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Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Cuba found itself solely responsible for feeding a nation that had grown dependent on imports and trade subsidies. With fuel, fertilizers, and pesticides disappearing overnight, citizens began growing their own organic produce anywhere they could find space, on rooftops, balconies, vacant lots, and even school(...)
Farming Cuba : urban agriculture from the ground up
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Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Cuba found itself solely responsible for feeding a nation that had grown dependent on imports and trade subsidies. With fuel, fertilizers, and pesticides disappearing overnight, citizens began growing their own organic produce anywhere they could find space, on rooftops, balconies, vacant lots, and even school playgrounds. By 1998 there were more than 8,000 urban farms in Havana producing nearly half of the country's vegetables. What began as a grassroots initiative had, in less than a decade, grown into the largest sustainable agriculture initiative ever undertaken, making Cuba the world leader in urban farming. Featuring a wealth of rarely seen material and intimate portraits of the environment, Farming Cuba details the innovative design strategies and explores the social, political, and environmental factors that helped shape this pioneering urban farming program.
Urban Landscapes
Nick Waplington: settlement
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The book investigates the topography of Jewish identity in the West Bank, which is in conflict not only with the Palestinian majority but also with mainstream Israeli society: While all the settlers are Jewish, and almost all are Israeli citizens, many are not natives of Israel. Most of the men and women photographed by Waplington are immigrants who arrived in the West(...)
Nick Waplington: settlement
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The book investigates the topography of Jewish identity in the West Bank, which is in conflict not only with the Palestinian majority but also with mainstream Israeli society: While all the settlers are Jewish, and almost all are Israeli citizens, many are not natives of Israel. Most of the men and women photographed by Waplington are immigrants who arrived in the West Bank from the United States, South Africa, Australia, the UK, the former Soviet Union, and other parts of the wider Jewish diaspora. The exact number of settlements cannot be determined with accuracy, as both construction and demolition take place regularly throughout the region. In general, however, the presence of Jewish settlers in the West Bank is entrenched, and their building projects continue with the support of the state of Israel.
Photography monographs
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Winner of the 2016 Prix Elysée, Martin Kollar’s new work, Provisional Arrangement, considers that which is temporary in a world made up of provisional situations and solutions. "We are tenants of culture", wrote Nicolas Bourriaud, foreseeing a world of precarious inhabitation of ideas. “I grew up in Czechoslovakia during the Communist era,” says Kollar, “and with the(...)
Martin Kollar: Provisional arrangement
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Winner of the 2016 Prix Elysée, Martin Kollar’s new work, Provisional Arrangement, considers that which is temporary in a world made up of provisional situations and solutions. "We are tenants of culture", wrote Nicolas Bourriaud, foreseeing a world of precarious inhabitation of ideas. “I grew up in Czechoslovakia during the Communist era,” says Kollar, “and with the motto, with the Soviet Union for all Eternity – which has been one of my few experiences with eternity... People of my generation fight against the void left behind the abandoned dogmas.” It is this world that Kollar turns to, one of aborted eternities and slackened certainties – to situations which reveal the disintegra-tion of permanences, capturing their fall into the provisional.
Photography monographs
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In an empty factory unit tucked away in Berlin’s Köpenicker Strasse, The Proletarian Building Exhibition was mounted with the humblest of resources in 1931. It marked the first action by a group of revolutionary architects, builders, and students forming the Kollektiv für sozialistisches Bauen under the architect Arthur Korn. Taking aim at modernist architects(...)
May 2016
Collective for a socialist architecture: proletarian building exhibition 1931
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In an empty factory unit tucked away in Berlin’s Köpenicker Strasse, The Proletarian Building Exhibition was mounted with the humblest of resources in 1931. It marked the first action by a group of revolutionary architects, builders, and students forming the Kollektiv für sozialistisches Bauen under the architect Arthur Korn. Taking aim at modernist architects participating in the German Building Exhibition and CIAM, they cast architecture as an instrument of power, questioned capitalist solutions to the housing question, and unveiled planning approaches imported from the then-Soviet Union. A full facsimile of the exhibition manifesto/catalog and exhibition panels is featured in addition to contributing essays by contemporary architects, writers and educators, and the Collectives’ Annual Report including a proposed work program and statement of intent. Historical photos are interspersed throughout providing a full reconstruction of this significant architectural and sociopolitical event.
