Venice from the ground up
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Venice came to life on spongy mudflats at the edge of the habitable world. Protected in a tidal estuary from barbarian invaders and Byzantine overlords, the fishermen, salt gatherers, and traders who settled there crafted an amphibious way of life unlike anything the Roman Empire had ever known. James H. S. McGregor recreates this world-turned-upside-down, with its(...)
octobre 2006, Cambridge (MA), London
Venice from the ground up
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Venice came to life on spongy mudflats at the edge of the habitable world. Protected in a tidal estuary from barbarian invaders and Byzantine overlords, the fishermen, salt gatherers, and traders who settled there crafted an amphibious way of life unlike anything the Roman Empire had ever known. James H. S. McGregor recreates this world-turned-upside-down, with its waterways rather than roads, its boats tethered alongside dwellings, and its livelihood harvested from the sea. McGregor begins with the river currents that poured into the shallow Lagoon, carving channels in its bed and depositing islands of silt. He then describes the imaginative responses of Venetians to the demands and opportunities of this harsh environment - transforming the channels into canals, reclaiming salt marshes for the construction of massive churches, erecting a thriving marketplace and stately palaces along the Grand Canal. Through McGregor's eyes, we witness the flowering of Venice's restless creativity in the elaborate mosaics of St. Mark's soaring basilica, the expressive paintings in smaller neighborhood churches, and the colorful religious festivals - but also in theatrical productions, gambling casinos, and masked revelry, which reveal the city's less pious and orderly face. McGregor tells his unique history of Venice by drawing on a crumbling, tide-threatened cityscape and a treasure-trove of art that can still be seen in place today. The narrative follows both a chronological and geographical organization, so that readers can trace the city's evolution chapter by chapter and visitors can explore it district by district on foot and by boat.
Robert Adams : turning back
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"Turning back: a photographic journal of re-exploration" is published to coincide with the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The narrative begins at the Pacific ocean and moves eastward through what was formerly one of the world’s great rain forests. Photographs at the center of the book report on the forest’s destruction. Elsewhere they trace a search for(...)
Robert Adams : turning back
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"Turning back: a photographic journal of re-exploration" is published to coincide with the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The narrative begins at the Pacific ocean and moves eastward through what was formerly one of the world’s great rain forests. Photographs at the center of the book report on the forest’s destruction. Elsewhere they trace a search for hope. Two hundred years ago, Lewis and Clark reported finding in the American Northwest a vast forest of ancient evergreens. In "Turning back", Robert Adams looks again at the region’s trees, discovering evidence both of America’s failure and of a continuing promise. President Jefferson’s primary charge to Lewis and Clark was to prepare the way for American commerce. Today, historians still speculate about why, upon his return, Lewis lapsed into depression and apparently committed suicide. "Going east," Adams suggests, "was more difficult than going west." So then, what is the future? "Turning back" documents two kinds of predictive evidence. On the one hand we observe the results of greed so unrestrained that they are indistinguishable from those of nihilism. On the other we see what still lives, whether by our design or neglect, or Providence; in these 164 pictures the tone is celebratory, as in a prayer book. From coastal landscapes populated with tourists to timber clear-cutting and small family farms in eastern Oregon, here we reflect on what was lost, what is retained, and what we value both regionally and as a people with a common history.
Monographies photo
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In an era of globalisation, there is an unprecedented scale and nature of contemporary migrant flows, as well as the flow of goods, capital, ideas, images and technology. This sheer number and mobility of contemporary migrants clearly has massively disruptive effects on traditional modes of dwelling however they were manifest in everyday life. But contemporary migrancy(...)
