Burtynsky - China

Book Description

Edward Burtynsky's imagery explores the intricate link between industry and nature, combining the raw elements of mining, quarrying, shipping, oil production, and recycling into eloquent, highly expressive visions that find beauty and humanity in the most unlikely places. These images are metaphors for the dilemma of our modern existence: we are drawn by desire--the desire to live well and in comfort--yet we all know that the world is suffering to meet those demands. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into uneasy contradiction and feeds the dialogue in Burtynsky's images between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. Burtysnky's latest body of work gives visual form to the industrial and urban transformation of China, a place where industrial forces are gathering on a scale that the world has never experienced before. If the earth's resources were up to now under siege through western colonialism and technological progress, then China is on the brink of a sweeping assault on the planet's ecosystem that is only just forming and is nowhere close to expressing its full impact.

Customer Reviews:

A significant and breathtaking record.......2007-06-14

As a record of this time in the world's history ... the dismantling of local industry around the world in tacit acquiescence of China's future dominance ... I can't think of a more significant body of work in the medium. The images herein are truly breathtaking for their scale. Burtynsky has a privileged view and uses crisp large-format photography to lend authority to his vision. The monumental is not without a humanizing touch as can be seen best in his beautiful ship-building images. This is a wonderful book with images that one can marvel at for their execution whilst viewing with trepidation for their portent. The printing and presentation complements the images.

Interesting landscape.......2007-03-27

Large format, interesting photographs of China. I was worried his work might not translate in a book, but if you like his work, not to worry about that.

Over all it's a nice book of a good photographer.......2007-01-10

I realy like Edward Burtysky as a photographer and this book shows sokme really nice photo's. But for some reason some of his photo's took me by surprise as I saw them in a completely different lightfrom other photos of which he took. it's a bit hard to explain but it almost seems like two different photographers were sharing this wonderful, 147 pages, Hardcover book.

large format photography.......2007-01-09

Nice and wonderful.
If you like large format details
this is to see

BUT I'm very angry because the package by amazon wasn't efficently prepared to the reality of post office.

On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture

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Interesting look at life on the Costa Rican plaza
Well written, an unbiased observer

On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture
Setha M. Low
Manufacturer: University of Texas Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Politics of Public Space
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ASIN: 0292747144

Book Description

"This is one of the best accounts of a place's history and meaning I have ever read. Low's book should be widely read and used in courses in architecture, urban design, planning, landscape architecture, and historic preservation, as well as Latin American studies and anthropology. What a wonderful book!"

—Dolores Hayden, Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies, Yale University

Friendly gossip, political rallies, outdoor concerts, drugs, shoeshines, and sex-for-sale—almost every aspect of Latin American life has its place and time in the public plaza. In this wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary study, Setha M. Low explores the interplay of space and culture in the plaza, showing how culture acts to shape public spaces and how the physical form of the plaza encodes the social and economic relations within its city.

Low centers her study on two plazas in San José, Costa Rica, with comparisons to public plazas in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. She interweaves ethnography, history, literature, and personal narrative to capture the ambiance and meaning of the plaza. She also uncovers the contradictory ethnohistories of the European and indigenous origins of the Latin American plaza and explains why the plaza is often a politically contested space.

Customer Reviews:

Interesting look at life on the Costa Rican plaza.......2003-03-30

Professor Setha M. Low's book On The Plaza-The Politics of Public Space and Culture discusses the interrelationship of public space and culture. She primarily focuses on two plazas in San Jose, Costa Rica, the Parque Central and the Plaza de la Cultura, while also making references to other places such as Tenochtitlan in Mexico. Using ethnographic, ethnohistorical, microgeographical, and statistic sampling methods, Low argues that "these culturally and politically charged public spaces are essential to everyday civic life and the maintenance of a participatory democracy."

Low describes the background of Costa Rica, going into its population, ethnic, religious, and urban proportion distribution. She explains the rise and fall of consecutive monocultural economies, such as cacao, tobacco, bananas, and coffee, its tradition of democracy, and the economic nadir in the 1980's. She then goes into the history of San Jose from colonial times to the present, including the devastating effects of the economic downtown and the trade vacuum created by NAFTA.

She then explores the history of the two plazas. Parque Central dates back to 1761, and is the larger and more densely populated of the two. It became a center for merchants, grocers, lottery ticket sellers, and sundry vendors, as well as shoppers and customers. Also, the trend of regulars sitting in the same benches over time gives Parque Central an ambience of traditional social life and hence less contested space between various social groups.

The Plaza de la Cultura, constructed between 1976 and 1982, was built as a contrast to the closed nature of Parque Central, as a more open space for the middle and lower classes. Central to the plaza was the National Theatre with a museum housing the country's Precolumbian gold. Despite its cultural stance, the new plaza became a haven for underage prostitutes, gangs, and drug users.

