Download or read book The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics written by John Brinckerhoff Jackson and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jackson discussed the evolution of the development, use, and perception of landscape--the space around us in the most general sense. The title chapter examines the proliferation of historic parks and monuments and argues that American culture demands a three-step formulation of history.
Download or read book Discovering the Vernacular Landscape written by John Brinckerhoff Jackson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1984-01-01 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneer in landscape studies takes us on a tour of landscapes past and present to show how our surroundings reflect our culture. "No one who cares deeply about landscape issues can overlook the scores of brilliant insights and challenges to the mind, eye and conscience contained in Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. It is a book to be deeply cherished and to be read and pondered many times."--Wilbur Zelinsky, Landscape "While it is fashionable to speak of man as alienated from his environment, Mr. Jackson shows us all the ties that bind us to it, consciously or unconsciously. He teaches us to speak intelligently--rather than polemically or wistfully--of the sense of place."--Anatole Broyard, New York Times "This book is a vital and seminal text: do beg, borrow or buy it."--Robert Holden, Landscape Design (London) "Incisive and overpoweringly influential. It will probably tell you something about how you live that you've never thought about."--Thomas Hine, The Philadelphia Inquirer "No one can come close to Jackson in his unique combination of historical scholarship and field experience, in his deep knowledge of European high culture as well as of American trailer parks, in his archivist's nose for the unusual fact and his philosopher's mind for the trenchant, surprising question."--Yi-Fu Tuan
Download or read book Half Broke A Memoir written by Ginger Gaffney and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of a 2020 Border Regional Library Association Southwest Book Award “Truly transcendent.” —Jessica Lustig, New York Times Book Review This riveting memoir follows professional horse trainer Ginger Gaffney’s year-long odyssey to train a herd of neglected horses at an alternative prison ranch in New Mexico. Working with her is a small team of ranch “residents,” men and women who are each uniquely broken by addiction and incarceration. Gaffney forms a bond with them as profound as the kinship and trust the residents discover among the troubled horses. Through these unforgettable characters—both animal and human—Half Broke tells a new kind of recovery story and speaks to the life-affirming joy of finding a sense of belonging.
Download or read book The House of Shattered Wings written by Aliette de Bodard and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Multi-award winning author Aliette de Bodard, brings her story of the War in Heaven to Paris, igniting the City of Light in a fantasy of divine power and deep conspiracy… In the late twentieth century, the streets of Paris are lined with haunted ruins, the aftermath of a Great War between arcane powers. The Grand Magasins have been reduced to piles of debris, Notre-Dame is a burnt-out shell, and the Seine has turned black with ashes and rubble and the remnants of the spells that tore the city apart. But those that survived still retain their irrepressible appetite for novelty and distraction, and The Great Houses still vie for dominion over France’s once grand capital. Once the most powerful and formidable, House Silverspires now lies in disarray. Its magic is ailing; its founder, Morningstar, has been missing for decades; and now something from the shadows stalks its people inside their very own walls. Within the House, three very different people must come together: a naive but powerful Fallen angel; an alchemist with a self-destructive addiction; and a resentful young man wielding spells of unknown origin. They may be Silverspires’ salvation—or the architects of its last, irreversible fall. And if Silverspires falls, so may the city itself.
Download or read book Men Among the Ruins written by Julius Evola and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-07-13 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Julius Evola's masterful overview of the political and social manifestations of our time, the "age of decline" known to the Hindus as the Kali Yuga. • Reveals the occult war that underlies the crises that have become a prevailing feature of modern life. • Includes H. T. Hansen's definitive essay on Evola's political life and theory. Men Among the Ruins is Evola's frontal assault on the predominant materialism of our time and the mirage of progress. For Evola and other proponents of Traditionalism, we are now living in an age of increasing strife and chaos: the Kali Yuga of the Hindus or the Germanic Ragnarok. In such a time, social decadence is so widespread that it appears as a natural component of all political institutions. Evola argues that the crises that dominate the daily lives of our societies are part of a secret occult war to remove the support of spiritual and traditional values in order to turn man into a passive instrument of the powerful. Evola is often regarded as the godfather of contemporary Italian fascism and right-wing radical politics, but attentive examination of the historical record--as provided by H. T. Hanson's definitive introduction--reveals Evola to be a much more complex figure. Though he held extreme right-wing views, he was a fearless critic of the Fascist regime and preferred a caste system based on spirituality and intellect to the biological racism championed by the Nazis. Ultimately, he viewed the forces of history as comprised by two factions: "history's demolition squad" enslaved by blind faith in the future and those individuals whose watchword is Tradition. These latter stand in this world of ruins at a higher level and are capable of letting go of what needs to be abandoned in order that what is truly essential not be compromised.
