From VKhUTEMAS to MARKhI, 1920-36 (2005) [English/Russian]
Filed under book | Tags: · 1920s, 1930s, architecture, avant-garde, russia
This album contains exercises, diploma works and projects of graduates and professors of the Moscow schools that graduated architects in the 1920s and 1930s: VKhUTEMAS-VKhUTEIN, MPI-MIGI, MVTU, and ASI-MAI. The book includes both original works and photos of projects and models gathered by the MARKhI Museum in 1989-2004. Most materials are published for the first time.
From VKhUTEMAS to MARKhI, 1920-1936: Architectural projects from the collection of the MARKhI Museum
Editors A.P. Kudryavtsev, N.O. Dushkina
Authors L.I.Ivanova-Veen, E.B. Ovsiannikova
Publisher A-Fond Publishers, Moscow, 2005
ISBN 9077344098, 9789077344095
231 pages
Download (92 MB)
Comment (0)Owen Hatherley: A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, city, modernism, neoliberalism, united kingdom, urbanism
The urban state of the nation—from Olympic dreams to broken Britain.
This is what austerity looks like: a nation surviving on the results of what conservatives privately call “the progressive nonsense” of the Big Society agenda.
In a journey that begins and ends in the capital, but takes in Belfast, Aberdeen, Plymouth and Brighton, Hatherley explores modern Britain’s urban landscape and finds a short-sighted disarray of empty buildings, malls and glass towers. Yet while A New Kind of Bleak anatomizes “broken Britain,” Hatherley also looks to a hopeful future and discovers fragments of what it might look like.
Illustrated by Laura Oldfield Ford, author and artist of Savage Messiah.
Publisher Verso Books, 2012
ISBN 1844679098, 9781844679096
640 pages
review (Andy Beckett, The Guardian)
review (Sarah Morrison, The Independent)
review (Igor Toronyi-Lalic, The Telegraph)
Renzo Dubbini: Geography of the Gaze: Urban and Rural Vision in Early Modern Europe (1994/2002)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, architecture, art history, cartography, diorama, image, landscape, mapping, panorama, topography, vision
Geography of the Gaze offers a new history and theory of how the way we look at things influences what we see. Focusing on Western Europe from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, Renzo Dubbini shows how developments in science, art, mapping, and visual epistemology affected the ways natural and artificial landscapes were perceived and portrayed.
He begins with the idea of the “view,” explaining its role in the invention of landscape painting and in the definition of landscape as a cultural space. Among other topics, Dubbini explores how the descriptive and pictorial techniques used in mariners’ charts, view-oriented atlases, military cartography, and garden design were linked to the proliferation of highly realistic paintings of landscapes and city scenes; how the “picturesque” system for defining and composing landscapes affected not just art but also archaeology and engineering; and how the everchanging modern cityscapes inspired new ways of seeing and representing the urban scene in Impressionist painting, photography, and stereoscopy. A marvelous history of viewing, Geography of the Gaze will interest everyone from scientists to artists.
Originally published as Geografie dello sguardo: Visione e paesaggio in età moderna, Giulio Einaudi, Torino, 1994
Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2002
ISBN 0226167372, 9780226167374
251 pages
Josef Albers: Glass, Color, and Light (1994)
Filed under catalogue | Tags: · architecture, art, colour, glass, light art
Josef Albers (1888-1976), famous as a master at Germany’s Bauhaus until 1933, and then a professor in American schools such as Yale University, influenced many young artists. His Homage to the Square series of paintings remains an important example of 20th-century art. Yet Albers’s first great works – the glass pictures that he made in Germany beginning in 1921 – remain little known. Starting with found fragments of colored glass, and later employing a sophisticated sandblasting process, Albers created a new art form.
Glass, Color and Light is the first monograph devoted to Albers’s work in this medium. Reproductions, 62 in color, of every extant glass picture are accompanied by full documentation by Brenda Danilowitz of the Josef Albers Foundation. Also illustrated and discussed are Albers’s architectural commissions in glass and those works that were lost or destroyed after the artist fled Nazi Germany. Essays by Nicholas Fox Weber, executive director of the Josef Albers Foundation, and Fred Licht, curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, illuminate the many themes suggested by this extraordinary group of works, while a chronology of Albers’s life and professional career places the glass works in the context of his entire oeuvre.
