Download or read book Imagined Utopias in the Built Environment written by Anna Novakov and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with the early history of London’s Vauxhall pleasure gardens, this volume surveys visionary architecture and urban planning from the 18th century to the present. The recurrence of themes of technology, individual agency and communal living in the work of Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray, Charles and Ray Eames and Constant Nieuwenhuys, testifies to the continued search for an ideal personal and public space. Inspired by works of fiction such as Utopia, Herland, Mizora: World of Women and Homo Ludens and the films Metropolis and Stalker, artists and architects created fantastic plans for individual homes, housing complexes and entire urban centers. The resulting projects discussed here manifest the modern anxiety between the liberation of the individual and the needs of the collective. The urban landscape from the 18th to the 21st centuries has been woven into the fabric of architecture as a way to improve day-to-day life, as well as to create personal identity within an expanding public world. The seven chapter topics are arranged chronologically, and begin with the design of social space in Georgian-era pleasure gardens and conclude with a study of contemporary Utopian groups that utilize early literary references as a focus for their societies. As such, the book builds upon the understanding of technology and architecture in its many forms as a shared benchmark for the expansion of individual rights and the growth of Utopian ideas in modern European and American society.
Download or read book Imagined Utopias in the Built Environment written by Anna Novakov and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with the early history of Londons Vauxhall pleasure gardens, this volume surveys visionary architecture and urban planning from the 18th century to the present. The recurrence of themes of technology, individual agency and communal living in the work of Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray, Charles and Ray Eames and Constant Nieuwenhuys, testifies to the continued search for an ideal personal and public space. Inspired by works of fiction such as Utopia, Herland, Mizora: World of Women and Homo Ludens and the films Metropolis and Stalker, artists and architects created fantastic plans for individual homes, housing complexes and entire urban centers. The resulting projects discussed here manifest the modern anxiety between the liberation of the individual and the needs of the collective. The urban landscape from the 18th to the 21st centuries has been woven into the fabric of architecture as a way to improve day-to-day life, as well as to create personal identity within an expanding public world. The seven chapter topics are arranged chronologically, and begin with the design of social space in Georgian-era pleasure gardens and conclude with a study of contemporary Utopian groups that utilize early literary references as a focus for their societies. As such, the book builds upon the understanding of technology and architecture in its many forms as a shared benchmark for the expansion of individual rights and the growth of Utopian ideas in modern European and American society.
Download or read book Imagining and Making the World written by Nathaniel Coleman and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the association between architecture and utopia (the relationship between imagining a new world and exploring how its new conditions can best be organized) might appear obvious from within the domain of utopian studies, architects have long attempted to dissociate themselves from utopia. Concentrating on the difficulties writers from both perspectives experience with the topic, this collection interrogates the meta-theoretical problematic for ongoing intellectual work on architecture and utopia. The essays explore divergent manifestations of the play of utopia on architectural imagination, situated within specific historical moments, from the early Renaissance to the present day. The volume closes with an exchange between Nathaniel Coleman, Ruth Levitas, and Lyman Tower Sargent, reflecting on the contributions the essays make to situating architecture and utopia historically and theoretically within utopian studies, and to articulating utopia as a method for inventing and producing better places. Intriguing to architects, planners, urban designers, and others who study and make the built environment, this collection will also be of interest to utopian studies scholars, students, and general readers with a concern for the interrelationships between the built environment and social dreaming.
Download or read book Utopias and Architecture written by Nathaniel Coleman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-05-07 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopian thought, though commonly characterized as projecting a future without a past, depends on golden models for re-invention of what is. Through a detailed and innovative re-assessment of the work of three architects who sought to represent a utopian content in their work, and a consideration of the thoughts of a range of leading writers, Coleman offers the reader a unique perspective of idealism in architectural design. With unparalleled depth and focus of vision on the work of Le Corbusier, Louis I Kahn and Aldo van Eyck, this book persuasively challenges predominant assumptions in current architectural discourse, forging a new approach to the invention of welcoming built environments and transcending the limitations of both the postmodern and hyper-modern stance and orthodox modernist architecture.
