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Burtynsky - China
Edward Burtynsky , and Ted Fishman Manufacturer: Steidl ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 3865211305 Release Date: 2006-01-15 |
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
Interesting landscape.......2007-03-27
Over all it's a nice book of a good photographer.......2007-01-10
large format photography.......2007-01-09
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On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture
Setha M. Low Manufacturer: University of Texas Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
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-salealmost 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
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
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Rainforest Cities
John O. Browder , and Brian Godfrey Manufacturer: Columbia University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
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.
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Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (Gender, Racism, Ethnicity Series)
Reina Lewis Manufacturer: Routledge ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
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.
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The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility
Arindam Dutta Manufacturer: Routledge ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 041597920X |
Book Description
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.
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Theorizing the City: The New Urban Anthropology Reader
Manufacturer: Rutgers University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
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.
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Cultural Quarters: Principles and Practice
Simon Roodhouse Manufacturer: Intellect Ltd ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 1841501395 |
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Barbershops
Tally Abecassis , and Claudine Sauve Manufacturer: Black Dog Publishing ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 1904772145 |
Customer Reviews:
in this case, you CAN judge a book by its cover.......2007-10-10
Great book for the barber in your life!!!.......2007-03-22
Wow. Just get it!.......2007-03-17
Wow! Awesome!.......2005-06-10
Gus
More than a photo book - so much fun.......2005-06-09
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Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces: Searching for an Architectural Grammar
Manufacturer: University Alabama Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items: ASIN: 0817309470 |
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Architecture & Anthropology (Architectural Design)
Manufacturer: Academy Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 1854902598 |
Book Description
This profile offers insight into the links to be made between architecture and anthropology.Books:
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