Red Books


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Bulletin


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Pyrotechnic Cities


Book Description

This book explores the relationship between architecture, government and fire. It posits that, through the question of fire-safety standardisation, building design comes to be both a problem for, and a tool of, government. Through a close study of fire-safety standards it demonstrates the shaping effect that architecture and the city have on the way we think about governing. Opening with an investigation into the Grenfell Tower fire and the political actors who sought to enrol it in programmes of governmental reform before contextualising the research in current literature, the book takes four city studies, each beginning with a specific historic fire: The 1654 Great Fire of Meirecki, Edo; the 1877 town fire of Lagos; the 1911 Empire Palace Theatre fire, Edinburgh; and the 2001 World Trade Centre attack, New York. Each study identifies the governmental response to the fire, safety standards and codes designed in its wake and how these new processes spread and change. Drawing on the work of sociologists John Law and Anne Marie Mol and their concept of ‘Fire Space’, it describes the way that architectural design, through the medium of fire, is an instrument of political agency. Pyrotechnic Cities is a critical investigation into these political implications, written for academics, researchers and students in architectural history and theory, infrastructure studies and governance.




The Admiral and the Ambassador


Book Description

On July 20, 1792, the body of Admiral John Paul Jones, Father of the American Navy, was buried in the Saint LouisCemetery on the outskirts of Paris. As the French Revolution was gathering steam, the unmarked location of Jones's grave was nobody's primary concern. And though the admiral was not forgotten to history, in time he was certainly lost beneath the soil in the City of Light. Luckily, Jones had been sealed in a lead-lined coffin filled with alcohol to preserve the body. In theory, if somebody could locate that coffin, Jones could be returned to the United States for a proper burial. That somebody was Horace Porter, Civil War hero, aide to General (and later President) Ulysses S. Grant, Republican Party fundraiser, and US ambassador to France from 1897 to 1905. Porter had been a driving force in the creation of Grant's Tomb, and he developed a similar sense of duty regarding the final interment of John Paul Jones. The Admiral and the Ambassador details Porter's long, relentless search for the lead-lined coffin, first through scraps of archive material and written recollections of funeral attendees, and then beneath the rickety buildings that had been constructed over what Porter believed to be the graveyard. Part history, part biography, and part detective story, The Admiral and the Ambassador is a fascinating look into the compelling real-life characters who populated the first century of the United States of America.







Willing's Press Guide


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"A guide to the press of the United Kingdom and to the principal publications of Europe, Australia, the Far East, Gulf States, and the U.S.A.