The Roundabout Revolutions

The Roundabout Revolutions
Author: Eyal Weizman
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015-09-04
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 3956790987

One common feature of the wave of recent revolutions and revolts around the world is not political but rather architectural: many erupted on inner-city roundabouts. In thinking about the relation between protest and urban form, Eyal Weizman starts with the May 1980 uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, the first of the “roundabout revolutions,” and traces its lineage to the Arab Spring and its hellish aftermath. Rereading the history of the roundabout through the vortices of history that traverse it, the book follows the development of the roundabout in Europe and North America in the early twentieth century, to its subsequent export to the colonial world in the context of attempts to discipline and police the “chaotic” non-Western city. How did an urban apparatus put in the service of authoritarian power became the locus of its undoing? Today, as the tide of revolt that characterized the Arab Spring seems to ebb, when nations and societies disintegrate by brutal civil wars and military oppression, the series of revolutions might seem like Dante's circles of hell. To counter this counter-revolution, Weizman proposes that the immanent power of the people at the roundabouts will need to find its corollary in sustained work at round tables—the ongoing formation of political movements able to enact political change. The sixth volume of the Critical Spatial Practice series stems from Eyal Weizman's contribution to the Gwangju Folly II in 2013, an exhibition curated by Nikolaus Hirsch with Philipp Misselwitz and Eui Young Chun for the Gwangju Biennale. Weizman and the architect Samaneh Moafi constructed a folly composed of seven roundabouts and a round table in front of the Gwangju train station, one of the central points in the events of May 1980. Critical Spatial Practice 6 With Blake Fisher and Samaneh Moafi Edited by Nikolaus Hirsch, Markus Miessen Featuring photography by Kyungsub Shin

Hollow Land

Hollow Land
Author: Eyal Weizman
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2024-10-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1804297100

Hollow Land is a groundbreaking exploration of the political space created by Israel’s colonial occupation. In this journey from the deep subterranean spaces of the West Bank and Gaza to their militarized airspace, Eyal Weizman unravels Israel’s mechanisms of control and its transformation of the Occupied Territories into a theoretically constructed artifice, in which all natural and built features function as the weapons and ammunition with which the conflict is waged. Weizman traces the development of these ideas, from the influence of archaeology on urban planning, Ariel Sharon’s reconceptualization of military defense during the 1973 war, through the planning and architecture of the settlements, to contemporary Israeli discourse and practice of urban warfare and airborne targeted assassinations. In exploring Israel’s methods to transform the landscape and the built environment themselves into tools of domination and control, Hollow Land lays bare the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation.

Crow's Eye View

Crow's Eye View
Author: Hyŏng-min Pae
Publisher: 아키라이프
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Architecture, Korean
ISBN: 9788996450863

The ninth architecture exhibition to be held in the Korean pavilion, on the occasion of the 2014 Venice Biennale, is significant in many ways. Minsuk Cho, the commissioner responsible for the exhibition, is also one of Korea's most important architects. Cho examines both South and North Korean architecture in a fascinating presentation of Korean modernity, responding to the multiplicity of narratives that have taken place on the divided peninsula over the last century. Moving through four themes - everyday life, the monumental state, utopian visions and borders - this book includes works and essays by more than 30 artists and theorists.

Dear Navigator

Dear Navigator
Author: Hu Fang
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Chinese fiction
ISBN: 9783956790348

Hu Fang's Dear Navigator is a collection of ten short stories that reflect on contemporary society, politics, and the human condition. The author takes us on a journey across time and space to hidden realities where we meet culture workers, astronauts, airplanes, Zen masters, and hunger artists. The title story "Dear Navigator" is a collection of letters written during a 520-day simulated space mission to Mars--to test if humans can endure travel from Earth to Mars and back again. "Whale Song" tells the story of XP, a lonely male escort, as he goes on a surreal journey to self-realization, and "The Shame of Participation" tells a tale of two thieving artists who legally steal objects from those living in a city in desperation. When the reality turns into fiction, and the science fiction becomes reality, Hu draws on the experience of everyday life, the past, and the unknown future to create stories of otherworldly melancholy and humor. Hu Fang is a fiction writer and cofounder of Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, and The Pavilion, Beijing. He lives and works in Guangzhou and Beijing. Previously published titles include Troubled Laughter (2012), Garden of Mirrored Flowers (2010), and Pavilion to the Heart's Insight (2008). His stories have been published in e-flux journal, Manifesta Journal, and various publications including Ming Wong: Life of Imitation, Drone Fiction, Odyssey: Architecture and Literature, and Gwangju Folly. Copublished with The Pavilion

