Author: Suzannah Lessard
Publisher: Delta
ISBN: 0307830489
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 349
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Book Description
The story of Stanford White--his scandalous affair with the 16-year-old actress Evelyn Nesbit, his murder in 1906 by her husband, the millionaire Harry K. Thaw, and the hailstorm of publicity that surrounded "the trial of the century"--has proven irresistable to generations of novelists, historians, and biographers. The premier neoclassical architect of his day, White's legacy to the world were such masterpieces as New York's original Madison Square Garden, the Washington Square Arch, and the Players, Metropolitan, and Colony clubs. He was also responsible for the palaces of such clients as the Whitneys, Vanderbilts, and Pulitzers, the robber barons of the Gilded Age whose power and dominance shaped the nation in its heady ascent at the turn of the century. As the century rolled on, however, the story of Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit came to be viewed as glamorous and romantic, the darker narrative of White's out-of-control sexual compulsion obscured by time. Indeed, White's wife Bessie and his son Larry remained adamantly silent about the matter for the duration of their lives, a silence that reverberated through the next four generations of their extended family. Suzannah Lessard is the eldest of Stanford White's great grandchildren. It was only in her 30's that she began to sense the parallels between the silence about her great-grandfather's life and the silence about her own perilous experience as a little girl in her own home. Thus she became drawn to the remarkable history of her family in order to uncover its hidden truths, and in so doing to liberate herself from its enclosure at last. The result is a multi-layered memoir of astonishing elegance and power, one that, like a great building, is illumined room by room, chapter by chapter, until the whole is clearly seen.
Author: Penelope Haralambidou
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351919997
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
While much has been written on Marcel Duchamp - one of the twentieth century's most beguiling artists - the subject of his flirtation with architecture seems to have been largely overlooked. Yet, in the carefully arranged plans and sections organising the blueprint of desire in the Large Glass, his numerous pieces replicating architectural fragments, and his involvement in designing exhibitions, Duchamp's fascination with architectural design is clearly evident. As his unconventional architectural influences - Niceron, Lequeu and Kiesler - and diverse legacy - Tschumi, OMA, Webb, Diller + Scofidio and Nicholson - indicate, Duchamp was not as much interested in 'built' architecture as he was in the architecture of desire, re-constructing the imagination through drawing and testing the boundaries between reality and its aesthetic and philosophical possibilities. Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire examines the link between architectural thinking and Duchamp's work. By employing design, drawing and making - the tools of the architect - Haralambidou performs an architectural analysis of Duchamp’s final enigmatic work Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas... demonstrating an innovative research methodology able to grasp meaning beyond textual analysis. This novel reading of his ideas and methods adds to, but also challenges, other art-historical interpretations. Through three main themes - allegory, visuality and desire - the book defines and theorises an alternative drawing practice positioned between art and architecture that predates and includes Duchamp.
Author: Rowan Moore
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062277596
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
In an era of brash, expensive, provocative new buildings, a prominent critic argues that emotions—such as hope, power, sex, and our changing relationship to the idea of home—are the most powerful force behind architecture, yesterday and (especially) today. We are living in the most dramatic period in architectural history in more than half a century: a time when cityscapes are being redrawn on a yearly basis, architects are testing the very idea of what a building is, and whole cities are being invented overnight in exotic locales or here in the United States. Now, in a bold and wide-ranging new work, Rowan Moore—former director of the Architecture Foundation, now the architecture critic for The Observer—explores the reasons behind these changes in our built environment, and how they in turn are changing the way we live in the world. Taking as his starting point dramatic examples such as the High Line in New York City and the outrageous island experiment of Dubai, Moore then reaches far and wide: back in time to explore the Covent Garden brothels of eighteenth-century London and the fetishistic minimalism of Adolf Loos; across the world to assess a software magnate’s grandiose mansion in Atlanta and Daniel Libeskind’s failed design for the World Trade Center site; and finally to the deeply naturalistic work of Lina Bo Bardi, whom he celebrates as the most underrated architect of the modern era.
Author: David Worthy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781646704491
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
You have a choice to make: either continue to live the same life you're currently living, hoping for a bigger, better, and more abundant life, or begin to architect the life you desire. Hoping for better will only lead you to have what you've always had with no change. In other words, hoping will do nothing for you.
Author: Aaron Betsky
Publisher: William Morrow
ISBN: 9780688143015
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
In Building Sex, architecture critic and curator Aaron Betsky looked at how traditional gender roles have influenced architecture. In Queer Space, he examines how same-sex desire is creating an entirely new architecture. Gay men and women are in the forefront of architectural innovation, reclaiming abandoned neighborhoods, redefining urban spaces, and creating liberating interiors out of hostile environments. Queer spaces have arisen out of the experiences of homosexuals in a straight culture. Often forced to hide their true nature, gay men and women have turned inward, playing with the norms of interior space and creating environments of stagecraft and celebration where they can define themselves with out fear. Their experiments point the way to an architecture that can free us all from the imprisoning structures and spaces of the modern city.
