grosz and Raoul Hausmann raised anarchic revolution through cutting photomontage, nonsensical performance, and biting visual satire. A singular and important work in the artist's oeuvre is the so-called(...)
Hannah Höch album
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As one of the protagonists of the Berlin Dada movement, Hannah Höch railed against tradition and conservatism in 1920s Germany. Höch and such cohorts as George Grosz and Raoul Hausmann raised anarchic revolution through cutting photomontage, nonsensical performance, and biting visual satire. A singular and important work in the artist's oeuvre is the so-called "Sammelalbum," which she produced and pasted together from found imagery for her own pleasure and use, circa 1933. In it, she arranged a choice selection of newspaper and magazine photographs cut from popular German magazines of the time, such as the Berliner Illustrirte and Der Dame. A diverse, allusive group of images they are, representing everything from her favorite film stars to oddly captured animals and toy dolls, nudes, landscapes, scenic travel vistas, and synchronized dancers. By combining the collected pictures in continuous and sometimes contradictory sequences and double-page spreads, Höch created startling and often jarring photo collages. Never before published, Album can be considered to represent a heretofore unknown aspect of Höch's work, since its style of collage differs strongly from her well-known photomontages. This publication presents the entire Album in an exquisite facsimile reproduction, maintaining the filmic quality of its order and layout. In an accompanying essay, Gunda Luyken considers the content and history of the Album, locating it in the wider context of Höch’s oeuvre.
Photography monographs
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Bamboo has an unparalleled history; it is very old, and at the same time very new. Bamboo extends far beyond the boundaries of most plants – it is distributed widely throughout the world, and is utilized by hundreds of millions of people in a great number of ways. Through its myriad uses as food, clothing, paper and shelter, bamboo has met the physical and spiritual(...)
Bamboo
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Bamboo has an unparalleled history; it is very old, and at the same time very new. Bamboo extends far beyond the boundaries of most plants – it is distributed widely throughout the world, and is utilized by hundreds of millions of people in a great number of ways. Through its myriad uses as food, clothing, paper and shelter, bamboo has met the physical and spiritual requirements of humanity since the earliest times. It is believed that the first books were written on bamboo, and there is evidence that it was used by humans more than 5,000 years ago for the framework of housing as well as musical instruments. It also occurs in the creation beliefs of cultures across the globe. Bamboo plays a vital role in the survival of many animals and ecosystems as well as having unique characteristics, offering potential solutions to modern ecological dilemmas – it grows extremely quickly, for example, making it an easily renewable resource. With the advent of modern research and technologies, the use of bamboo has increased dramatically, elevating its importance to human society – it can now be found in the filaments of light bulbs, the skins of airplanes and the reinforcements of concrete. Bamboo is even a new material for today's modern bicycles. Bamboo draws on a vast array of sources to build a complete picture of bamboo in both history and our modern world.
Fauna and flora
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Over the last twenty-five years, the concept of personhood has become central to many contentious debates. Corporations have won free speech protections, as if they were individuals. The right to life or freedom has been claimed on behalf of fetuses, trees, and elephants. The fund of human rights is spilling over into the nonhuman. ''The Problem of Personhood'' reveals(...)
The problem of personhood: Giving rights to trees, corporations and robots
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Over the last twenty-five years, the concept of personhood has become central to many contentious debates. Corporations have won free speech protections, as if they were individuals. The right to life or freedom has been claimed on behalf of fetuses, trees, and elephants. The fund of human rights is spilling over into the nonhuman. ''The Problem of Personhood'' reveals the unsettling consequences of granting rights to imagined persons, such as Sophia the robot citizen or New Zealand’s Whanganui River. Synthesizing the political and philosophical debates on personhood and drawing on a varied cast of thinkers that includes Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Dr. Seuss, Lisa Siraganian uncovers the disturbing impact of this contemporary development. Awarding rights to robots and rivers all too easily becomes a legal tool to turn people into capital. When robot Sophia is made a citizen, “she” is transformed into a subject in the law without the corresponding legal duties that protect us from her. At the root of this trend is the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that grants First Amendment rights to corporations as if they were individuals. The result has not been the transformation of things into humans so much as humans into things, when animals and the environment would be better protected with reference to our humanity rather than to theirs.
Social
Aki-wayn-zih
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Members of Eli Baxter’s generation are the last of the hunting and gathering societies living on Turtle Island. They are also among the last fluent speakers of the Anishinaabay language known as Anishinaabaymowin. 'Aki-wayn-zih' is a story about the land and its spiritual relationship with the Anishinaabayg, from the beginning of their life on Miss-koh-tay-sih Minis(...)
