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Title:
Coney island : the parchute pavilion competition

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For almost 100 years, Coney Island was the most popular seaside destination in the United States. Each year, millions escaped the heat of New York City to savor the thrills of the Cyclone roller coaster and Wonder Wheel at the Astroland amusement park. They came to sample an original Nathan's Famous hot dog, witness the first demolition derby, or to take a chance at a game of three-card Monte on the legendary boardwalk. The advent of air-conditioning, concerns about Coney's "tawdry" entertainment, and faster transportation to other beaches hastened the demise of what had become a uniquely American icon of entertainment and a defining terminus of New York at the water's edge. In an effort to revitalize the area, the Van Alen Institute, in concert with the Coney Island Development Corporation, held the Parachute Pavilion Competition, a contest to design a year-round pavilion in the shadow of the Parachute Jump, a landmark built for the 1939 World's Fair. Coney Island: The Parachute Pavilion Competition presents all 864 submissions—from the feasible to the fantastic—received from around the world. The winning design by London-based Carmody Groarke Hardie is a mesmerizing attraction in its own right, composed of two provocative trapezoids illuminated by thousands of colored light bulbs. The design respects the historic icon under which it is located but also promises to become an icon in its own right and bring the fun-loving spirit of Coney Island into the twenty-first century. Featuring essays, photographic documentation, and jury comments, Coney Island: The Parachute Pavilion Competition is a critical resource for students, designers, city officials, and anyone interested in Coney Island and the reinvention of the historic recreation sites of our cities.

Title:
Open : new designs for public space

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"Open: New Designs for Public Space" puts forth the simple proposition that new public spaces need not be the banal leftovers of design neglect. "Open" showcases the best recent public projects from some of the world's most talented designers, including Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Craig Dykers, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Walter Hood, UN Studio, Norman Foster, Weiss/Manfredi, and Will Alsop. More than 300 images illustrate a range of projects from memorials to new types of urban plazas and parks. Essays by Raymond Gastil, Linda Pollak, and Zoë Ryan, argue that the most successful urban spaces are those that combine large-scale operations and small-scale experiences, major infrastructure with recreation and culture, and grand civic events with intimate daily interaction.

Title:
Living design: The writings of Clara Porset

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Cuban-born, Mexico-based designer Clara Porset is renowned for her mid-century modern furniture and interior design and for her collaborations with architects such as Luis Barragán and Mario Pani. She was also an accomplished critic and writer. ''Living Design'' collects Porset’s essays, reviews, and lectures to highlight her role as an influential thinker, educator, and practitioner. This volume insightfully contextualizes the politics that shaped Porset’s design principles, charts the influence of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College on her work, and reveals the period’s fusion of local adaptations and modernist principles that made Mexico a major center of modernist design. At a time when many practitioners believed that design could only be modernized by replacing hand craftsmanship with mechanization, Porset valued both approaches for their distinctive qualities and urged others to do the same. Through her writings, she encouraged efforts to catalyze local design communities during a period of rapid technological and social change. With essays by historian Randal Sheppard and design curator and scholar Ana Elena Mallet, an introduction by volume editors Zoë Ryan and Valentina Sarmiento Cruz, and explanatory notes on the people and publishing forums in Porset’s circle, ''Living Design'' makes available works never before published in English, and with only limited circulation in the Spanish language, in order to recover an important and neglected voice in global modernism.

Title:
Bertrand Goldberg: architecture of invention

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Bertrand Goldberg (1913-1997) was a visionary Chicago architect whose designs for housing, urban planning, and industrial design made a distinctive mark in the modern era. This handsome publication, the first to focus in-depth on the entirety of Goldberg's life and work, traces his development from his early Bauhaus training to his notable architectural achievements. Featuring previously unpublished material, it also includes Goldberg's plans for unrealized projects as well as his collaborations with other prominent modern architects, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Buckminster Fuller. Goldberg's interest in the social dimension of architecture was reflected in many of his cutting-edge designs. In 1959, he conceived the plan for his most iconic structure, the sixty-story Marina City residential towers, in the heart of downtown Chicago. He created a number of hospitals that offered a new paradigm for how patients and staff interacted within the space. Goldberg's progressive designs also extended to schools, prefabricated structures, and furniture.

