Download or read book Invisible Cities written by Italo Calvino and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2013-08-12 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.
Download or read book Ideal City Invisible Cities written by Markus Richter and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zamosc is an extraordinary treasure of late Renaissance architecture singular in its urban conception, located near the Polish-Ukrainian border, on route between Lublin and Lwow. The never destroyed city will host the works of contemporary artists from twelve European and six non-European countries amidst its traces of a once truly multicultural society, the former orthodox churches, the cathedral, the synagogue as well as the Armenian houses. Only few ideal cities were ever partially or completely built. In particular, the ideal city plannings that were closely tied to societal utopias usually remained unrealized. Zamosc, conceived by Count Jan Zamoyski and built between 1580 1605 by Italian architect Bernardo Morando, is one of the rare existing examples of an ideal city. Today Zamosc is included in the UNESCO list of World Heritage. The artists working site-specifically will react to the given architecture and insert their work in public spaces and buildings, hidden courtyards or squares. Lawrence Weiner enfolds the arcades at the main square with one of his word sculptures. Monika Sosnowska composed a fountain while Miroslaw Balka sculpture relates to wounds, deeply cut during the second World War. Daniela Brahm, Colin Ardley, Kai Schiemenz determine squares and public spaces anew, Franka Hoernschemeyer reflects with her installation the clear gridding of the citys layout and Lucas Lenglet drafted a columbarium for one of the courtyards. Les Schliesser sets up a museum for a fictive architect born in Zamosc, Jakob Kolding investigates functional city planning with a poster project and Craigie Horsfield introduces a sound installation. David Tremlett inserted pastel wall drawings into the cartouches of the Renaissance synagogue, while the structural works of Katarzyna Jozefowicz and Pedro Cabrita Reis dialogue across its naves and Sol Lewitt inhabits its courtyard temporarily. Tilman Wendlands installation in the historical museum will integrate documentation on ideal city plans of the moderns Le Corbusier, Niemeyer and Hansen and Jaroslaw Flicinski will conceive a large wall painting for the academy, in the gymnasium of which George Hadjimichalis will install his Workshop of Projects and Images in Crisis. In the casemates of the decorates fortress Zamosc, the photo, film and video works by Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Francis Alys, Tacita Dean and Rula Halawani address the issues of geometry, order, defence systems, resistance and alleged security. In the historical academy building, which today houses the towns high school, in the Historical Museum and at the Zamosc City Gallery 20 artists will be showing their works relating to the major themes of the exhibition including memory and the grid. The contemporary art works will engage in a challenging and substantial discourse with the historical city and the underlying invisible cities, hidden beyond or masked by time and history. All in short walking distance, the exhibition will cover the entire city of Zamosc from June 18, 2006 to August 22, 2006. In September and October, a freshly adapted version of the exhibition will be shown in the city of Potsdam, which was mainly planned and built during Baroque times.
Download or read book The 99 Invisible City written by Roman Mars and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 2020 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully designed guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities, from the creators of the wildly popular 99% Invisible podcast
Download or read book The Ideal City written by Robert Klanten and published by Gestalten. This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Urban life is humankind’s biggest experiment to date, our cities are constantly evolving and adapting to climate and economy. The cities we have today are not necessarily the ones we need, but big and small innovation is rethinking visions of urbanization. Together with pioneering research and design lab SPACE10, we present future-orientated design which enhances quality of life and makes our urban spaces more vibrant. As technology and urban life edge ever closer, The Ideal City explores the ambitious actions and initiatives being brought to life across the globe to meet tomorrow’s demand in clever, forwarding-thinking ways. From pedestrian infrastructure to housing, the book uncovers what is being discussed at the forefront of urbanism through expert essays and profiles."--
Download or read book The Venice Variations written by Sophia Psarra and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability – how we imagine better urban environments – remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time. Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital – Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic ‘algorithm’, that is, a structure with a small number of rules capable of producing a large number of variations. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the ‘model city’ that endured a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other ‘Venices’ for the future.
Download or read book Plato s Invisible Cities written by Adi Ophir and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-10 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an original and detailed reading of Plato's Republic, one of the most influential philosophical works in the emergence of Western philosophy. The author discusses the Republic in terms of discursive events and political acts. Plato's act is placed in the context of a politico-discursive crisis in Athens at the end of the fifth and the beginning of the fourth century B.C that gave rise to the dialogue's primary question, that of justice. The originality of Dr. Ophir lies in the way he reconstructs the Republic's different spatial settings - utopian, mythical, dramatic and discursive - using them as the main thread of his interpretation. Against the background of Plato's critique of the organisation of civic-space in the Greek polis, the author relates the spatial settings in the Plato text to each other. This provides a basis for a re-examination of the relationship between philosophy and politics, which Plato's work advocates, and which it actually enacted.
