Subnature

Subnature
Author: David Gissen
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2012-03-20
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1568989512

We are conditioned over time to regard environmental forces such as dust, mud, gas, smoke, debris, weeds, and insects as inimical to architecture. Much of today's discussion about sustainable and green design revolves around efforts to clean or filter out these primitive elements. While mostly the direct result of human habitation, these 'subnatural forces' are nothing new. In fact, our ability to manage these forces has long defined the limits of civilized life. From its origins, architecture has been engaged in both fighting and embracing these so-called destructive forces. In Subnature, David Gissen, author of our critically acclaimed Big and Green, examines experimental work by today's leading designers, scholars, philosophers, and biologists that rejects the idea that humans can somehow recreate a purely natural world, free of the untidy elements that actually constitute nature. Each chapter provides an examination of a particular form of subnature and its actualization in contemporary design practice. The exhilarating and at times unsettling work featured in Subnature suggests an alternative view of natural processes and ecosystems and their relationships to human society and architecture. R&Sie(n)'s Mosquito Bottleneck house in Trinidad uses a skin that actually attracts mosquitoes and moves them through the building, while keeping them separate from the occupants. In his building designs the architect Philippe Rahm draws the dank air from the earth and the gasses and moisture from our breath to define new forms of spatial experience. In his Underground House, Mollier House, and Omnisport Hall, Rahm forces us to consider the odor of soil and the emissions from our body as the natural context of a future architecture. [Cero 9]'s design for the Magic Mountain captures excess heat emitted from a power generator in Ames, Iowa, to fuel a rose garden that embellishes the industrial site and creates a natural mountain rising above the city's skyline. Subnature looks beyond LEED ratings, green roofs, and solar panels toward a progressive architecture based on a radical new conception of nature.

The Inner Life of the Earth

The Inner Life of the Earth
Author: Paul V. O'Leary
Publisher: SteinerBooks
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2008-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 088010922X

"We need changes in our attitudes, our understanding of illness, our acceptance of non-allopathic practitioners, the economics of how we pay for health care, and our entire professional medical-legal system in which medical boards often act within the law to protect and defend the guild of conventional medicine under the guise of 'scientific proof.'... I present a template that combines economics, psychology, medicine, physiology, and mythology. It can serve as support and guidance for making the changes necessary for a new model of medicine in the twenty-first century." --Dr. Robert J. Zieve Dr. Zieve presents a new paradigm for health care that shows us how to go beyond the limitations and severe deficiencies of our current sickness care system. It embraces and synthesizes the emerging models of integrative medicine, energy medicine, and energy psychology into an effective and affordable approach to healing for everyone. This guide is for both those wish to provide a more complete form of health care for their patients and also for those individuals who are prepared to make the necessary changes in daily life in order to initiate or maintain a movement toward healing. This includes understanding the daily disciplines of a healing process, the deeper psychological processes of illness, and the creative arts in their therapeutic roles.

Installations by Architects

Installations by Architects
Author: Sarah Bonnemaison
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2009-08-12
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781568988504

Over the last few decades, a rich and increasingly diverse practice has emerged in the art world that invites the public to touch, enter, and experience the work, whether it is in a gallery, on city streets, or in the landscape. Like architecture, many of these temporary artworks aspire to alter viewers' experience of the environment. An installation is usually the end product for an artist, but for architects it can also be a preliminary step in an ongoing design process. Like paper projects designed in the absence of "real" architecture, installations offer architects another way to engage in issues critical to their practice. Direct experimentation with architecture's material and social dimensions engages the public around issues in the built environment that concern them and expands the ways that architecture can participate in and impact people's everyday lives. The first survey of its kind, Installations by Architects features fifty of the most significant projects from the last twenty-five years by today's most exciting architects, including Anderson Anderson, Philip Beesley, Diller + Scofidio, John Hejduk, Dan Hoffman, and Kuth/Ranieri Architects. Projects are grouped in critical areas of discussion under the themes of tectonics, body, nature, memory, and public space. Each project is supplemented by interviews with the project architects and the discussions of critics and theorists situated within a larger intellectual context. There is no doubt that installations will continue to play a critical role in the practice of architecture. Installations by Architects aims to contribute to the role of installations in sharpening our understanding of the built environment.

