SQM, the Quantified Home

SQM, the Quantified Home
Author: Space Caviar
Publisher: Lars Muller Publishers
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Architecture and technology
ISBN: 9783037784532

The way in which we live is changing under the influence of different factors - be they financial, environment of respective, technological or geopolitical nature, quickly. What was equated with "home" has change, the "home" has turned into a Handeslware whose value is measured in Quatdratmetern. 'SQM: The Quantified Home' is less concerned with the house as a physical , protective shell, it presents it as a complex universe of overlapping cultural references, daily rituals, practical needs, unexpressed wishes and aspirations which develop steadily and flow together in an architectural space. The book presents the fundamental changes in the perception of the home, evaluates relevant data, makes assumptions and shows a selection of houses and interiors - from Osama bin Laden's fortress to examples of "living" in the era of Airbnb. In essays by architects, designers, artists and theorists will examine how the space in which we live, has become recognisable and yet so foreign. 140 illustrations

Cloud of Cards

Cloud of Cards
Author: Patrick Keller
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2018-09-25
Genre: Art
ISBN: 2839924269

Cloud of Cards, "a home cloud kit to re-appropriate your data self", is the final outcome of Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s), a joint design and ethnographic research project investigating personal clouds and data centers. The main results of this design research project have been informed by the preliminary findings of an ethnographic research into the cloud (Cloud of Practices) and a design sketches phase conducted in parallel. They comprise four digital and physical artefacts, forming a set of modular tools ("cards"), which are delivered in the form of an open source DIY kit, freely accessible at www.cloudofcards.org and on Github. The purpose of these tools is to enable everyone, in particular the community of designers and makers, to set up their own small-scale data center and cloud, manage their data in a decentralized way and develop their own alternative projects using this small-scale personal infrastructure.

After Work

After Work
Author: Helen Hester
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2023-07-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1786633094

A timely manifesto for a feminist post-work politics Does it ever feel like you have no free time? You come home after work and instead of finding a space of rest and relaxation, you’re confronted by a pile of new tasks to complete – cooking, cleaning, looking after the kids, and so on. In this ground-breaking book, Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek lay out how unpaid work in our homes has come to take up an ever-increasing portion of our lives – how the vacuum of free time has been taken up by vacuuming. Examining the history of the home over the past century – from running water to white goods to smart homes – they show how repeated efforts to reduce the burden of this work have faced a variety of barriers, challenges, and reversals. Charting the trajectory of our domestic spaces over the past century, Hester and Srnicek consider new possibilities for the future, uncovering the abandoned ideas of anti-housework visionaries and sketching out a path towards real free time for all, where everyone is at liberty to pursue their passions, or do nothing at all. It will require rethinking our living arrangements, our expectations and our cities.

My Three Dads

My Three Dads
Author: Jessa Crispin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2022-08-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 022660070X

Sharp and thought-provoking, this memoir-meets-cultural criticism upends the romanticism of the Great Plains and the patriarchy at the core of its ideals. For many Americans, Kansas represents a vision of Midwestern life that is good and wholesome and evokes the American ideals of god, home, and country. But for those like Jessa Crispin who have grown up in Kansas, the realities are much harsher. She argues that the Midwestern values we cling to cover up a long history of oppression and control over Native Americans, women, and the economically disadvantaged. Blending personal narrative with social commentary, Crispin meditates on why the American Midwest still enjoys an esteemed position in our country's mythic self-image. Ranging from The Wizard of Oz to race, from chastity to rape, from radical militias and recent terrorist plots to Utopian communities, My Three Dads opens on a comic scene in a Kansas rent house the author shares with a (masculine) ghost. This prompts Crispin to think about her intellectual fathers, her spiritual fathers, and her literal fathers. She is curious to understand what she has learned from them and what she needs to unlearn about how a person should be in a family, as a citizen, and as a child of god—ideals, Crispin argues, that have been established and reproduced in service to hierarchy, oppression, and wealth. Written in Crispin’s well-honed voice—smart, assured, comfortable with darkness—My Three Dads offers a kind of bleak redemption, the insight that no matter where you go, no matter how far from home you roam, the place you came from is always with you, “like it or not.”

Retreat

Retreat
Author: Ethel Baraona Pohl
Publisher: dpr-barcelona
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2020-07-31
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 8494938851

Retreat is a lexicon, or inventory of language, to describe the action of withdrawal from civic life. By creating a spatial approach to the language of “escape”, the publication attempts to widen the definitions of familiar terms such as safety, surveillance, and self-reliance. The lexicon draws attention to current global events, such as the thread of epidemic disease, climate catastrophe, the militarization of public space and the impact of mass surveillance on daily life, specifically the emotional and social impact of the presence of unknown and potentially life threatening elements. The editorial approach for the lexicon is to investigate the notion and practices of retreat, its strategies and imaginaries, through others’ words as they inform contemporary spatial paradigms. A wide variety of source types (from blogs to Wikipedia to academic texts) and media (photographs, films,books, objects) and forms of literary genres are mobilized to create a portrait of retreat that describes not only militarized zones but dreams and anxieties of individuals across the globe, helping us better understand how humans might negotiate civil and human rights and freedoms within civic society at large.

idea journal: interior technicity: unplugged and/or switched on

idea journal: interior technicity: unplugged and/or switched on
Author: Julieanna Preston
Publisher: AADR – Art Architecture Design Research
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2020-10-07
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 3887788206

