EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book Reversible Destiny

    Book Details:
  • Author : Peter T. Schneider
  • Publisher : Univ of California Press
  • Release : 2003-03-13
  • ISBN : 0520929497
  • Pages : 357 pages

Download or read book Reversible Destiny written by Peter T. Schneider and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-03-13 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reversible Destiny traces the history of the Sicilian mafia to its nineteenth-century roots and examines its late twentieth-century involvement in urban real estate and construction as well as drugs. Based on research in the regional capital of Palermo, this book suggests lessons regarding secretive organized crime: its capacity to reproduce a subculture of violence through time, its acquisition of a dense connective web of political and financial protectors during the Cold War era, and the sad reality that repressing it easily risks harming vulnerable people and communities. Charting the efforts of both the judiciary and a citizen's social movement to reverse the mafia's economic, political, and cultural power, the authors establish a framework for understanding both the difficulties and the accomplishments of Sicily's multifaceted antimafia efforts.

Book Reversible Destiny  Arakawa Gins  We Have Decided Not to Die

Download or read book Reversible Destiny Arakawa Gins We Have Decided Not to Die written by Michael Govan and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The Mechanism of Meaning

    Book Details:
  • Author : Shausaku Arakawa
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 2001-05-01
  • ISBN : 9780788196041
  • Pages : 150 pages

Download or read book The Mechanism of Meaning written by Shausaku Arakawa and published by . This book was released on 2001-05-01 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A creative and dynamic volume by Arakawa and Gins, who have been called the most philosophical of living artists, which collects their writings and art work from a period of nearly 2 decades. They address the essential art query of our time: How does it all fit together? Art and science happens in fragments. They take fragments, and they try, by making linkages to perceiving tactics immediate, to draw these tactics, these ways of construing a demonstrably conceivable whole that are the perceiver-reader, into a unified field that they refer to as "the perceiving field." They propose to re-create and to rejoin fragments, and would-be fragments, so as to make a new whole.

Book Architectural Body

    Book Details:
  • Author : Madeline Gins
  • Publisher : University of Alabama Press
  • Release : 2002-09-25
  • ISBN : 0817311696
  • Pages : 129 pages

Download or read book Architectural Body written by Madeline Gins and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2002-09-25 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A verbal articulation of the authors' visionary theory of how the human body, architecture, and creativity define and sustain one another This revolutionary work by artist-architects Arakawa and Madeline Gins demonstrates the inter-connectedness of innovative architectural design, the poetic process, and philosophical inquiry. Together, they have created an experimental and widely admired body of work--museum installations, landscape and park commissions, home and office designs, avant-garde films, poetry collections--that challenges traditional notions about the built environment. This book promotes a deliberate use of architecture and design in dealing with the blight of the human condition; it recommends that people seek architectural and aesthetic solutions to the dilemma of mortality. In 1997 the Guggenheim Museum presented an Arakawa/Gins retrospective and published a comprehensive volume of their work titled Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die. Architectural Body continues the philosophical definition of that project and demands a fundamental rethinking of the terms “human” and “being.” When organisms assume full responsibility for inventing themselves, where they live and how they live will merge. The artists believe that a thorough re-visioning of architecture will redefine life and its limitations and render death passe. The authors explain that “Another way to read reversible destiny . . . Is as an open challenge to our species to reinvent itself and to desist from foreclosing on any possibility.” Audacious and liberating, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of 20th-century poetry, postmodern critical theory, conceptual art and architecture, contemporary avant-garde poetics, and to serious readers interested in architecture's influence on imaginative expression.

Book Helen Keller Or Arakawa

Download or read book Helen Keller Or Arakawa written by Madeline Gins and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction. Art Theory. HELEN KELLER OR ARAKAWA gives rise to a new form of speculative fiction, conveying the potential for human experience now and here rather than depicting worlds distant in space or time. The novel tracks consciousness and identity through the intermingling paths of its three protangonists: the historical person Helen Keller; the iconoclastic artist Arakawa; and the writer herself, Madeline Gins. At the same time, this innovative work advances and upsets key tenets of contemporary critcal theory. This is a beautifully published book whose author is a participant in the recent show POETRY PLASTIQUE at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. The catalog for that show, edited by Jay Sanders and Charles Bernstein, is listed in this SPD catalog.