Publisher Guggenheim Museum Publications, New York, 1994
ISBN 0810968649
152 pages
via Archive.org
Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy journal, No. 2: Materialism, No. 3: Realism (2011-2012)
Filed under journal | Tags: · architecture, capitalism, city, design, landscape, materialism, philosophy, political economy, politics, urbanism
“This issue arose out of a series of reflections on the contemporary meaning of realism in the representational strategies of the design disciplines. Realism, in this context, departs from the nineteenth century preoccupation with presenting environments and subjects typically excluded from pictorial representation. Today, while the ‘realistic’ is favoured and celebrated in student and professional renderings, it seems closer to a contemporary naturalism, at times verging on mannerism: for instance, impossibly lit buildings at dusk, exaggerated perspectives which amplify the speed toward a vanishing point, or, at its most intense, landscapes populated by ghostly figures simultaneously performing every possible cliché of ‘leisure’. While the ‘realistic’ is a recurring theme within both design education and professions, there seems to be a lack of realism. This issue attempts to set up a conversation between both terms by bringing together a series of reflections and practices hinged on both contemporary and historical usages of realism, situating conflictng accounts of its meaning side by side.” (from the Editorial Note)
Issue 3: Realism
Summer 2012
Issue Editors: Adrian Blackwell, Adam Bobbette
42 pages
“Materialism continues the commitment of our first two issues on Property and Service to examine foundational yet overlooked concepts in architecture and landscape architecture. In our estimation, these disciplines are haunted by materialism. We see its specular presence invoked in design research’s emphasis on large-scale flows and sites of material production, in the renewed focus on ‘performance’ and the rehabilitation of functionalism, in the centrality of ‘material’ as an expressive layer of tectonics, and through the import of non-human actors into discussions about spatial design. Each of the above invokes matter as its base.” (from the Editorial Note)
Issue 2: Materialism
Winter 2011
Issue Editors: Adam Bobbette, Jane Hutton
Publisher Scapegoat Publications, Toronto
40 pages
Dick Raaijmakers: Cahier-M: A Brief Morphology of Electric Sound (2000)
Filed under book | Tags: · acoustics, architecture, electronic music, music, sound
Cahier-M is about the morphology of electric sound. This inherently single-layered type of sound is discussed in the light of ‘neo-plastic’ music as suggested by the painter Piet Mondriaan in the 1920′s. He advocated a kind of music that consisted of single-layered, ‘single-colour’ electric sounds.
Furthermore, Cahier-M devotes ample attention to the morphological relationship between the typically uniform nature of electric sound and the multi-layered sound structures used by post-WWII serial composers. The discussion of this subject also covers layering (photo)graphic images as practised by the French physiologist E.J. Marey at the end of the 19th century, flipping monadic sound aggregates as practised by Karel Goeyvaerts since 1952, the application of so-called ‘horizontal arpeggios’ by Pierre Boulez around 1980, and the introduction of ‘liquid forms’ in contemporary architecture.
These aspects are illustrated based on a still valid morphological analysis of sound conducted by the author between 1963 and 1967.
Cahier-M comprises four chapters: ‘Invented Sound’, ‘Diagonal Sound’, ‘Composed Sound’ and ‘Spatial Sound’.
Publisher Leuven University Press, 2000
Volume 3 of Collected Writings of the Orpheus Institute
ISBN 9058670767
123 pages
publisher
publisher
google books
Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin: Wittgenstein’s Vienna (1973) [English/Spanish]
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, art, city, history, language, music, philosophy, vienna, vienna circle
The central figure in this portrait of a crumbling society giving birth to the modern world without realizing it was Wittgenstein, the brilliant and gifted young thinker whose great book remains the key to modern thought and who went on to influence a whole generation of English thinkers, artists and scientists.
As a portrait of a man, this book is superbly realized. It is even better as a portrait of the age and milieu in which our modern ideas were born–not only in philosophy, but in art, music, literature, architecture, design and style.
Publisher Simon and Schuster, New York, 1973
A Touchstone Book
ISBN 0671217259, 9780671217259
314 pages
review (Barry Seldes, H-Net Reviews)
Download (English)
Download (La Viena de Wittgenstein, Spanish, trans. Ignacio Gomez de Liaño, 1998)
