Keller Easterling: Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (2014)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, architecture, city, design, economics, globalisation, governance, infrastructure, power, resistance, software, space
“Extrastatecraft controls everyday life in the city: it’s the key to power – and resistance – in the twenty-first century.
Infrastructure is not only the underground pipes and cables controlling our cities. It also determines the hidden rules that structure the spaces all around us – free trade zones, smart cities, suburbs, and shopping malls. Extrastatecraft charts the emergent new powers controlling this space and shows how they extend beyond the reach of government.
Keller Easterling explores areas of infrastructure with the greatest impact on our world – examining everything from standards for the thinness of credit cards to the urbanism of mobile telephony, the world’s largest shared platform, to the “free zone,” the most virulent new world city paradigm. In conclusion, she proposes some unexpected techniques for resisting power in the modern world.”
Publisher Verso, 2014
ISBN 1781685878, 9781781685877
252 pages
Reviews: Self (AR 2014), Wark (2014), Garrett (Antipode 2015), Chan (Art Papers 2015), Owens (Icon 2015), Coggan (Oculus 2015), Harwood (Artforum 2015), Barber (CAA 2018).
PDF (added on 2019-7-8)
EPUB, EPUB (3 MB, updated on 2019-7-8)
Colin Rowe, Fred Koetter: Collage City (1978–) [EN, DE, ES]
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, bricolage, city, collage, modernism, postmodernism, theory, urban design, urban planning, urbanism, utopia
“A theoretical treatise that sets out various analyses of urban form in a number of existing cities known to be aesthetically successful, examining their actually existing urban structure as found, revealing it to be the end product of a ceaseless process of fragmentation, the collision / superimposition / contamination of many diverse ideas imposed on it by successive generations, each with its own idea.”
A major thesis on urban interaction which first introduced the concept of “bricolage” to urban theory.
Publisher MIT Press, 1978
ISBN 0262180863, 9780262180863
186 pages
Commentary: ANY 7-8, dedicated to Rowe’s work (ed. Robert Somol, 1994), K. Michael Hays (Architecture Theory Since 1968, 1998), Joan Ockman (Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 1998), Anthony Vidler (Architectural Review, 2011).
Review: Ed Cutler (2010).
Collage City (English, 1978, 99 MB, via)
Collage City (German, trans. Bernhard Hoesli, 1984, 37 MB)
Ciudad collage (Spanish, trans. Esteve Riambau Sauri, 1998, 23 MB, via)
Introduction to French edition (1993)
Valerio Borgonuovo, Silvia Franceschini (eds.): Global Tools, 1973-1975 (2015)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1970s, architecture, art, body, city, design, education, learning, self-education
“Global Tools was a multidisciplinary experimental program of design education founded in 1973 in Italy by the members of the Radical Architecture including Ettore Sottsass Jr. and Andrea Branzi among others. It was conceived as a diffuse system of laboratories (firstly in Florence, Milan and Naples) promoting the ‘study and use of natural materials and their behavioural characteristics’ with the support of media (namely the magazine Casabella) and aimed to establish an alternative relation with the Italian industry.”
“For the first time in the forty years that have passed since its formation, the experience of the Global Tools counter-school has been brought together in book form, uniting the images and archive documents that were produced over the few short years of its existence. This volume is compiled to chronicle and evaluate the three years of seminar activity that took place between Florence, Milan and Naples in the early 1970s, bringing to a wider audience the story of this tentative attempt to realize an experimental dispersed educational program that would serve as an alternative to the university as an institutional model of reference.
The aim of Global Tools 1973-1975 is to provide a tool for the understanding and reconstruction of the experience shared by, among others, the architects and designers Ettore Sottsass Jr., Alessandro Mendini, Andrea Branzi, Riccardo Dalisi, Remo Buti, Ugo La Pietra, Franco Raggi, Davide Mosconi, and members of the groups Archizoom, 9999, Superstudio, UFO and Zziggurat; conceptual artists and intellectuals Franco Vaccari, Giuseppe Chiari, Luciano Fabro and Germano Celant. The book also contextualizes Global Tools within a more complex network of references and connections. The critical perspectives offered by the contributions of experts and scholars are employed to shed light on those aspects of contemporary experience shared by this pedagogical utopia with the wider world.”
With contributions by Manola Antonioli, Valerio Borgonuovo, Alison J. Clarke, Beatriz Colomina, Silvia Franceschini, Maurizio Lazzarato, Franco Raggi, Simon Sadler, and Alessandro Vicari.
Publisher SALT, Istanbul, July 2015
Creative Commons BY NC ND 3.0 License
ISBN 9789944731461
173 pages