Download or read book Forensic Architecture written by Eyal Weizman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, a little-known research group named Forensic Architecture began using novel research methods to undertake a series of investigations into human rights abuses. Today, the group provides crucial evidence for international courts and works with a wide range of activist groups, NGOs, Amnesty International, and the UN. Beyond shedding new light on human rights violations and state crimes across the globe, Forensic Architecture has also created a new form of investigative practice that bears its name. The group uses architecture as an optical device to investigate armed conflicts and environmental destruction, as well as to cross-reference a variety of evidence sources, such as new media, remote sensing, material analysis, witness testimony, and crowd-sourcing. In Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman, the group’s founder, provides, for the first time, an in-depth introduction to the history, practice, assumptions, potentials, and double binds of this practice. The book includes an extensive array of images, maps, and detailed documentation that records the intricate work the group has performed. Included in this volume are case studies that traverse multiple scales and durations, ranging from the analysis of the shrapnel fragments in a room struck by drones in Pakistan, the reconstruction of a contested shooting in the West Bank, the architectural recreation of a secret Syrian detention center from the memory of its survivors, a blow-by-blow account of a day-long battle in Gaza, and an investigation of environmental violence and climate change in the Guatemalan highlands and elsewhere. Weizman’s Forensic Architecture, stunning and shocking in its critical narrative, powerful images, and daring investigations, presents a new form of public truth, technologically, architecturally, and aesthetically produced. Their practice calls for a transformative politics in which architecture as a field of knowledge and a mode of interpretation exposes and confronts ever-new forms of state violence and secrecy.
Download or read book Israel s Armor written by Walter L. Hixson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-11 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Israel's Armor provides a foundational history of the Israel lobby and its influence on American foreign policy.
Download or read book Architects of Repression written by Walter L. Hixson and published by Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy Incorporated. This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a compelling history of the most powerful lobby acting on behalf of a foreign government in all of American history. The book puts to rest any doubt as to whether the Israel lobby has played and continues to play the crucial role in enabling aggression, the suppression of Palestinian rights, and the failure to achieve a comprehensive Middle East peace accord.Rooted in archival evidence and an abundant secondary literature, Architects of Repression shows how AIPAC and other Israel affinity groups deploy propaganda, target campaign contributions, organize demonstrations, and exert political pressure to manage public opinion-and, especially, to influence the Congress. The massive foreign aid that the United States has provided Israel-far more than allocated to any other country and dispersed on favorable terms reserved for Israel alone--is only one of many enabling benefits the small Zionist state has received over many decades from the most powerful nation in the world.For decades, as the book explains in depth, the Israel lobby has played the pivotal role as the US enabled Israel's disdain for a negotiated settlement of the Middle East conflict; its contemptuous dismissal of the plight of Palestinian refugees; its cultivation of nuclear weapons in defiance of the global nuclear non-proliferation movement; its profusion of palpably racist, illegal and destabilizing Jewish-only settlements; its takeover of Jerusalem, much of the West Bank, and the Golan Heights; and its ongoing violent aggression, which has victimized Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as well as neighboring states notably Lebanon. In more recent years the Israel lobby launched a campaign to criminalize political engagement and freedom of speech by equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. Hixson convincingly reveals that there will never be peace in the Middle East until the monolithic Israel lobby is neutralized.
Download or read book Architecture State Modernism and Cultural Nationalism in the Apartheid Capital written by Hilton Judin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-08 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first comprehensive investigation of the architecture of the apartheid state in the period of rapid economic growth and political repression from 1957 to 1966 when buildings took on an ideological role that was never remote from the increasingly dominant administrative, legislative and policing mechanisms of the regime. It considers how this process reflected the usurpation of a regional modernism and looks to contribute to wider discourses on international postwar modernism in architecture. Buildings in Pretoria that came to embody ambitions of the apartheid state for industrialisation and progress serve as case studies. These were widely acclaimed projects that embodied for apartheid officials the pursuit of modernisation but carried latent apprehensions of Afrikaners about their growing economic prospects and cultural estrangement in Africa. It is a less known and marginal story due to the dearth of material and documents buried in archives and untranslated documents. Many of the documents, drawings and photographs in the book are unpublished and include classified material and photographs from the National Nuclear Research Centre, negatives of 1960s from Pretoria News and documents and pamphlets from Afrikaner Broederbond archives. State architecture became the most iconic public manifestation of an evolving expression of white cultural identity as a new generation of architects in Pretoria took up the challenge of finding form to their prospects and beliefs. It was an opportunistic faith in Afrikaners who urgently needed to entrench their vulnerable and contested position on the African continent. The shift from provincial town to apartheid capital was swift and relentless. Little was left to stand in the way of the ambitions and aim of the state as people were uprooted and forcibly relocated, structures torn down and block upon block of administration towers and slabs erected across Pretoria. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of architectural history as well as those with an interest in postcolonial studies, political science and social anthropology.