Book Making Dying Illegal

Download or read book Making Dying Illegal written by Shūsaku Arakawa and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Making Dying Illegal is the latest installment of the ongoing Arakawa and Gins Reversible Destiny Project. By making the on-the-surface absurd proposal to legislate against dying, a strong political and satirical strategy is produced as a series of architectural principles that relate to Arakawa's buildings in Europe and Japan. Having read the book over many times in editing, we feel that MDI can become what the reader wants to make it. This flexible text smacks of Alice in Wonderland, Dada tract, and contemporary self-help political critique--a truly exciting text."--Publisher's website

Book Arakawa and Madeline Gins

Download or read book Arakawa and Madeline Gins written by Shūsaku Arakawa and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 1994 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Continuing the collaboration of over 30 years between the New York-based artists Arakawa and Madeline Gins, this book is a unique and predominantly visual exploration into architecture and its centrality to the project of human self-knowledge and self-formation, carrying philosophical argument into the realm of construction. It asks what is the nature of perception? and how does the human being relate to surrounding space? Recording and documenting what it is actually like for a person to stand within a piece of architecture, this is the first systematic study of the role the body and bodily movement play in the forming of the world. Through a series of computer-generated images of great beauty and intricacy, the reader is presented with ways of reworking the man-made world that is architecture. Going further, the book suggests a revolutionary re-invention of the planet and, by extension, the universe.

Book Project Japan

    Book Details:
  • Author : Graham Cooper
  • Publisher : Images Publishing
  • Release : 2009
  • ISBN : 9781864703092
  • Pages : 252 pages

Download or read book Project Japan written by Graham Cooper and published by Images Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Project Japan is the product of a long journey by author Graham Cooper. A sustained rolling programme relating to contemporary art and architecture in Japan, this project involved over a decade of commitment, more than a dozen research and documentation

Book Architectures of Poetry

Download or read book Architectures of Poetry written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-09-06 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architectures of Poetry is the first comprehensive accounting of the currently intense dialogue between the sister arts of poetry and architecture. Refusing to take either term in a metaphoric sense, the eleven essays collected in this volume exemplify an exciting methodological direction for work in the humanities: a literal wager that is willing to take the unintended suggestions of language as reality. At the same time, they also provide close readings of the work of a number of important writers. In addition to a suite of essays devoted to the team of Arakawa and Madeline Gins, chapters focus on figures as diverse as Francesco Borromini, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stéphane Mallarmé, Friedrich Achleitner, John Cage and Lyn Hejinian.

Book Reimagining Textuality

Download or read book Reimagining Textuality written by Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when, in the wake of postmodernism, the old enterprise of bibliography, textual criticism, or scholarly editing crosses paths and processes with visual and cultural studies? In Reimagining Textuality, major scholars map out in this volume a new discipline, drawing on and redirecting a host of subfields concerned with the production, distribution, reproduction, consumption, reception, archiving, editing, and sociology of texts.

Book The Great Indoors

    Book Details:
  • Author : Emily Anthes
  • Publisher : Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Release : 2020-06-23
  • ISBN : 0374716684
  • Pages : 304 pages

Download or read book The Great Indoors written by Emily Anthes and published by Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Architectural Record Notable Book A fascinating, thought-provoking journey into our built environment Modern humans are an indoor species. We spend 90 percent of our time inside, shuttling between homes and offices, schools and stores, restaurants and gyms. And yet, in many ways, the indoor world remains unexplored territory. For all the time we spend inside buildings, we rarely stop to consider: How do these spaces affect our mental and physical well-being? Our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors? Our productivity, performance, and relationships? In this wide-ranging, character-driven book, science journalist Emily Anthes takes us on an adventure into the buildings in which we spend our days, exploring the profound, and sometimes unexpected, ways that they shape our lives. Drawing on cutting-edge research, she probes the pain-killing power of a well-placed window and examines how the right office layout can expand our social networks. She investigates how room temperature regulates our cognitive performance, how the microbes hiding in our homes influence our immune systems, and how cafeteria design affects what—and how much—we eat. Along the way, Anthes takes readers into an operating room designed to minimize medical errors, a school designed to boost students’ physical fitness, and a prison designed to support inmates’ psychological needs. And she previews the homes of the future, from the high-tech houses that could monitor our health to the 3D-printed structures that might allow us to live on the Moon. The Great Indoors provides a fresh perspective on our most familiar surroundings and a new understanding of the power of architecture and design. It's an argument for thoughtful interventions into the built environment and a story about how to build a better world—one room at a time.

Book Mafia   Mafiosi

    Book Details:
  • Author : Henner Hess
  • Publisher : NYU Press
  • Release : 1998-11
  • ISBN : 9780814735893
  • Pages : 250 pages

Download or read book Mafia Mafiosi written by Henner Hess and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1998-11 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henner Hess's classic work, first published almost a quarter century ago, gives a detailed picture of the typical career of mafiosi. Hess describes a distinct subculture whose behavioral patterns have been largely determined by the specific political, economic, and social history of Sicily, a society characterized by a weak state and organized on the basis of self-help. This subculture was and is the breeding ground for the strong-arm man "mafioso" or "uomo d'onore," man of honor, as he is called in Sicily, the proud, taciturn, independent man who believes in the use of violence to achieve personal goals. As a rule, the men come from poor families and rise through violent crime, shrewd diplomacy and the building of a "family" of followers to a respected position of power and wealth. Most important are the mafioso's reciprocal arrangements with politicians and government officials whom he supports in the elections and who protect him from law enforcement. Mafia, popularly conceived as a strictly centralized secret society, is instead proven to be a system of independent families which might on many occasions cooperate, but just as easily be driven to bloody feud. Only in the last decade have there been a number of so-called "pentiti," crown witnesses who cooperate with the criminal justice system. Using their testimonies, an extensive afterword brings the book up to date.

