Living as Form

Living as Form
Author: Nato Thompson
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2012
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262017342

'Living as Form' grew out of a major exhibition at Creative Time in New York City. Like the exhibition, the book is a landmark survey of more than 100 projects selected by a 30-person curatorial advisory team; each project is documented by a selection of colour images.

Artistic Research

Artistic Research
Author: Annette W. Balkema
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2004
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9789042010970

Advanced art education is in the process of developing research programs throughout Europe. What does the term research actually means in the practice of art? What is the relation to the scientific methods of alpha, beta or gamma sciences, directed toward knowledge production and the development of a certain scientific domaine? What will be the influence of scientific research on the art forms?

VERSUS: Heritage for Tomorrow

VERSUS: Heritage for Tomorrow
Author: Correia, Mariana
Publisher: Firenze University Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2014
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 8866557412

Vernacular architecture represents a great resource that has considerable potential to define principles for sustainable design and contemporary architecture. This publication is the result of an overall aim to produce a valuable tool for analysis regarding vernacular heritage through different assessments, in order to define principles to consider for sustainable development. This was possible through a comprehensive reflection on the principles established and the strategies to recognise in different world contexts. The present publication was the result of an in-depth approach by 46 authors from 12 countries, concerned with the analysis and critical assessment of vernacular heritage and its sustainable perspective. The book presents 8 chapters addressing operational definitions and synopses advances, regarding the main areas of vernacular heritage contribution to sustainable architecture. It also presents 15 chapters and 53 case studies of vernacular and contemporary approaches in all the 5 continents, regarding urban, architectural, technical and constructive strategies and solutions. VERSUS, HERITAGE FOR TOMORROW: Vernacular Knowledge for Sustainable Architecture is the result of a common effort undertaken by the partners ESG | Escola Superior Gallaecia, Portugal, as Project leader; CRAterre | École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble, France; DIDA | Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy; DICAAR | Università degli Studi di Cagliari, Italy; and UPV | Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain. This is the final outcome of VerSus, an European project developed from 2012 to 2014, in the framework of the Culture 2007-2013 programme.

Art as a Thinking Process

Art as a Thinking Process
Author: Mara Ambrožič
Publisher:
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2013
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781934105931

What is the contemporary relationship between art and thought,

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia
Author: Francisco Martinez
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2018-07-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1787353532

What happens to legacies that do not find any continuation? In Estonia, a new generation that does not remember the socialist era and is open to global influences has grown up. As a result, the impact of the Soviet memory in people’s conventional values is losing its effective power, opening new opportunities for repair and revaluation of the past. Francisco Martinez brings together a number of sites of interest to explore the vanquishing of the Soviet legacy in Estonia: the railway bazaar in Tallinn where concepts such as ‘market’ and ‘employment’ take on distinctly different meanings from their Western use; Linnahall, a grandiose venue, whose Soviet heritage now poses diffi cult questions of how to present the building’s history; Tallinn’s cityscape, where the social, spatial and temporal co-evolution of the city can be viewed and debated; Narva, a city that marks the border between the Russian Federation, NATO and the European Union, and represents a place of continual negotiation of belonging; and the new Estonian National Museum in Raadi, an area on the outskirts of Tartu, that has been turned into a memory field. The anthropological study of all these places shows that national identity and historical representations can be constructed in relation to waste and disrepair too, also demonstrating how we can understand generational change in a material sense. Praise for Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia 'By adopting the tropes of ‘repair’ and ‘waste’, this book innovatively manages to link various material registers from architecture, intergenerational relations, affect and museums with ways of making the past present. Through a rigorous yet transdisciplinary method, Martínez brings together different scales and contexts that would often be segregated out. In this respect, the ethnography unfolds a deep and nuanced analysis, providing a useful comparative and insightful account of the processes of repair and waste making in all their material, social and ontological dimensions.' Victor Buchli, Professor of Material Culture at UCL 'This book comprises an endearingly transdisciplinary ethnography of postsocialist material culture and social change in Estonia. Martínez creatively draws on a number of critical and cultural theorists, together with additional research on memory and political studies scholarship and the classics of anthropology. Grappling concurrently with time and space, the book offers a delightfully thick description of the material effects generated by the accelerated post-Soviet transformation in Estonia, inquiring into the generational specificities in experiencing and relating to the postsocialist condition through the conceptual anchors of wasted legacies and repair. This book defies disciplinary boundaries and shows how an attention to material relations and affective infrastructures might reinvigorate political theory.' Maria Mälksoo, Senior Lecturer, Brussels School of International Studies at the University of Kent

In the Bubble

In the Bubble
Author: John Thackara
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2006-02-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0262701154

How to design a world in which we rely less on stuff, and more on people. We're filling up the world with technology and devices, but we've lost sight of an important question: What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives? So asks author John Thackara in his new book, In the Bubble: Designing for a Complex World. These are tough questions for the pushers of technology to answer. Our economic system is centered on technology, so it would be no small matter if "tech" ceased to be an end-in-itself in our daily lives. Technology is not going to go away, but the time to discuss the end it will serve is before we deploy it, not after. We need to ask what purpose will be served by the broadband communications, smart materials, wearable computing, and connected appliances that we're unleashing upon the world. We need to ask what impact all this stuff will have on our daily lives. Who will look after it, and how? In the Bubble is about a world based less on stuff and more on people. Thackara describes a transformation that is taking place now—not in a remote science fiction future; it's not about, as he puts it, "the schlock of the new" but about radical innovation already emerging in daily life. We are regaining respect for what people can do that technology can't. In the Bubble describes services designed to help people carry out daily activities in new ways. Many of these services involve technology—ranging from body implants to wide-bodied jets. But objects and systems play a supporting role in a people-centered world. The design focus is on services, not things. And new principles—above all, lightness—inform the way these services are designed and used. At the heart of In the Bubble is a belief, informed by a wealth of real-world examples, that ethics and responsibility can inform design decisions without impeding social and technical innovation.

The Cultural Identities of European Cities

The Cultural Identities of European Cities
Author: Katia Pizzi
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2010
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9783039119301

Cities are both real and imaginary places whose identity is dependent on their distinctive heritage: a network of historically transmitted cultural resources. The essays in this volume, which originate from a lecture series at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London, explore the complex and multi-layered identities of European cities. Themes that run through the essays include: nostalgia for a grander past; location between Eastern and Western ideologies, religions and cultures; and the fluidity and palimpsest quality of city identity. Not only does the book provide different thematic angles and a variety of approaches to the investigation of city identity, it also emphasizes the importance of diverse cultural components. The essays presented here discuss cultural forms as various as music, architecture, literature, journalism, philosophy, television, film, myths, urban planning and the naming of streets.