The System Designer's Guide to VHDL-AMS

The System Designer's Guide to VHDL-AMS
Author: Peter J. Ashenden
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 909
Release: 2002-09-10
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0080518362

The demand is exploding for complete, integrated systems that sense, process, manipulate, and control complex entities such as sound, images, text, motion, and environmental conditions. These systems, from hand-held devices to automotive sub-systems to aerospace vehicles, employ electronics to manage and adapt to a world that is, predominantly, neither digital nor electronic. To respond to this design challenge, the industry has developed and standardized VHDL-AMS, a unified design language for modeling digital, analog, mixed-signal, and mixed-technology systems. VHDL-AMS extends VHDL to bring the successful HDL modeling methodology of digital electronic systems design to these new design disciplines.Gregory Peterson and Darrell Teegarden join best-selling author Peter Ashenden in teaching designers how to use VHDL-AMS to model these complex systems. This comprehensive tutorial and reference provides detailed descriptions of both the syntax and semantics of the language and of successful modeling techniques. It assumes no previous knowledge of VHDL, but instead teaches VHDL and VHDL-AMS in an integrated fashion, just as it would be used by designers of these complex, integrated systems. - Explores the design of an electric-powered, unmanned aerial vehicle system (UAV) in five separate case studies to illustrate mixed-signal, mixed-technology, power systems, communication systems, and full system modeling.

Broken Vessels

Broken Vessels
Author: Rudolf Steiner
Publisher: SteinerBooks
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2002-02
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 088010841X

11 lectures in Dornach, September 8-19, 1924 (CW 318) "Humans cannot be known by uncreative thoughts, because by their very nature human beings are creative. One must re-create if one wants knowledge. With today's passive thinking, one can understand only the periphery of the human being; one has to ignore the inner being." -- Rudolf Steiner Today we hear a great deal about holistic medicine --an approach to healing that integrates body, mind, and spirit. For Rudolf Steiner, healing is not possible unless it takes into account all the dimensions that make up a human being-both visible and invisible. Unless we begin to understand these dimensions of ourselves, real health will always be hard to attain. To meet inner frailty with truly adequate concepts, Steiner describes specific inner structures of both healthy and unhealthy states that escape ordinary perception. Addressing topics ranging from sleepwalking to "hyperliteracy" to the visions of St. Teresa of Avila, he suggests how to approach the misalignments of nonstandard inner structures and other psychic difficulties with what he calls "pastoral medicine" --a truly holistic healing that can bring body and soul together and help them function in the most effective and powerful way. Dr. Michael Lipson's foreword provides background for Steiner's lectures and brings them into the context of modern psychology. This work is a translation of Das Zusammenwirken von Ärzten und Seelsorgern (CW 318). A previous edition was published as Pastoral Medicine: The Collegial Working of Doctors and Priests.

Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts

Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts
Author: Rudolf Steiner
Publisher: Rudolf Steiner Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 1998
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1855840960

"Leading thoughts" and letters for members of the Anthroposophical Society (CW 26) "The leading thoughts here given are meant to open up subjects for study and discussion. Points of contact with them will be found in countless places in the anthroposophic books and lecture courses, so that the subjects thus opened up can be enlarged upon and the discussions in the groups centered around them." -- Rudolf Steiner This key volume contains Rudolf Steiner's "leading thoughts," or guiding principles, and related letters to members of the Anthroposophical Society. Using brief, aphoristic statements, Steiner succinctly presents his spiritual science as a modern path of knowledge, accompanied by "letters" that expand and contextualize the guiding thought. These 185 thoughts constitute invaluable, clear summaries of Steiner's fundamental ideas--indeed, they contain the whole of Anthroposophy. They are intended not as doctrine, but to stimulate and focus one's study and discussion of spiritual science. "Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge to guide the Spiritual in the human being to the Spiritual in the universe.... Anthroposophy communicates knowledge that is gained in a spiritual way.... There are those who believe that with the limits of knowledge derived from sense perception the limits of all insight are given. Yet if they would carefully observe howthey become conscious of these limits, they would find in the very consciousness of the limits the faculties to transcend them." -- Rudolf Steiner This volume is a translation of Anthroposophische Leitsätze, Der Erkenntnisweg der Anthroposophie--Das Michael-Mysterium (GA 26).

