Architecture of Defeat

Architecture of Defeat PDF Author: Kengo Kuma
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429751206
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Kengo Kuma, one of Japan’s leading architects, has been combining professional practice and academia for most of his career. In addition to creating many internationally recognized buildings all over the world, he has written extensively about the history and theory of architecture. Like his built work, his writings also reflect his profound personal philosophy. Architecture of Defeat is no exception. Now available in English for the first time, the book explores events and architectural trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in both Japan and beyond. It brings together a collection of essays which Kuma wrote after disasters such as the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City on 9/11 and the earthquake and tsunami that obliterated much of the built landscape on Japan’s northern shore in a matter of minutes in 2011. Asking if we have been building in a manner that is too self-confident or arrogant, he examines architecture’s intrinsic—and often problematic—relationship to the powerful forces of contemporary politics, economics, consumerism, and technology, as well as its vital ties to society. Despite the title, Architecture of Defeat is an optimistic and hopeful book. Rather than anticipating the demise of architecture, Kuma envisages a different mode of conceiving architecture: guided and shaped by more modesty and with greater respect for the forces of our natural world. Beautifully designed and illustrated, this is a fascinating insight into the thinking of one of the world’s most influential architects.

Architecture of Defeat

Architecture of Defeat PDF Author: Kengo Kuma
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429751206
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book Here

Book Description
Kengo Kuma, one of Japan’s leading architects, has been combining professional practice and academia for most of his career. In addition to creating many internationally recognized buildings all over the world, he has written extensively about the history and theory of architecture. Like his built work, his writings also reflect his profound personal philosophy. Architecture of Defeat is no exception. Now available in English for the first time, the book explores events and architectural trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in both Japan and beyond. It brings together a collection of essays which Kuma wrote after disasters such as the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City on 9/11 and the earthquake and tsunami that obliterated much of the built landscape on Japan’s northern shore in a matter of minutes in 2011. Asking if we have been building in a manner that is too self-confident or arrogant, he examines architecture’s intrinsic—and often problematic—relationship to the powerful forces of contemporary politics, economics, consumerism, and technology, as well as its vital ties to society. Despite the title, Architecture of Defeat is an optimistic and hopeful book. Rather than anticipating the demise of architecture, Kuma envisages a different mode of conceiving architecture: guided and shaped by more modesty and with greater respect for the forces of our natural world. Beautifully designed and illustrated, this is a fascinating insight into the thinking of one of the world’s most influential architects.

Kengo Kuma: My Life as an Architect in Tokyo (My Life as an Architect)

Kengo Kuma: My Life as an Architect in Tokyo (My Life as an Architect) PDF Author: Kengo Kuma
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500776644
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 123

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Book Description
A personal tour of Tokyo’s architecture, as seen through the eyes of one of the world’s most acclaimed architects who is also designing the primary venue for the Tokyo Olympic games. Tokyo is Japan’s cultural and commercial epicenter, bursting with vibrancy and life. Its buildings, both historical and contemporary, are a direct reflection of its history and its people. Kengo Kuma was only ten years old when he found himself so inspired by Tokyo’s cityscape that he decided to become an architect. Here he tells the story of his career through twenty-five inspirational buildings in the city. Kuma’s passion is evident on every page, as well as his curiosity about construction methods and his wealth of knowledge about buildings around the world, making this a unique commentary on Tokyo’s dynamic architecture. Kengo Kuma: My Life as an Architect is an intimate and truly inspiring book, revealing the beauty that exists in the world’s everyday spaces.