Download or read book Freud for Architects written by John Abell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Freud for Architects explains what Freud offers to the understanding of architectural creativity and architectural experience, with case examples from early modern architecture to the present. Freud's observations on the human psyche and its influence on culture and social behaviour have generated a great deal of discussion since the 19th century. Yet, what Freud's key ideas offer to the understanding of architectural creativity and experience has received little direct attention. That is partly because Freud opened the door to a place where conventional research in architecture has little traction, the unconscious. Adding to the difficulties, Freud's collection of work is vast and daunting. Freud for Architects navigates Freud's key ideas and bridges a chasm between architecture and psychoanalytic theory. The book highlights Freud's ideas on the foundational developments of childhood, developments on which the adult psyche is based. It explains why and how the developmental stages could influence adult architectural preferences and preoccupations, spatial intuition, and beliefs about what is proper and right for architectural design. As such Freud for Architects will be of great interest to students, practitioners and scholars in a range of disciplines including architecture, psychoanalysis and philosophy"--
Download or read book Parting the Curtain written by Walter L. Hixson and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 1998-01-11 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, Washington policymakers aspired to destabilize the Soviet and East European Communist Party regimes by implementing programs of psychological warfare and gradual cultural infiltration. In focusing on American propaganda and cultural infiltration of the Soviet empire in these years, Parting the Curtain emerges as a groundbreaking study of certain aspects of US Cold War diplomacy never before examined.
Download or read book Inside Outside written by Anita Berrizbeitia and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inside Outside constructs a framework of interpretation for architecture and landscape architecture in order to disclose relations between them that are normally overlooked. Five operations--reciprocity, materiality, threshold, insertion, and infrastructure--each initiate an alternative way of looking at the construction and representation of relationships between architecture, landscape, city, and individuals. Twenty-four projects each contribute in a unique way to the definition of an operation.
Download or read book Why We Build written by Rowan Moore and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-08-20 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Tokyoids written by Francois Blanciak and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-09-13 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A photographic survey of the robotic face of Tokyo buildings and an argument that robot aesthetics plays a central role in architectural history. In Tokyoids, architect François Blanciak surveys the robotic faces omnipresent in Tokyo buildings, offering an architectural taxonomy based not on the usual variables—size, material, historical style—but on the observable expressions of buildings. Are the eyes (windows) twinkling, the mouth (door) laughing? Is that balcony a howl of distress? Investigating robot aesthetics through his photographs of fifty buildings, Blanciak argues that the robot face originated in architecture—before the birth of robotics—and has played a central role in architectural history. Blanciak first puts the robot face into historical perspective, examining the importance of the face in architectural theory and demonstrating that the construction of architecture’s emblematic portraits triggered the emergence of a robot aesthetics. He then explores the emotions conveyed by the photographed buildings’ robot faces, in chapters titled “Awe,” “Wrath,” “Mirth,” “Pain,” “Angst,” and “Hunger.” As he does so he considers, among other things, the architectural relevance of Tokyo’s ordinary buildings; the repression of the figural in contemporary architecture; an aesthetic of dismemberment, linked to the structure of the Japanese language and local building design; and the influence of automation technology upon human interaction. Part photographic survey, part theoretical inquiry, Tokyoids upends the usual approach to robotics in architecture by considering not the automation of architectural output but the aesthetic properties of the robot.
Download or read book Frank O Gehry written by Frank O. Gehry and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 1995-05-11 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This critique of Gehry's architecture contains edited proceedings from a symposium held at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in June 1994. In addition, this book features commentaries by three architectural critics - Charles Jencks, Jeffrey Kipnis and Robert Maxwell.
Download or read book Lefebvre for Architects written by Nathaniel Coleman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the work of Henri Lefebvre has become better known in the English-speaking world since the 1991 translation of his 1974 masterpiece, The Production of Space, his influence on the actual production of architecture and the city has been less pronounced. Although now widely read in schools of architecture, planning and urban design, Lefebvre’s message for practice remains elusive; inevitably so because the entry of his work into the Anglosphere has come with repression of the two most challenging aspects of his thinking: romanticism and Utopia, which simultaneously confront modernity while being progressive. Contemporary discomfort with romanticism and Utopia arguably obstructs the shift of Lefebvre’s thinking from being objects of theoretical interest into positions of actually influencing practices. Attempting to understand and act upon architecture and the city with Lefebvre but without Utopia and romanticism risks muting the impact of his ideas. Although Utopia may seem to have no place in the present, Lefebvre reveals this as little more than a self-serving affirmation that ‘there is no alternative’ to social and political detachment. Demanding the impossible may end in failure but as Lefebvre shows us, doing so is the first step towards other possibilities. To think with Lefebvre is to think about Utopia, doing so makes contact with what is most enduring about his project for the city and its inhabitants, and with what is most radical about it as well. Lefebvre for Architects offers a concise account of the relevance of Henri Lefebvre’s writing for the theory and practice of architecture, planning and urban design. This book is accessible for students and practitioners who wish to fully engage with the design possibilities offered by Lefebvre’s philosophy.