Analog and Mixed-Signal Hardware Description Language

Analog and Mixed-Signal Hardware Description Language
Author: A. Vachoux
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 146156297X

Hardware description languages (HDL) such as VHDL and Verilog have found their way into almost every aspect of the design of digital hardware systems. Since their inception they gradually proved to be an essential part of modern design methodologies and design automation tools, ever exceeding their original goals of being description and simulation languages. Their use for automatic synthesis, formal proof, and testing are good examples. So far, HDLs have been mainly dealing with digital systems. However, integrated systems designed today require more and more analog parts such as A/D and D/A converters, phase locked loops, current mirrors, etc. The verification of the complete system therefore asks for the use of a single language. Using VHDL or Verilog to handle analog descriptions is possible, as it is shown in this book, but the real power is coming from true mixed-signal HDLs that integrate discrete and continuous semantics into a unified framework. Analog HDLs (AHDL) are considered here a subset of mixed-signal HDLs as they intend to provide the same level of features as HDLs do but with a scope limited to analog systems, possibly with limited support of discrete semantics. Analog and Mixed-Signal Hardware Description Languages covers several aspects related to analog and mixed-signal hardware description languages including: The use of a digital HDL for the description and the simulation of analog systems The emergence of extensions of existing standard HDLs that provide true analog and mixed-signal HDLs. The use of analog and mixed-signal HDLs for the development of behavioral models of analog (electronic) building blocks (operational amplifier, PLL) and for the design of microsystems that do not only involve electronic parts. The use of a front-end tool that eases the description task with the help of a graphical paradigm, yet generating AHDL descriptions automatically. Analog and Mixed-Signal Hardware Description Languages is the first book to show how to use these new hardware description languages in the design of electronic components and systems. It is necessary reading for researchers and designers working in electronic design.

Creating Gaia Culture

Creating Gaia Culture
Author: Marko Pogačnik
Publisher: CLAIRVIEW BOOKS
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2021-10-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1912992329

Humanity stands at the threshold of a new phase of Earth’s planetary evolution. Breathtaking possibilities – in tune with the evolutionary path of the universe – are now available. Yet the question arises: Does humanity have the ideas, foresight and potential for action that could create a culture that corresponds to the planet’s transformation? In the midst of distressing ecological crises, Marko Pogačnik offers fresh hope. Having worked intensively in the fields of holistic ecology (geomancy) and Earth-healing for four decades, he now formulates a vision of a culture based on co-creation with Gaia (the Earth), her elemental worlds and beings from parallel evolutions. Creating Gaia Culture is also a workbook, featuring dozens of drawings and meditative exercises to help transcend mental obstacles by cultivating the quality of living imagina­tion. Pogačnik – UNO Goodwill Ambassador and UNESCO Artist for Peace – presents numerous ways to collaborate with the process of creating Gaia culture. He allows us to look into the primeval source of the future by interpreting the ancient book of the biblical Apocalypse – a text that holds the secret of Earth changes in a coded vision of a new human civilization – and uses his experiences, visions, dream stories and communications with beings from parallel worlds to trigger pictures that can enable a new human culture become a tactile reality. ‘The only path that makes sense is to reconnect with the essence of life and embrace a loving partnership with Gaia, Earth. This path involves a challenging transformation of our current cultures and may provoke changes in many aspects of the embodied world as we know it, as we continue to evolve into the future.’

Cyberpunk and Visual Culture

Cyberpunk and Visual Culture
Author: Graham Murphy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2017-10-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351665154

Within the expansive mediascape of the 1980s and 1990s, cyberpunk’s aesthetics took firm root, relying heavily on visual motifs for its near-future splendor saturated in media technologies, both real and fictitious. As today’s realities look increasingly like the futures forecast in science fiction, cyberpunk speaks to our contemporary moment and as a cultural formation dominates our 21st century techno-digital landscapes. The 15 essays gathered in this volume engage the social and cultural changes that define and address the visual language and aesthetic repertoire of cyberpunk – from cybernetic organisms to light, energy, and data flows, from video screens to cityscapes, from the vibrant energy of today’s video games to the visual hues of comic book panels, and more. Cyberpunk and Visual Culture provides critical analysis, close readings, and aesthetic interpretations of exactly those visual elements that define cyberpunk today, moving beyond the limitations of merely printed text to also focus on the meaningfulness of images, forms, and compositions that are the heart and lifeblood of cyberpunk graphic novels, films, television shows, and video games.