Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!

You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.

Sign up

The World as an Architectural Project
  • Language: en

The World as an Architectural Project

Architects imagine the planet: fifty speculative world-scale projects from Patrick Geddes, Alison and Peter Smithson, Kiyonori Kikutake, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Luc Deleu, and others. The world's growing vulnerability to planet-sized risks invites action on a global scale. The World as an Architectural Project shows how for more than a century architects have imagined the future of the planet through world-scale projects. With fifty speculative projects by Patrick Geddes, Alison and Peter Smithson, Kiyonori Kikutake, Saverio Muratori, Takis Zenetos, Sergio Bernardes, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Luc Deleu, and many others, documented in text and images, this ambitious and wide-ranging book is the f...

Landscape as Urbanism
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 216

Landscape as Urbanism

A definitive intellectual history of landscape urbanism It has become conventional to think of urbanism and landscape as opposing one another—or to think of landscape as merely providing temporary relief from urban life as shaped by buildings and infrastructure. But, driven in part by environmental concerns, landscape has recently emerged as a model and medium for the city, with some theorists arguing that landscape architects are the urbanists of our age. In Landscape as Urbanism, one of the field's pioneers presents a powerful case for rethinking the city through landscape. Charles Waldheim traces the roots of landscape as a form of urbanism from its origins in the Renaissance through th...

The Architecture of Closed Worlds
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 352

The Architecture of Closed Worlds

What do outer space capsules, submarines, and office buildings have in common? Each is conceived as a closed system: a self-sustaining physical environment demarcated from its surroundings by a boundary that does not allow for the transfer of matter or energy. Contemporary discussions about global warming, recycling, and sustainability have emerged as direct conceptual constructs related to the study and analysis of closed systems. From the space program to countercultural architectural groups experimenting with autonomous living, this publication documents a disciplinary transformation and the rise of a new environmental consensus in the form of a synthetic naturalism. It presents an archive of 39 historical living prototypes from 1928 to the present that put forth an unexplored genealogy of closed resource regeneration systems. Prototypes are presented through unique discursive narratives with historical images, and each includes new analysis in the form of a feedback drawing that problematizes the language of environmental representation by illustrating loss, derailment, and the production of new substances and atmospheres.

The Map Reader
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 528

The Map Reader

WINNER OF THE CANTEMIR PRIZE 2012 awarded by the Berendel Foundation The Map Reader brings together, for the first time, classic and hard-to-find articles on mapping. This book provides a wide-ranging and coherent edited compendium of key scholarly writing about the changing nature of cartography over the last half century. The editorial selection of fifty-four theoretical and thought provoking texts demonstrates how cartography works as a powerful representational form and explores how different mapping practices have been conceptualised in particular scholarly contexts. Themes covered include paradigms, politics, people, aesthetics and technology. Original interpretative essays set the lit...

Uneven Development
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 401

Uneven Development

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2020-05-05
  • -
  • Publisher: Verso Books

In Uneven Development, a classic in its field, Neil Smith offers the first full theory of uneven geographical development, entwining theories of space and nature with a critique of capitalism. Featuring groundbreaking analyses of the production of nature and the politics of scale, Smith's work anticipated many of the uneven contours that now mark neoliberal globalization. This third edition features an afterword examining the impact of Neil's argument in a contemporary context.

Shades of Citizenship
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 268

Shades of Citizenship

This book explores the politics of race, censuses, and citizenship, drawing on the complex history of questions about race in the U.S. and Brazilian censuses. It reconstructs the history of racial categorization in American and Brazilian censuses from each country’s first census in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries up through the 2000 census. It sharply challenges certain presumptions that guide scholarly and popular studies, notably that census bureaus are (or are designed to be) innocent bystanders in the arena of politics, and that racial data are innocuous demographic data. Using previously overlooked historical sources, the book demonstrates that counting by race has always been ...

Spacesuit
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 379

Spacesuit

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2011-03-18
  • -
  • Publisher: MIT Press

How the twenty-one-layer Apollo spacesuit, made by Playtex, was a triumph of intimacy over engineering. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: twenty-one layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. This book is the story of that spacesuit. It is a story of the triumph over the military-industrial complex by the International Latex Corporation, best known by its consumer brand of "Playtex"—a victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation over cybernetics. Playtex's spacesuit went u...

Another World Is Possible
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 386

Another World Is Possible

As the world confronts the fast catastrophe of Covid and the slow calamity of climate change, we also face a third, less visible emergency: a crisis of imagination. We can easily picture ecological disaster or futures dominated by technology. But we struggle to imagine a world in which people thrive and where we improve our democracy, welfare, neighbourhoods or education. Many are resigned to fatalism—yet they desperately want transformational social change. This book argues that, although the threats are real, we can use creative imagination to achieve a better future: visualising where we want to go and how to get there. Political and social thinker Geoff Mulgan offers lessons we can learn from the past, and methods we can use now to open up thinking about the future and spark action. Drawing on social sciences, the arts, philosophy and history, Mulgan shows how we can recharge our collective imagination. From Socrates to Star Wars, he provides a roadmap for the future.

Data-Spheres of Planetary Urbanization
  • Language: en

Data-Spheres of Planetary Urbanization

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2023-05-31
  • -
  • Publisher: Actar

How can we map the urbanization of the planet? To confront this question, the Urban Theory Lab presents a series of experimental visualizations of the worldwide urban fabric. Reversing conventional understandings of urbanization as a process of city growth, the 12 data-spheres reveal the importance of operational landscapes beyond the city (zones of agriculture, extraction, forestry and fishing), as well as planetary logistical infrastructures, that directly support urban life. By illustrating how radically divergent cartographies of an urbanized planet can be constructed on the basis of different indicators, the visualizations are intended to interrupt the authoritative, scientific "aura" t...

Water Brings No Harm
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 404

Water Brings No Harm

In Water Brings No Harm, Matthew V. Bender explores the history of community water management on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Kilimanjaro’s Chagga-speaking peoples have long managed water by employing diverse knowledge: hydrological, technological, social, cultural, and political. Since the 1850s, they have encountered groups from beyond the mountain—colonial officials, missionaries, settlers, the independent Tanzanian state, development agencies, and climate scientists—who have understood water differently. Drawing on the concept of waterscapes—a term that describes how people “see” water, and how physical water resources intersect with their own beliefs, needs, and expectations—Bender argues that water conflicts should be understood as struggles between competing forms of knowledge. Water Brings No Harm encourages readers to think about the origins and interpretation of knowledge and development in Africa and the global south. It also speaks to the current global water crisis, proposing a new model for approaching sustainable water development worldwide.