Book The Funambulist Papers

Download or read book The Funambulist Papers written by Léopold Lambert and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2013-10-23 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is a collection of thirty-five texts from the first series of guest writers' essays, written specifically for The Funambulist weblog from June 2011 to November 2012. The idea of complementing Lambert's own texts on his blog with those written by others originated from the idea that having friends communicate with each other about their work could help develop mutual interests and provide a platform to address an audience. Thirty-nine authors of twenty-three nationalities were given the opportunity to write essays about a part of their work that might fit with the blog's editorial line. Overall, two 'families' of texts emerged, collected in two distinct parts in this volume.The first part, The Power of the Line, explores the legal, geographical and historical politics of various places of the world. The second part, Architectural Narratives, approaches architecture in a mix of things that were once called philosophy, literature and art. This dichotomy represents the blog's editorial line and can be reconciled by the obsession of approaching architecture without care for the limits of a given discipline. This method, rather than adopting the contemporary architect's syndrome that consists in talking about everything but being an expert in nothing, attempts to consider architecture as something embedded within (geo)political, cultural, social, historical, biological, and dromological mechanisms that widely exceed what is traditionally understood as the limits of its expertise."

Book Beyond Sustainable

Download or read book Beyond Sustainable written by Ryan Ludwig and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-21 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Sustainable discusses the relationship between human-beings and the constructed environments of habitation we create living in the Anthropocene, an increasingly volatile and unpredictable landscape of certain change. This volume accepts that human-beings have reached a moment beyond climatological and ecological crisis. It asks not how we resolve the crisis but, rather, how we can cope with, or adapt to, the irreversible changes in the earth-system by rethinking how we choose to inhabit the world-ecology. Through an examination of numerous historical and contemporary projects of architecture and art, as well as observations in philosophy, ecology, evolutionary biology, genetics, neurobiology and psychology, this book reimagines architecture capable of influencing and impacting who we are, how we live, what we feel and even how we evolve. Beyond Sustainable provides students and academics with a single comprehensive overview of this architectural reconceptualization, which is grounded in an ecologically inclusive and co-productive understanding of architecture.

Book Credibility in Court

Download or read book Credibility in Court written by Marco Jacquemet and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-10-17 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study analyses courtroom communicative practices in the trials of an Italian criminal organisation.

Book The Singularity Is Near

Download or read book The Singularity Is Near written by Ray Kurzweil and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-09-22 with total page 992 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil, hailed by Bill Gates as “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence,” presents an “elaborate, smart, and persuasive” (The Boston Globe) view of the future course of human development. “Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.”—Los Angeles Times “Startling in scope and bravado.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times “An important book.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and thrilling period in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, The Singularity Is Near presents a radical and optimistic view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.

Book Ecologies of Inception

Download or read book Ecologies of Inception written by Simone Ferracina and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Responding to increasing levels of planetary pollution, waste generation, carbon dioxide emission and environmental collapse, Ecologies of Inception re-thinks potentiality—an object’s ability to change—in architecture and design. The book problematizes the still-prevailing modern paradigm of design practice: the technical tabula rasa, a tendency to begin from scratch and use raw, amorphous, and obedient materials that can be easily and effectively manipulated, facilitating a seamless and faithful embodiment of intentions. Instead, the philosophy of design developed in the text prompts—through a variety of case studies, thinkers, and disciplines—a collective reconsideration of value, dissociating it from the projects and signatures of any one author or generation. Whereas the merits of up-cycling and circular design are canonically defined vis-à-vis status-quo economic and socio-cultural orthodoxies, this project unpacks the theoretical assumptions that underpin these practices, showing that they perpetuate the same biases and exclusions that generate waste in the first place. As an alternative, the book introduces a nodal and exaptive paradigm for design: a conceptual and methodological toolset for engaging the durational and anthropocenic materiality of the third millennium, and for radically prioritizing practices of maintenance, reuse, care, and co-option. This approach, which is inspired by (and builds upon) evolutionary biology, technological disobedience, queer use, adaptive reuse, experimental preservation, and improvisational practices such as collage, adhocism, bricolage, and kit-bashing, refuses to reduce pre-existing material substrates to abstract lists of properties or featureless lumps, encountering them on their own terms—as situated individuals and co-authors. Ecologies of Inception will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, educators, and professional architects and designers interested in sustainable design and seeking to develop conceptual and design tools commensurate with the magnitude and urgency of the climate emergency.