Author: Paul Scheerbart Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022620314X Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
German writer, critic, and theorist Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) died nearly a century ago, but his influence is still being felt today. Considered by some a mad eccentric and by others a visionary political thinker in his own time, he is now experiencing a revival thanks to a new generation of scholars who are rightfully situating him in the modernist pantheon. Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is the first collection of Scheerbart’s multifarious writings to be published in English. In addition to a selection of his fantastical short stories, it includes the influential architectural manifesto Glass Architecture and his literary tour-de-force Perpetual Motion: The Story of an Invention. The latter, written in the guise of a scientific work (complete with technical diagrams), was taken as such when first published but in reality is a fiction—albeit one with an important message. Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is richly illustrated with period material, much of it never before reproduced, including a selection of artwork by Paul Scheerbart himself. Accompanying this original material is a selection of essays by scholars, novelists, and filmmakers commissioned for this publication to illuminate Scheerbart’s importance, then and now, in the worlds of art, architecture, and culture. Coedited by artist Josiah McElheny and Christine Burgin, with new artwork created for this publication by McElheny, Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is a long-overdue monument to a modern master.
Author: Paul Scheerbart Publisher: ISBN: 9780984115549 Category : Perpetual motion Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
In the last days of 1907, the German novelist and exponent of glass architecture Paul Scheerbart embarked upon an attempt to invent a perpetual motion machine. For the next two and a half years he would document his ongoing efforts (and failures) from his laundry-room-cum-laboratory, hiring plumbers and mechanics to construct his models while spinning out a series of imagined futures that his invention-in-the-making was going to enable. The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention, originally published in German in 1910, is an indefinable blend of diary, diagrams and digression that falls somewhere between memoir and reverie: a document of what poet and translator Andrew Joron calls a "two-and-a-half-year-long tantrum of the imagination." Shifting ambiguously from irony to enthusiasm and back, Scheerbart's unique amalgamation of visionary humor and optimistic failure ultimately proves to be a more literary invention than scientific: a perpetual motion of a fevered imagination that reads as if Robert Walser had tried his hand at science fiction. With "toiling wheels" inextricably embedded in his head, Scheerbart's visions of rising globalization, ecological devastation, militaristic weapons of mass destruction and the possible end of literature soon lead him to dread success more than failure. The Perpetual Motion Machine is an ode to the fertility of misery and a battle cry of the imagination against praxis.
Author: Karrie Jacobs Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1440684529 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 277
Book Description
A home of one’s own has always been a cornerstone of the American dream, fulfilling like nothing else the desire for comfort, financial security, independence, and with a little luck, even a touch of distinctive character, or even beauty. But what we have come to regard as almost a national birthright has recently begun to elude more and more prospective homebuyers. Where housing is concerned, affordable and well-crafted rarely exist together. Or do they? For years, founding editor-in-chief of Dwell magazine and noted architecture and design critic Karrie Jacobs had been confronting this question both professionally and personally. Finally, she decided to see for herself whether it was possible to build the home of her own dreams for a reasonable sum. The Perfect $100,000 House is the story of that quest, a search that takes her from a two-week crash course in housebuilding in Vermont to a road trip of some 14,000 miles. In the course of her journey Jacobs encounters a group of intrepid and visionary architects and builders working to revolutionize the way Americans thinks about homes, about construction techniques, and about the very idea of community. By her trip’s end Jacobs, has not only had a practical and sobering education in the economics, aesthetics, and politics of homebuilding, but has been spurred to challenge her own deeply held beliefs about what constitutes an ideal home. The Perfect $100,000 House is a compelling and inspiring demonstration that we can live in homes that are sensible, modest, and beautiful.
Author: Marilyn J. McCabe Publisher: ISBN: 9781944585051 Category : American poetry Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Poetry. Environmental Studies. Chemically speaking, glass is neither a liquid nor a solid; it has properties of both states of being. It is precisely these kinds of ambiguities of experience, internal and external, that McCabe's crisp yet sonically adroit poems seek to reveal. In a world in which all matter is destined for ruin, we find a speaker who again and again not only holds the elusive present in her fierce attention but also praises the very processes that, while ushering new fruit from the trees, erase all that has been, including the familiar self, which is at every moment already "turning, turning" into something other.