Download or read book The Israel Lobby and U S Foreign Policy written by John J. Mearsheimer and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-09-04 with total page 651 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 2007, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, provoked both howls of outrage and cheers of gratitude for challenging what had been a taboo issue in America: the impact of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy. A work of major importance, it remains as relevant today as it was in the immediate aftermath of the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006. Mearsheimer and Walt describe in clear and bold terms the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States provides to Israel and argues that this support cannot be fully explained on either strategic or moral grounds. This exceptional relationship is due largely to the political influence of a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. They provocatively contend that the lobby has a far-reaching impact on America's posture throughout the Middle East―in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict―and the policies it has encouraged are in neither America's national interest nor Israel's long-term interest. The lobby's influence also affects America's relationship with important allies and increases dangers that all states face from global jihadist terror. The publication of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy led to a sea change in how the U.S-Israel relationship was discussed, and continues to be one of the most talked-about books in foreign policy.
Download or read book Deconstruction written by Jonathan D. Culler and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It could be argued that deconstruction has to a considerable extent been formed by critical accounts of it. This collection reprints a cross section of these important works, charting the ways in which deconstruction is conceptualized and demonstrating the impact it has had on a wide range of traditions. The essential pieces in this set include writings by Jacques Derrida, Jonathan Culler, Paul de Man, Barbara Johnson, and a wide range of key thinkers in areas as diverse as psychoanalysis, law, gender studies, and architecture. The major themes covered include: * Vol. 1: Part I: "What is Deconstruction?"Part II: "Philosophy"* Vol. 2: Part III: "Literary Criticism"Part IV: "Feminism and Queer Theory"* Vol. 3: Part V: "Psychoanalysis"Part VI: "Religion/Theology"Part VII: "Architecture"* Vol. 4: Part VIII: "Politics"Part IX: "Ethics"
Download or read book Modern Man written by Anthony Flint and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Journalist Flint recounts the life and times of the legendary architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, aka Le Corbusier, and provides illuminating details of his most iconic projects.
Download or read book Is there an Object Oriented Architecture written by Joseph Bedford and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing Graham Harman's philosophy into direct confrontation with contemporary architectural theory in new and creative ways, Is There an Object-Oriented Architecture? provides a dialogue between Harman and six of the world's leading architectural thinkers, Adam Sharr, Lorens Holm, Jonathan Hale, Peg Rawes, Patrick Lynch and Peter Carl. Harman's object-oriented philosophy is one that sees the universe as a carnival of equal “objects” with no hierarchy between humans and nonhumans. In his model, unicorns, triangles, bicycles, neutrons, and humans are all things with enduring essences that outlast their partial transformations. It is a strikingly democratic vision of the universe that knocks humans off their ontological pedestal as arbiters of what is real. It also radically challenges the very precepts of architectural theory, the structure of which remains stubbornly human-centric as it seeks to give form to the human being's place at the centre of the cosmos. In this new book, each thinker develops the implications of Harman's philosophy for the future of architecture by entering into a direct exchange with the philosopher and his thinking, both questioning him and questioning with him.
Download or read book The Creative Architect written by Pierluigi Serraino and published by The Monacelli Press, LLC. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story behind a little-known episode in the annals of modern architecture and psychology—a 1950s creativity study of the top architects of the day, including Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Philip Johnson, Louis Kahn, Richard Neutra, George Nelson, and dozens more—is now published for the first time. The story of midcentury architecture in America is dominated by outsized figures who were universally acknowledged as creative geniuses. Yet virtually unheard of is this intensive 1958–59 study, conducted at the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research at the University of California, Berkeley, that scrutinized these famous architects in an effort to map their minds. Deploying an array of tests reflecting current psychological theories, the investigation sought to answer questions that still apply to creative practice today: What makes a person creative? What are the biographical conditions and personality traits necessary to actualize that potential? The study’s findings have been gathered through numerous original sources, including questionnaires, aptitude tests, and interview transcripts, revealing how these great architects evaluated their own creativity and that of their peers. In The Creative Architect, Pierluigi Serraino charts the development, implementation, and findings of this historic study, producing the first look at a fascinating and forgotten moment in architecture, psychology, and American history.
Download or read book Questioning Architectural Judgment written by Steven A. Moore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-24 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book shines light on the problem of judgment, particularly in the realm of architectural "technics" and the codes that regulate it. The struggle to define "sustainability," and thus judge architecture through such lenses, is but one dimension of the contemporary problem of judgment. By providing the reader with an inherently interdisciplinary study of a particular discipline—architecture, it brings to the topic lenses that challenge the too frequently unexamined assumptions of the discipline. By situating architecture within a broader cultural field and using case studies to dissect the issues discussed, the book emphasizes that it is not simply a matter of designing better, more efficient, or more stringent codes to guide place-making, but a matter of reconstructing the boundaries of the systems to be coded. The authors are winners of the EDRA Place-Research Award 2014 for their work on the Green Alley Demonstration Project used in the book.
