books
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In "The Monumental Impulse", art historian George Hersey investigates many ties between the biological sciences and the building arts. Natural building materials such as wood and limestone, for example, originate in biological processes. Much architectural (...)
The monumental impulse : architecture's biological roots
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In "The Monumental Impulse", art historian George Hersey investigates many ties between the biological sciences and the building arts. Natural building materials such as wood and limestone, for example, originate in biological processes. Much architectural ornament borrows from botany and zoology. Hersey draws striking analogies between building types and animal species. He examines the relationship between physical structures and living organisms, from bridges to mosques, from molecules to mammals. Insects, mollusks, and birds are given separate chapters, and three final chapters focus on architectural form and biological reproduction. Hersey also discusses architecture in connection with the body's interior processes and shows how buildings may be said to reproduce, adapt, and evolve, like other inanimate or "nonbiotic" entities such as computer programs and robots.
books
April 1999, Cambridge, Mass.
Architectural Theory
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The current ecological crisis brings about a new relational landscape: an unprecedented collapse of distances creates interspecies promiscuities and a crisis of the human scale. In his latest book, Nicolas Bourriaud proposes that artists are the anthropologists of this new era. Artists acknowledge the fading of the division between nature and culture, which has been the(...)
Inclusions: Aesthetics of the Capitalocene
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The current ecological crisis brings about a new relational landscape: an unprecedented collapse of distances creates interspecies promiscuities and a crisis of the human scale. In his latest book, Nicolas Bourriaud proposes that artists are the anthropologists of this new era. Artists acknowledge the fading of the division between nature and culture, which has been the matrix of segregation for millenia. Capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, social segregation, the exploitation of land, subsoil, and animals—all are based on status distinctions between subject and object. Against the commodification of natural elements, Bourriaud sees a new generation of artists calling for a molecular anthropology that studies the human effects on the universe and the interaction between humans and nonhumans. Contemporary art reconnects to archaic magic, the witches, sorcerers, and shamans of precapitalist societies. Against the devitalization of the world, art has managed to preserve certain aspects of the social function and spiritualist practices of these societies.
Critical Theory
Salmon: A red herring
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Salmon is usually thought of as pink. The colour is even called ‘salmon pink’. However, farmed salmon today would be grey. To make them the expected colour, synthetic pigments are added to their feed. Salmon are farmed in open nets, whose runoff has a severe impact on wild salmon populations, as well as on the seabed of the west coast of Scotland at large. Salmon is the(...)
Salmon: A red herring
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Salmon is usually thought of as pink. The colour is even called ‘salmon pink’. However, farmed salmon today would be grey. To make them the expected colour, synthetic pigments are added to their feed. Salmon are farmed in open nets, whose runoff has a severe impact on wild salmon populations, as well as on the seabed of the west coast of Scotland at large. Salmon is the colour of a wild fish which is neither wild, nor fish, nor even salmon. The changing colours of species around the planet are warning signs of an environmental crisis. Many of these alterations result from humans and animals ingesting and absorbing synthetic substances. Changes in flesh, scales, feathers, skin, leaves or wings give us clues to environmental and metabolic transformations around us and inside us. Continuing our work on the Isle of Skye, this project questions what colours we expect in our ‘natural’ environment. It asks us to examine how our perception of colour is changing as much as we are changing the planet.
Food
Cabinet 45: Games
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In the nineteenth century, Marx rejected the notion of homo sapiens, offering instead homo faber to indicate how consciousness follows from the primary activity of making. Against this, a certain ludic tradition has imagined a homo ludens, humans defined through their relationship with games and play. Cabinet 45 features Joshua Glenn on H.G. Wells’ “Floor Games”; D.(...)
Cabinet 45: Games
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In the nineteenth century, Marx rejected the notion of homo sapiens, offering instead homo faber to indicate how consciousness follows from the primary activity of making. Against this, a certain ludic tradition has imagined a homo ludens, humans defined through their relationship with games and play. Cabinet 45 features Joshua Glenn on H.G. Wells’ “Floor Games”; D. Graham Burnett on games played by game theorists; Barbara Levine and Jessica Helfand on dexterity games; James Trainor on the lost world of “adventure” playgrounds; Dana Katz on Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s “Oblique Strategies”; an interview with Bertell Ollman, inventor of the board game “Class Struggle”; and Jeff Dolven on poems as games. Elsewhere in the issue: Helen Larsson on the history of applause; Wayne Koestenbaum’s legendary “Legend” column; Naomi Muller on eating the zoo animals in Berlin during World War II; Jeremy Crichton on “spite” houses; and much more.