Download or read book Imaginary Cities written by Darran Anderson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-04-06 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we understand the infinite variety of cities? Darran Anderson seems to exhaust all possibilities in this work of creative nonfiction. Drawing inspiration from Marco Polo and Italo Calvino, Anderson shows that we have much to learn about ourselves by looking not only at the cities we have built, but also at the cities we have imagined. Anderson draws on literature (Gustav Meyrink, Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, and James Joyce), but he also looks at architectural writings and works by the likes of Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, Medieval travel memoirs from the Middle East, mid-twentieth-century comic books, Star Trek, mythical lands such as Cockaigne, and the works of Claude Debussy. Anderson sees the visionary architecture dreamed up by architects, artists, philosophers, writers, and citizens as wedded to the egalitarian sense that cities are for everyone. He proves that we must not be locked into the structures that exclude ordinary citizens--that cities evolve and that we can have input. As he says: "If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined as well.”
Download or read book The Help yourself City written by Gordon C. C. Douglas and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When local governments neglect public services or community priorities, how do concerned citizens respond? In The Help-Yourself City, Gordon Douglas looks closely at people who take urban planning into their own hands with homemade signs and benches, guerrilla bike lanes and more. Douglas explores the frustration, creativity, and technical expertise behind these interventions, but also the position of privilege from which they often come. Presenting a needed analysis of this growing trend from vacant lots to city planning offices, The Help-Yourself City tells a street-level story of people's relationships to their urban surroundings and the individualization of democratic responsibility.
Download or read book Plato s Invisible Cities written by Adi Ophir and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1991 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an original and detailed reading of Plato's Republic, one of the most influential philosophical works in the development of Western philosophy. The author discusses the Republic in terms of discursive events and political acts. Plato's act is placed in the context of a politico-discursive crisis in Athens at the end of the fifth and the beginning of the fourth century B.C. that gave rise to the dialogue's primary question, that of justice. The originality of Dr. Ophir lies in the way he reconstructs the Republic's different spatial settings--utopian, mythical, dramatic and discursive--using them as the main thread of his interpretation. Against the background of Plato's critique of the organization of civic-space in the Greek polis, the author relates the spatial settings in the Plato text to each other. This provides a basis for a re-examination of the relationship between philosophy and politics, which Plato's work advocates, and which it actually enacted.
Download or read book The Image of the City written by Kevin Lynch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1964-06-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.
Download or read book City written by P.D. Smith and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time in the history of the planet, more than half the population - 3.3 billion people - are now living in cities. Two hundred years ago only 3 per cent of the world's population were urbanites, a figure that had remained fairly stable (give or take the occasional plague) for about 1000 years. By 2030, 60 per cent of us will be urban dwellers. City is the ultimate handbook for the archetypal city and contains main sections on 'History', 'Customs and Language', 'Districts', 'Transport', 'Money', 'Work', 'Tourist Sites', 'Shops and markets', 'Nightlife', etc., and mini-essays on anything and everything from Babel, Tenochtitl�n and Ellis Island to Beijing, Mumbai and New York, and from boulevards, suburbs, shanty towns and favelas, to skylines, urban legends and the sacred. Drawing on a wide range of examples from cities across the world and throughout history, it explores the reasons why people first built cities and why urban populations are growing larger every year. City is illustrated throughout with a range of photographs, maps and other illustrations.
Download or read book Mapping Modern Beijing written by Weijie Song and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mapping Modern Beijing investigates the five methods of representing Beijing-a warped hometown, a city of snapshots and manners, an aesthetic city, an imperial capital in comparative and cross-cultural perspective, and a displaced city on the Sinophone and diasporic postmemory-by authors travelling across mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas Sinophone and non-Chinese communities. The metamorphosis of Beijing's everyday spaces and the structural transformation of private and public emotions unfold Manchu writer Lao She's Beijing complex about a warped native city. Zhang Henshui's popular snapshots of fleeting shocks and everlasting sorrows illustrate his affective mapping of urban transition and human manners in Republican Beijing. Female poet and architect Lin Huiyin captures an aesthetic and picturesque city vis- -vis the political and ideological urban planning. The imagined imperial capital constructed in bilingual, transcultural, and comparative works by Lin Yutang, Princess Der Ling, and Victor Segalen highlights the pleasures and pitfalls of collecting local knowledge and presenting Orientalist and Cosmopolitan visions. In the shadow of World Wars and Cold War, a multilayered displaced Beijing appears in the Sinophone postmemory by diasporic Beijing native Liang Shiqiu, Taiwan sojourners Zhong Lihe and Lin Haiyin, and migr martial arts novelist Jin Yong in Hong Kong. Weijie Song situates Beijing in a larger context of modern Chinese-language urban imaginations, and charts the emotional topography of the city against the backdrop of the downfall of the Manchu Empire, the rise of modern nation-state, the 1949 great divide, and the formation of Cold War and globalizing world. Drawing from literary canons to exotic narratives, from modernist poetry to chivalric fantasy, from popular culture to urban planning, Song explores the complex nexus of urban spaces, archives of emotions, and literary topography of Beijing in its long journey from imperial capital to Republican city and to socialist metropolis.
