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From its origins in the Midwest in the early nineteenth century, the technique of light timber framing-also known at the time as "Chicago construction"-quickly came to underwrite the territorial and ideological expansion of the United States. Softwood construction was inherently practical, as its materials were readily available and required little skill to assemble. The result was a built environment that erased typological and class distinctions: no amount of money can buy you a better 2 x 4. This fundamental sameness paradoxically underlies the American culture of individuality, unifying all superficial differences. It has been both a cause and effect of the country's high regard for nove...
Historically, we see the city as the cramped, crumbling core of development and culture, and the suburb as the vast outlying wasteland – convenient, but vacant. Contemporary urban design proves this wrong. In New SubUrbanisms, Judith De Jong explains the on-going "flattening" of the American Metropolis, as suburbs are becoming more like their central cities – and cities more like their suburbs through significant changes in spatial and formal practice as well as demographic and cultural changes. These revisionist practices are exemplified in the emergence of hybrid sub/urban conditions such as parking practices, the residential densification of suburbia, hyper-programmed public spaces an...
Through essays, interviews, and narratives by Bruce Sterling, Fiona Raby, Sam Jacob and other significant voices in the field, this volume questions the initial discourses around “design fiction”—a broad category of critical design that includes overlapping interests in science fiction, world building, speculation, and futuring. Made Up: Design’s Fictions advances contemporary analysis and enactment of narrative and speculation as an important part of practice today. Essays, interviews, and narratives by: Julian Bleecker, Benjamin H. Bratton, Anne Burdick, Emmet Byrne, Stuart Candy, Fiona Raby, Tim Durfee, Sam Jacob, Norman M. Klein, Peter Lunenfeld, Geo Manaugh, Tom Marble, m-a-u-s-e-r, Metahaven, China Miéville, Keith Mitnick, MOS, Susanna Schouweiler, Bruce Sterling, Mimi Zeiger. Co-published with Art Center Graduate Press
This book refocuses current understandings of American Literature from the revolutionary period to the present-day through an analytical accounting of class, reestablishing a foundation for discussions of class in American culture. American Studies scholars have explored the ways in which American society operates through inequality and modes of social control, focusing primarily on issues of status group identities involving race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. The essays in this volume focus on both the historically changing experience of class and its continuing hold on American life. The collection visits popular as well as canonical literature, recognizing that class is co...
Packed with stunning imagery and featuring the world’s most celebrated cultural institutions, architectural historian and museum curator Owen Hopkins looks at the fascinating history of The Museum.
Is architecture inherently complete? Or is it a state of incompletion and seeming inadequacy that incites us to imagine architecture as an armature for an ever-changing daily life? Buildings and Almost Buildings, made possible in part through a grant from the Graham Foundation, explores the work of nARCHITECTS as a single project – an anti-monograph with a subtle manifesto about the open-ended, incomplete, and ambiguous in architecture. Structured around a variety of modes of representation specially prepared for the book, Buildings and Almost Buildings reveals the ways in which the celebrated New York office led by Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang addresses contemporary issues of a world in flux...
This book gathers research and writings that reflect on traditional and current global issues related to art and aesthetics, gender perspectives, body theories, knowledge and learning. It illustrates these core dimensions, which are bringing together philosophy, tradition and cultural studies and laying the groundwork for comparative research and dialogues between aesthetics, Chinese philosophies, Western feminist studies and cross-cultural thought. Pursuing an interdisciplinary approach, the book also integrates philosophical enquiries with cultural anthropology and contextual studies. As implied in the title, the main methodologies are cross-cultural and comparative studies, which touch...
The Western town of roughly 1860-90 exists in an ephemeral moment of American history ... these towns vanished entirely from the prairie by the end of the nineteenth century. Yet even today, everyone has visited these towns, since they survive in their abstract and distilled form through the plot-generating sets of Western movies ... a clichéd but consistent host of characteristics and characters ... 22 towns in the Wild West are the protagonists in this book, including famous places like El Paso, Rio Bravo, and Lahood - not as clichés, but as constructed reality. Detailed maps offer a previously non-existent overview of spatial contexts and form the basis for an intensive exploration of a...