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 Urban Utopias written by Malcolm Miles and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-11-21 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia tends to generate a bad press - regarded as impracticable, perhaps nostalgic, or contradictory when visions of a perfect world cannot accommodate the change that is necessary to a free and self-organizing society. But people from diverse backgrounds are currently building a new society within the old, balancing literal and metaphorical utopianism, and demonstrating plural possibilities for alternative futures and types of settlement. Thousands of such places exist around the world, including intentional communities, eco-villages, permaculture plots, religious and secular retreats, co-housing projects, self-build schemes, projects for low-impact housing, and activist squats in urban and rural sites. This experience suggests, however, that when planning and design are not integral to alternative social formations, the modern dream to engineer a new society cannot be realized. The book is structured in four parts. In part one, literary and theoretical utopias from the early modern period to the nineteenth-century are reconsidered. Part two investigates twentieth-century urban utopianism and contemporary alternative settlements focusing on social and environmental issues, activism and eco-village living. Part three looks to wider horizons in recent practices in the non-affluent world, and Part four reviews a range of cases from the author’s visits to specific sites. This is followed by a short conclusion in which a discussion of key issues is resumed. This book brings together insights from literary, theoretical and practical utopias, drawing out the characteristics of groups and places that are part of a new society. It links today’s utopian experiments to historical and literary utopias, and to theoretical problems in utopian thought.
Download or read book Where are the Utopian Visionaries written by Hansy Better Barraza and published by Periscope. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book fits the era of Obama and financial meltdown. It contains essays by mostly young architects who have gone grass roots to work with people, materials, and building types way off radar for earlier generations of architects. There is an eye-opening essay on bamboo. Jean Chae discusses her work using materials form Home Depot to build communal buildings in villages of Central America. Balkrishna Doshi introduces a "housing development" that its inhabitants, following a few guidelines, built from debris. The point throughout is a reversal of the usual flow of power and ideas. The architects have all endeavored to learn from people who, if noticed by mainstream authorities, have had buildings imposed on them. 175 illustrations
Download or read book Embodied Utopias written by Amy Bingaman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-12-16 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia has become a dirty word in recent scholarship on modernism, architecture, urban planning and gender studies. Many utopian designs now appear impractical, manifesting an arrogant disregard for the lived experiences of the ordinary inhabitants who make daily use of global public and private spaces. The essays in Embodied Utopias argue that the gendered body is the crux of the hopes and disappointments of modern urban and suburban utopias of the Americas, Europe and Asia. They reassess utopian projects - masculinist, feminist, colonialist, progressive - of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they survey the dystopian landscapes of the present; and they gesture at the potential for an embodied approach to the urban future, to the changing spaces of cities and virtual landscapes.
Download or read book Inventing an Exemplary Architecture written by Nathaniel Coleman and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Utopias and Architecture written by Nathaniel Coleman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-05-07 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopian thought, though commonly characterized as projecting a future without a past, depends on golden models for re-invention of what is. Through a detailed and innovative re-assessment of the work of three architects who sought to represent a utopian content in their work, and a consideration of the thoughts of a range of leading writers, Coleman offers the reader a unique perspective of idealism in architectural design. With unparalleled depth and focus of vision on the work of Le Corbusier, Louis I Kahn and Aldo van Eyck, this book persuasively challenges predominant assumptions in current architectural discourse, forging a new approach to the invention of welcoming built environments and transcending the limitations of both the postmodern and hyper-modern stance and orthodox modernist architecture.