Aki-wayn-zih
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Members of Eli Baxter’s generation are the last of the hunting and gathering societies living on Turtle Island. They are also among the last fluent speakers of the Anishinaabay language known as Anishinaabaymowin. 'Aki-wayn-zih' is a story about the land and its spiritual relationship with the Anishinaabayg, from the beginning of their life on Miss-koh-tay-sih Minis (Turtle Island) to the present day. Baxter writes about Anishinaabay life before European contact, his childhood memories of trapping, hunting, and fishing with his family on traditional lands in Treaty 9 territory, and his personal experience surviving the residential school system. Examining how Anishinaabay Kih-kayn-daa-soh-win (knowledge) is an elemental concept embedded in the Anishinaabay language, 'Aki-wayn-zih' explores history, science, math, education, philosophy, law, and spiritual teachings, outlining the cultural significance of language to Anishinaabay identity. Recounting traditional Ojibway legends in their original language, fables in which moral virtues double as survival techniques, and detailed guidelines for expertly trapping or ensnaring animals, Baxter reveals how the residential school system shaped him as an individual, transformed his family, and forever disrupted his reserve community and those like it. Through spiritual teachings, historical accounts, and autobiographical anecdotes, 'Aki-wayn-zih' offers a new form of storytelling from the Anishinaabay point of view.
Environment and environmental theory
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People are key elements of wild places. At the same time, human entanglements with wild ecologies involve extractivism, the growth of resource-based economies, and imperial-colonial expansion, activities that are wreaking havoc on our planet. Through an ethnographic exploration of Canada’s ten UNESCO Natural World Heritage sites, ''Inhabited'' reflects on the meanings(...)
Environment and environmental theory
November 2021
Inhabited: Wildness and the vitality of the land
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People are key elements of wild places. At the same time, human entanglements with wild ecologies involve extractivism, the growth of resource-based economies, and imperial-colonial expansion, activities that are wreaking havoc on our planet. Through an ethnographic exploration of Canada’s ten UNESCO Natural World Heritage sites, ''Inhabited'' reflects on the meanings of wildness, wilderness, and natural heritage. As we are introduced to local inhabitants and their perspectives, Phillip Vannini and April Vannini ask us to reflect on the colonial and dualist assumptions behind the received meaning of wild, challenging us to reimagine wildness as relational and rooted in vitality. Over the three years they spent in and around these sites, they learned from Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples about their entanglements with each other and with non-human animals, rocks, plants, trees, sky, water, and spirits. The stories, actions, and experiences they encountered challenge conventional narratives of wild places as uninhabited by people and disconnected from culture and society. While it might be tempting to dismiss the idea of wildness as outdated in the Anthropocene era, ''Inhabited'' suggests that rethinking wildness offers a better – if messier – way forward. Part geography and anthropology, part environmental and cultural studies, and part politics and ecology, ''Inhabited'' balances a genuine love of nature’s vitality with a culturally responsible understanding of its interconnectedness with more-than-human ways of life.
Environment and environmental theory
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"Borderwall as architecture" is an artistic and intellectual hand grenade of a book, and a timely re-examination of what the physical barrier that divides the United States of America from the United Mexican States is and could be. It is both a protest against the wall and a projection about its future. Through a series of propositions suggesting that the nearly seven(...)
Borderwall as architecture: a manifesto for the US-Mexico boundary
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"Borderwall as architecture" is an artistic and intellectual hand grenade of a book, and a timely re-examination of what the physical barrier that divides the United States of America from the United Mexican States is and could be. It is both a protest against the wall and a projection about its future. Through a series of propositions suggesting that the nearly seven hundred miles of wall is an opportunity for economic and social development along the border that encourages its conceptual and physical dismantling, the book takes readers on a journey along a wall that cuts through a “third nation”—the Divided States of America. On the way the transformative effects of the wall on people, animals, and the natural and built landscape are exposed and interrogated through the story of people who, on both sides of the border, transform the wall, challenging its existence in remarkably creative ways. Coupled with these real-life accounts are counterproposals for the wall, created by Rael’s studio, that reimagine, hyperbolize, or question the wall and its construction, cost, performance, and meaning. Rael proposes that despite the intended use of the wall, which is to keep people out and away, the wall is instead an attractor, engaging both sides in a common dialogue. Included is a collection of reflections on the wall and its consequences by leading experts Michael Dear, Norma Iglesias-Prieto, Marcello Di Cintio, and Teddy Cruz.
Architectural Theory