Plazas also contain social and spatial boundaries as factors that symbolize differences such as nationalities, race, class, and gender between plaza populations within a capitalist system. Low again contrasted the two plazas in San Jose in the framework of social boundaries:

Parque Central: mostly older men, closed space, clique-oriented, has professional prostitutes, lottery ticket, newspaper, food vendors, less foreigners, older.

Plaza de la Cultura: mostly women and children, open space, not clique-oriented, prostitutes who give services for clothes, nurturing relationships, balloon, popcorn, tourist item vendors, more foreigners, younger.

Another more important function of the plaza is for public protest. Low categorizes them in terms of the kinds of protest and their outcomes. Manifest protests such as strikes and demonstrations usually result in the temporary closure of the public space, followed by a reopening where the space is policed to discourage undesirables. An example of that involved the chasing out of shoeshine men from Parque Central. Latent protests involve conflicts that become apparent in terms of design and surrounding buildings and can result in discussions in various media or a plebiscite. Ritual protests, such as parades, normally involve the temporary takeover of space by a protesting group before it is relinquished to the forces nominally in charge of that space.

Taken in the context of protest, Low sees public space as symbolizing political objectives by those, particularly national leaders, who created them--e.g. the Plaza de la Democracia is a legacy to Oscar Arias Sanchez's Nobel Peace Prize-winning efforts for Central American peace. Plazas that don't fulfill the objectives of their creators or are not deemed valuable are either redesigned or denied access to the public.

Constituting twenty-five years of research spanning from 1972 to 1997, Setha Low's exhaustively researched book depicts the essence of the function of the plaza.

Well written, an unbiased observer.......2002-02-14

I read this book mainly because as a Tico (Costa Rican) I was very surprised somebody would write a whole book about a couple of places that for me are part of my everyday life. Besides having been to the Plazas of Europe and seen on TV the huge plazas that some other Latin American countries (Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, etc) have I was curious to find out the reason behind her choosing of the Parque Central and the Plaza de la Cultura for this work.
I really liked what I read, she has the benefit of having seen these two public spaces in the city of San Jose, Costa Rica evolve over the last 30 years, from the days we used to consider the Plaza de la Cultura not a nice place to go to, the days when we were outraged by foreign musicians and artist taking over a ground that was supposed to be for the display of our culture till nowadays that the Plaza has turned the city into a sort of fish-tank from where the tourists and US retirees can leisurely watch Costa Ricans as we go about our daily lives.
I truly recommend this book.

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Rainforest Cities
John O. Browder , and Brian Godfrey
Manufacturer: Columbia University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Economic Policy & Development | Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

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An Introduction to Tropical Rain Forests

ASIN: 0231106556

Book Description

Amazonia has undergone a significant urban transformation since the late 1970s. This is the first comprehensive analysis of urbanization in the Brazilian Amazon. Drawing on comparative household and sectoral survey research, the authors find that the growth of Amazon cities fits no single current theory of urbanization; instead they propose a pluralistic theory of "disarticulated urbanization" to explain the region's varied and volatile settlement patterns.

Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (Gender, Racism, Ethnicity Series)

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Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (Gender, Racism, Ethnicity Series)
Reina Lewis
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0415124905

Book Description

To what extent did white European women contribute to the imperial cultures of the second half of the nineteenth century?

In contrast to most cultural histories of imperialism which analyze Orientalist images of women rather than images by women, Gendering Orientalism focuses on how women themselves contributed. Drawing on the little-known work of Henriette Browne and other "lost" women Orientalist artists and the literary works of George Eliot, Lewis challenges masculinist assumptions relating to the stability and homogeneity of the Orientalist gaze. In order to draw out how the meanings attributed to their words and images, as well as t the writers and artists themselves, were specifically gendered, classed and racialized, the author examines women's visual and literary Orientalism through their contemporary reception in the press.

The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility

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The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility
Arindam Dutta
Manufacturer: Routledge
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Designing the Present is a wide-ranging work of cultural theory that connects literary studies, postcoloniality, the history of architecture and design, and the history and present of empire. Professor Ananya Roy of UC Berkeley calls it a "fantastic book," and in many ways this is the best description of it. Designing the Present begins with nineteenth-century Britain's Department of Science and Arts, a venture organized by the Board of Trade, and how the DSA exerted a powerful influence on the growth of museums, design schools, and architecture throughout the British Empire. But this is only the book's literal subject: in a remarkable set of chapters, Dutta explores the development of international laws of intellectual property, ideas of design pedagogy, the technological distinction between craft and industry, the relation of colonial tutelage to economic policy, the politics and technology of exhibition, and competing philosophies of aesthetics. His thinking across these areas is ignited by engagements with Benjamin, Marx, Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, Kant, Mill, Ruskin, and Gandhi.
A rich study in the history of ideas, of design and architecture, and of cultural politics, Designing the Present converges on the issues of present-day globalization. From nineteenth-century Britain to twenty-first century America, Designing the Present offers a theory of how things - big things -change.

