Materan Contradictions

Materan Contradictions PDF Author: Anne Parmly Toxey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317099516
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
Shaped by encrusted layers of development spanning millennia, the southern Italian city of Matera is the ultimate palimpsest. Known as the Sassi, the majority of the ancient city is composed of thousands of structures carved into a limestone cliff and clinging to its walls. The resultant menagerie of forms possesses a surprising visual uniformity and an ineffable allure. Conversely, in the 1950s Matera also served as a crucible for Italian postwar urban and architectural theory, witnessed by the Neorealist, modernist expansion of the city that developed in aversion to the Sassi. In another about-face, the previously disparaged cave city has now been recast as a major tourist destination, UNESCO World Heritage Monument, and test subject for ideas and methods of preservation. Set within a sociopolitical and architectural history of Matera from 1950 to the present, this book analyses the contemporary effects of preservation on the city and surrounding province. More broadly, it examines the relationship between and interdependence of preservation and modernism within architectural thought. To understand inconsistencies inherent to preservation, in particular its effect of catalyzing change, the study lays bare planners' and developers' use of preservation, especially for economic goals and political will. The work asserts that preservation is not a passive, curatorial pursuit: it is a cloaked manifestation of modernism and a powerful tool often used to control economies. The study demonstrates that preservation also serves to influence societies through the shaping of memory and circulation of narratives.

Materan Contradictions

Materan Contradictions PDF Author: Anne Parmly Toxey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317099516
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 483

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shaped by encrusted layers of development spanning millennia, the southern Italian city of Matera is the ultimate palimpsest. Known as the Sassi, the majority of the ancient city is composed of thousands of structures carved into a limestone cliff and clinging to its walls. The resultant menagerie of forms possesses a surprising visual uniformity and an ineffable allure. Conversely, in the 1950s Matera also served as a crucible for Italian postwar urban and architectural theory, witnessed by the Neorealist, modernist expansion of the city that developed in aversion to the Sassi. In another about-face, the previously disparaged cave city has now been recast as a major tourist destination, UNESCO World Heritage Monument, and test subject for ideas and methods of preservation. Set within a sociopolitical and architectural history of Matera from 1950 to the present, this book analyses the contemporary effects of preservation on the city and surrounding province. More broadly, it examines the relationship between and interdependence of preservation and modernism within architectural thought. To understand inconsistencies inherent to preservation, in particular its effect of catalyzing change, the study lays bare planners' and developers' use of preservation, especially for economic goals and political will. The work asserts that preservation is not a passive, curatorial pursuit: it is a cloaked manifestation of modernism and a powerful tool often used to control economies. The study demonstrates that preservation also serves to influence societies through the shaping of memory and circulation of narratives.

Reconstructing Italy

Reconstructing Italy PDF Author: Stephanie Zeier Pilat
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317070291
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Reconstructing Italy traces the postwar transformation of the Italian nation through an analysis of the Ina-Casa plan for working class housing, established in 1949 to address the employment and housing crises. Government sponsored housing programs undertaken after WWII have often been criticized as experiments that created more social problems than they solved. The neighborhoods of Ina-Casa stand out in contrast to their contemporaries both in terms of design and outcome. Unlike modernist high-rise housing projects of the period, Ina-Casa neighborhoods are picturesque and human-scaled and incorporate local construction materials and methods resulting in a rich aesthetic diversity. And unlike many other government forays into housing undertaken during this period, the Ina-Casa plan was, on the whole, successful: the neighborhoods are still lively and cohesive communities today. This book examines what made Ina-Casa a success among so many failed housing experiments, focusing on the tenuous balance struck between the legislation governing Ina-Casa, the architects who led the Ina-Casa administration, the theory of design that guided architects working on the plan, and an analysis of the results-the neighborhoods and homes constructed. Drawing on the writings of the architects, government documents, and including brief passages from works of neorealist literature and descriptions of neorealist films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino and others, this book presents a portrait of the postwar struggle to define a post-Fascist Italy.

Photography, Architecture, and the Modern Italian Landscape

Photography, Architecture, and the Modern Italian Landscape PDF Author: Lindsay Harris
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040256716
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Photography, Architecture, and the Modern Italian Landscape explores the impact of photography at a pivotal moment in Italian architecture and culture, focusing on the period between 1910 and the mid-1970s. The book analyzes architectural photographs taken by Italian cultural figures who helped transform the Italian landscape into what we know today. This study charts the oscillation of Italians’ ideas about what progress signified. For example, the book demonstrates that for writers and artists familiar with ancient ideas about civilization in 1910, the Roman countryside exemplified the contradictions inherent in primitivism. On the one hand, their photographs praised the region’s primordial beauty, yet their images condemned the crudeness of local living conditions. More broadly, it traces the history of primitivism and photography in Italy to show how cultural leaders’ alarm at the nation’s pre-modern living conditions, their aspiration to modernize them, and their grasp of photography to catalyze the process helped forge the modern Italian landscape—its monuments, housing, infrastructure, and natural environments. At the same time, it explores a vibrant period in photographic history when the advent of photographic reproduction as a commercial process developed into a medium with its own visual style capable of shaping ideas about modernity. This new image-making and reproduction technology empowered Italy’s cultural leaders not simply to represent the Italian landscape through photography but to determine how it developed. Of interest to researchers and students from a range of disciplines, modern architecture, photography, and Italian studies, this book demonstrates the power of art to transform society and to reformulate our ideas of progress.

