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Title:
Architectures of time : toward a theory of the event in modernist culture

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$47.95
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Summary:
In "Architectures of Time", Sanford Kwinter offers a critical guide to the modern history of time and to the interplay between the physical sciences and the arts. Tracing the transformation of twentieth-century epistemology to the rise of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, Kwinter explains how the demise of the concept of absolute time, and of the classical notion of space as a fixed background against which things occur, led to field theory and a physics of the "event." He suggests that the closed, controlled, and mechanical world of physics gave way to the approximate, active, and qualitative world of biology as a model of both scientific and metaphysical explanation. Kwinter examines theory of time and space in Einstein's theories of relativity and shows how these ideas were reflected in the writings of the sculptor Umberto Boccioni, the town planning schema of the Futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the writings of Franz Kafka. He argues that the writings of Boccioni and the visionary architecture of Sant'Elia represent the earliest and most profound deployments of the concepts of field and event. In discussing Kafka's work, he moves away from the thermodynamic model in favor of the closely related one of Bergsonian durée, or virtuality. He argues that Kafka's work manifests a coherent cosmology that can be understood only in relation to the constant temporal flux that underlies it.

Title:
Pamphlet architecture 27 : tooling : Aranda / Lasch

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$21.95
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Summary:
In "Tooling", the technologically progressive young firm Aranda/Lasch illustrates how advanced computational methods and algorithmic codes can be used to foster architectural design."Tooling" explores patterns generated by computer codes that in turn create an organizational template assembling projects. By openly sharing these codes, the authors seek to foster further investigation into their methods, allowing other architects to model and evolve more critical and insightful geometries and patterns.

Title:
Requiem: For the city at the end of the millenium

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$16.00
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Summary:
Theorist Sanford Kwinter addresses the sometimes subtle, sometimes brutal transformations that characterized the modernization processes set into motion at the turn of the millennium. The City is here seen not only as the last frontier of human history currently under threat of total eclipse, it is the indomitable form of collective experience upon which one can count as assuredly as one can on death and taxes.

Title:
Steven Holl: Color, light, time

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$40.00
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Summary:
In this publication, the current work of New York-based Steven Holl-an outstanding representative of contemporary American architecture-is the subject of a detailed examination that is orientated by a focus on archetypical aspects of visual perception. For nearly three decades now, Steven Holl has developed his architectural stance and his reflections on architecture with striking consistency. The success of his work can be attributed to its sculptural shaping, his interest in the poetics of space, colour, light, and material, and his fascination with scientific phenomena. With essays by Jordi Safont-Tria, Sanford Kwinter, and Steven Holl that discuss various dimensions of temporality vis a vis processes of creation, utilizations, and perception in architecture.