Download or read book Invisible Cities and the Urban Imagination written by Benjamin Linder and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-11-08 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1972, Italo Calvino published Invisible Cities, a literary book that masterfully combines philosophy and poetry, rigid structure and free play, theoretical insight and glittering prose. The text is an extended meditation on urban life, and it continues to resonate not only among literary scholars, but among social scientists, architects, and urban planners as well. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Invisible Cities, this collection of essays serves as both an appreciation and a critical engagement. Drawing from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives and geographical contexts, this volume grapples with the theoretical, pedagogical, and political legacies of Calvino’s work. Each chapter approaches Invisible Cities not only as a novel but as a work of evocative ethnography, place-writing, and urban theory. Fifty years on, what can Calvino’s dreamlike text offer to scholars and practitioners interested in actually existing urban life?
Download or read book Italo Calvino s Architecture of Lightness written by Letizia Modena and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study recovers Italo Calvino's central place in a lost history of interdisciplinary thought, politics, and literary philosophy in the 1960s. Drawing on his letters, essays, critical reviews, and fiction, as well as a wide range of works--primarily urban planning and design theory and history--circulating among his primary interlocutors, this book takes as its point of departure a sweeping reinterpretation of Invisible Cities. Passages from Calvino's most famous novel routinely appear as aphorisms in calendars, posters, and the popular literature of inspiration and self-help, reducing the novel to vague abstractions and totalizing wisdom about thinking outside the box. The shadow of postmodern studies has had a similarly diminishing effect on this text, rendering up an accomplished but ultimately apolitical novelistic experimentation in endless deconstructive deferrals, the shiny surfaces of play, and the ultimately rigged game of self-referentiality. In contrast, this study draws on an archive of untranslated Italian- and French-language materials on urban planning, architecture, and utopian architecture to argue that Calvino's novel in fact introduces readers to the material history of urban renewal in Italy, France, and the U.S. in the 1960s, as well as the multidisciplinary core of cultural life in that decade: the complex and continuous interplay among novelists and architects, scientists and artists, literary historians and visual studies scholars. His last love poem for the dying city was in fact profoundly engaged, deeply committed to the ethical dimensions of both architecture and lived experience in the spaces of modernity as well as the resistant practices of reading and utopian imagining that his urban studies in turn inspired.
Download or read book Happy City Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design written by Charles Montgomery and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A globe-trotting, eye-opening exploration of how cities can—and do—make us happier people Charles Montgomery's Happy City will revolutionize the way we think about urban life. After decades of unchecked sprawl, more people than ever are moving back to the city. Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks, and tower dwelling an improvement on the car-dependence of sprawl? The award-winning journalist Charles Montgomery finds answers to such questions at the intersection between urban design and the emerging science of happiness, and during an exhilarating journey through some of the world's most dynamic cities. He meets the visionary mayor who introduced a "sexy" lipstick-red bus to ease status anxiety in Bogotá; the architect who brought the lessons of medieval Tuscan hill towns to modern-day New York City; the activist who turned Paris's urban freeways into beaches; and an army of American suburbanites who have transformed their lives by hacking the design of their streets and neighborhoods. Full of rich historical detail and new insights from psychologists and Montgomery's own urban experiments, Happy City is an essential tool for understanding and improving our own communities. The message is as surprising as it is hopeful: by retrofitting our cities for happiness, we can tackle the urgent challenges of our age. The happy city, the green city, and the low-carbon city are the same place, and we can all help build it.
Download or read book Restless Cities written by Gregory Dart and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The metropolis is a site of endless making and unmaking. From the attempt to imagine a 'city-symphony' to the cinematic tradition that runs from Walter Ruttmann to Terence Davies, Restless Cities traces the idiosyncratic character of the metropolitan city from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first-century megalopolis. With explorations of phenomena including nightwalking, urbicide, property, commuting and recycling, this wide-ranging new book identifies and traces the patterns that have defined everyday life in the modern city and its effect on us as individuals. Bringing together some of the most significant cultural writers of our time, Restless Cities is an illuminating, revelatory journey to the heart of our metropolitan world.
Download or read book The Literature Machine written by Italo Calvino and published by . This book was released on 2011-03-22 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