Theorizing the City: The New Urban Anthropology Reader

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Theorizing the City: The New Urban Anthropology Reader

Manufacturer: Rutgers University Press
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ASIN: 0813527201

Book Description

"Theorizing the City has become fundamental reading for those students of urban society and culture who wish to better understand twentieth-century city forms and spaces, as well as why certain race, gender, age, and class inequalities continue to be manifested today." -- Alejandro Lugo, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "Using rich comparative material, this volume presents an intriguing anthropological vision of how cities are shaped. A major addition to a comparative anthropology of cities." --Judith Goode, co-editor of The New Poverty Studies "These informative essays make clear that anthropology has much to offer to urban theory and policy debates." --Nancy Foner, author of From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration Anthopological perspectives are not often represented in urban studies, even though many anthropologists have been contributing actively to theory and research on urban poverty, racism, globalization, and architecture. Theorizing the City corrects this omission. Following a brief history of urban anthroplogy, emphasizing developments in the field during the 1990s, this volume presents twelve ethnographies of major cities in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Five images of the city--the divided city, the contested city, the global city, the modernist city, and the postmodern city--serve as frameworks for the essays. Each section highlights current research trends such as poststructural studies of race, class, and gender in the urban context; political economic studies of transnational culture; and studies of the symbolic meanings and social production or urban spaces. Setha M. Low is professor of environmental psychology and anthopology and director of the Public Space Research Group at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture.

Cultural Quarters: Principles and Practice

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Cultural Quarters: Principles and Practice
Simon Roodhouse
Manufacturer: Intellect Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Architecture | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 1841501395

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in this case, you CAN judge a book by its cover
Great book for the barber in your life!!!
Wow. Just get it!
Wow! Awesome!
More than a photo book - so much fun

Barbershops
Tally Abecassis , and Claudine Sauve
Manufacturer: Black Dog Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Architectural | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 1904772145

Customer Reviews:

in this case, you CAN judge a book by its cover.......2007-10-10

Admittedly I was a bit disappointed with this book. We all know barbershops have fallen in popularity from their heyday but in an age of retro love and resurgence, I was was looking for a book that was going to document and capture the classic, enticing nature of old barbershops. A classic, old style barber's chair is a true beauty to behold--with expert metal craftsmanship and complimentary upholstery. But, our cover's picture of a torn chair with its exposed stuffing is a perfect indication for the majority of this book. The photographic style--muted colors, low contrast, etc just end up lending to the overall depressing message of this book--that barbershops have long lost their allure as men's clubs and are stuck withering away in a 70s era of nothingness. There are some interviews with people who are still keeping the dream alive but again most of these are men in their 50s who end up literally dating the vitality of the clubs. This is not a celebration, but an obituary.
We have had a minor barbershop resurgence--look at Rudy's. Let's sweep the old hair off the floor and uncover the true beauty and social importance of these shops. And there is a treasure trove of romantic images to assist us--the advertisements!, the colognes!, the powders!, the hot towel machines!, the blades!, the chairs!
But sadly, this book chose not to take that side.

Great book for the barber in your life!!!.......2007-03-22

I bought this book for my husband for his birthday -- he read it in one night! He has been a barber for about 15 years and loved reading the stories!! A great find!

Wow. Just get it!.......2007-03-17

I can't wait for my clients to see this great book. It makes me feel proud to cut hair. It's a dying bread and seeing this awesomely done photos will make you wonder why Barber shops are fading? Talented book all the way. A++++++

Wow! Awesome!.......2005-06-10

Books like this come along once in a generation. You can almost smell the hair tonic as you flip through the pages. The anecdotes are bittersweet and nostalgic and compliment the stunning high-quality imagery beautifully. The old style barbershop may be going the way of the dinosaur, but thanks to this lovely book, they will live on in our memories forever. Thank you for giving us this wonderful treasure.

Gus

More than a photo book - so much fun.......2005-06-09

My grandfather was a barber so I was immediately interested when I saw photos from this book in the Globe and Mail. I just bought the book and was so impressed. The photos and text really capture the world of barbers and I'm thankful there is a record of this disappearing profession. And it's not all nostalgic - some of my favourite pages feature modern barbershops that are striving. A book that anyone would enjoy.

Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces: Searching for an Architectural Grammar

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Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces: Searching for an Architectural Grammar

Manufacturer: University Alabama Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Architecture | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0817309470

Architecture & Anthropology (Architectural Design)

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Architecture & Anthropology (Architectural Design)

Manufacturer: Academy Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1854902598

Book Description

This profile offers insight into the links to be made between architecture and anthropology.

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