Author : Eve Blau
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 554 pages
File Size : 33,64 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 0262024519
Encyclopedic in its coverage, this seminal work focuses on the architecture of Prague from the turn of the century to the end of the Second World War: a rich matrix within which to place the figures who created the powerful, innovative spirits of modern Czech architecture. The book documents the architects, structures, and theoretical underpinnings that helped to shape Prague's cultural heritage and present-day artistic spirit.
Author : Tricia Starks
Publisher : University of Wisconsin Pres
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 45,93 MB
Release : 2009-01-06
Category : History
ISBN : 0299229637
In 1918 the People's Commissariat of Public Health began a quest to protect the health of all Soviet citizens, but health became more than a political platform or a tactical decision. The Soviets defined and categorized the world by interpreting political orthodoxy and citizenship in terms of hygiene. The assumed political, social, and cultural benefits of a regulated, healthy lifestyle informed the construction of Soviet institutions and identity. Cleanliness developed into a political statement that extended from domestic maintenance to leisure choices and revealed gender, ethnic, and class prejudices. Dirt denoted the past and poor politics; health and cleanliness signified mental acuity, political orthodoxy, and modernity. Health, though essential to the revolutionary vision and crucial to Soviet plans for utopia, has been neglected by traditional histories caught up in Cold War debates. The Body Soviet recovers this significant aspect of Soviet thought by providing a cross-disciplinary, comparative history of Soviet health programs that draws upon rich sources of health care propaganda, including posters, plays, museum displays, films, and mock trials. The analysis of propaganda makes The Body Soviet more than an institutional history; it is also an insightful critique of the ideologies of the body fabricated by health organizations. "A masterpiece that will thoroughly fascinate and delight readers. Starks's understanding of propaganda and hygiene in the early Soviet state is second to none. She tells the stories of Soviet efforts in this field with tremendous insight and ingenuity, providing a rich picture of Soviet life as it was actually lived."— Elizabeth Wood, author of From Baba to Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia
Author : Mark Swenarton
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 40,25 MB
Release : 2014-09-15
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1317661907
In the decades following World War Two, and in part in response to the Cold War, governments across Western Europe set out ambitious programmes for social welfare and the redistribution of wealth that aimed to improve the everyday lives of their citizens. Many of these welfare state programmes - housing, schools, new towns, cultural and leisure centres – involved not just construction but a new approach to architectural design, in which the welfare objectives of these state-funded programmes were delineated and debated. The impact on architects and architectural design was profound and far-reaching, with welfare state projects moving centre-stage in architectural discourse not just in Europe but worldwide. This is the first book to explore the architecture of the welfare state in Western Europe from an international perspective. With chapters covering Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden and the UK, the book explores the complex role played by architecture in the formation and development of the welfare state in both theory and practice. Themes include: the role of the built environment in the welfare state as a political project the colonial dimension of European welfare state architecture and its ‘export’ to Africa and Asia the role of welfare state projects in promoting consumer culture and economic growth the picture of the collective produced by welfare state architecture the role of architectural innovation in the welfare state the role of the architect, as opposed to construction companies and others, in determining what was built the relationship between architectural and social theory the role of internal institutional critique and the counterculture. Contributors include: Tom Avermaete, Eve Blau, Nicholas Bullock, Miles Glendinning, Janina Gosseye, Hilde Heynen, Caroline Maniaque-Benton, Helena Mattsson, Luca Molinari, Simon Pepper, Michelle Provoost, Lukasz Stanek, Mark Swenarton, Florian Urban and Dirk van den Heuvel.
Author : Aristotle Kallis
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 429 pages
File Size : 41,41 MB
Release : 2023-10-05
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1350346209
This book provides an intellectual history of the modernist "minimum dwelling", exploring how early modernism saw mass housing as a primary vehicle for achieving the utopian transformation of society. It reappraises the often-overlooked 2nd and 3rd CIAM conferences (1929-31), addressing their engagement with the "minimum dwelling" and revealing them both as milestones in the organisation's annals and as seminal moments in the history of interwar modernism. In 1929, an eclectic international group of avant-garde modernist architects, including Ernst May, Mart Stam, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, met in Frankfurt for the second instalment of the CIAM conferences. They discussed a design programme for cost-effective, good-quality housing, seeking new approaches and processes to maximize quality and functionality while ensuring affordability for the wider population. In exploring the meaning and form of the 'minimum dwelling', they also re-defined dwelling as the hub of a new way of living, proposing a revolutionary multi-scalar approach to urban design based on the concept of the Existenzminimum ('optimally minimal housing'). Despite the two conferences falling short of the organizer's expectations, and being overshadowed by later instalments, the participating architects sanctioned a semantic shift from minimum as bare necessity to a very different, aspirational, kind of minimalism transforming the entire conversation on mass low-cost dwelling in design, social and ethical terms. Split into two parts, The Minimum Dwelling Revisited first takes a genealogical approach to explore the provenance of the concept of "minimum dwelling" prior to the 2nd and 3rd CIAM conferences, it then traces the proceedings of the two conferences themselves. Addressing the origins of the "minimum dwelling" concept but also its legacies, and serving as a corrective to the overemphasis on 4th CIAM conference and the Athens Charter, the book is essential reading for scholars researching urban design during the Interwar period.
Author : Barbera, Filippo
Publisher : Policy Press
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 46,20 MB
Release : 2022-03
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1447353366
Drawing on case studies in areas of social and economic concern, this interdisciplinary collection explores how foundational experiments can foster collective consumption and promote social justice.