Interior Technicity: Unplugged and/ or Switched On invites reflection on how interiors have always been augmenting entities and how they continue to be so—in other words, extending, facilitating and consolidating bodies within socio-cultural environments. Rather than seeing an interior as an 'inside' in opposition to a world beyond, it asks what modes of 'folding inward' have equipped and enabled the spatial environment? Technicity—the world of tools and technical objects that extend and mediate memory, as Bernard Steigler (1998) describes it—has never been what inside-ness, in its sheltering of life, keeps at bay; mediation is from the start technical, indexed to inscribing practices rich in temporal and embodied implications. By this reading, interiors have always been augmented and augmenting (in the sense of the Latin"augmentare": to increase, enlarge, or enrich). This IDEA Journal issue considers this mode of 'folding inward' as a condition of an interior'sspecificity. Whether it be a small structure such as a tramping hut or a tiny house, a large complex interior environment such as an airport or shopping mall, handmade with local materials such as Samoan fale, or the result of manufacturing processes assembling artificial and prefabricated elements as in the case of a spacecraft, boat or train, interiors are augmented, mediated, generated or embellished by technologies. The effect of these technologies is not neutral; one's experience of an interior is significantly influenced by the affective resonance of its technologies.

Economies of Design

Economies of Design
Author: Guy Julier
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2017-02-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1526421305

How are the rise of design and neoliberalism connected? How does design change the way we operate as economic beings? What is the economic significance of design? Historically, design has been promoted for its for its capacity to add value to products and services. In contemporary capitalism, however, it assumes a more central and more complex role. Design today is both influenced by, and actively shapes, our economic systems. This ground-breaking book shines a spotlight on how design has become embedded in political economies. It reveals the multiple ways in which design has emerged as a vital feature of neoliberal economic systems, from urban strategies to commercial processes to government policy-making. Drawing on a range of global examples, Guy Julier: explains the economic processes of design explores the relationship between design and intellectual property discusses the role of design in the public sector highlights the impact of design in informal and alternative economies brings theory to life with case studies on home improvements, fast fashion, shopping centres and more. Economies of Design provides a thought-provoking new way of understanding and talking about the meanings of design in contemporary capitalism. It is an essential companion for students of design and the creative industries across the arts, humanities and social sciences.

In Search of African American Space

In Search of African American Space
Author: Sara Caples
Publisher: Lars Muller Publishers
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: African American architecture
ISBN: 9783037786338

"If African American experience emerges from the structure of slavery, how does architecture relate to that experience? African Americans have claimed space in unexpected locations – often in opposition to architecture as a Eurocentric discipline that has served to regulate and exclude them. In Search of African American Space examines both historical record and personal and collective memory to uncover these instances. African American space can be creative and aspirational, taking the form of speech and performance that reflects its fleeting nature. This anthology of essays from contemporary architects, historians and artists presents a broad range of knowledge and practices that evoke consciousness of this form of space making in the afterlife of slavery."--

Architects After Architecture

Architects After Architecture
Author: Harriet Harriss
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2020-12-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1000316440

What can you do with a degree in architecture? Where might it take you? What kind of challenges could you address? Architects After Architecture reframes architecture as a uniquely versatile way of acting on the world, far beyond that of designing buildings. In this volume, we meet forty practitioners through profiles, case studies, and interviews, who have used their architectural training in new and resourceful ways to tackle the climate crisis, work with refugees, advocate for diversity, start tech companies, become leading museum curators, tackle homelessness, draft public policy, become developers, design videogames, shape public discourse, and much more. Together, they describe a future of architecture that is diverse and engaged, expanding the limits of the discipline, and offering new paths forward in times of crisis. Whether you are an architecture student or a practicing architect considering a change, you’ll find this an encouraging and inspiring read. Please visit the Architects After Architecture website for more information, including future book launches and events: architectsafterarchitecture.com

A Moving Border

A Moving Border
Author: Marco Ferrari
Publisher:
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2019
Genre: Alps Region
ISBN: 9781941332450

Italy's northern border follows the watershed that separates the drainage basins of Northern and Southern Europe. Running mostly at high altitudes, it crosses snowfields and perennial glaciers--all of which are now melting as a result of anthropogenic climate change. As the watershed shifts so does the border, contradicting its representations on official maps. Italy, Austria, and Switzerland have consequently introduced the novel legal concept of a "moving border," one that acknowledges the volatility of geographical features once thought to be stable. A Moving Border: Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change builds upon the Italian Limes project by Studio Folder, which was devised in 2014 to survey the fluctuations of the boundary line across the Alps in real time. The book charts the effects of climate change on geopolitical understandings of border and the cartographic methods used to represent them. Locating the Italian condition alongside a longer political history of boundary making, the book brings together critical essays, visualizations, and unpublished documents from state archives. By examining the nexus of nationalism and cartography, A Moving Border details how borders are both material and imagined, and the ways global warming challenges Western conceptions of territory. Even more, it provides a blueprint for spatial intervention in a world where ecological processes are bound to dominate geopolitical affairs. A Moving Border features a foreword by Bruno Latour and texts by Stuart Elden, Mia Fuller, Francesca Hughes, and Wu Ming 1, and is co-published with ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe.