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Author: Anna Novakov Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443862649 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 165
Book Description
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.
Author: Anna Novakov Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443862649 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 165
Book Description
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.
Author: Anna Novakov Publisher: ISBN: 9781443841399 Category : City planning Languages : en Pages : 150
Book Description
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.
Author: Nathaniel Coleman Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften ISBN: 9783034301206 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
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.
Author: Letizia Modena Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136730605 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
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.
Author: Nathaniel Coleman Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135993947 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 358
Book Description
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.
Author: Sophia Psarra Publisher: UCL Press ISBN: 1787352390 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 332
Book Description
From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability – how we imagine better urban environments – remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time. Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital – Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic ‘algorithm’, that is, a structure with a small number of rules capable of producing a large number of variations. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the ‘model city’ that endured a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other ‘Venices’ for the future.
Author: Maria do Rosário Monteiro Publisher: CRC Press ISBN: 1351966839 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 418
Book Description
The idea of Utopia springs from a natural desire of transformation, of evolution pertaining to humankind and, therefore, one can find expressions of “utopian” desire in every civilization. Having to do explicitly with human condition, Utopia accompanies closely cultural evolution, almost as a symbiotic organism. Maintaining its roots deeply attached to ancient myths, utopian expression followed, and sometimes preceded cultural transformation. Through the next almost five hundred pages (virtually one for each year since Utopia was published) researchers in the fields of Architecture and Urbanism, Arts and Humanities present the results of their studies within the different areas of expertise under the umbrella of Utopia. Past, present, and future come together in one book. They do not offer their readers any golden key. Many questions will remain unanswered, as they should. The texts presented in Proportion Harmonies and Identities - UTOPIA(S) WORLDS AND FRONTIERS OF THE IMAGINARY were compiled with the intent to establish a platform for the presentation, interaction and dissemination of researches. It aims also to foster the awareness and discussion on the topics of Harmony and Proportion with a focus on different utopian visions and readings relevant to the arts, sciences and humanities and their importance and benefits for the community at large.
Author: Teppo Eskelinen Publisher: Zed Books Ltd. ISBN: 1786999560 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 214
Book Description
The Revival of Political Imagination offers a unique examination of the methodological aspects of utopia. Discussing utopia as a tool for social criticism, method and imaginative spaces - rather than in terms of its content - this volume analyses the function of utopias, to develop utopias as methodology and to show how instrumental utopian modes of thought can be in such diverse fields such as education, labour, and housing. Including discussions of traditional and contemporary utopias, as well as various forms of expression of utopian hope, from literature to social science and cultural practices, The Revival of Political Imagination is both analytical and practical in its elucidation of how political theory can function to foster our imaginative skills.
Author: Ruth Eaton Publisher: Leiden University Press ISBN: 9789061534754 Category : Architecture and society Languages : en Pages : 255
Book Description
"In this richly illustrated book, the author explores the ability of ideal cities to stimulate reflection and change, and suggests under what conditions they might continue to exercise their vital function in relation to the urban environment of the future. The ideal cities presented by Ruth Eaton exist for the most part in the virtual domain of ideas, treading the fine line between dream and nightmare." - book jacket.