Author : David Harvey
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 46,2 MB
Release : 2012-04-04
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1781684057
Long before Occupy, cities were the subject of much utopian thinking. They are the centers of capital accumulation as well as of revolutionary politics, where deeper currents of social and political change rise to the surface. Do the financiers and developers control access to urban resources or do the people? Who dictates the quality and organization of daily life? Rebel Cities places the city at the heart of both capital and class struggles, looking at locations ranging from Johannesburg to Mumbai, from New York City to So Paulo. Drawing on the Paris Commune as well as Occupy Wall Street and the London Riots, Harvey asks how cities might be reorganized in more socially just and ecologically sane ways-and how they can become the focus for anti-capitalist resistance.
Author : Kira Thurman
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 37,37 MB
Release : 2021-10-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1501759868
In Singing Like Germans, Kira Thurman tells the sweeping story of Black musicians in German-speaking Europe over more than a century. Thurman brings to life the incredible musical interactions and transnational collaborations among people of African descent and white Germans and Austrians. Through this compelling history, she explores how people reinforced or challenged racial identities in the concert hall. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, audiences assumed the categories of Blackness and Germanness were mutually exclusive. Yet on attending a performance of German music by a Black musician, many listeners were surprised to discover that German identity is not a biological marker but something that could be learned, performed, and mastered. While Germans and Austrians located their national identity in music, championing composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as national heroes, the performance of their works by Black musicians complicated the public's understanding of who had the right to play them. Audiences wavered between seeing these musicians as the rightful heirs of Austro-German musical culture and dangerous outsiders to it. Thurman explores the tension between the supposedly transcendental powers of classical music and the global conversations that developed about who could perform it. An interdisciplinary and transatlantic history, Singing Like Germans suggests that listening to music is not a passive experience, but an active process where racial and gendered categories are constantly made and unmade.
Author : Deborah Cohen
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
Page : 625 pages
File Size : 45,29 MB
Release : 2023-03-14
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0525511210
WINNER OF THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE • A prize-winning historian’s “effervescent” (The New Yorker) account of a close-knit band of wildly famous American reporters who, in the run-up to World War II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism “High-speed, four-lane storytelling . . . Cohen’s all-action narrative bursts with colour and incident.”—Financial Times NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITH BOOK PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE PROSE AWARD ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, NPR, BookPage, Booklist They were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on wooden saddles, sometimes gliding through countries in the splendor of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers, and Balkan gun-runners, and then knocked back doubles late into the night. Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is the extraordinary story of John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson. In those tumultuous years, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler and Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi, and helped shape what Americans knew about the world. Alongside these backstage glimpses into the halls of power, they left another equally incredible set of records. Living in the heady afterglow of Freud, they subjected themselves to frank, critical scrutiny and argued about love, war, sex, death, and everything in between. Plunged into successive global crises, Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheean, and Thompson could no longer separate themselves from the turmoil that surrounded them. To tell that story, they broke long-standing taboos. From their circle came not just the first modern account of illness in Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud—a memoir about his son’s death from cancer—but the first no-holds-barred chronicle of a marriage: Sheean’s Dorothy and Red, about Thompson’s fractious relationship with Sinclair Lewis. Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century felt up close.
Author : Richard Cockett
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 465 pages
File Size : 22,41 MB
Release : 2023-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0300266537
How can one European capital be responsible for most of the West's intellectual and cultural achievements in the twentieth century? Viennese ideas saturate the modern world. From California architecture to Hollywood Westerns, modern advertising to shopping malls, orgasms to gender confirmation surgery, nuclear fission to fitted kitchens--every aspect of our history, science, and culture is in some way shaped by Vienna. The city of Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, and Klimt was the melting pot at the heart of a vast metropolitan empire. But with the Second World War and the rise of fascism, the dazzling coteries of thinkers who squabbled, debated, and called Vienna home dispersed across the world, where their ideas continued to have profound impact. Richard Cockett gives us the entirety of this extraordinary story. Tracing Vienna's rich intellectual history from psychoanalysis to Reaganomics, Cockett encompasses everything from the communist rebels of Red Vienna to the neoliberal economists of the Austrian School. This is the panoramic account of how one city made the modern world--and how we all remain inescapably Viennese.
Author : Michelle Jackson-Beckett
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 29,19 MB
Release : 2024-03-20
Category : Art
ISBN : 0198879512
While the domestic sphere might seem tangential to the dire political situation and humanitarian crises of interwar Europe, it was nevertheless at the forefront of debates about cultural identity and economic policy in the Viennese press, culture, and arts. Vienna and the New Wohnkultur, 1918-1938 explores why and how the Viennese design landscape was set apart--aesthetically and theoretically--from other European explorations of modern design. Jackson-Beckett examines interior design exhibitions, press, and debates about modern living in interwar Vienna, an overlooked area of modern European architecture and design history, arguing for a reconsideration of the contours of European modernism. The text analyses varied interpretations of modern domestic culture (Wohnkultur) in Vienna, and explores why these interpretations were distinct from other strands of European modernism. Vienna and the New Wohnkultur introduces new research and translation of primary sources on flexible, adaptable, and affordable design by architects, designers, and retailers. Vienna's design discourse also prefigured important postmodern and contemporary discussions on historicism, eclecticism, empathy, and user experience. Through extensive new research in archival and period sources, Jackson-Beckett illustrates how design ideas, taste, and portrayals of domestic culture of fin-de-si?cle Viennese Modernism (Wiener Moderne) were also deployed as forms of cultural and national identity both during the early years of the Social Democratic government in Vienna (1918-1934) and later under the fascist state (1934-1938).
