Volume 16: Engineering Society & Volume 17: Content Management (2008)

Volume 16: Engineering Society (2008, 2)

Just as there was a time before the book, there will also be a time after it. In this issue ‘The Last Book’ project is taken up, but as to the consequences of publishing exclusively online – the loss of filters such as the publisher, editor and publication costs – we can only guess. Yet it is clear that our centuries old house of knowledge is undergoing a fundamental renovation, beginning with the solid base of the library.

Volume 17: Content Management (2008, 3)

At the close of this era of expansion and surplus Volume speculates on one of the period’s emblematic inventions: Content Management, or the collecting, organizing and sharing of digital information. Our retrospective appraisal of recent developments in the managing of information offers inside into the ability of Content Management to serve the current realities of digital abundance and material shortage, and to protect both vast and extremely limited quantities.

Publisher Archis Publishers, Amsterdam

Magazine website

PDF (Vol. 16, added on 2013-7-28)
PDF (Vol. 17, added on 2013-7-28)

Andrew Benjamin, Charles Rice (eds.): Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity (2009)

Walter Benjamin is universally recognized as one of the key thinkers of modernity: his writings on politics, language, literature, media, theology and law have had an incalculable influence on contemporary thought. Yet the problem of architecture in and for Benjamin’s work remains relatively underexamined. Does Benjamin’s project have an architecture and, if so, how does this architecture affect the explicit propositions that he offers us? In what ways are Benjamin’s writings centrally caught up with architectural concerns, from the redevelopment of major urban centres to the movements that individuals can make within the new spaces of modern cities? How can Benjamin’s theses help us to understand the secret architectures of the present? This volume takes up the architectural challenge in a number of innovative ways, collecting essays by both well-known and emerging scholars on time in cinema, the problem of kitsch, the design of graves and tombs, the orders of road-signs, childhood experience in modern cities, and much more. Engaged, interdisciplinary, bristling with insights, the essays in this collection will constitute an indispensable supplement to the work of Walter Benjamin, as well as providing a guide to some of the obscurities of our own present.

Publisher re.press, Melbourne, July 2009
Anamnesis series
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.5 license
ISBN 9780980544022
224 pages

publisher

PDF

William W Braham, Jonathan A Hale (eds.): Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory (2006)

“This book contains over fifty selected essays, manifestoes, reflections and theories by architects and architectural writers from 1900 to 2004. This mapping out of a century of architectural technology reveals the discipline’s long and close attention to the experience and effects of new technologies, and provides a broad picture of the shift from the ‘age of tools’ to the ‘age of systems’.

Chronological arrangement and cross-referencing of the articles enable both a thematic and historically contextual understanding of the topic and highlight important thematic connections across time.”

Publisher Routledge, 2006
ISBN 0415346541, 9780415346542
488 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2018-5-31)