The Provisional City PDF Download

Author: Dana Cuff
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262532020
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
A look at urban transformation through the architecture and land development of large-scale residential projects.

Author: Renata Tyszczuk
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317074041
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
This book considers the provisional nature of cities in relation to the Anthropocene – the proposed geological epoch of human-induced changes to the Earth system. It charts an environmental history of curfews, admonitions and alarms about dwelling on Earth. ‘Provisional cities’ are explored as exemplary sites for thinking about living in this unsettled time. Each chapter focuses on cities, settlements or proxy urbanisations, including past disaster zones, remote outposts in the present and future urban fossils. The book explores the dynamic, changing and contradictory relationship between architecture and the global environmental crisis and looks at how to re-position architectural and urban practice in relation to wider intellectual, environmental, political and cultural shifts. The book argues that these rounder and richer accounts can better equip humanity to think through questions of vulnerability, responsibility and opportunity that are presented by immense processes of planetary change. These are cautionary tales for the Anthropocene. Central to this project is the proposition that living with uncertainty requires that architecture is reframed as a provisional practice. This book would be beneficial to students and academics working in architecture, geography, planning and environmental humanities as well as professionals working to shape the future of cities.

Author: Dana Cuff
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262356996
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Original, action-oriented humanist practices for interpreting and intervening in the city: a new methodology at the intersection of the humanities, design, and urban studies. Urban humanities is an emerging field at the intersection of the humanities, urban planning, and design. It offers a new approach not only for understanding cities in a global context but for intervening in them, interpreting their histories, engaging with them in the present, and speculating about their futures. This book introduces both the theory and practice of urban humanities, tracing the evolution of the concept, presenting methods and practices with a wide range of research applications, describing changes in teaching and curricula, and offering case studies of urban humanities practices in the field. Urban humanities views the city through a lens of spatial justice, and its inquiries are centered on the microsettings of everyday life. The book's case studies report on real-world projects in mega-cities in the Pacific Rim—Tokyo, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Los Angeles—with several projects described in detail, including playful spaces for children in car-oriented Mexico City, a commons in a Tokyo neighborhood, and a rolling story-telling box to promote “literary justice” in Los Angeles.

Author: Dana Cuff
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262531122
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Dana Cuff delves into the architect's everyday world in "Architecture" to uncover an intricate social art of design, resulting in a new portrait of the profession that sheds light on what it means to become an architect.

Author: Giacomo Parrinello
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782389512
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Earth’s fractured geology is visible in its fault lines. It is along these lines that earthquakes occur, sometimes with disastrous effects. These disturbances can significantly influence urban development, as seen in the aftermath of two earthquakes in Messina, Italy, in 1908 and in the Belice Valley, Sicily, in 1968. Following the history of these places before and after their destruction, this book explores plans and developments that preceded the disasters and the urbanism that emerged from the ruins. These stories explore fault lines between “rural” and “urban,” “backwardness” and “development,” and “before” and “after,” shedding light on the role of environmental forces in the history of human habitats.

Author: Pier Vittorio Aureli
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262515792
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Architectural form reconsidered in light of a unitary conception of architecture and the city. In The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Pier Vittorio Aureli proposes that a sharpened formal consciousness in architecture is a precondition for political, cultural, and social engagement with the city. Aureli uses the term absolute not in the conventional sense of “pure,” but to denote something that is resolutely itself after being separated from its other. In the pursuit of the possibility of an absolute architecture, the other is the space of the city, its extensive organization, and its government. Politics is agonism through separation and confrontation; the very condition of architectural form is to separate and be separated. Through its act of separation and being separated, architecture reveals at once the essence of the city and the essence of itself as political form: the city as the composition of (separate) parts. Aureli revisits the work of four architects whose projects were advanced through the making of architectural form but whose concern was the city at large: Andrea Palladio, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Étienne Louis-Boullée, and Oswald Mathias Ungers. The work of these architects, Aureli argues, addressed the transformations of the modern city and its urban implications through the elaboration of specific and strategic architectural forms. Their projects for the city do not take the form of an overall plan but are expressed as an “archipelago” of site-specific interventions.

Author: Elite Kedan
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 9781568988788
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Provisional profiles nine of the United States' most exciting architectural practices. They all share a pragmatic, "roll-up-your-sleeves" approach that seeks opportunities to redefine the role of craft in architectural practice. Enlightening interviews together with a selection of drawings, diagrams, models, renderings, and building process photographs reveal a shared commitment to experimentation and learning-by-doing. Projects by SHoP Architects, Front Studio, Gehry Technologies, Lewis.Tsurumaki. Lewis, Hweler + Yoon Architecture, nARCHITECTS, servo, GYA Architects, and Chris Hoxie Design are included as well as the following projects: Beijing National Stadium, China Central Television (CCTV) Station and Headquarters (Beijing), Dee and Charles Wyly Theater (Dallas); FutureGen Power Plant (Illinois); Highline HL23 (New York City); and the Olympic Sculpture Park (Seattle).

Author: Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307265927
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • National Book Award Finalist • This "eyewitness history of the first order ... should be read by anyone who wants to understand how things went so badly wrong in Iraq” (The New York Times Book Review). The Green Zone, Baghdad, Iraq, 2003: in this walled-off compound of swimming pools and luxurious amenities, Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority set out to fashion a new, democratic Iraq. Staffed by idealistic aides chosen primarily for their views on issues such as abortion and capital punishment, the CPA spent the crucial first year of occupation pursuing goals that had little to do with the immediate needs of a postwar nation: flat taxes instead of electricity and deregulated health care instead of emergency medical supplies. In this acclaimed firsthand account, the former Baghdad bureau chief of The Washington Post gives us an intimate portrait of life inside this Oz-like bubble, which continued unaffected by the growing mayhem outside. This is a quietly devastating tale of imperial folly, and the definitive history of those early days when things went irrevocably wrong in Iraq.

Author: Abdou Maliqalim Simone
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822334453
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
DIVA study of how colonial and postcolonial legacies manifest in African cities and African urban planning./div

Author: Peter Wilson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262047268
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
An idiosyncratic guidebook to architectural (and other) wonders of Italy, accompanied by the author’s own witty illustrations. In Some Reasons for Traveling to Italy, architect Peter Wilson offers a Grand Tour of Grand Tours, providing an idiosyncratic guidebook to architectural (and other) wonders of Italy, illustrated by his own witty watercolors and sketches. Wilson chronicles the reasons that people throughout history have traveled to Italy—ranging from “To Be the Subject of an Equestrian Painting by Uccello in Florence Cathedral” to “To Rebuild Herculaneum in Malibu” (the desire of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty in the 1970s)—while giving readers a deeper understanding of Italy’s architectural habitat and cultural mythology. In Wilson’s narratives and anecdotes, place names function as talismans; the events may not tally with recorded history, or with the exact topographies of actual places. Wilson offers historical reworkings, appropriations, and an architect’s scrutiny of certain Italian tropes. He recounts that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, set out “To Flee England Out of Embarrassment” after breaking wind when he bowed to Queen Elizabeth I; French novelist Stendhal went “To Discover an Anti-France”; and an English architect went “To Get Some Ideas for a Mausoleum.” At the first Venice Biennale of Architecture in 1980, a dapper architect found that he had come to Italy “To Fall Overboard in a White Suit,” the artist Cy Twombly went simply “To See,” and Wilson himself found that he was “Captured by the Ospedale Degli Innocenti,” enchanted by the sight of Brunelleschi’s architrave.