Notes on the Underground
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The underground has always played a prominent role in human imaginings, both as a place of refuge and as a source of fear. The late nineteenth century saw a new fascination with the underground as Western societies tried to cope with the pervasive changes of a new social and technological order. In Notes on the Underground, Rosalind Williams takes us inside that critical(...)
Notes on the Underground
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The underground has always played a prominent role in human imaginings, both as a place of refuge and as a source of fear. The late nineteenth century saw a new fascination with the underground as Western societies tried to cope with the pervasive changes of a new social and technological order. In Notes on the Underground, Rosalind Williams takes us inside that critical historical moment, giving equal coverage to actual and imaginary undergrounds. She looks at the real-life invasions of the underground that occurred as modern urban infrastructures of sewers and subways were laid, and at the simultaneous archaeological excavations that were unearthing both human history and the planet’s deep past. She also examines the subterranean stories of Verne, Wells, Forster, Hugo, Bulwer-Lytton, and other writers who proposed alternative visions of the coming technological civilization. Williams argues that these imagined and real underground environments provide models of human life in a world dominated by human presence and offer a prophetic look at today’s technology-dominated society. In a new afterword written for this edition, Williams points out that her book traces the emergence in the nineteenth century of what we would now call an environmental consciousness--an awareness that there will be consequences when humans live in a sealed, finite environment. Today we are more aware than ever of our limited biosphere and how vulnerable it is. Notes on the Underground, now even more than when it first appeared, offers a guide to the human, cultural, and technical consequences of what Williams calls "the human empire on earth."
Théorie de l’architecture
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Once symbols of the past, ruins have become ubiquitous signs of our future. Americans today encounter ruins in the media on a daily basis - images of abandoned factories and malls, toxic landscapes, devastating fires, hurricanes, and floods. In this sweeping study, Miles Orvell offers a new understanding of the spectacle of ruins in US culture, exploring how(...)
Empire of ruins: American culture, phptography, and the spectacle of destruction
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Once symbols of the past, ruins have become ubiquitous signs of our future. Americans today encounter ruins in the media on a daily basis - images of abandoned factories and malls, toxic landscapes, devastating fires, hurricanes, and floods. In this sweeping study, Miles Orvell offers a new understanding of the spectacle of ruins in US culture, exploring how photographers, writers, painters, and filmmakers have responded to ruin and destruction, both real and imaginary, in an effort to make sense of the past and envision the future. ''Empire of ruins'' explains why Americans in the nineteenth century yearned for the ruins of Rome and Egypt and how they portrayed a past as ancient and mysterious in the remains of Native American cultures. As the romance of ruins gave way to twentieth-century capitalism, older structures were demolished to make way for grander ones, a process interpreted by artists as a symptom of America's "creative destruction." In the late twentieth century, Americans began to inhabit a perpetual state of ruins, made visible by photographs of decaying inner cities, derelict factories and malls, and the waste lands of the mining industry. This interdisciplinary work focuses on how visual media have transformed disaster and decay into spectacles that compel our moral attention even as they balance horror and beauty. Looking to the future, Orvell considers the visual portrayal of climate ruins as we face the political and ethical responsibilities of our changing world. A wide-ranging work by an acclaimed urban, cultural, and photography scholar, ''Empire of ruins'' offers a provocative and lavishly illustrated look at the American past, present, and future.
Théorie de la photographie
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This publication is based on a thesis that studies global mobility and territories in dispersion. Based in Rotterdam, Diego Barajas concentrates his research on the urban dispersals shaped by migration, looking first at the Cape Verdean Diaspora and its territorial structure, and then focused on the case of the 'belhuis' - 'call-house'. By 'territories in dispersion',(...)
Dispersion : a study of global mobility and the dynamics of a fictional urbanism
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This publication is based on a thesis that studies global mobility and territories in dispersion. Based in Rotterdam, Diego Barajas concentrates his research on the urban dispersals shaped by migration, looking first at the Cape Verdean Diaspora and its territorial structure, and then focused on the case of the 'belhuis' - 'call-house'. By 'territories in dispersion', Barajas refers to social habitats that are no longer physically contained in geographically continuous areas, but have been spread out and re-articulated by artificial means. The de-territorialized condition created by increased mobility - particularly by migration - had led to an urbanism of artificial re-territorializaton. This is a functional urbanism - as based on mental constructions but tangible - that is manifested in the city as fragments, micro environments of global circuits, each of which establishes its own identity, time, rules and aesthetics - its own atmospheres. These fragments are globally connected and articulated by abstract infrastructures like telecommunication systems, as much as by physical places - ethnic shops, religious centers, et cetera - and by the imaginary and idealized realms through which dispersed societies operate. This is an urbanism ruled by traditional values, by intuitive and emotional forces, as much by efficiency and functionality. This research argues that as patterns of dispersion intensify, they generate not just fragmented societies, but a new territorial cohesion - a realm in which 'the collective' has gained a new dimension. Cultural identity is no longer necessarily linked to geographical place, or to traditional territorial structures like the nation-state, but has become a particular concept attached to individual imaginations though subjected to and conditioned by the contradictory pressures of self-determination and commoditization. This research is an attempt to trace the patterns of urban dispersals shaped by migration to the city of Rotterdam. A city whose harbour has made it one of the most concentrated points of settlement for Cape Verdean emigrants.
