Bernard Cache: Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories (1995)

Earth Moves, Bernard Cache’s first major work, conceptualizes a series of architectural images as vehicles for two important developments. First, he offers a new understanding of the architectural image itself. Following Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson, he develops an account of the image that is nonrepresentational and constructive—images as constituents of a primary, image world, of which subjectivity itself is a special kind of image. Second, Cache redefines architecture beyond building proper to include cinematic, pictoral, and other framings.

Complementary to this classification, Cache offers what is to date the only Deleuzean architectural development of the “fold,” a form and concept that has become important over the last few years. For Cache, as for Deleuze, what is significant about the fold is that it provides a way to rethink the relationship between interior and exterior, between past and present, and between architecture and the urban.

Translation of an unpublished French manuscript written in 1983 under the title Terre meuble.
Translated by Anne Boyman
Edited by Michael Speaks
Publisher MIT Press, 1995
Writing Architecture series
ISBN 0262531305, 9780262531306
153 pages

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Christian Ulrik Andersen, Geoff Cox, Jacob Lund (eds.): Nyhedsavisen: Public Interfaces, No. 1 (2011)

Nyhedsavisen: Public Interfaces is a fake newspaper presenting cutting edge research in an accessible free tabloid format. The newspaper is a 100% genuine copy of the famous Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

The increasing demand for publication of academic peer-reviewed journal articles must be met. Unfortunate examples demonstrate that this may lead to plagiarism. This is not a viable solution. Research must be original and academia is not lacking original content. But perhaps researchers need new visions of how to produce research? Perhaps the readers need new ways of consuming research? Why not imagine academic research as something that can be consumed on a daily basis, in the train or at the breakfast table?

On April 1, at 1 pm, Nyhedsavisen: Public Interfaces was handed out to the public at the metro station ‘DR Byen/Universitetet’ in Copenhagen as well as at the central railway station in Aarhus and the State Library. Also, issues were tactically placed in selected free newspaper stands and at University lunchrooms worldwide.

Emerging from the Digital Aesthetics Research Center and the Center for Digital Urban Living (Aarhus University), the aim of Nyhedsavisen: Public Interfaces is to encompass the changing concept of the ’public’. This is the result of an ongoing research in the computer interface.

The starting point for the newspaper is that the computer interface is a cultural paradigm affecting not only our creative production and presentation of the world but also our perception of the world. Its authors recognize that in the past decade, interfaces have been expanding from the graphical user interface of the computer to meet the needs of different new technologies, uses, cultures and contexts: they are more mobile, networked, ubiquitous, and embedded in the environment and architecture, part of regeneration agendas and new aesthetic and cultural practices, etc. Nyhedsavisen: Public Interfaces investigates these new interfaces that affect relations between public and private realms, and generate new forms urban spaces and activities, new forms of exchange and new forms of creative production.

The newspaper is organised into thematic strands (urban, art, capital) and brings together researchers from diverse fields – across aesthetics, cultural theory, architecture, digital design and urban studies – united by the need to understand public interfaces and the paradigmatic changes they pose to these fields.

All articles derive from an initial conference and PhD workshop held in January 2011, at Aarhus University.

Publisher Digital Aesthetics Research Center & Center for Digital Urban Living, Aarhus University, Aarhus, March 2011
ISBN 87-91810-18-3
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
24 pages

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Margret Kentgens-Craig: The Bauhaus and America: First Contacts, 1919-1936 (1999)

The Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar in 1919 by the German architect Walter Gropius, moved to Dessau in 1925 and to Berlin in 1932, and was dissolved in 1933 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe under political duress. Although it existed for a mere fourteen years and boasted fewer than 1,300 students, its influence is felt throughout the world in numerous buildings, artworks, objects, concepts, and curricula.

After the Bauhaus’s closing in 1933, many of its protagonists moved to the United States, where their acceptance had to be cultivated. The key to understanding the American reception of the Bauhaus is to be found not in the émigré success stories or the famous 1938 Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, but in the course of America’s early contact with the Bauhaus. In this book Margret Kentgens-Craig shows that the fame of the Bauhaus in America was the result not only of the inherent qualities of its concepts and products, but also of a unique congruence of cultural supply and demand, of a consistent flow of information, and of fine-tuned marketing. Thus the history of the American reception of the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 1930s foreshadows the patterns of fame-making that became typical of the post-World War II art world. The transfer of artistic, intellectual, and pedagogical concepts from one cultural context to another is a process of transformation and integration. In presenting a case study of this process, the book also provides fresh insights into the German-American cultural history of the period from 1919 to 1936.

Publisher MIT Press, 1999
ISBN 026211237X, 9780262112376
283 pages

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