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Title:
MiInima moralia: reflections from a damaged life

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A classic of twentieth-century thought, Minima Moralia is Adorno's literary and philosophical masterpiece Written between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia is a collection of rich, lucid aphorisms and essays about life in modern capitalist society. Adorno casts his penetrating eye across society in mid-century America and finds a life deformed by capitalism. This is Adorno's theoretical and literary masterpiece and a classic of twentieth-century thought.

Title:
The return of the political

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A powerful new understanding of citizenship, democracy and pluralism Chantal Mouffe is one of the most influential political theorists at work today. Her work has influenced political parties across Europe and continues to inform the direction of left politics. In this work, Mouffe argues that liberal democracy misunderstands the problems of ethnic, religious and nationalist conflicts because of its inadequate conception of politics.

Title:
The system of objects

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The System of Objects is a tour de force—a theoretical letter-in-a-bottle tossed into the ocean in 1968, which brilliantly communicates to us all the live ideas of the day—offering a cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society.

Title:
Total design: architecture and interiors of iconic modern houses

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$26.98
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Celebrating the ultimate masterpieces of modernist design, from the Arts and Crafts movement up to the twenty-first century, Total Design offers an intimate tour of houses conceived as complete works of art. Each of the spectacular houses making up Total Design demonstrates how an architect realized a unifying vision through all aspects of design—architecture, furniture, fittings, decorative objects, color, and gardens. Presenting masterpieces of modern architecture conceived as complete works of art inside and out, author George H. Marcus, a veteran chronicler of modernist design, delivers a highly accessible tour of the creations of some of the twentieth century’s greatest architects and designers, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, Eero Saarinen, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Gio Ponti. Together these masterworks of design offer a stunning survey of the many modes of modernist design, from the inventive refinement of Pierre Chareau to the colorful Nordic forms of Finn Juhl to the twenty-first-century expressionism of Daniel Libeskind.

Title:
Arts, entre libertés et scandales : études de cas

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Qu'est-ce qu'un scandale en art et que révèle-t-il ? Comment se déploie-t-il dans l'espace public et comment agit-il rétrospectivement sur ce qui fait mémoire ? Comment s'enracine-t-il dans les contextes artistique et sociopolitique tout en dévoilant certaines de leurs facettes ? Comment s'articule-t-il au pôle censure - liberté d'expression ? Comment l'analyse rétrospective de celui-ci est-elle elle-même ancrée dans des choix théoriques et des sensibilités éthiques et politiques qui peuvent en redéfinir les contours ? C'est ce à quoi réfléchissent les chercheurs et chercheures dans une quinzaine d'études de cas aussi divers que l'oeuvre de Brancusi Princesse X, le Mémorial lyonnais du génocide des Arméniens, Les fées ont soif de Denise Boucher, Des femmes de Wajdi Mouawad, Sur le concept du visage du fils de Dieu de Romeo Castellucci, le Carnaval des vagins à dents, etc. Qu'est-ce qui fait scandale ? Qui sont les acteurset actrices du scandale ? Quelles sont les définitions du scandale ? Que peut le scandale ?

Title:
Donald Judd spaces: Judd Foundation New York & Texas

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$99.00
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This book presents an unprecedented visual survey of the living and working spaces of the artist Donald Judd in New York and Texas. Filled with newly commissioned and previously unpublished archival photographs alongside five essays by the artist, this book provides an opportunity to explore Judd’s personal spaces, which are a crucial part of this revered artist’s oeuvre. From a 19th-century cast-iron building in Manhattan to an extensive ranch in the mountains of western Texas, this book details the interiors, exteriors, and lands surrounding the buildings that comprise Judd’s extant living and working spaces. Readers will discover how Judd developed the concept of permanent installation at Spring Street in New York City, with artworks, furniture, and decorative objects striking a balance between the building’s historic qualities and his own architectural innovations. His buildings in Marfa, Texas, demonstrate how Judd reiterated his concept of integrative living on a larger scale, extending to the reaches of the Chinati Mountains at Ayala de Chinati, his 33,000-acre ranch south of the town. Each of the spaces was thoroughly considered by Judd with resolute attention to function and design. From furniture to utilitarian structures that Judd designed himself, these residences reflect Judd’s consistent aesthetic. His spaces underscore his deep interest in the preservation of buildings and his deliberate interventions within existing architecture.

Title:
Vera Lutter: Museum in the Camera

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$66.00
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Documenting Vera Lutter’s ambitious residency at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, this book traces the artist’s process and features images from her two-year-long photography project. Vera Lutter’s work has taken her and her pinhole camera all over the world, most recently to LACMA as its artist in residence. Stationing a mobile camera obscura outside the museum, Lutter captured the exterior of the campus buildings in images that transform the mid- and late-20th century architecture. Using an enormous camera, custom-built into the museum’s Old Masters gallery, she captured the long perspective on the classically installed room, echoing historical paintings of museum interiors. Finally, with four smaller cameras, Lutter photographed various works in the LACMA collection, transforming colorful paintings into ethereal black-and-white images. In contrast to digitized photography, which allows artists to fine-tune and perfect their product, Lutter’s analogue pinhole photographs are a refreshing reminder of the medium’s origins.

Title:
Recollections of my nonexistence: a memoir

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In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher, and of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer–books themselves; the gay community that presented a new model of what else gender, family, and joy could mean; and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West.

Title:
The world as an architectural project

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$69.95
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The world's growing vulnerability to planet-sized risks invites action on a global scale. The World as an Architectural Project shows how for more than a century architects have imagined the future of the planet through world-scale projects. With fifty speculative projects by Patrick Geddes, Alison and Peter Smithson, Kiyonori Kikutake, Saverio Muratori, Takis Zenetos, Sergio Bernardes, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Luc Deleu, and many others, documented in text and images, this ambitious and wide-ranging book is the first compilation of its kind. Interestingly, architects begin to address the world as a project long before the advent of contemporary globalism and its assorted anxieties. The Spanish urban theorist and entrepreneur Arturo Soria y Mata, for example, in 1882 envisions a system that connects the entire planet in a linear urban network. In 1927, Buckminster Fuller's “World Town Plan—4D Tower” proposes to solve global housing problems with mobile structures delivered and installed by a Zeppelin. And Joyce Hsiang and Bimal Mendis visualize the conditions of a worldwide “City of Seven Billion” in a 2015–2019 project. Rather than indulging the cliché of the megalomaniac architect, this volume presents a discipline reflecting on its own responsibilities.

Title:
Against creativity

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$22.95
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Summary:
Everything you have been told about creativity is wrong. From line managers, corporate CEOs, urban designers, teachers, politicians, mayors, advertisers and even our friends and family, the message is ‘be creative’. Creativity is heralded as the driving force of our contemporary society; celebrated as agile, progressive and liberating. It is the spring of the knowledge economy and shapes the cities we inhabit. It even defines our politics. What could possibly be wrong with this? In this brilliant, counter intuitive blast Oli Mould demands that we rethink the story we are being sold. Behind the novelty, he shows that creativity is a barely hidden form of neoliberal appropriation. It is a regime that prioritizes individual success over collective flourishing. It refuses to recognise anything – job, place, person – that is not profitable. And it impacts on everything around us: the places where we work, the way we are managed, how we spend our leisure time. Is there an alternative? Mould offers a radical redefinition of creativity, one embedded in the idea of collective flourishing, outside the tyranny of profit.