Download or read book Designs of Destruction written by Lucia Allais and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twentieth century was the most destructive in human history, but from its vast landscapes of ruins was born a new architectural type: the cultural monument. In the wake of World War I, an international movement arose which aimed to protect architectural monuments in large numbers, and regardless of style, hoping not only to keep them safe from future conflicts, but also to make them worthy of protection from more quotidian forms of destruction. This movement was motivated by hopeful idealism as much as by a pragmatic belief in bureaucracy. An evolving group—including architects, intellectuals, art historians, archaeologists, curators, and lawyers—grew out of the new diplomacy of the League of Nations. During and after World War II, it became affiliated with the Allied Military Government, and was eventually absorbed by the UN as UNESCO. By the 1970s, this organization had begun granting World Heritage status to a global register of significant sites—from buildings to bridges, shrines to city centers, ruins to colossi. Examining key episodes in the history of this preservation effort—including projects for the Parthenon, for the Cathedral of St-Lô, the temples of Abu Simbel, and the Bamyian Buddahs —Lucia Allais demonstrates how the group deployed the notion of culture to shape architectural sites, and how architecture in turn shaped the very idea of global culture. More than the story of an emergent canon, Designs of Destruction emphasizes how the technical project of ensuring various buildings’ longevity jolted preservation into establishing a transnational set of codes, values, practices. Yet as entire nations’ monumental geographies became part of survival plans, Allais also shows, this paradoxically helped integrate technologies of destruction—from bombs to bulldozers—into cultural governance. Thus Designs of Destruction not only offers a fascinating narrative of cultural diplomacy, based on extensive archival findings; it also contributes an important new chapter in the intellectual history of modernity by showing the manifold ways architectural form is charged with concretizing abstract ideas and ideals, even in its destruction.
Download or read book Ruined by Design written by Mike Monteiro and published by . This book was released on 2020-05-25 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world is working exactly as designed.The combustion engine which is destroying our planet's atmosphere and rapidly making it inhospitable is working exactly as we designed it. Guns, which lead to so much death, work exactly as they're designed to work. And every time we "improve" their design, they get better at killing. Facebook's privacy settings, which have outed gay teens to their conservative parents, are working exactly as designed. Their "real names" initiative, which makes it easier for stalkers to re-find their victims, is working exactly as designed. Twitter's toxicity and lack of civil discourse is working exactly as it's designed to work.The world is working exactly as designed. And it's not working very well. Which means we need to do a better job of designing it. Design is a craft with an amazing amount of power. The power to choose. The power to influence. As designers, we need to see ourselves as gatekeepers of what we are bringing into the world, and what we choose not to bring into the world. Design is a craft with responsibility. The responsibility to help create a better world for all.Design is also a craft with a lot of blood on its hands. Every cigarette ad is on us. Every gun is on us. Every ballot that a voter cannot understand is on us. Every time social network's interface allows a stalker to find their victim, that's on us. The monsters we unleash into the world will carry your name.This book will make you see that design is a political act. What we choose to design is a political act. Who we choose to work for is a political act. Who we choose to work with is a political act. And, most importantly, the people we've excluded from these decisions is the biggest (and stupidest) political act we've made as a society.If you're a designer, this book might make you angry. It should make you angry. But it will also give you the tools you need to make better decisions.
Download or read book Beautiful Destruction written by and published by Rocky Mountain Books Ltd. This book was released on 2014 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Alberta oil/tar sands are a place of superlatives, of awesome beauty and equally awesome destruction. They are a kaleidoscope of contrasts, colours and patterns keeping time with the seemingly unstoppable movement of machinery, smoke and effluent set in an immense boreal landscape with its own immutable patterns, cadence and cycles. Beautiful Destruction is a large-format, high-quality photography book that uses over 100 stunning, full-colour aerial photographs to transcend the polarities that dominate public discourse of the largest industrial project in North America: the Alberta oil/tar sands. With short essays by renowned personalities Bill McKibben, Charles Wilkinson, Duff Connacher, Elizabeth May, Eric Reguly, Ezra Levant, Jennifer Grant, Rick George, Gil McGowan, Allan Adam, Megan Leslie and Francis Scarpaleggia from both sides of the oil/tar sands debate discussing the artistic, industrial and environmental perceptions of northern Alberta's petroleum-based mega-project, Beautiful Destruction is one of the most ambitious, provocative and unique photography projects to be published in years.
