The Alchemy of Things: Interiors Shaped by Curious Minds

The Alchemy of Things: Interiors Shaped by Curious Minds PDF Author: Karen McCartney
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781760637026
Category : Interior decoration
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Explores the homes of 18 global creatives who take an eccentric, whimsical, curated and clever approach to their living space.

The Alchemy of Things: Interiors Shaped by Curious Minds

The Alchemy of Things: Interiors Shaped by Curious Minds PDF Author: Karen McCartney
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781760637026
Category : Interior decoration
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Explores the homes of 18 global creatives who take an eccentric, whimsical, curated and clever approach to their living space.

Luxury Arts of the Renaissance

Luxury Arts of the Renaissance PDF Author: Marina Belozerskaya
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 0892367857
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.

The Topkapi Scroll

The Topkapi Scroll PDF Author: Gülru Necipoğlu
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 0892363355
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
Since precious few architectural drawings and no theoretical treatises on architecture remain from the premodern Islamic world, the Timurid pattern scroll in the collection of the Topkapi Palace Museum Library is an exceedingly rich and valuable source of information. In the course of her in-depth analysis of this scroll dating from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, Gülru Necipoğlu throws new light on the conceptualization, recording, and transmission of architectural design in the Islamic world between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. Her text has particularly far-reaching implications for recent discussions on vision, subjectivity, and the semiotics of abstract representation. She also compares the Islamic understanding of geometry with that found in medieval Western art, making this book particularly valuable for all historians and critics of architecture. The scroll, with its 114 individual geometric patterns for wall surfaces and vaulting, is reproduced entirely in color in this elegant, large-format volume. An extensive catalogue includes illustrations showing the underlying geometries (in the form of incised “dead” drawings) from which the individual patterns are generated. An essay by Mohammad al-Asad discusses the geometry of the muqarnas and demonstrates by means of CAD drawings how one of the scroll’s patterns could be used co design a three-dimensional vault.

Brilliant

Brilliant PDF Author: Jane Brox
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547487150
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
This “superb history” of artificial light traces the evolution of society—“invariably fascinating and often original . . . [it] amply lives up to its title” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). In Brilliant, Jane Brox explores humankind’s ever-changing relationship to artificial light, from the stone lamps of the Pleistocene to the LEDs embedded in fabrics of the future. More than a survey of technological development, this sweeping history reveals how artificial light changed our world, and how those social and cultural changes in turn led to the pursuit of more ways of spreading, maintaining, and controlling light. Brox plumbs the class implications of light—who had it, who didn’t—through the centuries when crude lamps and tallow candles constricted waking hours. She identifies the pursuit of whale oil as the first time the need for light thrust us toward an environmental tipping point. Only decades later, gas street lights opened up the evening hours to leisure, which changed the ways we live and sleep and the world’s ecosystems. Edison’s bulbs produced a light that seemed to its users all but divorced from human effort or cost. And yet, as Brox’s informative portrait of our current grid system shows, the cost is ever with us. Brilliant is infused with human voices, startling insights, and timely questions about how our future lives will be shaped by light

Perfect Imperfect

Perfect Imperfect PDF Author: Karen McCartney
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1952533589
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
If you have read The House that Pinterest Built, Smart Spaces, The Alchemy of Things, or Elements of Style you're going to love Perfect Imperfect. Wabi-sabi and new creative interior design expressions: Perfect Imperfect is a stunning collection of homes and studios of creatives from all over the world, with thought-provoking text by Karen McCartney and stunning visuals by Sharyn Cairns and Glen Proebstel. Perfect Imperfect takes as its founding principle the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi. Wabi-Sabi advocates the beauty to be found in imperfection, impermanence and the authentic. Importantly this is done without losing sight of the benefits of living in the 21st century; where designers are merging digital technology with the handmade, rethinking how to use space and accommodating the natural world. Creating a new interior design vocabulary: As the collaborative process for creating Perfect Imperfect involved working across continents, the authors created a list of words and phrases that define how to curate the work they include in their stunning book. Their new interior design and interior decorating vocabulary includes terms such as mutability, irregularity, unfinished and incomplete, void, the effects of accident, unpretentious, simplicity, contrasts, and Leonard Koren's idea that 'beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness'. The new words and phrases introduced by the authors define the book's visual sections: - Spirit of Nature - Strange Beauty - Mark of Hand - Deep Shadow - Weathering & Decay - And, Incomplete and Irregular A beautiful, inspirational decorative book: Perfect Imperfect is a celebration of accident, curation, collection, hesitation, collaboration, reuse, reimagining and true originality. It explores an established aesthetic in a new way and embraces current design objects alongside well-worn ones; featuring interior settings that mix comfort, design and an off-beat beauty.

The Mystery and Romance of Alchemy and Pharmacy

The Mystery and Romance of Alchemy and Pharmacy PDF Author: Charles John Samuel Thompson
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
ISBN: 1465611150
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Dr. v. Oefele states of pharmacy before the time of Hippocrates, that although the practice of medicine was not separated from pharmacy among the Greeks and Romans, there was such a separation among the ancient Egyptians, from whom the distinction was handed down to the Copts, and by them to the Arabians; and, in fact, that the term pharmacist is probably of Egyptian origin, being derived from Ph-ar-maki, which signifies the preparation of medicine from drugs. The Egyptian pharmaki who were engaged in that occupation belonged to the higher social ranks of writers or academically-educated persons, comprising also the priests, physicians, statesmen, and military commanders. The Jews were indebted to Egypt for their primary ideas of medicine, but they cast away the ideas of demonology and magic which clouded what was good in the practice of Egypt. The Talmud recommends onions for worms, and wine, pepper, and asafœtida for flatulency. The Talmudists are responsible for calling the earth, air, fire, and water elementary bodies. In the middle ages the Jews rendered service to the healing art, and had a large share in the scientific work connected with the Arab domination of Spain. In China the use of drugs goes back to a very remote age, and alchemy was practised by the Chinese long previous to its being known in Europe. For two centuries prior to the Christian era, and for four or more subsequent, the transmutation of the base metals into gold, and the composition of the elixir of immortality, were questions ardently studied by the Chinese. It is, moreover, a matter of history that intercourse between China and Persia was frequent both before and after the Mahomedan conquest of the latter country; that embassies from Persia as well as from the Arabs, and even from the Greeks in Constantinople, visited the court of the Chinese emperor in Shansi; that Arab traders settled in China, and that there was frequent intercourse by sea between China and the Persian Gulf; and lastly, that China had an extensive alchemical literature anterior to the period when alchemy was studied in the West. All these facts go to prove that the ancient science known as alchemy was originated by the Chinese, and not by the disciples of Mahomed, who only acquired the knowledge at second hand.

Distinction

Distinction PDF Author: Pierre Bourdieu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113587316X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 641

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Book Description
Examines differences in taste between modern French classes, discusses the relationship between culture and politics, and outlines the strategies of pretension.

The System of Objects

The System of Objects PDF Author: Jean Baudrillard
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781844670536
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
A cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society, The System of Objects is a tour de force a theoretical letter-in-a-bottle tossed into the ocean in 1968, which brilliantly communicates to us all the live ideas of the day.

The Enemies of Books

The Enemies of Books PDF Author: William Blades
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Book-worms
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description


The Conduct of Life

The Conduct of Life PDF Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Publisher: London G. Routledge 1884.
ISBN:
Category : Conduct of life
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description