Weak and Diffuse Modernity

Weak and Diffuse Modernity PDF Author: Andrea Branzi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788876246517
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In Weak and Widespread, modernity stands as a contrasting operative practice when compared to that of the 20th century, which was based on finding definitive solutions to old and new problems of industrial society. Today's architecture and urban planning tends to operate through reversible solutions, taking their references from models that are incomplete, imperfect and elastic. Precisely for this reason they are capable of withstanding the continuous processes of innovation. In this book Branzi examines how transformations in the concept of modernity have changed project strategy following new territorial and social developments. He puts this into relation to his own projects and research from the mid-1960's with the radical experience of the Archizoom group until the present.

Weak and Diffuse Modernity

Weak and Diffuse Modernity PDF Author: Andrea Branzi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788876246517
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In Weak and Widespread, modernity stands as a contrasting operative practice when compared to that of the 20th century, which was based on finding definitive solutions to old and new problems of industrial society. Today's architecture and urban planning tends to operate through reversible solutions, taking their references from models that are incomplete, imperfect and elastic. Precisely for this reason they are capable of withstanding the continuous processes of innovation. In this book Branzi examines how transformations in the concept of modernity have changed project strategy following new territorial and social developments. He puts this into relation to his own projects and research from the mid-1960's with the radical experience of the Archizoom group until the present.

Risk, Environment and Modernity

Risk, Environment and Modernity PDF Author: Scott Lash
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1848609574
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
This wide-ranging and accessible contribution to the study of risk, ecology and environment helps us to understand the politics of ecology and the place of social theory in making sense of environmental issues. The book provides insights into the complex dynamics of change in `risk societies′.

Liquid Modernity

Liquid Modernity PDF Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074565701X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history. This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life - emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community - and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning. Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.

Systemic Architecture

Systemic Architecture PDF Author: Marco Poletto
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136336907
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This is a manual investigating the subject of urban ecology and systemic development from the perspective of architectural design. It sets out to explore two main goals: to discuss the contemporary relevance of a systemic practice to architectural design, and to share a toolbox of informational design protocols developed to describe the city as a territory of self-organization. Collecting together nearly a decade of design experiments by the authors and their practice, ecoLogicStudio, the book discusses key disciplinary definitions such as ecologic urbanism, algorithmic architecture, bottom-up or tactical design, behavioural space and the boundary of the natural and the artificial realms within the city and architecture. A new kind of "real-time world-city" is illustrated in the form of an operational design manual for the assemblage of proto-architectures, the incubation of proto-gardens and the coding of proto-interfaces. These prototypes of machinic architecture materialize as synthetic hybrids embedded with biological life (proto-gardens), computational power, behavioural responsiveness (cyber-gardens), spatial articulation (coMachines and fibrous structures), remote sensing (FUNclouds), and communication capabilities (Ecological Footprint Grotto). Supporting the authors’ own essays and projects are contributions from key innovators in contemporary architecture and urban design: Michael Batty, Andrew Hudson-Smith, Michael Weinstock and Patrik Schumacher.

Architecture as Signs and Systems

Architecture as Signs and Systems PDF Author: Robert Venturi
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The observer-designer-theorists who analyzed the Las Vegas strip as an archetype in "Learning from Las Vegas" now turn their iconoclastic vision onto their own remarkable partnership and the rule-breaking architecture it has spawned for this fascinating retrospective of their life work.

Analogical City

Analogical City PDF Author: Cameron McEwan
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1685711227
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
In Analogical City, Cameron McEwan argues for architecture’s status as a critical project. McEwan revisits architect Aldo Rossi as a paradigmatic figure of the critical rational tradition, studying a neglected aspect of his thought — the analogical city — to excavate its potential. McEwan develops a grammar of the analogical city under the headings of Imagination, Transformation, City, Multitude, and Project. McEwan argues that the analogical city is critical, collective, and emancipatory. Analogical thought and understanding cities as analogical might open the conditions of possibility for rethinking the critical project in architecture. At a time when the humanities and the sciences are threatened by irrational thought, from climate denial to post-truth narratives, and when architecture has seemingly disavowed its critical capacity and political possibility through its commodification as an instrument of the neoliberal city, McEwan offers critical strategies, conceptual tools, figures of thought, and knowledge practices to articulate modes of thinking and acting differently within architectural criticism and practice. Today, knowledge is a common terrain of struggle and thought requires constant reinvention. The task of architecture, and critique more broadly, must be to interpret the world in order to change it. Consequently Analogical City proposes modes for imagining the city, the subject, and the world otherwise — towards a more egalitarian and critical architecture of the city. Ultimately, the analogical city is not a fully developed theory, nor is it only an intuitive, poetic, or purely formal practice, as some critics propose. McEwan argues that the analogical city is poetic and political: it always refers beyond itself towards a collective and critical project of the city, and yet it invites a series of formal, spatial, and graphic operations comprising erasure and negativity followed by substitution and remontage.

