Author: Deyan Sudjic
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241188059
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
The director of the Design Museum defines the greatest artefact of all time: the city We live in a world that is now predominantly urban. So how do we define the city as it evolves in the twenty-first century? Drawing examples from across the globe, Deyan Sudjic decodes the underlying forces that shape our cities, such as resources and land, to the ideas that shape conscious elements of design, whether of buildings or of space. Erudite and entertaining, he considers the differences between capital cities and the rest to understand why it is that we often feel more comfortable in our identities as Londoners, Muscovites, or Mumbaikars than in our national identities.
Author: Sherry Simon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136629890
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
All cities are multilingual, but there are some where language relations have a special importance. These are cities where more than one historically rooted language community lays claim to the territory of the city. This book focuses on four such linguistically divided cities: Calcutta, Trieste, Barcelona, and Montreal. Though living with the ever-present threat of conflict, these cities offer the possibility of creative interaction across competing languages and this book examines the dynamics of translation in its many forms. By focusing on a category of cities which has received little attention, this study contributes to our understanding of the kinds of language relations that sustain the diversity of urban life. Illustrated with photos and maps, Cities in Translation is both an engaging read for a wide-ranging audience and an important text in advancing theory and methodology in translation studies.
Author: Daniel A. Bell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691159696
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
A lively and personal book that returns the city to political thought Cities shape the lives and outlooks of billions of people, yet they have been overshadowed in contemporary political thought by nation-states, identity groups, and concepts like justice and freedom. The Spirit of Cities revives the classical idea that a city expresses its own distinctive ethos or values. In the ancient world, Athens was synonymous with democracy and Sparta represented military discipline. In this original and engaging book, Daniel Bell and Avner de-Shalit explore how this classical idea can be applied to today's cities, and they explain why philosophy and the social sciences need to rediscover the spirit of cities. Bell and de-Shalit look at nine modern cities and the prevailing ethos that distinguishes each one. The cities are Jerusalem (religion), Montreal (language), Singapore (nation building), Hong Kong (materialism), Beijing (political power), Oxford (learning), Berlin (tolerance and intolerance), Paris (romance), and New York (ambition). Bell and de-Shalit draw upon the richly varied histories of each city, as well as novels, poems, biographies, tourist guides, architectural landmarks, and the authors' own personal reflections and insights. They show how the ethos of each city is expressed in political, cultural, and economic life, and also how pride in a city's ethos can oppose the homogenizing tendencies of globalization and curb the excesses of nationalism. The Spirit of Cities is unreservedly impressionistic. Combining strolling and storytelling with cutting-edge theory, the book encourages debate and opens up new avenues of inquiry in philosophy and the social sciences. It is a must-read for lovers of cities everywhere. In a new preface, Bell and de-Shalit further develop their idea of "civicism," the pride city dwellers feel for their city and its ethos over that of others.
Author: James Holston
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822322740
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
An expanded edition of the Public Culture special issue, which explores current meanings and contestations of citizenship in relation to the urban experience.
Author: Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 1616890533
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
Extraordinary architecture addresses so much more than mere practical considerations. It inspires and provokes while creating a seamless experience of the physical world for its users. It is the rare writer that can frame the discussion of a building in a way that allows the reader to see it with new eyes. Writing About Architecture is a handbook on writing effectively and critically about buildings and cities. Each chapter opens with a reprint of a significant essay written by a renowned architecture critic, followed by a close reading and discussion of the writer's strategies. Lange offers her own analysis using contemporary examples as well as a checklist of questions at the end of each chapter to help guide the writer. This important addition to the Architecture Briefs series is based on the author's design writing courses at New York University and the School of Visual Arts. Lange also writes a popular online column for Design Observer and has written for Dwell, Metropolis, New York magazine, and The New York Times. Writing About Architecture includes analysis of critical writings by Ada Louise Huxtable, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Muschamp, Michael Sorkin, Charles Moore, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Jane Jacobs. Architects covered include Marcel Breuer, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Field Operations, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Frederick Law Olmsted, SOM, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Author: Stephen Inwood
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 033054067X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 783
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Book Description
By 1880, London, capital of the largest empire ever known, was the richest, most populous city in the world. And yet it remained an overcrowded, undergoverned city with huge slums gripped by poverty and disease. Over the next three decades, London began its transformation into a new kind of city - one of unprecedented size, dynamism and technological advance. In this highly evocative account, Stephen Iinwood defines an era of unique character and importance by delving into the lives and textures of the booming city. He takes us - by hansom cab, bicycle, electric tram or motor bus - from the glittering new department stores of Oxford Street to the synagogues and sweat shops of the East End, from bohemian bars and gaudy mushc halls to the well-kept gardens of Edwardian surburbia. 'Essential reading for the scholar, the historian and the lover of London. ..He is equally at home with the grand sweep and the human detail, always supported by immaculate research...Inwood can throw off with elegant ease a concise explanation of technicalities that the reader was vaguely aware of not understanding and perhaps meant to look up sometime.' Liza Picard Financial Times Magazine
Author: Deyan Sudjic
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393240924
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
A brilliant exposé of the interaction between art, design, and commerce. In The Language of Things, the director of London's Design Museum charts our relationship with all things designed. With scintillating wit and an eye for the pleasures and dangers of rampant consumerism, Deyan Sudjic takes us from luxury car commercials to glossy advertisements for seasonal variations of the Prada purse to the hype surrounding the latest version of the iPhone, exploring how we are manipulated and seduced by our possessions. Who would've thought that it's the subtle visual similarity between the Volkswagen Golf GTI and the barrel of an automatic pistol that makes people want to get behind the wheel? And why is it that digital cameras in cell phones "click" even though they don't have a shutter? Sudjic's illuminating argument will resound with anyone who has ever been affected by how things look—lured, in other words, by the powerful siren call of design.
Author: Philip Steele
Publisher: Big Picture Press
ISBN: 1536203106
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 64
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Book Description
The world's most famous cities through the ages! Walk around any famous city and layers of history start to emerge. In London, Roman walls are dwarfed by office blocks. In Rome, ancient treasures like the Colosseum stand shoulder to shoulder with buildings from the Renaissance. In New York, skyscrapers from the 1920s and 1930s predate enormous glass towers. In Cities in Layers: Six Famous Cities Through Time, six major world cities are shown at different stages throughout history. A clever die-cut element allows readers to really peel back layers of time.
Author: Jane Tormey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415564395
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
Cities and Photography discusses the relationship between people and the city, visualized in photographs. It explores how photographs display attitudes, agency and vision in the way a city is documented and imagined. It provides a visually focused examination of the city and urbanism for a range of different disciplines - across the social sciences and humanities, photography and fine art. This book offers different perspectives from which to view social, political and cultural ideas about the city. It provides introductions to the theories useful to photographers addressing issues relating to urbanism, and to key photographic themes that inform cultural issues central to a discussion of urbanism (e.g. the street, the everyday, social conditions). A series of case studies, featuring international and contemporary photographic projects, provides a means with which to examine a range of issues, for example: regeneration and displacement, power and the institution, visions of modernity and post-modernity, psycho-geographical space. Cities and Photography interprets the city as a space that we inhabit on different conceptual and physical levels, and gives emphasis to how people operate within, relate to, and activate the city via construction, habitation and disruption.
Author: Christopher Alexander
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190050357
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 1216
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Book Description
You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.
