Download or read book Irresistible Decay written by Michael S. Roth and published by Getty Research Institute. This book was released on 1997 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ruins have fascinated and intrigued viewers for centuries. These include not only famous sites like Angkor Wat and the Temple of Olympian Zeus, but the remnants of natural disasters like the Lisbon earthquake. This book--the catalog for an exhibition held at the Getty Center--explores the allure of ruins and examines the roles that they play in modern cultural life. An incisive introduction laying out the general issues is followed by an essay discussing the nature of the fragment, a discussion of the Research Institute's vast holdings of item relating to ruins, a unique section uses juxtaposed color images, and quotations drawn from literary works to point out the longevity and prominence of the ruin as a metaphor.

Download or read book Archaeologies of the Greek Past written by Susan E. Alcock and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 2002 book explores social memory in the ancient Greek world using the evidence of landscapes and monuments.

Download or read book Counterpreservation written by Daniela Sandler and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Berlin, decrepit structures do not always denote urban blight. Decayed buildings are incorporated into everyday life as residences, exhibition spaces, shops, offices, and as leisure space. As nodes of public dialogue, they serve as platforms for dissenting views about the future and past of Berlin. In this book, Daniela Sandler introduces the concept of counterpreservation as a way to understand this intentional appropriation of decrepitude. The embrace of decay is a sign of Berlin's iconoclastic rebelliousness, but it has also been incorporated into the mainstream economy of tourism and development as part of the city's countercultural cachet. Sandler presents the possibilities and shortcomings of counterpreservation as a dynamic force in Berlin and as a potential concept for other cities. Counterpreservation is part of Berlin's fabric: in the city's famed Hausprojekte (living projects) such as the Køpi, Tuntenhaus, and KA 86; in cultural centers such as the Haus Schwarzenberg, the Schokoladen, and the legendary, now defunct Tacheles; in memorials and museums; and even in commerce and residences. The appropriation of ruins is a way of carving out affordable spaces for housing, work, and cultural activities. It is also a visual statement against gentrification, and a complex representation of history, with the marks of different periods—the nineteenth century, World War II, postwar division, unification—on display for all to see. Counterpreservation exemplifies an everyday urbanism in which citizens shape private and public spaces with their own hands, but it also influences more formal designs, such as the Topography of Terror, the Berlin Wall Memorial, and Daniel Libeskind's unbuilt redevelopment proposal for a site peppered with ruins of Nazi barracks. By featuring these examples, Sandler questions conventional notions of architectural authorship and points toward the value of participatory environments.

Download or read book Repair written by Elizabeth Spelman and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2003-10-20 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a world constantly in need of repair. Our cars break down. Marriages weaken, friendships sour, ties between nations are rent. Yet we fix things and relationships all the time, without giving these activities much thought. Repair is the first book to offer an in-depth exploration of this core aspect of human life.

Download or read book The Desertmakers written by Javier Uriarte and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies how the rhetoric of travel introduces different conceptualizations of space and time in scenarios of war during the last decades of the 19th century, in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. By examining accounts of war and travel in the context of the consolidation of state apparatuses in these countries, Uriarte underlines the essential role that war (in connection to empire and capital) has played in the Latin American process of modernization and state formation. In this book, the analysis of British and Latin American travel narratives proves particularly productive in reading the ways in which national spaces are reconfigured, reimagined, and reappropriated by the state apparatus. War turns out to be a central instrument not just for making possible this logic of appropriation, but also for bringing temporal notions such as modernization and progress to spaces that were described — albeit problematically — as being outside of history. The book argues that wars waged against "deserts" (as Patagonia, the sertão, Paraguay, and the Uruguayan countryside were described and imagined) were in fact means of generating empty spaces, real voids that were the condition for new foundations. The study of travel writing is an essential tool for understanding the transformations of space brought by war, and for analyzing in detail the forms and connotations of movement in connection to violence. Uriarte pays particular attention to the effects that witnessing war had on the traveler’s identity and on the relation that is established with the oikos or point of departure of their own voyage. Written at the intersection of literary analysis, critical geography, political science, and history, this book will be of interest to those studying Latin American literature, Travel Writing, and neocolonialism and Empire writing.

Download or read book Excavating Victorians written by Virginia Zimmerman and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2009-01-08 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Victorians reacted to the new sciences of geology and archaeology.

Download or read book The Ruins of Allegory written by Catherine Gimelli Martin and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a reexamination of the allegorical dimensions of PARADISE LOST, Catherine Martin presents Milton's poem as a prophecy foretelling the end of one culture and its replacement by another. Maintaining a dialogue with a critical tradition that extends from Johnson and Coleridge to the best contemporary Milton scholarship, Martin sets PARADISE LOST in both the early modern and the postmodern worlds.