We Have Never Been Modern

We Have Never Been Modern PDF Author: Bruno Latour
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674076753
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith. What does it mean to be modern? What difference does the scientific method make? The difference, Latour explains, is in our careful distinctions between nature and society, between human and thing, distinctions that our benighted ancestors, in their world of alchemy, astrology, and phrenology, never made. But alongside this purifying practice that defines modernity, there exists another seemingly contrary one: the construction of systems that mix politics, science, technology, and nature. The ozone debate is such a hybrid, in Latour’s analysis, as are global warming, deforestation, even the idea of black holes. As these hybrids proliferate, the prospect of keeping nature and culture in their separate mental chambers becomes overwhelming—and rather than try, Latour suggests, we should rethink our distinctions, rethink the definition and constitution of modernity itself. His book offers a new explanation of science that finally recognizes the connections between nature and culture—and so, between our culture and others, past and present. Nothing short of a reworking of our mental landscape, We Have Never Been Modern blurs the boundaries among science, the humanities, and the social sciences to enhance understanding on all sides. A summation of the work of one of the most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and replacing the rest with a broader, fairer, and finer sense of possibility.

Bracket 1

Bracket 1 PDF Author: Mason White
Publisher: Actar D, Inc.
ISBN: 1945150432
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Seeking new voices and design talent, the new Bracket book series is structured around an open call for entries. Conceived as an almanac, the series looks at emerging thematics in our global age that are shaping the built environment in radically significant, yet often unexpected ways. Bracket 1: On Farming looks at the capacity for architecture to address ideas and issues of productive landscapes and urbanisms. Entries were selected by an international jury including Nathalie de Vries, Charles Waldheim and Michael Speaks. Once merely understood in terms of agriculture, today information, energy, labour, and landscape, among others, can be farmed. Farming harnesses the efficiency of collectivity and community. Whether cultivating land, harvesting resources, extracting energy or delegating labor, farming reveals the interdependencies of our globalized world. Simultaneously, farming represents the local gesture, the productive landscape, and the alternative economy. The processes of farming are mutable, parametric, and efficient. Farming is the modification of infrastructure, urbanisms, architectures, and landscapes toward a privileging of production.

Masterplanning Futures

Masterplanning Futures PDF Author: Lucy Bullivant
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135717834
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Winner of the Urban Design Group's 2014 Book of the Year Award! In the past, spatial masterplans for cities have been fixed blueprints realized as physical form through conventional top down processes. These frequently disregarded existing social and cultural structures, while the old modernist planning model zoned space for home and work. At a time of urban growth, these models are now being replaced by more adaptable, mixed use plans dealing holistically with the physical, social and economic revival of districts, cities and regions. Through today’s public participative approaches and using technologically enabled tools, contemporary masterplanning instruments embody fresh principles, giving cities a greater resilience and capacity for social integration and change in the future. Lucy Bullivant analyses the ideals and processes of international masterplans, and their role in the evolution of many different types of urban contexts in both the developed and developing world. Among the book’s key themes are landscape-driven schemes, social equity through the reevaluation of spatial planning, and the evolution of strategies responding to a range of ecological issues and the demands of social growth. Drawing on first-hand accounts and illustrated throughout with colour photographs, plans and visualizations, the book includes twenty essays introduced by an extensive overview of the field and its objectives. These investigate plans including one-north Singapore, Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, Xochimilco in Mexico City and Waterfront Seattle, illuminating their distinct yet complementary integrated strategies. This is a key book for those interested in today’s multiscalar masterplanning and conceptually advanced methodologies and principles being applied to meet the challenges and opportunities of the urbanizing world. The author's research was enabled by grants from the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), the SfA (the Netherlands Architecture Fund), the Danish Embassy and support from the Alfred Herrhausen Society.

Introduction to Modernity

Introduction to Modernity PDF Author: Henri Lefebvre
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859840566
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
Appearing for the first time in an English translation, Introduction to Modernity is one of Henri Lefebvre's greatest works. Published in 1962, when Lefebvre was beginning his career as a lecturer in sociology at the University of Strasbourg, it established his position in the vanguard of a movement which was to culminate in the events of May 1968. It is a book which supersedes the conventional divisions between academic disciplines. With dazzling skill, Lefebvre moves from philosophy to sociology, from literature to history, to present a profound analysis of the social, political and cultural forces at work in France and the world in the aftermath of Stalin's death—an analysis in which the contours of our own "postmodernity" appear with startling clarity. Lefebvre's lectures have become legendary, and something of his charismatic presence and delivery is captured in this book, which he intended "to be understood in the mind's ear ... and not simply to be read." With its mercurial shifts of tone, now intensely poetic, now conversational, it not only explores modernity, it exemplifies it. Equally experimental in conception is the book's remarkable structure, twelve "preludes" through which a range of recurrent themes are interwoven in free-form counterpoint: irony as a critical tool, utopianism, nature and culture, the Stalinization of Marxism, the alienation of everyday life, the cybernetic society ... What gradually emerges is not only a series of original concepts about humanity and culture, but an extraordinary invocation of the complexity of social contradictions. Yet the fragmented structure of the book is not left to float free. Its shifting and eclectic melodies and leitmotifs have a solid ground basis: the wish to rehabilitate the Marxist dialectic as a method for understanding and transforming the modern world. This program is at the heart of the book, and gives it its underlying coherence, making Introduction to Modernity not only essential reading for all students of European cultural history, but also a key text for Marxism in the post-communist world of the late twentieth century.