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Following on from the successful book "Natural Born CAADesigners: Young American Architects", this book takes a look at the most recent architectonic developments in the Mediterranean countries, where architects have up to now been strongly influenced by the archaeologically significant environment and their classical architectural inheritance. How do young architects in Italy, France, Spain and Greece react to the new digital age? The electronic tools give them the chance to free themselves from the burden of tradition, to explore fascinating opportunities in their architecture. This book provides a colourful and concise overview of their work, using previously unpublished material. The team IAN+ was formed in 1997 in Rome by Carmelo Baglivo, Luca Galofaro and Stefania Manna. Maria Luisa Palumbo works at the McLuhan Programm in Culture and Technology.
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Cyber Readeris an anthology of extracts from key texts relating to the theme of cyberspace, the virtual communicative space created by digital technologies. Approaching the subject from a variety of angles, including science fiction, this book reflects the multidisciplinary basis of cyberspace and illustrates how different disciplines can inform one another. Over 40 texts are presented in chronological order, beginning with key precursors to cyberspace theory as we know it today. Writings by early theoreticians such as Charles Babbage and Alan Turing, and authors such as E M Forster, help to give a historical perspective to the subject, while texts on theoretical developments show the parall...
How science changed the way artists understand reality Exploring the Invisible shows how modern art expresses the first secular, scientific worldview in human history. Now fully revised and expanded, this richly illustrated book describes two hundred years of scientific discoveries that inspired French Impressionist painters and Art Nouveau architects, as well as Surrealists in Europe, Latin America, and Japan. Lynn Gamwell describes how the microscope and telescope expanded the artist's vision into realms unseen by the naked eye. In the nineteenth century, a strange and exciting world came into focus, one of microorganisms in a drop of water and spiral nebulas in the night sky. The world is...
Examining how the `here and now' of space, territory, the body, are being redefined by new technologies and how this undoes simplistic versions of the globalization thesis, Paul Virilio demonstrates how technology has made inertia the defining condition of modernity. An instantaneous present has replaced space and the sovereignty of territory; everything happens without the need to go anywhere. This book will be a key reference for students and scholars of the latest thinking in social theory.
The town is an organism created and driven by people. The complexity of the problems arising from it poses a challenge to those in positions of responsibility. Oswald and Baccini seek to bring clarity to the web of urban phenomena. They present a highly original model which draws together the two separate fields of architecture and science by considering architecture and urban planning from the scientific perspective. In four main chapters, topics such as new urbanism, the net city, designing with the net-city method, sustainability, renovation, conversion, and responsibility are explored in detail. The examples presented all derive from Switzerland, but the analyses and methodology is valid for any region or country. The theory is complemented by attractive visual material. Franz Oswald is Professor of Architecture and Design, Peter Baccini is Professor of Resource and Waste Management (both at Zurich ETH).
"The messages of our electronic age are becoming increasingly metaphorical and less assertive. This metaphorization process affects every aspect of society today, as can be seen in design and, although more resistant to change, in the sphere of architecture. A building does not acquire value just because it works, is solid, spatially stimulating and liveable, but because it refers to something else. The process of metaphorization concerns most of today's architecture. Its basic objective is a new interiorization of the landscape and the relations between man and nature, an objective which has been accomplished, or nearly. In order to make further progress and gain ground, we must turn to electronics and, above all, its center: interconnections."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
City planning is a concept which usually covers the wide range of events, processes and developments taking place in our cities, but individual plans and designs cannot do justice to the complex realities of the city. In "Induction Cities" the author aims to take the reader beyond our traditional understanding of city design to redefine our perception of design in this context. With the assistance of computers, a dynamic mechanism will be created which generates a result corresponding to the specific conditions and requirements stipulated. By this form of "meta-design" a greater degree of freedom is obtained than the conventional design methods provide. In this publication, this new theory and process is analysed, looking at the first computer-generated architecture in the world, the underground station "Iidabashi"in Tokyo. Makoto Sei Watanabe studied architecture and worked in the office of Arata Isozaki in Tokyo. In 1984 he founded his own architectural office which has realised numerous projects.
Heinz von Foerster was the inventor of second-order cybernetics, which recognizes the investigator as part of the system he is investigating. The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name provides an accessible, nonmathematical, and comprehensive overview of von Foerster’s cybernetic ideas and of the philosophy latent within them. It distills concepts scattered across the lifework of this scientific polymath and influential interdisciplinarian. At the same time, as a book-length interview, it does justice to von Foerster’s élan as a speaker and improviser, his skill as a raconteur. Developed from a week-long conversation between the editors and von Foerster near the end of his life, this work playfully engages von Foerster in developing the difference his notion of second-order cybernetics makes for topics ranging from emergence, life, order, and thermodynamics to observation, recursion, cognition, perception, memory, and communication. The book gives an English-speaking audience a new ease of access to the rich thought and generous spirit of this remarkable and protean thinker.
Winy Maas proposed a provocative and inspiring brief; he asked participants to redesign the cities of Rotterdam and New York in a way that everything is reachable within five minutes. A series of serious questions arise from the challenging brief: 'What will such a city look like? What happens to such an hypothesis if cars are the only mode of transport? What will such a city look like when it is only accessed by public transport? Or by walking?' How one can extend the knowledge of compact or dense cities? How fast cities can be? Is increased speed an ideal concept for future cities? Is development of new infrastructure sustainable for cities in future? Can Rotterdam become such a city? Is it possible to upscale Manhattan? How does mobility affects the working and living qualities of the cities and how is mobility shaping cities?