Théorie de l’architecture
septembre 2003, London / New York
Drifting : architecture and migrancy
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In an era of globalisation, there is an unprecedented scale and nature of contemporary migrant flows, as well as the flow of goods, capital, ideas, images and technology. This sheer number and mobility of contemporary migrants clearly has massively disruptive effects on traditional modes of dwelling however they were manifest in everyday life. But contemporary migrancy also has important consequences for the way dwelling is conceptualised more generally. This book is concerned with the modes of dwelling that emerge through migrancy; it is also concerned with the effects these modes of dwelling have for dominant conceptions of space and place; and finally, it is interested in the kinds of architectures that become possible if those effects are taken seriously. This book inspects the intersections between architectures of place and flows of migrancy. It does so without seeking to defend the idea of place, nor lament its passing. Rather, this book is an exploration of the often complex and unorthodox modes of dwelling that are emerging precisely from within the ruins of the idea of place. This exploration is informed by post-structuralist analyses of architecture and urbanism, and their representation in media such as film. It focuses on the Pacific Rim as an intensified zone of global flows. Within the Pacific Rim there are complex tensions between the new economies of Asia and the settler nations of Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand. These tensions produce difficulties for the narrative of the nation state, and herald conditions that no longer conform to the geo-political norms of the old world.
Théorie de l’architecture
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Published for a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this catalog reveals new perspectives on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, a designer so prolific and familiar as to nearly preclude critical reexamination. Structured as a series of inquiries into the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives at Taliesin West, Arizona (recently acquired by MoMA and Avery(...)
Frank Lloyd Wright: unpacking the archive
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Published for a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this catalog reveals new perspectives on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, a designer so prolific and familiar as to nearly preclude critical reexamination. Structured as a series of inquiries into the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives at Taliesin West, Arizona (recently acquired by MoMA and Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University), the book is a collection of scholarly explorations rather than an attempt to construct a master narrative. Each chapter centers on a key object from the archive that an invited author has “unpacked”— tracing its meanings and connections, and juxtaposing it with other works from the archive, from MoMA, or from outside collections. Wright’s quest to build a mile-high skyscraper reveals him to be one of the earliest celebrity architects, using television, press relations and other forms of mass media to advance his own self-crafted image. A little-known project for a Rosenwald School for African-American children, together with other projects that engage Japanese and Native American culture, ask provocative questions about Wright’s positions on race and cultural identity. Still other investigations engage the architect’s lifelong dedication to affordable and do-it-yourself housing, as well as the ecological systems, both social and environmental, that informed his approach to cities, landscapes and even ornament. The publication aims to open up Wright’s work to questions, interrogations and debates, and to highlight interpretations by contemporary scholars, both established Wright experts and others considering this iconic figure from new and illuminating perspectives.
Architecture, monographies
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This book celebrates, by way of a dual narrative, the Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm, designed and furnished by Gio Ponti to a commission from Carlo Maurilio Lerici. The essays aim to examine the events linked to the commission of the project itself, and to the planning and realization of the building together with its interior design. The volume contains a(...)
Enchanting architecture: Gio Ponti's Italian Cultural institute in Stockholm
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This book celebrates, by way of a dual narrative, the Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm, designed and furnished by Gio Ponti to a commission from Carlo Maurilio Lerici. The essays aim to examine the events linked to the commission of the project itself, and to the planning and realization of the building together with its interior design. The volume contains a selection of images taken from the Institute's historical archive, as well as a new photographic reportage on the architectural and design elements featured in this building. It is well-known that Ponti took a great interest in Sweden (suffice it to think of all the space that was devoted to Swedish design in the pages of the magazine Domus from the early 1950s), yet it is fascinating to learn more and find answers regarding the dynamics that lay behind the making of this structure. Indeed, Gio Ponti managed to surpass the Swedish architect Ture Wennerholm's original idea, to breathe life into a project where the spaces, albeit organized according to function, succeed one another in a harmonious play of broken lines and different hues. Assisting him in the task were Pier Luigi Nervi and Ferruccio Rossetti. Gio Ponti gave life to a "classical modern" project in which art and architecture merge, proof that he had overcome the limits that were set by the trends characterizing that day and age. In so doing, he laid the groundwork for a new course in the cultural relations between Italy and Sweden.
Architecture, monographies
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This is the first installation of Forensic Architecture Reports, a series of books each dedicated to a single FA investigation, with insights into the agency’s research methodologies, additional texts from and interviews with collaborators, and dossiers of documents that shaped the investigation in question. On the evening of 4 August 2011, Mark Duggan was shot and(...)