Download or read book Destruction written by Sven Spieker and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2017-08-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays explore contemporary artists' engagement with destruction, and how it has disrupted the perceived integrity of built structures and institutions. The effects and meanings of destruction are central to the work of many of our most influential artists. Since the early 1960s, artists have employed destruction to creative ends. Here destruction changes from a negative state or passive condition to a highly productive category. The destructive subversion of media imagery aims to release us from its controlling effects. The self-destructing artwork extinguishes art's fixity as arrested form and ushers in the ephemeral and contingent "open work." This anthology explores artworks that convey the threat of destruction an how they have disrupted the perceived integrity of built structures and institutions. Artistic acts of iconoclasm or risk to the self have raised consciousness of authoritarian oppression. More understated works explore the theme of destruction in armed conflict, media violence, and threats to the environment. These text make up the first collection to be focused systematically on destruction in modern and contemporary art. Artists surveyed include Ai Weiwei, John Baldessari, Monica Bonvicini, Alexander Brener, Stuart Brisley, Douglas Gordon, Huang Yong Ping, Enrique Jezik, Milan Knizak, Paul McCarthy, Piero Manzoni, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gustav Metzger, Otto Mühl, Yoko Ono, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Petr Pavlensky, William Pope.L, Walid Raad, Arnulf Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, Song Dong, Jean Tinguely, Wolf Vostell Writers include Alain Badiou, Walter Benjamin, Horst Bredekamp, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Medina Cuauthémoc, Dario Gamboni, Richard Galpin, Caleb Kelly, Bruno Latour, Sven Lütticken, Antonio Negri, Sophie O'Brien, Kristine Stiles, Jennifer Walden
Download or read book Godzilla written by Mark Cotta Vaz and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces the creative process behind the film, with concept illustrations, sketches, storyboards, and other pre-production materials, and features interviews with the director, key crew, and cast members.
Download or read book The Destruction of Memory written by Robert Bevan and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2007-04-20 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crumbled shells of mosques in Iraq, the bombing of British cathedrals in World War II, the fall of the World Trade Center towers on September 11: when architectural totems such as these are destroyed by conflicts and the ravages of war, more than mere buildings are at stake. The Destruction of Memory reveals the extent to which a nation weds itself to its landscape; Robert Bevan argues that such destruction not only shatters a nation’s culture and morale but is also a deliberate act of eradicating a culture’s memory and, ultimately, its existence. Bevan combs through world history to highlight a range of wars and conflicts in which the destruction of architecture was pivotal. From Cortez’s razing of Aztec cities to the carpet bombings of Dresden and Tokyo in World War II to the war in the former Yugoslavia, The Destruction of Memory exposes the cultural war that rages behind architectural annihilation, revealing that in this subliminal assault lies the complex aim of exterminating a people. He provocatively argues for “the fatally intertwined experience of genocide and cultural genocide,” ultimately proposing the elevation of cultural genocide to a crime punishable by international law. In an age in which Frank Gehry, I. M. Pei, and Frank Lloyd Wright are revered and yet museums and temples of priceless value are destroyed in wars around the world, Bevan challenges the notion of “collateral damage,” arguing that it is in fact a deliberate act of war.
Download or read book Architecture and Armed Conflict written by JoAnne Mancini and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architecture and Armed Conflict is the first multi-authored scholarly book to address this theme from a comparative, interdisciplinary perspective. By bringing together specialists from a range of relevant fields, and with knowledge of case studies across time and space, it provides the first synthetic body of research on the complex, multifaceted subject of architectural destruction in the context of conflict. The book addresses several specific research questions: How has the destruction of buildings and landscapes figured in recent historical conflicts, and how have people and states responded to it? How has the destruction of architecture been represented in different historical periods, and to what ends? What are the relationships between the destruction of architecture and the destruction of art, particularly iconoclasm? If architectural destruction is a salient feature of many armed conflicts, how does it feature in post-conflict environments? What are the relationships between architectural destruction and processes of restoration, recreation or replacement? Considering multiple conflicts, multiple time periods, and multiple locations allows this international cohort of authors to provide an essential primer for this crucial topic.