Download or read book The Necessity of Sculpture written by Eric Gibson and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Necessity of Sculpture brings together a selection of articles on sculpture and sculptors from Eric Gibson’s nearly four-decade career as an art critic. It covers subjects as diverse as Mesopotamian cylinder seals, war memorials, and the art of the American West; stylistic periods such as the Hellenistic in Ancient Greece and Kamakura in medieval Japan; Michelangelo, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and other historical figures; modernists like Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, and Alberto Giacometti; and contemporary artists including Richard Serra, Rachel Whiteread, and Jeff Koons. Organized chronologically by artist and period, this collection is as much a synoptic history of sculpture as it is an art chronicle. At the same time, it is an illuminating introduction to the subject for anyone coming to it for the first time.
Download or read book Daughters of Ruin written by K. D. Castner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a war begins, four princesses of enemy kingdoms who were raised as sisters must decide where their loyalties lie: to their kingdoms, or to each other.
Download or read book Rock Bone and Ruin written by Adrian Currie and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-02-16 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that we should be optimistic about the capacity of “methodologically omnivorous” geologists, paleontologists, and archaeologists to uncover truths about the deep past. The “historical sciences”—geology, paleontology, and archaeology—have made extraordinary progress in advancing our understanding of the deep past. How has this been possible, given that the evidence they have to work with offers mere traces of the past? In Rock, Bone, and Ruin, Adrian Currie explains that these scientists are “methodological omnivores,” with a variety of strategies and techniques at their disposal, and that this gives us every reason to be optimistic about their capacity to uncover truths about prehistory. Creative and opportunistic paleontologists, for example, discovered and described a new species of prehistoric duck-billed platypus from a single fossilized tooth. Examining the complex reasoning processes of historical science, Currie also considers philosophical and scientific reflection on the relationship between past and present, the nature of evidence, contingency, and scientific progress. Currie draws on varied examples from across the historical sciences, from Mayan ritual sacrifice to giant Mesozoic fleas to Mars's mysterious watery past, to develop an account of the nature of, and resources available to, historical science. He presents two major case studies: the emerging explanation of sauropod size, and the “snowball earth” hypothesis that accounts for signs of glaciation in Neoproterozoic tropics. He develops the Ripple Model of Evidence to analyze “unlucky circumstances” in scientific investigation; examines and refutes arguments for pessimism about the capacity of the historical sciences, defending the role of analogy and arguing that simulations have an experiment-like function. Currie argues for a creative, open-ended approach, “empirically grounded” speculation.
Download or read book No Ruined Stone written by Shara McCallum and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No Ruined Stone is a verse sequence rooted in the life of 18th-century Scottish poet Robert Burns. In 1786, Burns arranged to migrate to Jamaica to work on a slave plantation, a plan he ultimately abandoned. Voiced by a fictive Burns and his fictional granddaughter, a "mulatta" passing for white, the book asks: what would have happened had he gone?
Download or read book Landscapes written by John Brinckerhoff Jackson and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Secret Lives of Buildings written by Edward Hollis and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2009-11-10 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A strikingly original, beautifully narrated history of Western architecture and the cultural transformations that it represents Concrete, marble, steel, brick: little else made by human hands seems as stable, as immutable, as a building. Yet the life of any structure is neither fixed nor timeless. Outliving their original contexts and purposes, buildings are forced to adapt to each succeeding age. To survive, they must become shape-shifters. In an inspired refashioning of architectural history, Edward Hollis recounts more than a dozen stories of such metamorphosis, highlighting the way in which even the most familiar structures all change over time into "something rich and strange." The Parthenon, that epitome of a ruined temple, was for centuries a working church and then a mosque; the cathedral of Notre Dame was "restored" to a design that none of its original makers would have recognized. Remains of the Berlin Wall, meanwhile, which was once gleefully smashed and bulldozed, are now treated as precious relics. With The Secret Lives of Buildings, Edward Hollis recounts the most enthralling of these metamorphoses and shows how buildings have come to embody the history of Western culture.