Forensic Architecture, reports #1: The police shooting of Mark Duggan
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This is the first installation of Forensic Architecture Reports, a series of books each dedicated to a single FA investigation, with insights into the agency’s research methodologies, additional texts from and interviews with collaborators, and dossiers of documents that shaped the investigation in question. On the evening of 4 August 2011, Mark Duggan was shot and killed by the police in the north London neighbourhood of Tottenham after the minicab in which he was traveling was pulled over by a team of undercover officers. The team had begun following Duggan shortly after receiving intelligence that he was in possession of a gun, and the officer who shot him testified that he had seen, for a ‘split second’, Duggan aiming the gun at him after he had exited the minicab. However, the gun was not found next to Duggan’s body on the pavement. According to the police, they discovered it in a patch of grass some seven meters away. After a coroner’s inquest ruled Duggan’s killing ‘lawful’ and the police watchdog organisation issued a report siding with the officers’ version of events, the Duggan family’s legal team commissioned Forensic Architecture to conduct an investigation into the critical question at the heart of the case: How did the gun end up in the grass? ?With no video footage of the shooting itself, Forensic Architecture had to rely primarily on the written and oral testimony of the officers involved to develop a spatial investigation designed to test the plausibility of the police’s narrative and to examine whether the officers themselves could have planted the gun...
Social
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Today, the physical scale model is a centrepiece for design education, celebrated practices and architecture’s public relations. The development of digital fabrication devices has made model manufacture even more pervasive. The physical model is the most accessible form of architectural communication. Clients and the general public seem to immediately respond to and(...)
Architecture and the miniature : models
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Today, the physical scale model is a centrepiece for design education, celebrated practices and architecture’s public relations. The development of digital fabrication devices has made model manufacture even more pervasive. The physical model is the most accessible form of architectural communication. Clients and the general public seem to immediately respond to and understand the model, over blueprints and computer simulations. Many architects use finished models for presentations, competitions and exhibitions. Others also embrace sketch models as quick, economic and flexible generative tools. It is only with the rise of the virtual that the advantages and disadvantages of more traditional models can be fully evaluated. As attested by this book, we are now at an important watershed for the model in architecture. Practitioners and educators alike are seeking to fully understand the multiplicity of model types and how they might be strategically deployed at appropriate stages in the design process. The historic role that the model has played is outlined with attention paid to Alberti, John Soane, the Bauhaus and education reforms. A cultural history is offered by examining models in the guise of toys, food, cinema, product design, souvenirs, narrative and art. Model theories are considered and tied to specific examples in the field. New technologies and creative combinations of traditional model-making techniques are evaluated. Kinetic, multi-media, nightscape and interdisciplinary models reveal the broad scope and exceptional versatility offered by this important tool. Models: Architecture and the Miniature focuses on current model use and experimentation by architects across the globe including David Chipperfield, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Daniel Libeskind, Greg Lynn and UN Studio.
Maquettes
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Who are you? And how can you prove it? How were individuals described and identified by people who had never seen them before, in the centuries before photography and fingerprinting, in a world without centralized administrations, where names and addresses were constantly changing? In "Who are you?", Valentin Groebner traces the early modern European history of(...)
Who are you? : identification, deception, and surveillance in early modern Europe
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Who are you? And how can you prove it? How were individuals described and identified by people who had never seen them before, in the centuries before photography and fingerprinting, in a world without centralized administrations, where names and addresses were constantly changing? In "Who are you?", Valentin Groebner traces the early modern European history of identification practices and identity papers. The documents, seals, stamps, and signatures were — and are — powerful tools that created the double of a person in writ and bore the indelible signs of bureaucratic authenticity. Ultimately, as Groebner lucidly explains, they revealed as much about their makers’ illustory fantasies as they did about their bearers’ actual identity. The bureaucratic desire to register and control the population created, from the sixteenth century onward, an intricate administrative system for tracking individual identities. Most important, the proof of one’s identity was intimately linked and determined by the identification papers the authorities demanded and endlessly supplied. At the same time, these papers and practices gave birth to two uncanny doppelgängers of administrative identity procedures : the spy who craftily forged official documents and passports, and the impostor who dissimulated and mimed any individual he so disired. Through careful research and powerful narrative, Groebner recounts the complicated and bizarre stories of the many ways in which identities were stolen, created, and doubled. Groebner argues that identity papers cannot be interpreted literally as pure and simple documents. They are themselves pieces of history, histories of individuals and individuality, papers that both document and transform their owner’s identity — from Renaissance vagrants and gypsies to the illegal immigrants of today who remain "sans papiers", without papers.