Bold Ventures

Bold Ventures PDF Author: Charlotte Van den Broeck
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1635423171
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
A prize-winning Belgian poet explores the nature of creative endeavor—the godlike ambition, the crushing defeat of failure—through the stories of thirteen tragic architects. In thirteen fascinating chapters, Charlotte Van den Broeck goes in search of buildings that were fatal to their architects—architects who either killed themselves or are rumored to have done so. They range across time and space from a church with a twisted spire in seventeenth-century France to a theater that collapsed mid-performance in 1920s Washington, DC, and an eerily sinking swimming pool in the author’s hometown. Drawing on a vast range of material, from Hegel and Darwin to art history, stories from her own life, and popular culture, Van den Broeck brings patterns into focus as she asks, What is that strange, life-or-death connection between a creation and its creator? Threaded through each story is the author’s meditation on the question of suicide—what Albert Camus called the “one truly serious philosophical problem”—in relation to creativity and public disgrace. The result is a profoundly idiosyncratic book, breaking ground in literary nonfiction, as well as providing solace and consolation to anyone who has ever attempted a creative act.

The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine

The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine PDF Author: Noel Emmanuel Lenski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521521574
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine offers students a comprehensive one-volume survey of this pivotal emperor and his times. Richly illustrated and designed as a readable survey accessible to all audiences, it also achieves a level of scholarly sophistication and a freshness of interpretation that will be welcomed by the experts. The volume is divided into five sections that examine political history, religion, social and economic history, art, and foreign relations during the reign of Constantine, who steered the Roman Empire on a course parallel with his own personal development.

Epistemic Defeat

Epistemic Defeat PDF Author: Jan Constantin
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110730545
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
A number of well-developed theories shed light on the question, under what circumstances our beliefs enjoy epistemic justification. Yet, comparatively little is known about epistemic defeat—when new information causes the loss of epistemic justification. This book proposes and defends a detailed account of epistemic defeaters. The main kinds of defeaters are analyzed in detail and integrated into a general framework that aims to explain how beliefs lose justification. It is argued that defeaters introduce incompatibilities into a noetic system and thereby prompt a structured re-evaluation process that makes a justified reinstatement of the defeated belief impossible. The account is then applied to the topic of disagreement, where it is used in an argument for conciliationism, as well as a new explanation for higher-order defeat. Throughout the book, the notion of defeat is the center of attention, while a number of new issues are discussed at the intersections of defeat and justification. Specifically, new problems are raised for broadly internalist accounts of defeat, a fully descriptive reliabilist account of defeat is provided, and the case for normative defeat is revisited.

Architecture's Historical Turn

Architecture's Historical Turn PDF Author: Jorge Otero-Pailos
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452942692
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
Architecture’s Historical Turn traces the hidden history of architectural phenomenology, a movement that reflected a key turning point in the early phases of postmodernism and a legitimating source for those architects who first dared to confront history as an intellectual problem and not merely as a stylistic question. Jorge Otero-Pailos shows how architectural phenomenology radically transformed how architects engaged, theorized, and produced history. In the first critical intellectual account of the movement, Otero-Pailos discusses the contributions of leading members, including Jean Labatut, Charles Moore, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Kenneth Frampton. For architects maturing after World War II, Otero-Pailos contends, architectural history was a problem rather than a given. Paradoxically, their awareness of modernism’s historicity led some of them to search for an ahistorical experiential constant that might underpin all architectural expression. They drew from phenomenology, exploring the work of Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Ricoeur, which they translated for architectural audiences. Initially, the concept that experience could be a timeless architectural language provided a unifying intellectual basis for the stylistic pluralism that characterized postmodernism. It helped give theory—especially the theory of architectural history—a new importance over practice. However, as Otero-Pailos makes clear, architectural phenomenologists could not accept the idea of theory as an end in itself. In the mid-1980s they were caught in the contradictory and untenable position of having to formulate their own demotion of theory. Otero-Pailos reveals how, ultimately, the rise of architectural phenomenology played a crucial double role in the rise of postmodernism, creating the antimodern specter of a historical consciousness and offering the modern notion of essential experience as the means to defeat it.