Author: K. Michael Hays
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262513021
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
Theorizes an architectural ethos of extreme self-reflection and finality from a Lacanian perspective. While it is widely recognized that the advanced architecture of the 1970s left a legacy of experimentation and theoretical speculation as intense as any in architecture's history, there has been no general theory of that ethos. Now, in Architecture's Desire, K. Michael Hays writes an account of the “late avant-garde” as an architecture systematically twisting back on itself, pondering its own historical status, and deliberately exploring architecture's representational possibilities right up to their absolute limits. In close readings of the brooding, melancholy silence of Aldo Rossi, the radically reductive “decompositions” and archaeologies of Peter Eisenman, the carnivalesque excesses of John Hejduk, and the “cinegrammatic” delirium of Bernard Tschumi, Hays narrates the story of architecture confronting its own boundaries with objects of ever more reflexivity, difficulty, and intransigence. The late avant-garde is the last architecture with philosophical aspirations, an architecture that could think philosophical problems through architecture rather than merely illustrate them. It takes architecture as the object of its own reflection, which in turn produces an unrelenting desire. Using the tools of critical theory together with the structure of Lacan's triad imaginary-symbolic-real, Hays constructs a theory of architectural desire that is historically specific and yet sets the terms and the challenges of all subsequent architectural practice, including today's.
Author: Nikki Sloane
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781949409116
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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Book Description
On the surface, my new boyfriend is a stiff, buttoned-up architect. He plans every detail of his life while carefully maintaining the walls he's built around his heart. But when the biggest project of his career pulls him away, Clay's solution is both temporary and unconventional. It even comes with a name-Travis. This handsome stranger is sweet and thoughtful. He's only meant to be a stand-in, to fulfill my needs under Clay's watchful direction, yet these two men couldn't be more different. The one thing they share? Well, I guess that would be me. One gets off on my pain, the other on my pleasure, and it awakens a desire none of us knew existed. But it can't last. Eventually I'll have to choose. And it's going to destroy us all.
Author: Mark Rakatansky
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781907896156
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
For the first time a number of key essays by the New York-based architect and critic Mark Rakatansky is brought together in this instalment in the Architecture Words series published by the Architectural Association.
Author: Jessica Helfand
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300205090
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
A compelling defense for the importance of design and how it shapes our behavior, our emotions, and our lives Design has always prided itself on being relevant to the world it serves, but interest in design was once limited to a small community of design professionals. Today, books on "design thinking" are best sellers, and computer and Web-based tools have expanded the definition of who practices design. Looking at objects, letterforms, experiences, and even theatrical performances, award-winning author Jessica Helfand asserts that understanding design's purpose is more crucial than ever. Design is meaningful not because it is pretty but because it is an intrinsically humanist discipline, tethered to the very core of why we exist. For example, as designers collaborate with developing nations on everything from more affordable lawn mowers to cleaner drinking water, they must take into consideration the full range of a given community's complex social needs. Advancing a conversation that is unfolding around the globe, Helfand offers an eye-opening look at how designed things make us feel as well as how--and why--they motivate our behavior.
Author: Suzannah Lessard
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640093516
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
"Of beach plums, ramps, and Ramada Inns: a quietly sensitive eminently sensible consideration of the landscapes of our lives . . . A gift." —Kirkus Reviews Following her bestselling The Architect of Desire, Suzannah Lessard returns with a remarkable book, a work of relentless curiosity and a graceful mixture of observation and philosophy. This intriguing hybrid will remind some of W. G. Sebald’s work and others of Rebecca Solnit’s, but it is Lessard’s singular talent to combine this profound book–length mosaic— a blend of historical travelogue, reportorial probing, philosophical meditation, and prose poem—into a work of unique genius, as she describes and reimagines our landscapes. In this exploration of our surroundings, The Absent Hand contends that to reimagine landscape is a form of cultural reinvention. This engrossing work of literary nonfiction is a deep dive into our surroundings—cities, countryside, and sprawl—exploring change in the meaning of place and reimagining the world in a time of transition. Whether it be climate change altering the meaning of nature, or digital communications altering the nature of work, the effects of global enclosure on the meaning of place are panoramic, infiltrative, inescapable. No one will finish this book, this journey, without having their ideas of living and settling in their surroundings profoundly enriched.