Title:
Building with water

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Water has been an important topic in architecture and urban planning for years. The theme of this publication is the use of water in architecture. It presents buildings that explicitly refer to water in their design and form. It establishes a typology of building by the water: residential buildings, transportation and industrial buildings, buildings for culture and leisure. Classic examples of building by, in, or on the water serve as introductions : for example, the Château de Chenonceaux on the Loire, Falling Water in Pennsylvania by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, by Louis I. Kahn. Organized according to their locations by a river, lake, or the sea, some twenty international projects are presented. The authors’ concern is not showing luxurious buildings in privileged locations but rather presenting projects that seriously grapple with the main criterion of the location — namely, water — in an ecologically sustainable way and respond to it with their design.

Title:
David Adjaye : form, heft, material

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$74.95
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Adjaye's expanding portfolio of civic architecture, public buildings, and urban planning commissions spans Europe, the United States, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. He transforms complex ideas and concepts into approachable and innovative structures that respond to the geographical, ecological, technological, engineering, economic, and cultural systems that shape the practice of global architecture. The publication of this compendium of work and essays coincides with the scheduled opening of Adjaye’s National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Title:
The future is not what it used to be

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Curators Zoë Ryan and Meredith Carruthers use the Istanbul Design Biennial as a forum for posing questions and generating dialogue. This illustrated volume presents more than 50 international projects by designers working across disciplines, as well as essays by leading thinkers in design.

Title:
Konstantin Grcic: decisive design

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$18.99
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The hip, functional, and versatile furniture and products of Konstantin Grcic—widely recognized as one of the most important designers working today—are transforming the landscape of contemporary design. This book accompanies the first exhibition in North America of Grcic’s work, highlighting the innovative archetypes of form and concept that have marked his remarkable output since 2004.

Title:
Information exchange : how cities renew, rebuild, and remember

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Van Alen Institute mounted the exhibition "Renewing, Rebuilding, Remembering" to demonstrate how cities, after incomparable loss of people and places, find ways to plan, design, and reconstruct the life of the city. The book is both a catalogue and a special edition of our series of "Van Alen Reports," the publication both documents the exhibit and expands on it with personal essays, articles and interviews. The point of the exhibition was not to compare catastrophes, but to compare, contrast, and try to explicate and understand initiatives, projects, plans, and actions that took place after the bomb, the earthquake, the war. After that, what worked, what would they do differently, what mattered right away, what mattered for the long-term? In October, the Institute put out a call for ideas for the exhibit. Students, designers, planners, artists, professors, photographers, public officials and a wide range of respondents from around the world were generous in suggesting places, projects, issues, and designs that were telling for the future of New York. From this response and ongoing research, the Institute chose to focus on specific processes and projects in seven cities. In Beirut, a public art installation that progressed through the city was a first step in reclaiming its war-torn districts, and the Lebanese capital has continued not only with master plans and major new developments, but also with works such as the Garden of Forgiveness, grappling with a hard history to contemplate. In Berlin, a center for information about the city and its reconstruction rose above the ruins of the Berlin Wall, half a century after the city had been devastated and divided. In San Francisco, an earthquake left the elevated highway downtown in such precarious decision that the city decided to tear it down-and implement a long-held dream of reopening the city to the waterfront. In Kobe, where an earthquake resulted not only in billions of dollars of damage to infrastructure, but also in a terrible loss of life, architects responded with an outpouring of energy to survey the damage and construct innovative emergency housing, proving the old adage that necessity is the mother of invention. In addition, they strove to understand the disaster, building a museum about, and at, the geological fault that brought down so much of their city. Manchester had a terrorist attack in the mid-1990s, and rebuilt its center city better than before, as well as setting up an institute for the study of cities around the world, to better understand that the life of the city and its public realm can not be taken for granted. So, too, did Oklahoma City, where a public process led to an international design competition for a memorial, and the city has rebuilt itself around it. Sarajevo, after years of civil war, pulled together its citizens through restoring the landmarks of their public life.

Title:
As seen: exhibitions that made architecture and design history

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$44.95
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Featuring written and photographic descriptions of the shows and illuminating essays from noted curators, scholars, critics, designers, and theorists, As Seen: Exhibitions that Made Architecture and Design History explores the multifaceted ways in which exhibitions have reflected on contemporary dilemmas and opened up new processes and ways of working. Providing a fresh perspective on some of the most important exhibitions of the 20th century from America, Europe, and Japan, including This Is Tomorrow, Expo ’70, and Massive Change, this book offers a new framework for thinking about how exhibitions can function as a transformative force in the field of architecture and design.