Monrovia Modern

Monrovia Modern
Author: Danny Hoffman
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2017-08-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822373084

In Monrovia Modern Danny Hoffman uses the ruins of four iconic modernist buildings in Monrovia, Liberia, as a way to explore the relationship between the built environment and political imagination. Hoffman shows how the E. J. Roye tower and the Hotel Africa luxury resort, as well as the unfinished Ministry of Defense and Liberia Broadcasting System buildings, transformed during the urban warfare of the 1990s from symbols of the modernist project of nation-building to reminders of the challenges Monrovia's residents face. The transient lives of these buildings' inhabitants, many of whom are ex-combatants, prevent them from making place-based claims to a right to the city and hinder their ability to think of ways to rebuild and repurpose their built environment. Featuring nearly 100 of Hoffman's color photographs, Monrovia Modern is situated at the intersection of photography, architecture, and anthropology, mapping out the possibilities and limits for imagining an urban future in Monrovia and beyond.

Los Angeles Modern

Los Angeles Modern
Author:
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2008-10-21
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0847830675

The birthplace of American modernism, Los Angeles is the epicenter for a new way of living for the last one hundred years, as manifested in its cutting-edge architecture and design. With roots in the innovative houses by Frank Lloyd Wright, Greene & Greene, and Rudolph Schindler in the early twentieth century, this constantly evolving city became a crucible of modern living. Inspired by the International Style, architects and designers in Los Angeles developed their own individual styles with a rare sensitivity to site, landscape, and human scale. This brand of modernism, blurring the boundaries of indoors and outdoors, has since been imitated from Seattle to Sydney. Acclaimed architecture and design photographer Tim Street-Porter captures the best Modernist architecture of Los Angeles, from the seminal Neutra houses to the idiosynchratic structures by Frank Gehry. With iconic buildings by Craig Ellwood, Pierre Koenig, John Lautner, Charles and Ray Eames, and Oscar Niemeyer, among others, L.A. Modern presents the full spectrum of Los Angeles modernism in gorgeous new color photography.

1887

1887
Author: Richard Singer
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2020-06
Genre:
ISBN: 9780578693835

The story of Monrovia, California's beginnings and the people who created a city.

Los Angeles Modernism Revisited

Los Angeles Modernism Revisited
Author: Andreas Nierhaus
Publisher: Park Publishing (WI)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Architecture, Domestic
ISBN: 9783038601616

Two Austrian-born designers have left their indelible mark on California?s residential architecture of the 1930s to 1960s: Richard Neutra (1892?1970) and Rudolph M. Schindler (1887?1953) combined modern form and inventive construction with new materials to create a truly modern vision of living that remains inspirational to the present day.00This new book features twenty famous and lesser known houses from that period, designed by the two pioneers and other architects that were influenced by Neutra?s and Schindler?s ideas. All are marked by highly economical use and outstanding quality of space, a minimalist aesthetic, and by their ideal adaption to climatic conditions. They are monuments of a period as well as timeless models for contemporary and future architecture.00The images by photographer David Schreyer show the buildings in their present state as a commodity of highest quality that can be, and should be, altered to meet today?s changed demands to a living space. Andreas Nierhaus?s texts, based on interviews, explore the relationship of the present inhabitants to their homes and what they mean to them. Together, the authors offer uniquely intimate insights into a sophisticated way of life still too little known outside California.

Making L.A. Modern

Making L.A. Modern
Author: Michael Boyd
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2018-04-03
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0847861538

This is the definitive volume on Craig Ellwood, a visionary architect, designer, and tastemaker often called the “California Mies van der Rohe.” Craig Ellwood, “the Cary Grant of architecture,” was one of the most visible faces of California mid-century modernism. He was known as much for his exquisitely designed, minimalist structures as he was for his exuberant lifestyle. This book celebrates and explores the glamour of Ellwood’s work, life, myth, and career. Through photographs, primarily of the iconic houses he designed in Southern California during the 1950s and ’60s, we see a life of refined decadence, expressed through gorgeous architecture, fast cars, beautiful women, Hollywood style, palm trees, swimming pools, and minimalist design—all in the context of the Southern California postwar building boom. This volume will appeal to design junkies, architecture buffs, students of modernism, and anyone interested in problem-solving and elegant solutions.

The War Machines

The War Machines
Author: Danny Hoffman
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2011-09-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822350777

Based on ethnographic research among militias in Sierra Leone and Liberia, Danny Hoffman considers how young men are made available for violent labor on battlefields and in dangerous unregulated industries.

Molvania:A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry

Molvania:A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry
Author: R Sitch
Publisher: Hardie Grant Publishing
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2003-11-01
Genre: Humor
ISBN: 1742731295

The funniest book about travel you will ever read: a travel guide to the fictional European republic 'Molvania', birthplace of the polka and whooping cough. The text and design draw on the standard travel guide format and include: background information on the destination, including cultural details, useful phrases, holidays, and calendar of events; accommodation and restaurant listings; activities and excursions; as well as text break-outs, colour photos and maps throughout.

Wake Up, This Is Joburg

Wake Up, This Is Joburg
Author: Tanya Zack
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2022-09-19
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1478023325

A single image taken from a high-rise building in inner-city Johannesburg uncovers layers of history—from its premise and promise of gold to its current improvisations. It reveals the city as carcass and as crucible, where informal agents and processes spearhead its rapid reshaping and transformation. In Wake Up, This Is Joburg, writer Tanya Zack and photographer Mark Lewis offer a stunning portrait of Johannesburg and personal stories of some of the city’s ordinary, odd, and outrageous residents. Their photos and essays take readers into meat markets where butchers chop cow heads; the eclectic home of an outsider artist that features turrets and full of manikins; long-abandoned gold pits beneath the city, where people continue to mine informally; and lively markets, taxi depots, and residential high-rises. Sharing people’s private and work lives and the extraordinary spaces of the metropolis, Zack and Lewis show that Johannesburg’s urban transformation occurs not in a series of dramatic, wide-scale changes but in the everyday lives, actions, and dreams of individuals.

Los Angeles and the Automobile

Los Angeles and the Automobile
Author: Scott L. Bottles
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 1987
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520057951

More comprehensive than any other book on this topic, Los Angeles and the Automobile places the evolution of Los Angeles within the context of American political and urban history.

A Ritual Geology

A Ritual Geology
Author: Robyn d'Avignon
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2022-07-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478023074

Set against the ongoing corporate enclosure of West Africa’s goldfields, A Ritual Geology tells the untold history of one of the world’s oldest indigenous gold mining industries: Francophone West Africa’s orpaillage. Establishing African miners as producers of subterranean knowledge, Robyn d’Avignon uncovers a dynamic “ritual geology” of techniques and cosmological engagements with the earth developed by agrarian residents of gold-bearing rocks in savanna West Africa. Colonial and corporate exploration geology in the region was built upon the ritual knowledge, gold discoveries, and skilled labor of African miners even as states racialized African mining as archaic, criminal, and pagan. Spanning the medieval and imperial past to the postcolonial present, d’Avignon weaves together long-term ethnographic and oral historical work in southeastern Senegal with archival and archeological evidence from Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Mali. A Ritual Geology introduces transnational geological formations as a new regional framework for African studies, environmental history, and anthropology.