Modernism

Modernism
Author: Christopher Wilk
Publisher: Victoria & Albert Museum
Total Pages: 447
Release: 2006
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781851774777

Modernism flourished from 1914 to 1939 and it was a key point of reference for 20th century architecture, design and art. This work explores Modernism and design from an international perspective and reveals the ways in which it has shaped our world and its visual culture.

Building a new New World

Building a new New World
Author: Jean-Louis Cohen
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 545
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0300248156

An essential exploration of how Russian ideas about the United States shaped architecture and urban design from the czarist era to the fall of the U.S.S.R. Idealized representations of America, as both an aspiration and a menace, played an important role in shaping Russian architecture and urban design from the American Revolution until the fall of the Soviet Union. Jean-Louis Cohen traces the powerful concept of “Amerikanizm” and its impact on Russia’s built environment from early czarist interest in Revolutionary America, through the spectacular World’s Fairs of the 19th century, to department stores, skyscrapers, and factories built in Russia using American methods during the 20th century. Visions of America also captivated the Russian avant-garde, from El Lissitzky to Moisei Ginzburg, and Cohen explores the ongoing artistic dialogue maintained between the two countries at the mid-century and in the late Soviet era, following a period of strategic competition. This first major study of Amerikanizm in the architecture of Russia makes a timely contribution to our understanding of modern architecture and its broader geopolitics.

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.

Designing a New World

Designing a New World
Author: Janny Venema
Publisher: Uitgeverij Verloren
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2011
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9087041969

A biography of Kiliaen van Rensselaer, one of the founding directors of the Dutch West India Company and a leading figure in the establishment of the New Netherland colony

Designing a World for Everyone

Designing a World for Everyone
Author: Jeremy Myerson
Publisher: Lund Humphries Publishers Limited
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2021-06-10
Genre: Design
ISBN: 9781848224636

The way we experience the world is largely through the design of the places, products, communications, services and systems we encounter every day. Design determines how difficult or easy it is to achieve certain things - whether boarding a plane, taking a bath, cooking a meal, crossing the street or making a call, we all want a world that works ......

Building a New World

Building a New World
Author: Prestel Publishing
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022-05-31
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3791379429

This collection of nearly two dozen detachable, frameable, propaganda posters offer an outstanding selection of examples from East Germany, Russia, Southeast Asia, and China. Reproduced in startling color and printed on high-quality paper, they offer fascinating historical insight, as well as sublime examples of how graphic art can be both highly effective as well as visually stunning. The Russian October Revolution of 1917 marked the beginning of decades of communist rule that spanned large parts of the world. For many years and in many countries, the most reliable means of spreading state propaganda was through posters like the ones included in this beautiful collection. Distinguished by their bold, bright colors, and generally featuring one or two main figures or a single forceful image, they were ubiquitously plastered on the walls of factories, farms, office buildings, transportation centers, and public squares. They exhorted citizens to proclaim their patriotism through hard work, exercise, and loyalty, and celebrated technological advances in science, space travel, and architecture. Representing an impressive array of styles, cultures, and historical eras this collection is suitable for walls and coffee tables alike.

Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World, Volume 1

Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World, Volume 1
Author: Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2018-12-04
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262535793

Tools for navigating today's hyper-connected, rapidly changing, and radically contingent white water world. Design Unbound presents a new tool set for having agency in the twenty-first century, in what the authors characterize as a white water world—rapidly changing, hyperconnected, and radically contingent. These are the tools of a new kind of practice that is the offspring of complexity science, which gives us a new lens through which to view the world as entangled and emerging, and architecture, which is about designing contexts. In such a practice, design, unbound from its material thingness, is set free to design contexts as complex systems. In a world where causality is systemic, entangled, in flux, and often elusive, we cannot design for absolute outcomes. Instead, we need to design for emergence. Design Unbound not only makes this case through theory but also presents a set of tools to do so. With case studies that range from a new kind of university to organizational, and even societal, transformation, Design Unbound draws from a vast array of domains: architecture, science and technology, philosophy, cinema, music, literature and poetry, even the military. It is presented in five books, bound as two volumes. Different books within the larger system of books will resonate with different reading audiences, from architects to people reconceiving higher education to the public policy or defense and intelligence communities. The authors provide different entry points allowing readers to navigate their own pathways through the system of books.

The World as Design

The World as Design
Author: Otl Aicher
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2015-04-27
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 3433031177

Otl Aicher's writings are explorations of the world, a substantive part of his work. In moving through the history of thought and design, building and construction, he assures us of the possibilities of arranging existence in a humane fashion. As ever he is concerned with the question of the conditions needed to produce a civilised culture. These conditions have to be fought for against apparent factual or material constraints and spiritual and intellectual substitutes on offer. Otl Aicher likes a dispute. For this reason, the volume contains polemical statements on cultural and political subjects as well as practical reports and historical exposition. He fights with productive obstinacy, above all for the renewal of Modernism, which he claims has largely exhausted itself in aesthetic visions; he insists the ordinary working day is still more important than the "cultural Sunday". Wolfgang Jean Stock

Clean New World

Clean New World
Author: Maud Lavin
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2001
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780262621700

Maud Lavin approaches design from the broader field of visual culture criticism, asking challenging questions about about who really has a voice in the culture and what unseen influences affect the look of things designers produce. Our culture is dominated by the visual. Yet most writing on design reflects a narrow preoccupation with products, biographies, and design influences. Maud Lavin approaches design from the broader field of visual culture criticism, asking challenging questions about about who really has a voice in the culture and what unseen influences affect the look of things designers produce. Lavin shows how design fits into larger questions of power, democracy, and communication. Many corporate clients instruct designers to convey order and clarity in order to give their companies the look of a clean new world. But since designers cannot clean up messy reality, Lavin shows, they often end up simply veiling it. Lacking the power to influence the content of their commercial work, many designers work simultaneously on other, more fulfilling projects. Lavin is especially interested in the graphic designer's role in shaping cultural norms. She examines the anti-Nazi propaganda of John Heartfield, the modernist utopian design of Kurt Schwitters and the neue ring werbegestalter, the alternative images of women by studio ringl + pit, the activist work of such contemporary designers as Marlene McCarty and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, and the Internet innovations of David Steuer and others. Throughout the book, Lavin asks how designers can expand the pleasure, democracy, and vitality of communication.