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“This eloquent, elegant book thoughtfully plumbs the . . . consequences of our dependence on plastics” (The Boston Globe, A Best Nonfiction Book of 2011). From pacemakers to disposable bags, plastic built the modern world. But a century into our love affair, we’re starting to realize it’s not such a healthy relationship. As journalist Susan Freinkel points out in this eye-opening book, we’re at a crisis point. Plastics draw on dwindling fossil fuels, leach harmful chemicals, litter landscapes, and destroy marine life. We’re drowning in the stuff, and we need to start making some hard choices. Freinkel tells her story through eight familiar plastic objects: a comb, a chair, a Fris...
At Dwell, we're staging a minor revolution. We think that it's possible to live in a house or apartment by a bold modern architect, to own furniture and products that are exceptionally well designed, and still be a regular human being. We think that good design is an integral part of real life. And that real life has been conspicuous by its absence in most design and architecture magazines.
Following Italy's unification in 1861, architects, artists, politicians, and literati engaged in volatile debates over the pursuit of national and regional identity. Growing industrialization and urbanization across the country contrasted with the rediscovery of traditionally built forms and objects created by the agrarian peasantry. Pride in Modesty argues that these ordinary, often anonymous, everyday things inspired and transformed Italian art and architecture from the 1920s through the 1970s. Through in-depth examinations of texts, drawings, and buildings, Michelangelo Sabatino finds that the folk traditions of the pre-industrial countryside have provided formal, practical, and poetic inspiration directly affecting both design and construction practices over a period of sixty years and a number of different political regimes. This surprising continuity allows Sabatino to reject the division of Italian history into sharply delimited periods such as Fascist Interwar and Democratic Postwar and to instead emphasize the long, continuous process that transformed pastoral and urban ideals into a new, modernist Italy.
Considering the influence of the forms and tectonics of the Mediterranean vernacular on modern architectural practice and discourse from the 1920s to the 1960s.
This book aims to be a short guide for architecture in extreme environments. Its four chapters are focused on the relationship between man, architecture and extreme places, like the oceans, high altitude environments, metropolis and outer space. We structured this book as an open conversation that can be extended in academic places. After this pandemic period we will need to adapt in a more harmonious way with nature.
Perkins+Will, a global architecture and design practice, releases the first volume in a series of publications showcasing the talent of its teams and scope of their projects. Ideas + Buildings defines the essential characteristics of innovation and excellence that make Perkins+Will unique among architecture firms worldwide. The Ideas + Buildings series will includes essays on design theory; white papers on programmatic and technological innovation, client business issues and the environment; and ideas that relate directly to the practice and its work as well as broader social and cultural issues. Ideas + Buildings Collective Process / Global, Social and Sustainable Design includes 12 unique projects along with anecdotal information about the firm and its history - providing insight into the firm, who they are and what they do. The book demonstrates the progress and energy of Perkins+Will as the firm advances towards its 75th anniversary.
In Modern Middle-Class Housing in Tehran – Reproduction of an Archetype, Rana Habibi offers an engaging analysis of the modern urban history of Tehran during the Cold War period: 1945–1979. The book, while arguing about the institutionalism of modernity in the form of modern middle-class housing in Tehran, shows how vernacular archetypes found their way into the construction of new neighborhoods. The trajectory of ideal modernism towards popular modernism, the introduction of modern taste to traditional society through architects, while tracing the path of transnational models in local projects, are all subjects extensively expounded by Rana Habibi through engaging graphical analyses and appealing theoretical interpretations involving five modern Tehran neighborhoods.
Der Garten als Inspiration Der Garten verkörpert verdichtete Natur, so wie sich nach japanischem Verständnis in einem Tautropfen die Welt widerspiegelt. Diese Vorstellung kann als Impuls für die Imitationen japanischer Gärten in der Schweiz im 20. Jahrhundert gesehen werden, als Anstoß für die Einbindung japanischer Elemente und als Stoffumwandler vom Alpinum zur Trockenlandschaft. Die Autorin illustriert erstmals anhand von zehn Schweizer Landschaftsarchitekturbüros wie diese sich von miniaturisierten Gärten (Bonsai) inspirieren ließen, sich Szenerien (Shakkei) liehen, dem Reiz des Unvollkommenen (Wabi-sabi) erlagen und den Geist von Zen einfingen. Sie beleuchtet Parallelen zur Anverwandlung chinesischer Einflüsse in Japan und verortet das Phänomen in der Rezeption Nippons im Westen. Hochattraktives und viel bisher unveröffentlichtes Bildmaterial Fundiert recherchiertes Material verständlich und ansprechend aufbereitet Japan-Begeisterung in der Schweizer Landschaftsarchitektur Mit einem Fotoessay von Martin Linsi
None of us had the faintest idea where we were going [but] during 1938–39 . . . the town [Christchurch] was made strangely interesting for anyone like myself, [with the] scattered arrival of ‘the refugees’. All at once there were people among us who were actually from Vienna, or Chemnitz, or Berlin . . . who knew the work of Schoenberg and Gropius. – Anthony Alpers, 1985 From the 1930s through the 1950s, a substantial number of forced migrants – refugees from Nazism, displaced people after World War II and escapees from Communist countries – arrived in New Zealand from Europe. Among them were an extraordinary group of artists and writers, photographers and architects whose Europe...