Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror


Book Description

An illustrated reevaluation of the seminal architectural manifesto Learning from Las Vegas. It explores the significance of this controversial publication by situating it in the artistic, architectural, and urbanist discourse of the 1960s and '70s, and by evaluating the book's enduring influence of visual studies and architectural research.




The Good Metropolis


Book Description

The publication presents the first historical analysis of the tension between the city and architectural form. It introduces 20th century theories to construct a historical context from which a new architecture-city relationship emerged. The book provides a conceptual framework to understand this relationship and comes to the conclusion that urbanization may be filled with potential, i.e. be a Good Metropolis.




Feast of Excess


Book Description

Feast of Excess is an engaging and accessible portrait of "The New Sensibility," as it was named by Susan Sontag in 1965. The New Sensibility sought to push culture in extreme directions: either towards stark minimalism or gaudy maximalism. Through vignette profiles of prominent figures-John Cage, Patricia Highsmith, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Anne Sexton, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Erica Jong, and Thomas Pynchon, to name a few-George Cotkin presents their bold, headline-grabbing performances and places them within the historical moment.




Cinematic Aided Design


Book Description

Cinematic Aided Design: An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture provides architects, planners, designer practitioners, politicians and decision makers with a new awareness of the practice of everyday life through the medium of film. This novel approach will also appeal to film scholars and film practitioners with an interest in spatial and architectural issues, as well as researchers from cultural studies in the field of everyday life. The everyday life is one of the hardest things to uncover since by its very nature it remains overlooked and ignored. However, cinema has over the last 120 years represented, interpreted and portrayed hundreds of thousands of everyday life situations taking place in a wide range of dwellings, streets and cities. Film constitutes the most comprehensive lived in building data in existence. Cinema created a comprehensive encyclopedia of architectural spaces and building elements. It has exposed large fragments of our everyday life and everyday environment that this book is aiming to reveal and restitute.




The Accidental Possibilities of the City


Book Description

Claes Oldenburg’s commitment to familiar objects has shaped accounts of his career, but his associations with Pop art and postwar consumerism have overshadowed another crucial aspect of his work. In this revealing reassessment, Katherine Smith traces Oldenburg’s profound responses to shifting urban conditions, framing his enduring relationship with the city as a critical perspective and conceiving his art as urban theory. Smith argues that Oldenburg adapted lessons of context, gleaned from New York’s changing cityscape in the late 1950s, to large-scale objects and architectural plans. By examining disparate projects from New York to Los Angeles, she situates Oldenburg’s innovations in local geographies and national debates. In doing so, Smith illuminates patterns of urbanization through the important contributions of one of the leading artists in the United States.




Graphic Assembly


Book Description

An innovative look at the contribution of montage to twentieth-century architecture Graphic Assembly unearths the role played by montage and collage in the development of architectural culture over the past century, revealing their unexamined yet crucial significance. Craig Buckley brings together experimental architectural practices based in London, Paris, Vienna, and Florence, showing how breakthroughs in optical media and printing technologies enabled avant-garde architects to reimagine their field. Graphic Assembly considers a range of architects and movements from the 1950s through the early ’70s, including Theo Crosby, Hans Hollein, and John McHale; the magazine Clip-Kit; and the groups Archigram, Superstudio, and Utopie. It gives a thorough account of how montage concepts informed the design of buildings, prototypes, models, exhibitions, and multimedia environments, accompanied by Buckley’s insightful interpretations of the iconic images, exhibitions, and buildings of the 1960s that mark how the decade is remembered. Richly illustrated with never-before-published material from more than a dozen archives and private collections, Graphic Assembly offers a comparative overview of the network of experimental architectural practice in Europe. It provides a deep historical account of the cut-and-paste techniques now prevalent with architecture’s digital turn, demonstrating the great importance of montage to architecture past, present, and future.




Shakedown


Book Description




For They Know Not What They Do


Book Description

Let Me Die Zack Mitchell finds himself unwillingly pulled into solving his best friend Joel Thomas' cause of death. Eighteen-year old Ronald Blaine, a black man with a storied past, trying desperately to break from gang inclusion and claw his way out of poverty, claims he was acting in self-defense when he shot Joel on a dark street in a poorer section of Las Vegas. Zack is asked by Joel's widower to attend Ronald's arraignment. During his trip to Las Vegas, where there once was a garden of racial anger and rage, a seed of doubt is sewn. For They Know Not What They Do Bill Baxter, racked with emphysema, dies at the foot of a cross while trying to cleanse his guilt for an act committed during his senior year at a Maryland Catholic high school. To further make amends, Bill leaves the majority of his inheritance to Margaret Chase, a deeply religious cleaning lady who works at Baxter Satellite. Sam Baxter, Bill's ruthless brother and C.E.O. of Baxter Satellite, works furiously to deny Margaret her just inheritance.




Architecture and Ugliness


Book Description

Whatever 'ugliness' is, it remains a problematic category in architectural aesthetics – alternately vilified and appropriated, used either to shock or to invert conventions of architecture. This book presents sixteen new scholarly essays which rethink ugliness in recent architecture – from Brutalism to eclectic postmodern architectural productions – and together offer a diverse reappraisal of the history and theory of postmodern architecture and design. The essays address both broad theoretical questions on ugliness and postmodern aesthetics, as well as more specific analyses of significant architectural examples dating from the last decades of the twentieth century. The book attends to the diverse relations between the aesthetic register of ugliness and closely connected aesthetic concepts such as the monstrous, the ordinary, disgust, the excessive, the grotesque, the interesting, the impure and the sublime. This volume does not simply document the history of a postmodern anti-aesthetic through case studies. Instead, it aims to shed light on aesthetic problems that have been largely overlooked in the agenda of architectural theory. This book answers in detail the questions: How did postmodern architects appropriate troublesome contradictions bound to the raw ugliness of the real? How have the ugly and the antiaesthetic been a productive force in postmodern architecture? How can ugliness be of value to architecture? And how can architecture make good use of ugliness?




The New York City Bartender's Joke Book


Book Description

Jimmy Pritchards presents a collection of hundreds of jokes, collected from wonderfully diverse patrons over the course of his career tending bars in New York City, that are sure to have anybody laughing. When it comes to the finest, the far-outest, and the just plain funniest, the jokes start here--in the saloon capital of the world, New York, New York. Jimmy Pritchard, author and veteran NYC bartender, has heard them all from patrons across the oak. In these comedic cocktails, no one is spared, not the Irish or the elderly, not lawyers or blondes, not the handicapped, not sex-crazed animals, not even God. Jimmy brings you over 400 of the best in the house, stirred, shaken, and served inside this one-of-a-kind collection that is downright intoxicating.