Recherche

Titre:
Searching for utopia: The history of an idea

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$50.00
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
Searching for Utopia surveys the influence of the idea of utopia on history, literature, art, architecture, and religious and political thought. Central to his exploration of ideal worlds are creation myths; archetypes of heaven and the afterlife; new worlds and voyages of discovery; ages of revolution and technological progress; model communities and kibbutzim; political and ecological dystopias; space travel and science fiction.

Titre:
Omon Ra

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$15.00
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
A rising star in the Russian literary firmament Pelevin, winner of the 1993 Russian Booker Prize for short stories, has written a parody of life under Communism refracted through the prism of the Soviet space program. This clever parable about a young cosmonaut ordered to make the ultimate sacrifice? Killing himself after secretly piloting a supposedly unmanned lunar expedition? is sprinkled with throwaway gags, absurdist humor and wickedly ironic touches, as well as with the eerie beauty of space exploration. Obsessed with space travel since early childhood, Omon Krivomazov identifies with Ra, the ancient Egyptian falcon-headed sun god, a fixation that reflects his desire to escape the gray conformity of Soviet life and his yearning for a soul. Omon learns that more than 100 of his fellow cosmonauts have already been sacrificed as guinea pigs after taking part in supposedly automated, manless launches. Pelevin portrays the Russian space program as a vast propaganda enterprise, a distraction to paper over the tawdriness and fear of everyday life. Many allusions will be lost on American readers. And, in light of the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction state of contemporary Russian society, some of the Soviet-era satire seems oddly tame.

Titre:
Architecture without place, 1968/2008 : unbuilt visionary, ephemeral architecture & installations

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$64.95
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
The exhibition 'Architectures without Place (1968-2008)' presents a series of works that either were never built or no longer exist : a vast field which ranges from theoretical speculations, visionary prefigurings and ideas competitions to modified projects, ephemeral installations and botched buildings. This variegated realm of the unbuilt (or of the now non-existent) allows us to analyse the conceptual heritage of a long period of Catalonian cultural history; in other words, it lets us dissect forty years of architecture produced locally, highlighting the prevailing ideas at each step of the way. This is a heterogeneous field of project design in which converge other disciplines fuelled by a powerful desire to articulate and transform space : comics, theatre, film, ephemeral installations and the visual arts in general.

Titre:
Slowness

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$16.99
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, sperated by more than two-hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic, finally culminating in poignant cross-century encounter sure to linger in the reader's mind.

Titre:
Ghosts

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$14.50
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
Translation in 2008 by Chris Andrews. Ghosts revolves around an immigrant worker's family squatting on the haunted construction site of a luxury condominium building. All of the workmen and their wives and children see the ghosts, who literally hang around the place, but one teenage girl becomes the most curious. Her questions about the ghosts get so intense that her mother - in a chilling split-second - realizes her daughter's life hangs in the balance.

Titre:
Automatic cities: the architectural imaginary in contemporary art

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$40.00
(disponible en magasin)

Résumé:
The "architectural imaginary" describes architecture in its broadest sense: images of cities drawn from collective experience and imagination. Hailing from 11 countries, each of the 14 artists who have contributed to Automatic Cities engage the psychological and sociopolitical aspects of architecture through their work, mapping the influence of the architectural imaginary on contemporary visual art. The book is organized into four thematic groupings. Matthew Buckingham, Ann Lislegaard and Paul Noble treat architecture's relationship to language; "Architecture and Memory" includes installations by Saskia Olde Wolbers, Hiraki Sawa and Rachel Whiteread; "Architecture as Model" encompasses installations by Michael Borremans, Los Carpinteros, Catharina van Eetvelde and Katrin Sigurdardottir; and the theme of surveillance is explored by Jakob Kolding, Sarah Oppenheimer, Julie Mehretu and Matthew Ritchie.

Titre:
Silly novels by Lady Novelists

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$9.99
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
Describing the silliness and 'feminine fatuity' of many popular books by lady novelists, George Eliot perfectly skewers the formulaic yet bestselling works that dominated her time, with their loveably flawed heroines. She also examines the great women writers of France and their enrichment of the culture, and the varying qualities of literary translations.

Titre:
Lesabénio : an asteroid novel

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$15.95
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
First published in German in 1913 and widely considered to be Paul Scheerbart's masterpiece, Lesabéndio is an intergalactic utopian novel that describes life on the planetoid Pallas, where rubbery suction-footed life forms with telescopic eyes smoke bubble-weed in mushroom meadows under violet skies and green stars. A cosmic ecological fable, Scheerbart's novel was admired by such architects as Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, and such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem

Titre:
Soumission

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$32.95
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
Dans une France assez proche de la nôtre, un homme s'engage dans la carrière universitaire. Peu motivé par l'enseignement, il s'attend à une vie ennuyeuse mais calme, protégée des grands drames historiques. Cependant les forces en jeu dans le pays ont fissuré le système politique jusqu'à provoquer son effondrement. Cette implosion sans soubresauts, sans vraie révolution, se développe comme un mauvais rêve. L'auteur nous entraîne sur un terrain ambigu et glissant ; son regard sur notre civilisation vieillissante fait coexister dans ce roman les intuitions poétiques, les effets comiques, une mélancolie fataliste. Ce livre est une fable politique et morale.

Titre:
Venusia

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$18.95
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
Primitive literacy is redundant. Mere words are expelled. We inaugurate a world of pure presence. The mind, that intrudes itself between ourselves and those memories too terrible to know, must keep us moving beyond the grasp of their claw. To control the flow, it will be necessary that political order be imposed always temporarily. The state shall enjoy direct, creative access to the real.