Download or read book Materan Contradictions written by Anne Parmly Toxey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shaped by encrusted layers of development spanning millennia, the southern Italian city of Matera is the ultimate palimpsest. Known as the Sassi, the majority of the ancient city is composed of thousands of structures carved into a limestone cliff and clinging to its walls. The resultant menagerie of forms possesses a surprising visual uniformity and an ineffable allure. Conversely, in the 1950s Matera also served as a crucible for Italian postwar urban and architectural theory, witnessed by the Neorealist, modernist expansion of the city that developed in aversion to the Sassi. In another about-face, the previously disparaged cave city has now been recast as a major tourist destination, UNESCO World Heritage Monument, and test subject for ideas and methods of preservation. Set within a sociopolitical and architectural history of Matera from 1950 to the present, this book analyses the contemporary effects of preservation on the city and surrounding province. More broadly, it examines the relationship between and interdependence of preservation and modernism within architectural thought. To understand inconsistencies inherent to preservation, in particular its effect of catalyzing change, the study lays bare planners' and developers' use of preservation, especially for economic goals and political will. The work asserts that preservation is not a passive, curatorial pursuit: it is a cloaked manifestation of modernism and a powerful tool often used to control economies. The study demonstrates that preservation also serves to influence societies through the shaping of memory and circulation of narratives.

Download or read book Explore Everything written by Bradley L. Garrett and published by Verso Trade. This book was released on 2013 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A photographed collection tours everyday cities from unique perspectives that explore scenic urban edges, forgotten tunnels, evocative skylines and other metropolitan vistas in regions ranging from London and Berlin to Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Download or read book Reimagining Industrial Sites written by Catherine Heatherington and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-06 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The discourse around derelict, former industrial and military sites has grown in recent years. This interest is not only theoretical, and landscape professionals are taking new approaches to the design and development of these sites. This book examines the varied ways in which the histories and qualities of these derelict sites are reimagined in the transformed landscape and considers how such approaches can reveal the dramatic changes that have been wrought on these places over a relatively short time scale. It discusses these issues with reference to eleven sites from the UK, Germany, the USA, Australia and China, focusing specifically on how designers incorporate evidence of landscape change, both cultural and natural. There has been little research into how these developed landscapes are perceived by visitors and local residents. This book examines how the tangible material traces of pastness are interpreted by the visitor and the impact of the intangible elements - hidden traces, experiences and memories. The book draws together theory in the field and implications for practice in landscape architecture and concludes with an examination of how different approaches to revealing and reimagining change can affect the future management of the site.

Download or read book Ruins of Modernity written by Julia Hell and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-19 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Images of ruins may represent the raw realities created by bombs, natural disasters, or factory closings, but the way we see and understand ruins is not raw or unmediated. Rather, looking at ruins, writing about them, and representing them are acts framed by a long tradition. This unique interdisciplinary collection traces discourses about and representations of ruins from a richly contextualized perspective. In the introduction, Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle discuss how European modernity emerged partly through a confrontation with the ruins of the premodern past. Several contributors discuss ideas about ruins developed by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin. One contributor examines how W. G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn betrays the ruins erased or forgotten in the Hegelian philosophy of history. Another analyzes the repressed specter of being bombed out of existence that underpins post-Second World War modernist architecture, especially Le Corbusier’s plans for Paris. Still another compares the ways that formerly dominant white populations relate to urban-industrial ruins in Detroit and to colonial ruins in Namibia. Other topics include atomic ruins at a Nevada test site, the connection between the cinema and ruins, the various narratives that have accrued around the Inca ruin of Vilcashuamán, Tolstoy’s response in War and Peace to the destruction of Moscow in the fire of 1812, the Nazis’ obsession with imperial ruins, and the emergence in Mumbai of a new “kinetic city” on what some might consider the ruins of a modernist city. By focusing on the concept of ruin, this collection sheds new light on modernity and its vast ramifications and complexities. Contributors. Kerstin Barndt, Jon Beasley-Murray, Russell A. Berman, Jonathan Bolton, Svetlana Boym, Amir Eshel, Julia Hell, Daniel Herwitz, Andreas Huyssen, Rahul Mehrotra, Johannes von Moltke, Vladimir Paperny, Helen Petrovsky, Todd Presner, Helmut Puff, Alexander Regier, Eric Rentschler, Lucia Saks, Andreas Schönle, Tatiana Smoliarova, George Steinmetz, Jonathan Veitch, Gustavo Verdesio, Anthony Vidler

