Download or read book Destruction By Design written by Steven Owlett, EdD and published by Page Publishing Inc. This book was released on 2024-09-30 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the precipice of global upheaval, this book delves into the systemic forces threatening our way of life. From the erosion of public trust to the escalating climate crisis, from the psychological grip of social media to the economic stranglehold of debt, it paints a stark picture of a world teetering on the edge of chaos. But amidst the destruction, glimmerings of hope emerge. Systems thinking and complex adaptive approaches offer tools to navigate the ever-changing landscape. Insights from ancient wisdom like Sun Tzu's Art of War and historical giants like the Roman Empire provide lessons for resilience and adaptation. Modern advancements in science and technology, from CRISPR to AI, hold the potential for both profound destruction and unimaginable progress. The book's core lies in confronting the critical issues of our time: The erosion of trust, the breakdown of systems, threats to individual well-being, and the looming environmental and economic crises. Through a balanced exploration of diverse viewpoints, from skeptics to activists, the book equips readers with the tools to form informed opinions. It challenges readers to examine the world around them critically, break free from echo chambers, and develop informed perspectives on the most pressing issues of our time. Ultimately, this book is a call to action. It urges us to embrace systems thinking and diverse perspectives and actively participate in shaping our future. By understanding the complex forces at play and harnessing the power of innovative solutions, we can navigate the chaos and build a more resilient, just, and sustainable world for ourselves and future generations.
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 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 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 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 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 The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures written by Henri Lipmanowicz and published by . This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smart leaders know that they would greatly increase productivity and innovation if only they could get everyone fully engaged. So do professors, facilitators and all changemakers. The challenge is how. Liberating Structures are novel, practical and no-nonsense methods to help you accomplish this goal with groups of any size. Prepare to be surprised by how simple and easy they are for anyone to use. This book shows you how with detailed descriptions for putting them into practice plus tips on how to get started and traps to avoid. It takes the design and facilitation methods experts use and puts them within reach of anyone in any organization or initiative, from the frontline to the C-suite. Part One: The Hidden Structure of Engagement will ground you with the conceptual framework and vocabulary of Liberating Structures. It contrasts Liberating Structures with conventional methods and shows the benefits of using them to transform the way people collaborate, learn, and discover solutions together. Part Two: Getting Started and Beyond offers guidelines for experimenting in a wide range of applications from small group interactions to system-wide initiatives: meetings, projects, problem solving, change initiatives, product launches, strategy development, etc. Part Three: Stories from the Field illustrates the endless possibilities Liberating Structures offer with stories from users around the world, in all types of organizations -- from healthcare to academic to military to global business enterprises, from judicial and legislative environments to R&D. Part Four: The Field Guide for Including, Engaging, and Unleashing Everyone describes how to use each of the 33 Liberating Structures with step-by-step explanations of what to do and what to expect. Discover today what Liberating Structures can do for you, without expensive investments, complicated training, or difficult restructuring. Liberate everyone's contributions -- all it takes is the determination to experiment.
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.
Download or read book Design After Decline written by Brent D. Ryan and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-05-22 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost fifty years ago, America's industrial cities—Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Baltimore, and others—began shedding people and jobs. Today they are littered with tens of thousands of abandoned houses, shuttered factories, and vacant lots. With population and housing losses continuing in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis, the future of neighborhoods in these places is precarious. How we will rebuild shrinking cities and what urban design vision will guide their future remain contentious and unknown. In Design After Decline, Brent D. Ryan reveals the fraught and intermittently successful efforts of architects, planners, and city officials to rebuild shrinking cities following mid-century urban renewal. With modern architecture in disrepute, federal funds scarce, and architects and planners disengaged, politicians and developers were left to pick up the pieces. In twin narratives, Ryan describes how America's two largest shrinking cities, Detroit and Philadelphia, faced the challenge of design after decline in dramatically different ways. While Detroit allowed developers to carve up the cityscape into suburban enclaves, Philadelphia brought back 1960s-style land condemnation for benevolent social purposes. Both Detroit and Philadelphia "succeeded" in rebuilding but at the cost of innovative urban design and planning. Ryan proposes that the unprecedented crisis facing these cities today requires a revival of the visionary thinking found in the best modernist urban design, tempered with the lessons gained from post-1960s community planning. Depicting the ideal shrinking city as a shifting patchwork of open and settled areas, Ryan concludes that accepting the inevitable decline and abandonment of some neighborhoods, while rebuilding others as new neighborhoods with innovative design and planning, can reignite modernism's spirit of optimism and shape a brighter future for shrinking cities and their residents.
Download or read book Interim Design Assessment for the Blue Grass Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plant written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2005-11-25 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because of concerns about incineration, the Department of Defense plans to use alternative means to destroy the chemical agent stockpiles at the Pueblo and Blue Grass facilities. The DOD contracted with Bechtel Parsons to design and operate pilot plants for this purpose. As part of the NRC efforts to assist the DOD with its chemical demilitarization efforts, the Department requested a review and assessment of the Bechtel designs for both plants. An earlier report presented an assessment of the Pueblo design. This report provides a review of the Blue Grass Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plant based on review of data and information about the initial design and some intermediate design data. Among other topics, the report presents technical risk assessment issues, an analysis of delivery and disassembly operations and of agent destruction core processes, and an examination of waste treatment.
Download or read book Interim Design Assessment for the Pueblo Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plant written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2005-01-18 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1996, Congress enacted directing the Department of Defense to assess and demonstrate technology alternatives to incineration for destruction of the chemical weapons stored at Pueblo Chemical and Blue Grass Army Depots. Since then, the National Research Council (NRC) has been carrying out evaluations of candidate technologies including reviews of engineering design studies and demonstration testing. Most recently, the NRC was asked by the Army to evaluate designs for pilot plants at Pueblo and Blue Grass. These pilot plants would use chemical neutralization for destroying the chemical agent and the energetics in the munitions stockpiles of these two depots. This report provides the interim assessment of the Pueblo Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plant (PCAPP) to permit adjustment of any significant problems as soon as possible. The report presents an analysis of the issues about the current PCAPP design and a series of findings and recommendations about ways to reduce concerns with involve the public more heavily in the process.
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 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 Thermodynamics and the Destruction of Resources written by Bhavik R. Bakshi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a unique, multidisciplinary effort to apply rigorous thermodynamics fundamentals, a disciplined scholarly approach, to problems of sustainability, energy, and resource uses. Applying thermodynamic thinking to problems of sustainable behavior is a significant advantage in bringing order to ill-defined questions with a great variety of proposed solutions, some of which are more destructive than the original problem. The articles are pitched at a level accessible to advanced undergraduates and graduate students in courses on sustainability, sustainable engineering, industrial ecology, sustainable manufacturing, and green engineering. The timeliness of the topic, and the urgent need for solutions make this book attractive to general readers and specialist researchers as well. Top international figures from many disciplines, including engineers, ecologists, economists, physicists, chemists, policy experts and industrial ecologists among others make up the impressive list of contributors.
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: How historical preservation efforts to protect architectural monuments arose in the twentieth century. The twentieth century was highly destructive, but from its 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. 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, 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. Designs of Destruction emphasizes how the technical project of ensuring various buildings’ longevity jolted preservation into establishing a transnational set of codes, values, and practices. At the same time, this paradoxically helped integrate technologies of destruction—from bombs to bulldozers—into cultural governance. 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 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 303 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.