What Goes Up

What Goes Up PDF Author: Michael Sorkin
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1786635151
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
A radical architect examines the changing fortunes of the contemporary city Michael Sorkin is one of the most forthright and engaging architectural writers in the world. In What Goes Up he takes to task the public officials, developers, “civic” organizations, and other heroes of big money, who have made of Sorkin’s beloved New York a city of glittering towers and increasing inequality. He unpacks not simply the forms and practices—from zoning and political deals to the finer points of architectural design—that shape cities today but also offers spirited advocacy for another kind of city, reimagined from the street up on a human scale, a home to sustainable, just, and fulfilling neighborhoods and public spaces. Informing his writing is a lifetime’s experience as an architect and urbanist. Sorkin writes of the joys and techniques of observing and inhabiting cities and buildings in order to both better understand and to more happily be in them. Sorkin has never been shy about naming names. He has been a scourge of design mediocrity and of the supine compliance of “starchitects,” who readily accede to the demands of greed and privilege. What Goes Up casts the net wide, as he directs his arguments to students, professionals, and urban citizens with vigor, expertise, respect, and barbed wit.

Anti-object

Anti-object PDF Author: Kengo Kuma
Publisher: AA Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
"An 'object' is a work of architecture that is expressly cut off from its environment. Objects are not exclusive to any particular architectural style, but objectification has long been central to western architecture. Indeed, it might even be said to be the very strategy by which modernism succeeded in conquering the world. It is all-pervasive because it is consistent with the aim of the prevailing economic system: to transform virtually everything into a commodity.In Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma argues that this mindset prevents us from establishing a healthy relationship with the external world and suggests that an alternative form of architecture is not only desirable but possible as well. His approach is illustrated with a discussion of works by his office in which he has sought, by various tactics, to avoid objectification. The ideas embodied in these diverse projects have much in common with the Japanese tradition, not of 'monuments', but of 'weaker' buildings characterised by their use of natural light and natural materials."--Publisher's website.

Hollow Land

Hollow Land PDF Author: Eyal Weizman
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1804297100
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
How does Israel extend its control over Palestinian lands? From the tunnels of Gaza to the militarized airspace of the Occupied Territories, Eyal Weizman unravels the mechanisms of control and how they have transformed Gaza and the West Bank into a war zone. This is essential reading for understanding how architecture and infrastructure are used as lethal weapons in the formation of Israel. In this new edition, Weizman explains how the events following the invasion of Gaza in October 2023 bear witness to the continuing policies of oppression. He details how this book became a foundational text for Forensic Architecture.

Coping with Defeat

Coping with Defeat PDF Author: Jonathan Laurence
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691219788
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 606

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Book Description
The surprising similarities in the rise and fall of the Sunni Islamic and Roman Catholic empires in the face of the modern state Coping with Defeat presents a historical panorama of the Islamic and Catholic political-religious empires and exposes striking parallels in their relationship with the modern state. Drawing on interviews, site visits, and archival research in Turkey, North Africa, and Western Europe, Jonathan Laurence demonstrates how, over hundreds of years, both Sunni and Catholic authorities experienced three major shocks and displacements—religious reformation, the rise of the nation-state, and mass migration. As a result, Catholic institutions eventually accepted the state’s political jurisdiction and embraced transnational spiritual leadership as their central mission. Laurence reveals an analogous process unfolding across the Sunni Muslim world in the twenty-first century. Identifying institutional patterns before and after political collapse, Laurence shows how centralized religious communities relinquish power at different rates and times. Whereas early Christianity and Islam were characterized by missionary expansion, religious institutions forged in the modern era are primarily defensive in nature. They respond to the simple but overlooked imperative to adapt to political defeat while fighting off ideological challenges to their spiritual authority. Among Laurence’s findings is that the disestablishment of Islam—the doing away with Islamic affairs ministries in the Muslim world—would harm, not help with, reconciliation to the rule of law. Examining upheavals in geography, politics, and demography, Coping with Defeat considers how centralized religions make peace with the loss of prestige.