Spatial Tensions in Urban Design

Spatial Tensions in Urban Design PDF Author: Ianira Vassallo
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030840832
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This book provides an original research perspective to the field of contemporary urban conflicts. Even though violent conflicts have transformed cities during the XX century, it is nowadays possible to identify the phenomenon of “Tensions” as a specific contemporary both social and spatial urban changes catalyst. Through a collection of essays from various disciplines focusing on international case studies—from India to Europe to Latin America— the publication explores the multifaceted concept of “spatial tensions” as a lens for better understanding contemporary urban transformations. While tensions often depend on spatial dispositives and superstructures, they also offer a powerful key for design practices and strategies.

Political Landscapes of Capital Cities

Political Landscapes of Capital Cities PDF Author: Jessica Joyce Christie
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607324695
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
Political Landscapes of Capital Cities investigates the processes of transformation of the natural landscape into the culturally constructed and ideologically defined political environments of capital cities. In this spatially inclusive, socially dynamic interpretation, an interdisciplinary group of authors including archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians uses the methodology put forth in Adam T. Smith’s The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities to expose the intimate associations between human-made environments and the natural landscape that accommodate the sociopolitical needs of governmental authority. Political Landscapes of Capital Cities blends the historical, political, and cultural narratives of capital cities such as Bangkok, Cusco, Rome, and Tehran with a careful visual analysis, hinging on the methodological tools of not only architectural and urban design but also cultural, historiographical, and anthropological studies. The collection provides further ways to conceive of how processes of urbanization, monumentalization, ritualization, naturalization, and unification affected capitals differently without losing grasp of local distinctive architectural and spatial features. The essays also articulate the many complex political and ideological agendas of a diverse set of sovereign entities that planned, constructed, displayed, and performed their societal ideals in the spaces of their capitals, ultimately confirming that political authority is profoundly spatial. Contributors: Jelena Bogdanović, Jessica Joyce Christie, Talinn Grigor, Eulogio Guzmán, Gregor Kalas, Stephanie Pilat, Melody Rod-ari, Anne Toxey, Alexei Vranich

Atomic Dwelling

Atomic Dwelling PDF Author: Robin Schuldenfrei
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415676088
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
International scholars from architecture, design, urban planning, and interior design here reappraise modern life in the context of practices of dwelling over the span of the postwar period. Reassessing culture and the economic and political effects on civilian life, this collection looks at what role material objects, interior spaces, and architecture played in quelling or fanning the anxieties of modernism's ordinary denizens.

Cognitive Modelling in Language and Discourse across Cultures

Cognitive Modelling in Language and Discourse across Cultures PDF Author: Annalisa Baicchi
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 152750039X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
This volume deals with core issues in figurative language and figurative thought. It also explores areas of convergence between idealised cognitive models and language across fourteen European and non-European languages (Croatian, English, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Polish, Russian, Old Saxon, Sicilian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish). The collection foregrounds the relationship that holds between literalness and figurativeness in meaning construction, it emphasises the role of conceptual metonymy and metaphor as the main cognitive tools at work in inferential activity and as generators of discourse ties, and it also depicts the import of cognitive models in the production and interpretation of multimodal communication. In addition, a number of more specific topics are addressed from different perspectives, such as language variation and cultural models, the argumentative role of metaphor in discourse and the role of empirical work in cognitive linguistics.

Film as an Expression of Spirituality

Film as an Expression of Spirituality PDF Author: Kenneth R. Morefield
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527550850
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
What makes a film ‘spiritually significant’? These twelve essays explore the religious, political, social, and psychological importance of films on the Arts & Faith Top 100 list of spiritually significant films. The anthology features close readings and analyses of films by Dreyer, Antonioni, Pasolini, Kubrick, Scorsese, Schrader, Miyazaki, and others. It provides both important contributions to the understanding of canonical directors and a foundational introduction for those seeking to understand film as one expression of human spirituality.

Learning from Failure in the Design Process

Learning from Failure in the Design Process PDF Author: Lisa Huang
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131741974X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Learning from Failure in the Design Process shows you that design work builds on lessons learned from failures to help you relax your fear of making mistakes, so that you’re not paralyzed when faced with a task outside of your comfort zone. Working hands-on with building materials, such as concrete, sheet metal, and fabric, you will understand behaviors, processes, methods of assembly, and ways to evaluate your failures to achieve positive results. Through material and assembly strategies of stretching, casting, carving, and stacking, this book uncovers the issues, problems, and failures confronted in student material experiments and examines built projects that addressed these issues with innovative and intelligent strategies. Highlighting numerous professional practice case studies with over 250 color images, this book will be ideal for students interested in materials and methods, and students of architecture in design studios.

Images of Class

Images of Class PDF Author: Jacopo Galimberti
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1839765305
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 664

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Book Description
During the 1960s and 1970s, Workerism and Autonomia were prominent Marxist currents. However, it is rarely acknowledged that these movements inspired many visual artists such as the members of Archizoom, Gordon Matta-Clark and Gianfranco Baruchello. This book focuses on the aesthetic and cultural discourse developed by three generations of militants (including Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Bifo and Silvia Federici), and how it was appropriated by artists, architects, graphic designers and architectural historians such as Manfredo Tafuri. Images of Class signposts key moments of this dialogue, ranging from the drawings published on classe operaia to Potere Operaio's exhibition in Paris, the Metropolitan Indians' zines, a feminist art collective who adhered to the Wages for Housework Campaign, and the N group's experiments with Gestalt theory. Featuring more than 140 images of artworks, many published here for the first time, this volume provides an original perspective on post-war Italian culture and new insights into some of the most influential Marxist movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries worldwide.