Paola Berenstein Jacques: Estética da ginga: A arquitetura das favelas através da obra de Hélio Oiticica (2001) [Portuguese]

Estética da ginga goes from a transcendental gesture [the rising of the artist, Hélio Oiticica, to favela’s hill] to perform a mapping in three fields: artistic, architectural and, by extension, the sociocultural.

The book pursues an interdisciplinary frontier, narrowing notions of art, architecture and philosophy.

The life and work of Hélio Oiticica serve as a living model for this aesthetic in which the “ginga”, dancing, covering and uncovering his body of dancer, artist, slum inhabitant, the artist evokes at the same time the samba of the “favelas”, the “favelas” themselves, and shows us that the origin of the artwork changes every moment in the life of a city, a group, a man, in a sort of ephemeral joy.

Publisher Casa da Palavra, Rio de Janeiro, 2001
ISBN 8587220438
160 pages
via Andreia Costa

Publisher
Google books

PDF (no OCR)

Owen Hatherley: A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain (2012)

“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)

publisher

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Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy journal, No. 2: Materialism, No. 3: Realism (2011-2012)

“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

PDF

“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

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