Magazines
Dog dreams
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Originally printed by hand in a limited letterpress edition of 100 copies at the SF Center for the Book, Dog Dreams is a labor of love from the mind of author, artist, and printer Michael Wertz. The vibrantly colorful, engaging shapes in the board book pop out from the page in retro red and cyan that evokes a 60s feel. The narrative of the book imagines the many places(...)
Dog dreams
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Originally printed by hand in a limited letterpress edition of 100 copies at the SF Center for the Book, Dog Dreams is a labor of love from the mind of author, artist, and printer Michael Wertz. The vibrantly colorful, engaging shapes in the board book pop out from the page in retro red and cyan that evokes a 60s feel. The narrative of the book imagines the many places mans best friend may go during a long dog nap from Tracys dream of a rooftop tap dance to Dooeys evening cup of coffee on top of his new French chateau. This unique title is a work of pure joy and celebration of animal companions and is the perfect gift for any dog lover.
Children's Books
Mike Davis : dead cities
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Une Terre où la nature recouvre peu à peu ses droits sur la ville après la disparition de l'espèce humaine. Une architecture bunkerisée dédiée à la sécurité et au contrôle comme réponse à l'effondrement des Twin Towers. Des répliques d'immeubles allemands et japonais érigées dans le désert de l'Utah pour servir de laboratoire au dernier grand projet du New Deal : la(...)
Mike Davis : dead cities
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Une Terre où la nature recouvre peu à peu ses droits sur la ville après la disparition de l'espèce humaine. Une architecture bunkerisée dédiée à la sécurité et au contrôle comme réponse à l'effondrement des Twin Towers. Des répliques d'immeubles allemands et japonais érigées dans le désert de l'Utah pour servir de laboratoire au dernier grand projet du New Deal : la destruction par le feu des villes ennemies. Dévastée par les bombes ou les stylos rouges des spéculateurs immobiliers, la Grande Ville capitaliste s'est révélée particulièrement apte à réaliser certaines prophéties catastrophistes. Dans ce livre, Mike Davis nous montre que, depuis son émergence, elle n'a cessé d'être associée dans l'esprit des hommes au spectre apocalyptique de sa propre destruction. S'inscrivant dans la tradition marxiste d'Ernst Bloch, il affirme que l'aliénation cognitive produite par la mise au ban de la nature dans l'expérience collective a suscité une angoisse constante tout au long du xxe siècle. Dans une veine à la fois mélancolique et optimiste (le système capitaliste n'est qu'un stade de l'histoire humaine appelé à être dépassé), Mike Davis invite donc à une nouvelle science urbaine qui s'appuierait sur la " dialectique ville-nature ". Celle-ci permettrait d'envisager la ville dans la totalité des interactions qu'elle entretient avec son " dehors naturel ", et de déjouer les limites actuelles des études urbaines. Cela passe ici par un travail spéculatif s'appuyant sur une hypothèse - la disparition de l'homme - et sur un extraordinaire corpus littéraire et scientifique, où les espèces végétales et animales dansent sur les cendres de nos villes mortes.
Urban Theory
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It is an often heard cliché that the world is getting smaller. No. 235 / Encyclopaedia of an allotment rather proves the opposite. With a meticulous photographic study, Anne Geene gives us an insight into the surprising wealth of flora and fauna in an allotment garden of one of the Netherlands most urbanized areas. Hundreds of plant and animal species, remarkable(...)
No. 235 Encyclopaedia of an allotment
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It is an often heard cliché that the world is getting smaller. No. 235 / Encyclopaedia of an allotment rather proves the opposite. With a meticulous photographic study, Anne Geene gives us an insight into the surprising wealth of flora and fauna in an allotment garden of one of the Netherlands most urbanized areas. Hundreds of plant and animal species, remarkable behaviour and particular observations are represented with appropriate photographic techniques varying from saltprinting to microphotography. No. 235 / encyclopaedia of an allotment is inspired by science but has no scientific pretentions whatsoever. Although her observations are completely personal, they are selected and captured with the precision of a scientist and with a similar attention to detail. The book aims to be a complete visual representation of everything that grows, blossoms, swims, crawls and flies in the exact 245 square meters of allotment nr. 235 of garden complex 'eigen hof' in Rotterdam.
Gardens
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The rat has been described as the shadow of the human. From ancient times it spread via the routes of commerce and conquest to eventually inhabit almost every part of the world. Its impact on history has been enormous in terms of the damage done through plague and disease, the destruction of agricultural produce, and the infestations of cities. At the same time the rat(...)