Download or read book The Landscape Urbanism Reader written by Charles Waldheim and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Landscape Urbanism Reader Charles Waldheim—who is at the forefront of this new movement—has assembled the definitive collection of essays by many of the field's top practitioners. Fourteen essays written by leading figures across a range of disciplines and from around the world—including James Corner, Linda Pollak, Alan Berger, Pierre Bolanger, Julia Czerniak, and more—capture the origins, the contemporary milieu, and the aspirations of this relatively new field. The Landscape Urbanism Reader is an inspiring signal to the future of city making as well as an indispensable reference for students, teachers, architects, and urban planners.
Download or read book The Mushroom at the End of the World written by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What a rare mushroom can teach us about sustaining life on a fragile planet Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world—and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made? A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction. By investigating one of the world's most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.
Download or read book Drawn to Landscape written by Janet Mendelsohn and published by George F. Thompson Publishing. This book was released on 2015 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "J. B. (John Brinckerhoff) Jackson founded, edited, and published Landscape from 1951–1969, v. 1-32, no. 2; spring 1951-1994] a magazine that changed the way everyone—including writers and scholars, planners and designers, artists and the general public—came to understand and interpret the everyday places that surround us and influence us in fundamental ways. Then, through his distinguished teaching career at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, and through his expansive array of seminal essays and influential books, Jackson further pioneered the advancement of "landscape studies," whose connections today extend to more than a dozen academic, artistic, and professional fields. Drawn to Landscape is the first book to present fully the many aspects of Jackson's career. Including original essays by those who not only knew Jackson well, but also have carried his torch to new heights in their own work, the book sheds valuable light on Jackson's life, oeuvre, influences, and many legacies. Also included are 126 color illustrations and twenty-eight black-and-white illustrations, among them 117 of Jackson's original drawings, watercolors, and teaching slides. J. B. Jackson redefined landscape not as scenery but as the historical record of human interactions with the environment, whether urban, rural, suburban, social, or wild. He taught us to pay attention to the often overlooked but defining features of our everyday world, whose varied landscapes are created by ordinary people going about their day-to-day lives. And he guided us, from the first issue of Landscape to his last lecture and publication, to look at the landscape like one reads a book. As he proclaimed, "We have but to learn how to read it." This book helps show us the way."--
Download or read book Architecture written by Léon Krier and published by Papadakis Publisher. This book was released on 1998 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This polemic is essential reading for anyone converned with the state and direction of architecture and urban planning today and will provake wide-ranging discussion.
Download or read book Eaarth written by Bill McKibben and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2010-04-13 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Read it, please. Straight through to the end. Whatever else you were planning to do next, nothing could be more important." —Barbara Kingsolver Twenty years ago, with The End of Nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he insists, we need to acknowledge that we've waited too long, and that massive change is not only unavoidable but already under way. Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen. We've created, in very short order, a new planet, still recognizable but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth. That new planet is filled with new binds and traps. A changing world costs large sums to defend—think of the money that went to repair New Orleans, or the trillions it will take to transform our energy systems. But the endless economic growth that could underwrite such largesse depends on the stable planet we've managed to damage and degrade. We can't rely on old habits any longer. Our hope depends, McKibben argues, on scaling back—on building the kind of societies and economies that can hunker down, concentrate on essentials, and create the type of community (in the neighborhood, but also on the Internet) that will allow us to weather trouble on an unprecedented scale. Change—fundamental change—is our best hope on a planet suddenly and violently out of balance.
Download or read book Children of Ruin written by Adrian Tchaikovsky and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2019-05-16 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'My most anticipated book of the year' - Peter F. Hamilton, Britain's no.1 science fiction writer Children of Ruin follows Adrian Tchaikovsky's extraordinary Children of Time, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award. It is set in the same universe, with new characters and a thrilling narrative. It has been waiting through the ages. Now it's time . . . Thousands of years ago, Earth’s terraforming program took to the stars. On the world they called Nod, scientists discovered alien life – but it was their mission to overwrite it with the memory of Earth. Then humanity’s great empire fell, and the program’s decisions were lost to time. Aeons later, humanity and its new spider allies detected fragmentary radio signals between the stars. They dispatched an exploration vessel, hoping to find cousins from old Earth. But those ancient terraformers woke something on Nod better left undisturbed. And it’s been waiting for them. 'Books like this are why we read science fiction' - Ian McDonald, author of the Luna series All underpinned by great ideas. And it is crisply modern - but with the sensibility of classic science fiction' Stephen Baxter, author of the Long Earth series (with Terry Pratchett)
