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 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 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 Venice Variations written by Sophia Psarra and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 335 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 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 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 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 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 City written by William H. Whyte and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-09-10 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named by Newsweek magazine to its list of "Fifty Books for Our Time." For sixteen years William Whyte walked the streets of New York and other major cities. With a group of young observers, camera and notebook in hand, he conducted pioneering studies of street life, pedestrian behavior, and city dynamics. City: Rediscovering the Center is the result of that research, a humane, often amusing view of what is staggeringly obvious about the urban environment but seemingly invisible to those responsible for planning it. Whyte uses time-lapse photography to chart the anatomy of metropolitan congestion. Why is traffic so badly distributed on city streets? Why do New Yorkers walk so fast—and jaywalk so incorrigibly? Why aren't there more collisions on the busiest walkways? Why do people who stop to talk gravitate to the center of the pedestrian traffic stream? Why do places designed primarily for security actually worsen it? Why are public restrooms disappearing? "The city is full of vexations," Whyte avers: "Steps too steep; doors too tough to open; ledges you cannot sit on. . . . It is difficult to design an urban space so maladroitly that people will not use it, but there are many such spaces." Yet Whyte finds encouragement in the widespread rediscovery of the city center. The future is not in the suburbs, he believes, but in that center. Like a Greek agora, the city must reassert its most ancient function as a place where people come together face-to-face.
Download or read book Collage City written by Colin Rowe and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1984-03-15 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a critical reappraisal of contemporary theories of urban planning and design and of the role of the architect-planner in an urban context. The authors, rejecting the grand utopian visions of "total planning" and "total design," propose instead a "collage city" which can accommodate a whole range of utopias in miniature.
Download or read book The Literature Machine written by Italo Calvino and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-01-11 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'This brilliant collection of essays should be a feast for his admirers, as well as for those who approach his dazzling oeuvre for the first time-Calvino is not only constantly and supremely intelligent; he is constantly and supremely faithful to his narrative imagination' Guardian
Download or read book City Comforts written by David M. Sucher and published by City Comforts Inc.. This book was released on 2010-08 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Ottoman Traveller written by Evliya Çelebi and published by Eland Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evliya Celebi was the Orhan Pamuk of the 17th century, the Pepys of the Ottoman world - a diligent, adventurous and honest recorder with a puckish wit and humour. He is in the pantheon of the great travel-writers of the world, though virtually unknown to western readers. This translation brings his sparkling work to life.
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 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 The Castle of Crossed Destinies written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1979 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their tales. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal, and chaotic history of all human consciousness."--Goodreads
