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The glasshouses of the nineteenth century represent a remarkable confluence of opposites in architecture and technology. The architecture was designed to create an artificial climate in which people could return to paradise, and yet the technical means employed were also basic to the century's developing industrial grime -the other side of paradise. Enriched by more than 700 illustrations, Houses of Glass chronicles these pristine structures as they evolved from hothouses into exhibition halls, ballrooms, and theaters. Georg Kohlmaier is an architect and Barna von Sartory a sculptor. They have collaborated on many books and articles on contemporary architecture.
A wide-ranging illustrated history of transparency as told through the evolution of the glass window Transparency is a mantra of our day. It is key to the Western understanding of a liberal society. We expect transparency from, for instance, political institutions, corporations, and the media. But how did it become such a powerful—and global—idea? From ancient glass to Apple’s corporate headquarters, this book is the first to probe how Western people have experienced, conceptualized, and evaluated transparency. Daniel Jütte argues that the experience of transparency has been inextricably linked to one element of Western architecture: the glass window. Windows are meant to be unnoticed. Yet a historical perspective reveals the role that glass has played in shaping how we see and interpret the world. A seemingly “pure” material, glass has been endowed, throughout history, with political, social, and cultural meaning, in manifold and sometimes conflicting ways. At the same time, Jütte raises questions about the future of vitreous transparency—its costs in terms of visual privacy but also its ecological price tag in an age of accelerating climate change.
CMMM is a project that accompanied and was oriented by the priorities of municipalist activists in Belgrade, Berlin, and Barcelona. Spanning over 3.5 years from 2019 to 2023, it captured and supported the efforts of the Ministry of Space collective, AKS Gemeinwohl, Häuser Bewegen GIMA eG., Kollektiv Raumstation, and Observatori DESC to change the political paradigms shaping the contemporary housing emergency in the three cities. Coordinated by K LAB (TU Berlin) and supported by the Robert Bosch Stiftung, the CMMM team employed various formats of critical mapping to display the legislations, policies, events, hierarchies, as well as the main actors and factors that are shaping the housing cr...
'This is the first account in English of the making of Italian nationhood from the perspective of constitutional history. It is also the first to consider the role that the House of Savoy played in this process. Bringing together influential experts in the field, the collection covers the evolution of the Italian constitution from Russian diplomacy’s little-known planning of the Risorgimento to the monarchy’s demise after its clashes with fascism. Combining systematic coverage with original research, the volume includes such varied themes as the king’s role in the Italian wars of independence, the Italian peninsula’s forgotten charters of 1848, and the story of the ephemeral building that housed the first Italian parliament. Contributors are: Carolina Armenteros, Andrea Ungari, Paolo Colombo, Frans Willem Lantink, Christian Satto, Giulio Stolfi, Valentina Villa, Tommaso Zerbi, and Romano Ferrari Zumbini.
From the Renaissance idea of the painting as an open window to the nested windows and multiple images on today's cinema, television, and computer screens: a cultural history of the metaphoric, literal, and virtual window. As we spend more and more of our time staring at the screens of movies, televisions, computers, and handheld devices—"windows" full of moving images, texts, and icons—how the world is framed has become as important as what is in the frame. In The Virtual Window, Anne Friedberg examines the window as metaphor, as architectural component, and as an opening to the dematerialized reality we see on the screen. In De pictura (1435), Leon Battista Alberti famously instructed p...
Exploring the design of innovative building enclosure systems (or skins) in contemporary architecture and their precedents in earlier twentieth century modern architecture, this book examines the tectonics, the history and the influence of translucency as a defining characteristic in architecture. Highly illustrated throughout with drawings and full colour photographs, the book shows that translucency has been and continues to be a fertile ground for architectural experimentation. Each chapter presents a comparative analysis of two primary buildings: a recent project, paired with a historical precedent, highlighting how architects in different eras have realized the distinctive effects of tr...
"Le Corbusier grew up in La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland, a city described by Karl Marx as "one unified watchmaking industry." Among the unifying social structures of La Chaux-de-Fonds was the Loge L'Amitié, the Masonic lodge with its francophone moral, social, and philosophical ideas, including the symbolic iconography of the right angle (rectitude) and the compass (exactitude). Le Corbusier would later describe these as "my guide, my choice" and as his "time-honored ideas, ingrained and deep-rooted in the intellect, like entries from a catechism." Through exhaustive research that challenges long-held beliefs, J.K. Birksted's Le Corbusier and the Occult traces the structure of Le Corbusier's brand of modernist spatial and architectural ideas based on startling new documents in hitherto undiscovered family and local archives."--Publisher.
Was hat das Sehen in der Neuzeit verändert? Eine Fülle von Abbildungen belegt, dass die Entwicklung des Buchdrucks und der Übergang zur Linearperspektive den Wandel hervorgerufen haben. Der Autor untermauert, inwiefern die Grundlagen des neuzeitlichen Sehens, die Poetik der Arabeske und Goethes "West-östlichen Divan" eng mit einander verknüpft sind. Ein faszinierende Analyse.
Empire of Vines traces the development of wine culture as grape growing expanded from New York to the Midwest before gaining ascendancy in California—a progression that illustrates viticulture's centrality to the nineteenth-century American projects of national expansion and the formation of a national culture.
When John Ruskin attempted to disparage the Crystal Palace by referring to it as a great cucumber frame', he hit upon a truism. The Crystal Palace outdid its Victorian glasshouse contemporaries in public gardens around the world and represented the zenith of a building type that had developed spectacularly from humble horticultural roots. The Glasshouse traces the evolution of glass enclosures from the mid-seventeenth century when the desire to nurture exotic plants in a foreign and often hostile climate led to the development of the glasshouse and ingenious mechanical servicing systems, capable of creating its own artificial microclimate. Through tremendous technical advances in the early nineteenth century, large-scale constructions were built initially for private individuals and botanical societies. Towards the mid-century, with the advent of mass-production and specialist component systems, the fashioning of modular constructions, like the Crystal Palace, became possible. The Glasshouse charts the work of innovators such as Joseph Paxton and J C Loudon, and proceeds to examine their influence on the pioneers of twentieth-century design such as Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut.