Andreas Huyssen: Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, berlin, buenos aires, city, history, memory, new york
Memory of historical trauma has a unique power to generate works of art. This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York—three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas. Berlin experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the city’s reemergence as the German capital; Buenos Aires lived through the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and their legacy of state terror and disappearances; and New York City faces a set of public memory issues concerning the symbolic value of Times Square as threatened public space and the daunting task of commemorating and rebuilding after the attack on the World Trade Center.
Focusing on the issue of monumentalization in divergent artistic and media practices, the book demonstrates that the transformation of spatial and temporal experience by memory politics is a major cultural effect of globalization.
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2003
Cultural Memory in the Present series
ISBN 0804745617, 9780804745611
192 pages
Robert Sumrell, Kazys Varnelis: Blue Monday: Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, city, new media, object, philosophy
AUDC’s first book captures three moments in modern culture that offer glimpses into our increasingly perverse relationship to architecture, cities, and objects. “Ether” explores the Los Angeles telecom hotel, One Wilshire; a 39 story building of utter banality and complete mystery. “The Stimulus Progression” examines the strange story of the Muzak Corporation and the invention of a culture of horizontality. “Quartzsite, Arizona” visits a desert town of 3,000 people that swells to over 1 million residents every summer when modern nomads in Recreational Vehicles descend upon in it in hordes. This book is a lively mix of philosophy, photography, architectural drawings and models, and new media.
Publisher Actar Editorial, 2007
ISBN 8496540537, 9788496540538
175 pages
Rem Koolhaas: Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (1978/1994)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, city, new york, urbanism
Since its original publication in 1978, Delirious New York has attained mythic status. Back in print in a newly designed edition, this influential cultural, architectural, and social history of New York is even more popular, selling out its first printing on publication. Rem Koolhaas’s celebration and analysis of New York depicts the city as a metaphor for the incredible variety of human behavior. At the end of the nineteenth century, population, information, and technology explosions made Manhattan a laboratory for the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle — “the culture of congestion” — and its architecture.
“Manhattan,” he writes, “is the 20th century’s Rosetta Stone … occupied by architectural mutations (Central Park, the Skyscraper), utopian fragments (Rockefeller Center, the U.N. Building), and irrational phenomena (Radio City Music Hall).” Koolhaas interprets and reinterprets the dynamic relationship between architecture and culture in a number of telling episodes of New York’s history, including the imposition of the Manhattan grid, the creation of Coney Island, and the development of the skyscraper. Delirious New York is also packed with intriguing and fun facts and illustrated with witty watercolors and quirky archival drawings, photographs, postcards, and maps. The spirit of this visionary investigation of Manhattan equals the energy of the city itself.
Originally published by Thames & Hudson, 1978
Publisher Monacelli Press, 1994
ISBN 1885254008, 9781885254009
317 pages