Download or read book Times of Creative Destruction written by Alexander Tzonis and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Times of Creative Destruction is about the years that followed the end of WWII, one of the most seminal and dramatic epochs in human history, during which extraordinary star-buildings were born, cities exploded, and an unprecedented world of a ‘Third Ecology’ emerged. Never before was there such a flurry of daring mega-constructions, such daring spatial acrobatics, ‘star’ buildings by star architects attained by star developers, mega-constructions, technological feats, and flourishing spatial acrobatics. But, for all its exhilarating creativity, this was also an era of unanticipated, intractable, irreversible destruction reducing the uniqueness and diversity of cultural, social and ecological peaks and valleys of our world, to a ‘desert flatland’, environmental inequality and unhappiness. This book critically discusses and revaluates these contradictory events, bringing together and commenting on a selection of shorter key texts by Tzonis and Lefaivre, the product of a rare research and writing partnership. The texts, published between the early 1960s and the present, are significant as documents that inform about the period. They are also important and timely because of their critical and influential role in the debates of this era, both creative and destructive.
Download or read book Eve of Destruction written by Sylvia Day and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-01-29 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Class is in, but Evangeline Hollis is struggling to get through the requisite training to be a full-fledged Mark. When her class goes on a field trip to an abandoned military base, passing the course isn't just a matter of pride...it's a matter of life and death. There's a demon hidden among them, killing off Eve's classmates one by one. In Eve of Destruction, as the body count mounts, a ragtag team of cable TV ghost hunters unwittingly stumbles into the carnage. Now keeping the Mark system secret competes with the need to keep the "paranormal researchers" alive. With Cain on assignment and Abel on an investigation, Eve must fly solo on her hunt to stop a killer before he strikes again. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book War Diaries written by Elisa Dainese and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2022-03-31 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, the development of advanced weaponry systems and the instant flow of information have redefined the notion of urban warfare as a local phenomenon with global effects in an increasingly interconnected world. The annihilation of Aleppo and the broadcasted demolitions of Palmyra demonstrate the accelerating politicization of the destruction process. In this timely volume, Elisa Dainese, Aleksandar Staničić, and a broad range of contributors explore the weaponization of architecture—targeted attacks on art and infrastructure meant to destroy not only physical structures but also political unity and cultural memory. Focusing on regions where planners, architects, and artists are involved in concrete initiatives on the ground, War Diaries looks at complex postwar settings to illuminate design responses to urban warfare and violence against the built environment. The essays discuss creative strategies for rebuilding and restablizing damaged sites, often within the context of continuing animosities; the establishment of design coalitions to work with local communities on reconstruction; the designing of emergency settlements; the development of new and customized strategies for rebuilding diverse parts of the ravaged world; and the teaching of culturally sensitive design practices to architects and urbanists, among many other topics. A much-needed contribution to our understanding of postconflict design, this volume maps the creative approaches that specialists have used to remediate the effects of violence against cities and cultural heritage.
Download or read book Transformation Through Destruction written by David R. Fontijn and published by Sidestone Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over a 1000 tiny bronze artefacts were found alongside the remains of a man in a Dutch barrow that was excavated in laboratory conditions. The objects had been dismantled and taken apart, all to be destroyed by fire in what appears to have been a pars pro toto burial. In essence, a person and a place were being transformed through destruction. Based on the meticulous excavation and a range of specialist and comprehensive studies of finds, a prehistoric burial ritual now can be brought to life in surprising detail. This Iron Age community used extraordinary objects that find their closest counterpart in the elite graves of the Hallstatt culture in Central Europe.
Download or read book Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction written by John Austin and published by Ilex Press. This book was released on 2017-06-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We've come a long way from the Peashooter Era: with the advent of modern household products and office supplies - foldback clips, clothespins, rubber bands, ballpoint pens, toothpicks, paper clips and plastic utensils - the everyday junk drawer can hold all the materials needed to create pocket-sized weaponry. Whether you're slowing dying of boredom in a stuffy office, plotting revenge on your older siblings or simply looking for a wonderful way to kill some time, this book is for you. Toy designer John Austin provides detailed, step-by-step instructions for each project, including materials and ammo lists, clear pictures, and construction tips, for mayhem-loving MacGyvers. The 35 devices include catapults, slingshots, darts, crossbows, and combustion shooters. Build a tiny trebuchet from paper clips and a D-cell battery. Wrap a penny in a string of paper caps to create a surprisingly impressive "bomb." Several of the projects even include variations where combatants mount laser pointer sights to their shooters to increase their accuracy. The instructions are simple so that anyone can make these wacky innovations in minutes whilst also learning about mechanics and physics in a fun, hands-on way.