Flashback Hotel

Flashback Hotel
Author: Ivan Vladislavić
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2011-10-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1415202524

Two sought-after collections of short stories by Ivan Vladislavi? are brought together and made available again in this new volume. Vladislavi?’s abilities as a master of understatement and brevity are brilliantly demonstrated in these stories from Missing Persons (1989), for which he received the Olive Schreiner Prize, and Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories (1996), featuring the two stories that won him the Thomas Pringle Award.

Designing Streets for Kids

Designing Streets for Kids
Author: National Association of City Transportation Officials
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-12-12
Genre: Streets
ISBN: 9781642830712

Building on the success of their Global Street Design Guide, the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO)-Global Designing Cities Initiative (GDCI) Streets for Kids program has developed child-focused design guidance to inspire leaders, inform practitioners, and empower communities around the world to consider their city from the eyes of a child. The guidance in Designing Streets for Kids captures international best practices, strategies, programs, and policies that cities around the world have used to design streets and public spaces that are safe and appealing to children from their earliest days. The guidance also highlights tactics for engaging children in the design process, an often-overlooked approach that can dramatically transform how streets are designed and used.

Weaponized Architecture

Weaponized Architecture
Author: Léopold Lambert
Publisher: dpr-barcelona
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2012
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 8461537025

Research informs the development of a project which, rather than defusing these characteristics, attempts to integrate them within the scene of a political struggle. The proposed project dramatizes, through its architecture, a Palestinian disobedience to the colonial legislation imposed on its legal territory. In fact, the State of Israel masters the elaboration of territorial and architectural colonial apparatuses that act directly on Palestinian daily lives. In this regard, it is crucial to observe that 63% of the West Bank is under total control of the Israeli Defense Forces in regards to security, movement, planning and construction. Weaponized Architecture is thus manifested as a Palestinian shelter, with an associated agricultural platform, which expresses its illegality through its architectural vocabulary.

Forensic Architecture

Forensic Architecture
Author: Eyal Weizman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2017-05-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1935408178

In recent years, a little-known research group named Forensic Architecture began using novel research methods to undertake a series of investigations into human rights abuses. Today, the group provides crucial evidence for international courts and works with a wide range of activist groups, NGOs, Amnesty International, and the UN. Beyond shedding new light on human rights violations and state crimes across the globe, Forensic Architecture has also created a new form of investigative practice that bears its name. The group uses architecture as an optical device to investigate armed conflicts and environmental destruction, as well as to cross-reference a variety of evidence sources, such as new media, remote sensing, material analysis, witness testimony, and crowd-sourcing. In Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman, the group’s founder, provides, for the first time, an in-depth introduction to the history, practice, assumptions, potentials, and double binds of this practice. The book includes an extensive array of images, maps, and detailed documentation that records the intricate work the group has performed. Included in this volume are case studies that traverse multiple scales and durations, ranging from the analysis of the shrapnel fragments in a room struck by drones in Pakistan, the reconstruction of a contested shooting in the West Bank, the architectural recreation of a secret Syrian detention center from the memory of its survivors, a blow-by-blow account of a day-long battle in Gaza, and an investigation of environmental violence and climate change in the Guatemalan highlands and elsewhere. Weizman’s Forensic Architecture, stunning and shocking in its critical narrative, powerful images, and daring investigations, presents a new form of public truth, technologically, architecturally, and aesthetically produced. Their practice calls for a transformative politics in which architecture as a field of knowledge and a mode of interpretation exposes and confronts ever-new forms of state violence and secrecy.

The Folly

The Folly
Author: Ivan Vladislavic
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015-09-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0914671375

A vacant patch of South African veld next to the comfortable, complacent Malgas household has been taken over by a mysterious, eccentric figure with "a plan." Fashioning his tools out of recycled garbage, the stranger enlists Malgas's help in clearing the land and planning his mansion. Slowly but inevitably, the stranger's charm and the novel's richly inventive language draws Malgas into "the plan" and he sees, feels and moves into the new building. Then, just as remorselessly, all that seemed solid begins to melt back into air.