Rat
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The rat has been described as the shadow of the human. From ancient times it spread via the routes of commerce and conquest to eventually inhabit almost every part of the world. Its impact on history has been enormous in terms of the damage done through plague and disease, the destruction of agricultural produce, and the infestations of cities. At the same time the rat has provided science with a huge resource for experimentation. This highly adaptable, fertile and intelligent creature is almost universally loathed, but there are cultures in which it is revered, even deified. This book traces the history of the human relationship with rats from the first archaeological finds to the genetically engineered rats of the present day, describing its role in the arts and sciences, religion and myth, psychoanalysis and medicine. The author includes wide-ranging examples of the rat’s appearance: in literature – 'The Pied Piper'; Beatrix Potter stories, 'The Wind in the Willows'; in culture – Victorian rat-and-dog baiting pits, its popularity as a pet, even the subject of a ’70s pop song; folklore – it was a good luck symbol in ancient Rome, symbol of cunning in Chinese mythology; and psychoanalysis – Freud’s Rat Man, for example. The book also seeks to answer two problems raised by the complexity of human attitudes to the rat. The first concerns how it was that the rat came to be seen not just as verminous, but also as being particularly despised for being so – more so, in fact, than other parasitic animals. The second concerns the manner in which human attitudes to the rat can be so contradictory, when admiration for its abilities are set against this idea of hatred. The rat can be found at the heart of human preoccupations with hygiene, sexuality and appetite, and exists as a perverse totem for the worst excesses of human behaviour. In 'Rat', Jonathan Burt provides a fascinating account of this animal in history, myth and culture.
Fauna and flora
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In "The hidden factor," Steven Skaggs provides a beautifully illustrated and explained introduction to the mark—from those as physical as a scratch made by an animal, to those as accidental as a splatter of paint, to those as intentional as hand-drawn characters. Skaggs makes the case that, in the visual arts, gestures and mark-making operate on an equal level with image(...)
The hidden factor: Mark and gesture in visual design
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In "The hidden factor," Steven Skaggs provides a beautifully illustrated and explained introduction to the mark—from those as physical as a scratch made by an animal, to those as accidental as a splatter of paint, to those as intentional as hand-drawn characters. Skaggs makes the case that, in the visual arts, gestures and mark-making operate on an equal level with image and word. While we might think of content as that which is communicated through text and images, Skaggs shows, through visual examples, that the gestural mark is often hidden within both images and the typographic forms that convey words. By mapping different kinds of marks and showing how marks combine with image and word, "The hidden factor" explains that our desire for conceptual information suppresses our awareness of marking. This is especially the case with the tension between word and mark, where we desire legibility. As a result, one of the most conservative of arts—calligraphy—has the potential of being the most radical, since gesturally expressive handwriting is a natural threat to the legibility of a text.
Art Theory
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Il aura fallu attendre près de cent cinquante ans pour que paraissent en français les premières traductions de textes de celui qui est considéré comme le plus grand théoricien allemand de l'architecture du XIXe siècle et dont l'influence est encore clairement perceptible dans les références de jeunes architectes européens. Le présent ouvrage offre un large éventail de(...)
Du style et de l'architecture: écrits, 1834-1869
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Il aura fallu attendre près de cent cinquante ans pour que paraissent en français les premières traductions de textes de celui qui est considéré comme le plus grand théoricien allemand de l'architecture du XIXe siècle et dont l'influence est encore clairement perceptible dans les références de jeunes architectes européens. Le présent ouvrage offre un large éventail de textes de Gottfried Semper qui vont des Remarques préliminaires sur l'architecture peinte et la sculpture des Anciens écrit en 1834, où est débattue la question de la polychromie de l'architecture antique, jusqu'à la conférence de 1869 intitulée "Des styles architecturaux" où est exposée de manière très synthétique sa théorie de l'architecture comparée et de la notion de style confrontée à l'émergence de la nouvelle théorie de l'évolution dont il veut bien admettre les conclusions quant aux organismes mais pas quant à l'évolution des formes artistiques. D'importants extraits de Der Stil sont traduits ici et les principaux éléments de la théorie du style de Semper, les concepts clés de «revêtement», de «beauté formelle», de «type» et d'«élément», font l'objet de traitements plus spécifiques dans des textes aussi différents que Les Quatre éléments de l'architecture, De la détermination formelle de l'ornement, L'Art textile ou Des styles architecturaux, tous traduits intégralement. L'ensemble devrait permettre d'appréhender la richesse et la complexité d'une pensée singulière pour qui la forme artistique - du simple récipient au temple de dimension colossale - est conçue bien au-delà du seul «besoin», et se cristallise en ce point où se croisent des lois et forces physiques, des contraintes matérielles inhérentes à l'utilisation de tel matériau, enfin des idées et volontés qui caractérisent l'homme en tant qu'animal politique et religieux. C'est à l'appréhension de ce foyer cosmique au sein duquel interagissent le physique, le matériel, l'histoire et le politique, que s'intéresse Semper mobilisant en permanence un vaste ensemble de références scientifiques, esthétiques, littéraires ou historiques.
Architectural Theory