Download or read book Berlin Contemporary written by Julia Walker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-11-18 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For years following reunification, Berlin was the largest construction site in Europe, with striking new architecture proliferating throughout the city in the 1990s and early 2000s. Among the most visible and the most contested of the new projects were those designed for the national government and its related functions. Berlin Contemporary explores these buildings and plans, tracing their antecedents while also situating their iconic forms and influential designers within the spectacular world of global contemporary architecture. Close studies of these sites, including the Reichstag, the Chancellery, and the reconstruction of the Berlin Stadtschloss (now known as the Humboldt Forum), demonstrate the complexity of Berlin's political and architectural “rebuilding”-and reveal the intricate historical negotiations that architecture was summoned to perform.

Download or read book The Homesick Phone Book written by Cynthia Haynes and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2016-09-28 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Illustration List -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Party Lines -- 2. Casuistic Code -- 3. Mechanical Faith -- 4. Writing Offshore -- 5. Glitch Rhetoric -- 6. Torture and Absolution -- 7. Postconflict Pedagogy -- 8. Marine Media -- 9. Accidental Metaphysics -- 10. Armageddon Army -- 11. Endgame Rhetorics -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- About the Author -- Back Cover

Download or read book A Story of Ruins written by Wu Hung and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This richly illustrated book examines the changing significance of ruins as vehicles for cultural memory in Chinese art and visual culture from ancient times to the present. The story of ruins in China is different from but connected to “ruin culture” in the West. This book explores indigenous Chinese concepts of ruins and their visual manifestations, as well as the complex historical interactions between China and the West since the eighteenth century. Wu Hung leads us through an array of traditional and contemporary visual materials, including painting, architecture, photography, prints, and cinema. A Story of Ruins shows how ruins are integral to traditional Chinese culture in both architecture and pictorial forms. It traces the changes in their representation over time, from indigenous methods of recording damage and decay in ancient China, to realistic images of architectural ruins in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the strong interest in urban ruins in contemporary China, as shown in the many artworks that depict demolished houses and decaying industrial sites. The result is an original interpretation of the development of Chinese art, as well as a unique contribution to global art history.

Download or read book Ghostly Landscapes written by Patricia M. Keller and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2016-02-24 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Ghostly Landscapes, Patricia M. Keller analyses the aesthetics of haunting and the relationship between ideology and image production by revisiting twentieth-century Spanish history through the camera’s lens. Through its vision she demonstrates how the traumatic losses of the Spanish Civil War and their systematic denial and burial during the fascist dictatorship have constituted fertile territory for the expressions of loss, uncanny return, and untimeliness that characterize the aesthetic presence of the ghost. Examining fascist documentary newsreels, countercultural art films from the Spanish New Wave, and conceptual landscape photographs created since the transition to democracy, Keller reveals how haunting serves to mourn loss, redefine space and history, and confirm the significance of lives and stories previously hidden or erased. Her richly illustrated book constitutes a significant reevaluation of fascist and post-fascist Spanish visual culture and a unique theorization of haunting as an aesthetic register inextricably connected to the visual and the landscape.

Download or read book Time and Antiquity in American Empire written by Mark Storey and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021-03-18 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cultural history of the American empire via ancient Rome tracks the way writers and artists have imagined Roman antiquity as an analogy that variously bolsters and critiques American imperial power.

Download or read book Urban Wildscapes written by Anna Jorgensen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-12 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban Wildscapes is one of the first edited collections of writings about urban ‘wilderness’ landscapes. Evolved, rather than designed or planned, these derelict, abandoned and marginal spaces are frequently overgrown with vegetation and host to a wide range of human activities. They include former industrial sites, landfill, allotments, cemeteries, woods, infrastructural corridors, vacant lots and a whole array of urban wastelands at a variety of different scales. Frequently maligned in the media, these landscapes have recently been re-evaluated and this collection assembles these fresh perspectives in one volume. Combining theory with illustrated examples and case studies, the book demonstrates that urban wildscapes have far greater significance, meaning and utility than is commonly thought, and that an appreciation of their particular qualities can inform a far more sustainable approach to the planning, design and management of the wider urban landscape. The wildscapes under investigation in this book are found in diverse locations throughout the UK, Europe, China and the US. They vary in scale from small sites to entire cities or regions, and from discrete locations to the imaginary wildscapes of children’s literature. Many different themes are addressed including the natural history of wildscapes, their significance as a location for all kinds of playful activity, the wildscape as ‘commons’ and the implications for landscape architectural practice, ranging from planting interventions in wildscapes to the design of the urban public realm on wildscape principles.