Download or read book Utopia Drive written by Erik Reece and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Erik Reece, life, at last, was good: he was newly married, gainfully employed, living in a creekside cabin in his beloved Kentucky woods. It sounded, as he describes it, "like a country song with a happy ending." And yet he was still haunted by a sense that the world--or, more specifically, his country--could be better. He couldn't ignore his conviction that, in fact, the good ol' USA was in the midst of great social, environmental, and political crises--that for the first time in our history, we were being swept into a future that had no future. Where did we--here, in the land of Jeffersonian optimism and better tomorrows--go wrong? Rather than despair, Reece turned to those who had dared to imagine radically different futures for America. What followed was a giant road trip and research adventure through the sites of America's utopian communities, both historical and contemporary, known and unknown, successful and catastrophic. What he uncovered was not just a series of lost histories and broken visionaries but also a continuing and vital but hidden idealistic tradition in American intellectual history. Utopia Drive is an important and definitive reconstruction of that tradition. It is also, perhaps, a new framework to help us find a genuinely sustainable way forward. " ... an engaging exploration -- and example -- of the fruitful tunnel-visions of dreamers turned doers." - Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Architecture and Utopia written by Franco Borsi and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ideal Cities written by Eaton and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century written by Robert Fishman and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1982-09-16 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The utopian visions of three of urban planning’s greatest visionaries. Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, hated the cities of their time with an overwhelming passion. The metropolis was the counter-image of their ideal cities, the hell that inspired their heavens. In this book Robert Fishman examines the utopian visions of three of urban planning’s greatest visionaries. Howard created the concept of the “garden city” where shops and cottages formed the center of a geometric pattern with farmland surrounding; Wright conceived of “Broadacre City,” the ultimate suburb, where the automobile was king; and Le Corbusier imagined “Ville Radieuse,” the city of cruciform skyscrapers set down in open parkland.
Download or read book Advances in Utopian Studies and Sacred Architecture written by Claudio Gambardella and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time dominated by the disappearance of Future, as claimed by the French anthropologist Marc Augé, Utopia and Religion seem to be two different ways of giving back an inner horizon to mankind. Therefore this book, on the one hand, considers the importance of utopia as a tool and how it offers an economic and social resource to improve cities’ wealth, future and livability. On the other, it explores the impact of religious and cultural ideals on cities that have recently emerged in this context. Based on numerous observations, the book examines the intellectual legacy of utopian theory and practices across various academic disciplines. It also presents discussions, theories, and case studies addressing a range of issues and topics related to utopia.
Download or read book Reconstructing Modernism written by Ashley Maher and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstructing Modernism establishes for the first time the centrality of modernist buildings and architectural periodicals to British mid-century literature. Drawing upon a wealth of previously unexplored architectural criticism by British authors, this book reveals how arguments about architecture led to innovations in literature, as well as to redesigns in the concept of modernism itself. While the city has long been a focus of literary modernist studies, architectural modernism has never had its due. Scholars usually characterize architectural modernism as a parallel modernism or even an incompatible modernism to literature. Giving special attention to dystopian classics Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, this study argues that sustained attention to modern architecture shaped mid-century authors' political and aesthetic commitments. After many writers deemed modernist architects to be agents for communism and other collectivist movements, they squared themselves--and literary modernist detachment and aesthetic autonomy--against the seemingly tyrannical utopianism of modern architecture; literary aesthetic qualities were reclaimed as political qualities. In this way, Reconstructing Modernism redraws the boundaries of literary modernist studies: rather than simply adding to its canon, it argues that the responsibility for defining literary modernism for the mid-century public was shared by an incredible variety of authors--Edwardians, modernists, satirists, and even anti-modernists.
Download or read book Future Cities written by Paul Dobraszczyk and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2019-02-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though reaching ever further toward the skies, today’s cities are overshadowed by multiple threats: climate change, overpopulation, social division, and urban warfare all endanger our metropolitan way of life. The fundamental tool we use to make sense of these uncertain city futures is the imagination. Architects, artists, filmmakers, and fiction writers have long been inspired to imagine cities of the future, but their speculative visions tend to be seen very differently from scientific predictions: flights of fancy on the one hand versus practical reasoning on the other. In a digital age when the real and the fantastic coexist as near equals, it is especially important to know how these two forces are entangled, and how together they may help us best conceive of cities yet to come. Exploring a breathtaking range of imagined cities—submerged, floating, flying, vertical, underground, ruined, and salvaged—Future Cities teases out the links between speculation and reality, arguing that there is no clear separation between the two. In the Netherlands, prototype floating cities are already being built; Dubai’s recent skyscrapers resemble those of science-fiction cities of the past; while makeshift settlements built by the urban poor in the developing world are already like the dystopian cities of cyberpunk. Bringing together architecture, fiction, film, and visual art, Paul Dobraszczyk reconnects the imaginary city with the real, proposing a future for humanity that is firmly grounded in the present and in the diverse creative practices already at our fingertips.