Download or read book Architects of Annihilation written by Gotz Aly and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2015-09-24 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architects of Annihilation follows the activities of the demographers, economists, geographers and planners in the period between the disorderly excesses of the November 1938 pogrom and the fully-effective operation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz in summer 1942. The authors, both journalists and historians, argue that this group of intellectuals, often combining academic, civil service and Party functions, made an indispensable contribution to the planning and execution of the Final Solution. More than that, in the economic and demographic rationale of these experts, the Final Solution was only one element in a far-reaching programme of self-sufficiency which privileged the German Aryan population.
Download or read book Obsolescence written by Daniel M. Abramson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-02-12 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Things fall apart. But in his innovative, wide-ranging, and well-illustrated book, Daniel Abramson investigates the American definition of what falling apart entails. We build new buildings partly in response to demand, but even more because we believe that existing buildings are slowly becoming obsolete and need to be replaced. Abramson shows that our idea of obsolescence is a product of our tax code, which was shaped by lobbying from building interests who benefit from the idea that buildings depreciate and need to be replaced. The belief in depreciation is not held worldwide which helps explain why preservation movements struggle more in America than elsewhere. Abramson s tour of our idea of obsolescence culminates in an assessment of recent tropes of sustainability, which struggle to cultivate the idea that the greenest building is the one that already exists."
Download or read book Burning the Books written by Richard Ovenden and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The director of the famed Bodleian Libraries at Oxford narrates the global history of the willful destruction—and surprising survival—of recorded knowledge over the past three millennia. Libraries and archives have been attacked since ancient times but have been especially threatened in the modern era. Today the knowledge they safeguard faces purposeful destruction and willful neglect; deprived of funding, libraries are fighting for their very existence. Burning the Books recounts the history that brought us to this point. Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the UK Windrush generation. He examines both the motivations for these acts—political, religious, and cultural—and the broader themes that shape this history. He also looks at attempts to prevent and mitigate attacks on knowledge, exploring the efforts of librarians and archivists to preserve information, often risking their own lives in the process. More than simply repositories for knowledge, libraries and archives inspire and inform citizens. In preserving notions of statehood recorded in such historical documents as the Declaration of Independence, libraries support the state itself. By preserving records of citizenship and records of the rights of citizens as enshrined in legal documents such as the Magna Carta and the decisions of the US Supreme Court, they support the rule of law. In Burning the Books, Ovenden takes a polemical stance on the social and political importance of the conservation and protection of knowledge, challenging governments in particular, but also society as a whole, to improve public policy and funding for these essential institutions.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Destruction written by Lila Rakoczy and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buildings and landscapes are traditionally analysed with their construction and use in mind, with less interest shown in their destruction or â ~endâ (TM). This innovative book, canvassing the opinions of historians, archaeologists, and other professionals, highlights the complexity of destruction both as a concept and a phenomenon. Drawing from a variety of time periods and cultures, it explores the multiplicity of meanings that destruction can have, and the many complications this creates. Included in this are the politics behind how destruction is remembered (or forgotten), the logistical and ethical dilemmas it presents us with, and the power tensions and transitions that often accompany it. One of the most fundamental themes explored in this book is what destruction is: who defines it and how we choose to recognise it, and why these questions need to be debated. It clearly demonstrates the importance of understanding the complexity of destructive acts, and argues that the best way to achieve this is by establishing channels of dialogue between archaeologists and other disciplines.
Download or read book Subversive Institutions written by Valerie Bunce and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-01-28 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1989 to 1992, all of the socialist dictatorships in Europe (including the Soviet Union) collapsed, as did the Soviet bloc. Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia dismembered, and the Cold War international order came to an abrupt end. Based on a series of controlled comparisons among regimes and states, Valerie Bunce argues in this book that two factors account for these remarkable developments: the institutional design of socialism as a regime, a state, and a bloc, and the rapid expansion during the 1980s of opportunities for domestic and international change. When combined, institutions and opportunities explain not just when, how, and why these regimes and states disintegrated, but also some of the most puzzling features of these developments - why, for example, the collapse of socialism was largely peaceful and why Yugoslavia, but not the Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia, disintegrated through war.