Théorie de l’architecture
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The narrative of the artist's life and work is one of the oldest models in the Western literature of the visual arts. In "Art as existence", Gabriele Guercio investigates the metamorphosis of the artist's monograph, tracing its formal and conceptual trajectories from Vasari's sixteenth-century "Lives of the painters, sculptors, and architects" (which provided the model(...)
Art as existence : the artist's monograph and its project
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The narrative of the artist's life and work is one of the oldest models in the Western literature of the visual arts. In "Art as existence", Gabriele Guercio investigates the metamorphosis of the artist's monograph, tracing its formal and conceptual trajectories from Vasari's sixteenth-century "Lives of the painters, sculptors, and architects" (which provided the model and source for the genre) through its apogee in the nineteenth century and decline in the twentieth. He looks at the legacy of the life-and-work model and considers its prospects in an intellectual universe of deconstructionism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonialism. Since Vasari, the monograph has been notable for its fluidity and variety; it can be scrupulous and exact, probing and revelatory, poetic and imaginative, or any combination of these. In the nineteenth century, the monograph combined art-historical, biographical, and critical methods, and even added elements of fiction. Guercio explores some significant books that illustrate key phases in the model's evolution, including works by Gustav Friedrich Waagen, A. C. Quatremère de Quincy, Johann David Passavant, Bernard Berenson, and others. The hidden project of the artist's monograph, Guercio claims, comes from a utopian impulse; by commuting biography into art and art into biography, the life-and-work model equates art and existence, construing otherwise distinct works of an artist as chapters of a life story. Guercio calls for a contemporary reconsideration of the life-and-work model, arguing that the ultimate legacy of the artist's monograph does not lie in its established modes of writing but in its greater project and in the intimate portrait that we gain of the nature of creativity.
Théorie de l’art
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"The Artist as Producer" reshapes our understanding of the fundamental contribution of the Russian avant-garde to the development of modernism. Focusing on the single most important hotbed of Constructivist activity in the early 1920s - the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) in Moscow - Maria Gough offers a powerful reinterpretation of the work of the first group of(...)
The artist as producer : Russian Constructivism in revolution
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"The Artist as Producer" reshapes our understanding of the fundamental contribution of the Russian avant-garde to the development of modernism. Focusing on the single most important hotbed of Constructivist activity in the early 1920s - the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) in Moscow - Maria Gough offers a powerful reinterpretation of the work of the first group of artists to call themselves Constructivists. Her lively narrative ranges from famous figures such as Aleksandr Rodchenko to others who are much less well known, such as Karl Ioganson, a key member of the state-funded INKhUK whose work paved the way for an eventual dematerialization of the integral art object. Through the mining of untapped archives and collections in Russia and Latvia and a close reading of key Constructivist works, Gough highlights fundamental differences among the Moscow group in their handling of the experimental new sculptural form - the spatial construction - and of their subsequent shift to industrial production. "The Artist as Producer" upends the standard view that the Moscow group's formalism and abstraction were incompatible with the sociopolitical imperatives of the new Communist state. It challenges the common equation of Constructivism with functionalism and utilitarianism by delineating a contrary tendency toward non-determinism and an alternate orientation to process rather than product. Finally, the book counters the popular perception that Constructivism failed in its ambition to enter production by presenting the first-ever case study of how a Constructivist could, and in fact did, operate within an industrial environment. "The Artist as Producer" offers provocative new perspectives on three critical issues - formalism, functionalism, and failure - that are of central importance to our understanding not only of the Soviet phenomenon but also of the European vanguards more generally.