Théorie de l’urbanisme
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"Fuel" is an idiosyncratic, speculative dictionary of fuels, real and imagined, historical and futuristic, hopeless and utopian. Drawing on literature, film, and scientific treatises--most produced long before "climate change" was in circulation--"Fuel" argues for a distinction between energy (a system of power) and fuel (a substance, which can be thought of as(...)
Fuel : a speculative dictionary
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"Fuel" is an idiosyncratic, speculative dictionary of fuels, real and imagined, historical and futuristic, hopeless and utopian. Drawing on literature, film, and scientific treatises--most produced long before "climate change" was in circulation--"Fuel" argues for a distinction between energy (a system of power) and fuel (a substance, which can be thought of as "potentiality") as it endeavors to undo the dream that we can simply switch to renewables and all will be golden. From "Air" to "Zyklon B," entries in this unusual "dictionary" include Algae, Clathrates, Dilithium, Fleece, Goats, Theology, Whale Oil, and many, many more. The tone of the entries ranges as widely as the topics: from historical anecdotes (the Ford Fiesta "boozemobile") to eccentric readings of the classics of "energy lit" ( Germinal and Oil! ); from literary observations (a high octane Odyssey ?) to excursions into literary theory. The dictionary draws from an eccentric canon, including works by Jules Verne, George Eliot's Silas Marner , Paolo Bacigalupi's Windup Girl , and the Tom Cruise vehicle Oblivion , among others. A message from this ambitious project is that energy can be understood as a heterogeneous set of self-mystifying systems or machines that block access to thought as they fascinate us. Fuels emerge as more primal elements that the audience can grasp at various points along the way to consumption/combustion. This dictionary can help scramble our thinking about fuel--not in order to demonize energy and not in order to create a new hierarchy in which certain renewables take over from fossil fuels but instead to open up potential ways of interacting with real and imaginary substances, by wrenching them out of narrative and placing them into an idiosyncratic dictionary to be applied by readers into new narratives.
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Ralf Coussée and Klaas Goris. Over a period of twenty years, the two architects have built up a solid oeuvre. The proof can be found in this book, which offers a survey of the architecture of the due, both of works on paper and of designs that have been built. This book takes you on a guided tour of their work that is full of surprises. It shows you why Coussée & Goris do(...)
Coussée & Goris : architectuur/architecture
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Ralf Coussée and Klaas Goris. Over a period of twenty years, the two architects have built up a solid oeuvre. The proof can be found in this book, which offers a survey of the architecture of the due, both of works on paper and of designs that have been built. This book takes you on a guided tour of their work that is full of surprises. It shows you why Coussée & Goris do not strive inflexibly for an absolute, radical Modernist renewal, but to let old and new flow into one another harmoniously. You discover an oeuvre that is evidence of an architecture with a style of its own, based on an intriguing play of patterns, themes and constructional methods, and that at the same time reveals the 'thinking in doing' of architecture. You learn how remote their work is from doctrines, manifestos and concepts that alienate the design process from the architectural traditions of making and building. This book is more than just a monograph. It is a real architects' book, like an artist's book. After all, the architecture of Coussée & Goris should not be read as a series of individual buildings, but as an imaginary landscape, a capriccio, in which the principles are made visible of an architecture that inscribes itself in a contemporary framework. To understand the working and scenographic force of the landscape as the supporting element in the architecture of Coussée & Goris, the architecture theoretician Koen Van Synghel confronts pairs of designs: the master plan for the Jeugd- en Natuurdomein De Hoge Rielen, the reconversion of an industrial transformer complex near Kortrijk into a multifunctional urban landscape, the building of a factory shed in Roeselare, the conversion of a furniture store into a school of architecture in Brussels, and the award-winning submission for a crematorium in Hofheide. The art and poetry from which the artists draw their inspiration have forced their way into this book, show the world behind the designs, and make this publication unique.
livres
octobre 2006, Gent
Architecture, monographies