Spomenik monument database
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Spomenik—the Serbo-Croat/Slovenian word for monument—refers to the memorials built in Tito's Republic of Yugoslavia from the 1960s to the 1980s, marking the horror of the occupation and the defeat of Axis forces during World War II. Hundreds were built across the country, from coastal resorts to remote mountains. Through these imaginative forms of concrete and steel, a(...)
Photography Collections
August 2018
Spomenik monument database
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Spomenik—the Serbo-Croat/Slovenian word for monument—refers to the memorials built in Tito's Republic of Yugoslavia from the 1960s to the 1980s, marking the horror of the occupation and the defeat of Axis forces during World War II. Hundreds were built across the country, from coastal resorts to remote mountains. Through these imaginative forms of concrete and steel, a classless, forward-looking socialist society, free of ethnic tensions, was envisaged. Instead of looking to the ideologically aligned Soviet Union for artistic inspiration, Tito turned to the West and works of abstract expressionism and minimalism. This allowed Yugoslavia to develop its own distinct identity through the monuments, turning them into political tools, articulating Tito's personal vision of a new tomorrow.
Photography Collections
Alighiero e Boetti: mappa
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In 1971 Alighiero e Boetti commissioned Afghan embroiderers to create a map of the world, with each country bearing the colours and pattern of its flag. The commission grew into a beautifully crafted, large-scale series of maps produced over a period of twenty years in Kabul, Afghanistan and Peshawar, Pakistan. Each map tracked geopolitical changes throughout the world:(...)
Alighiero e Boetti: mappa
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In 1971 Alighiero e Boetti commissioned Afghan embroiderers to create a map of the world, with each country bearing the colours and pattern of its flag. The commission grew into a beautifully crafted, large-scale series of maps produced over a period of twenty years in Kabul, Afghanistan and Peshawar, Pakistan. Each map tracked geopolitical changes throughout the world: the break-up of the Soviet Union, the unification of Germany, disputes over territories in the Middle East and regime changes in the Eurasian peninsula. In this new study, Italian curator Luca Cerizza looks at Boetti's Mappa in relation to world events and the history of map-making, as well as to the contemporary art movements of Minimalism, Conceptualism and Arte Povera. Luca Cerizza is an art historian and curator based in Berlin.
Art Theory
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These essays by the critic and art historian Benjamin Buchloh have had a significant impact on the theory and practice of art history. Written over the course of three decades and now collected in one volume, they trace a history of crucial artistic transitions, iterations, and paradigmatic shifts in the twentieth century, considering both the evolution and emergence of(...)
Formalism and historicity : models and methods in Twentieth-Century art
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These essays by the critic and art historian Benjamin Buchloh have had a significant impact on the theory and practice of art history. Written over the course of three decades and now collected in one volume, they trace a history of crucial artistic transitions, iterations, and paradigmatic shifts in the twentieth century, considering both the evolution and emergence of artistic forms and the specific historical moment in which they occurred. Buchloh’s subject matter ranges through various moments in the history of twentieth-century American and European art, from the moment of the retour à l’ordre of 1915 to developments in the Soviet Union in the 1920s to the beginnings of Conceptual art in the late 1960s to the appropriation artists of the 1980s.
Art Theory
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The idea of fashion under socialism conjures up images of babushka headscarves and black market blue jeans. And yet, as Djurdja Bartlett shows in this groundbreaking book, the socialist East had an intimate relationship with fashion. Official antagonism—which cast fashion as frivolous and antirevolutionary—eventually gave way to grudging acceptance and creeping(...)