Author: Lucy Huskinson Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350412929 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 431
Book Description
Nietzsche and Architecture explores Nietzsche's relationship to the architects, buildings, and modern architectural movements he went on to inspire, and situates his philosophy more appropriately and comprehensively within the field of architectural studies, architectural history, and theory. Divided into two parts, the book first examines Nietzsche's philosophy of architecture, exploring his notions of rhythm, ornament, style, and power. It then goes on to examine Nietzsche's ambiguous architectural legacy, scrutinising iconic architects, thinkers, designs, and cultural movements to ascertain their relationship with Nietzschean ideas, from the crystal architecture of Bruno Taut and Peter Behrens, to the 'new styles' of the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier, Louis H. Sullivan's desire for the heights, and the cultural propaganda of 'Nazi architecture'. Clearly explaining the subtleties and complexities of Nietzsche's architectural thought, Nietzsche and Architecture provides an accessible insight into Nietzsche's philosophy and its significance to the development of modern architecture in the 19th and early 20th centuries, shedding vital light on the continued relevance of Nietzsche to architecture today.
Author: Deborah Ascher Barnstone Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350228761 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
Material Modernity explores creative innovation in German art, design, and architecture during the Weimar Republic, charting both the rise of new media and the re-fashioning of old media. Weimar became famous for the explosion of creative ingenuity across the arts in Germany, due to experiments with new techniques (including the move towards abstraction in painting and sculpture) and inventive work in such new media as paper and plastic, which utilized both new and old methods of art production. Individual chapters in this book consider inventions such as the camera and materials like celluloid, examine the role of new materials including concrete composites in opening up fresh avenues in the plastic arts, and relate advances in the understanding of color perception and psychology to an increased interest in visual perception and the latent potential of color as both architectural ornament and carrier of emotional force in space. While art historians usually argue that experimentation in the Weimar Republic was the result of an intentional rejection of traditional modes of expression in the conscious attempt to invent a modern art and architecture unshackled from historic media and methods, this volume shows that the drivers for innovation were often far more complex and nuanced. It first of all describes how the material shortages precipitated by the First World War, along with the devastation to industrial infrastructure and disruption of historic trade routes, affected art, as did a spirit of experimentation that permeated interwar German culture. It then analyzes new challenges in the 1920s to artistic conventions in traditional art modes like painting, sculpture, drawing, architecture, textiles, and print-making and simultaneously probes the likely causes of innovative new methods of artistic production that appeared, such as photomontage, assemblage, mechanical art, and multi-media art. In doing so, Material Modernity fills a significant gap in Weimar scholarship and art history literature.
Author: Katharina Herold-Zanker Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198880979 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
This book examines late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature written in England and Germany, exploring the relationship between Orientalism, Decadence, and cosmopolitanism, arguing that representations of the East played a critical role in the literary landscape of Decadence over this period.
Author: Almantas Samalavičius Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443878693 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
This volume is a passionate scholarly inquiry focused on some of the most pressing issues confronting contemporary architectural practice, urbanism, and city-making. Presented in the form of conversations with leading architects, urbanists, and internationally renowned architectural historians and urban thinkers, this concise book reviews and critiques the legacy of Modernism and its impact on global urbanisation. Timely, thoughtful and thought-provoking, these conversations, conducted by the editor during the last few years, urge the rejection of some of the most widespread dogmas and often dangerously limiting and misguided intellectual legacies of urban and architectural thinking. The contributors recommend a search instead for more enlightened architectural practices, urban planning, and city-making in the new millennium, when environmental problems have become particularly pressing. In this volume, readers will find not only glimpses into possible urban futures, but a thorough review of what now often appear as the shackles of the not-so-distant Modernist past.
Author: Thomas Bernhard Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022607434X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 161
Book Description
In this exuberantly satirical novel, the tutor Atzbacher has been summoned by his friend Reger to meet him in a Viennese museum. While Reger gazes at a Tintoretto portrait, Atzbacher—who fears Reger's plans to kill himself—gives us a portrait of the musicologist: his wisdom, his devotion to his wife, and his love-hate relationship with art. With characteristically acerbic wit, Bernhard exposes the pretensions and aspirations of humanity in a novel at once pessimistic and strangely exhilarating. "Bernhard's . . . most enjoyable novel."—Robert Craft, New York Review of Books. "Bernhard is one of the masters of contemporary European fiction."—George Steiner
Author: Paul Scheerbart
Author: Paul Scheerbart
Author: Paul Scheerbart
Author: Karrie Jacobs
Author: Marilyn J. McCabe
Author: Lucy Huskinson
Author: Deborah Ascher Barnstone
Author: Katharina Herold-Zanker
Author: Almantas Samalavičius
Author: Thomas Bernhard