Fashion East : the spectre that haunted socialism
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The idea of fashion under socialism conjures up images of babushka headscarves and black market blue jeans. And yet, as Djurdja Bartlett shows in this groundbreaking book, the socialist East had an intimate relationship with fashion. Official antagonism—which cast fashion as frivolous and antirevolutionary—eventually gave way to grudging acceptance and creeping consumerism. Bartlett outlines three phases in socialist fashion, and illustrates them with abundant images from magazines of the period: postrevolutionary utopian dress, official state-sanctioned socialist fashion, and samizdat-style everyday fashion. Utopian dress, ranging from the geometric abstraction of the constructivists under Bolshevism in the Soviet Union to the no-frills desexualized uniform of a factory worker in Czechoslovakia, reflected the revolutionary urge for a clean break with the past. The highly centralized socialist fashion system, part of Stalinist industrialization, offered official prototypes of high fashion that were never available in stores—mythical images of smart and luxurious dresses that symbolized the economic progress that socialist regimes dreamed of. Everyday fashion, starting in the 1950s, was an unofficial, do-it-yourself enterprise: Western fashions obtained through semiclandestine channels or sewn at home. The state tolerated the demand for Western fashion, promising the burgeoning middle class consumer goods in exchange for political loyalty. Bartlett traces the progress of socialist fashion in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, and Yugoslavia, drawing on state-sponsored socialist women’s magazines, etiquette books, socialist manuals on dress, private archives, and her own interviews with designers, fashion editors, and other key figures. Fashion, she suggests, with all its ephemerality and dynamism, was in perpetual conflict with the socialist regimes’ fear of change and need for control. It was, to echo the famous first sentence from the Communist Manifesto, the spectre that haunted socialism until the end.
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October 2010
Fashion Design
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Following the liberation and subsequent occupation of Austria at the end of World War II in spring 1945 by the victorious powers Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union, Vienna soon became a central stage for the quickly emerging Cold War. The struggle of differing political systems was also carried out in the field of architecture. Cold War and(...)
Cold war and architecture: the competing forces that reshaped Austria after 1945
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Following the liberation and subsequent occupation of Austria at the end of World War II in spring 1945 by the victorious powers Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union, Vienna soon became a central stage for the quickly emerging Cold War. The struggle of differing political systems was also carried out in the field of architecture. Cold War and Architecture sheds new light on the building activity in postwar Austria and its main protagonists. For the first time, this book explores the lines of architectural debates of the time in the context of the global political and cultural conflict of East vs. West. With its transnational perspective, it changes our view of architectural history and postwar society. During the ten-year occupation period, Austria experienced a transition from authoritarian government to democratic consumer society. Each of the four Allied powers established its own extensive cultural program. Architectural exhibitions became important instruments of such educational schemes with the objective of a new social order. British, American, French, and Soviet cultural policies served as catalysts for ideological convictions.
Modernism
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Between 1917 and 1945, a tide of hyperindustrialization washed over the United States and the Soviet Union. While the two countries remained ideologically opposed, the factories that amassed in Stalingrad, Moscow, Detroit, Buffalo, and Cleveland were strikingly similar, as were the new forms of modern work and urban and infrastructural development that supported this(...)
Architectural Theory
September 2023
Detroit-Moscow-Detroit: An architecture for industrialization, 1917-1945
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Between 1917 and 1945, a tide of hyperindustrialization washed over the United States and the Soviet Union. While the two countries remained ideologically opposed, the factories that amassed in Stalingrad, Moscow, Detroit, Buffalo, and Cleveland were strikingly similar, as were the new forms of modern work and urban and infrastructural development that supported this industrialization. Drawing on previously unknown archival materials and photographs, the essays in ''Detroit-Moscow-Detroit'' document a stunning two-way transfer of technical knowledge between the United States and the USSR that greatly influenced the built environment in both countries, upgrading each to major industrial power by the start of the Second World War. The innovative research presented here explores spatial development, manufacturing, mass production, and organizational planning across geopolitical lines to demonstrate that capitalist and communist built environments in the twentieth century were not diametrically opposed and were, on certain sites, coproduced in a period of intense technical exchange between the two world wars. A fresh account of the effects of industrialization and globalization on US and Soviet cultures, architecture, and urban history, ''Detroit-Moscow-Detroit'' will find wide readership among architects, urban designers, and scholars of architectural, urban, and twentieth-century history.
Architectural Theory