DECEMBER LIST

 Upcomings reviews on THE BOOKLIST

Sol LeWitt

Centre Pompidou Metz

The Centre Pompidou-Metz is organizing a major project around the American conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (1928-2007). Selected thirty-three wall drawings, the largest group ever exhibited in Europe, span the artist's career from its beginnings to his final works. Chosen from the 1,200 wall drawings which LeWitt created between 1968 and 2007, they reflect both the extraordinary consistency of his systematic explorations - with rigorous sets and combinations of geometric elements - and the remarkable diversity of his practice, both in the evolution of forms from simple geometric figures to what the artist called "complex" or "continuous" forms, and of the materials used (from pencil and crayon to ink washes, acrylic paint and graphite).

In 2013, the Centre Pompidou-Metz will show Sol LeWitt's personal collection. This second exhibition will reflect LeWitt's extraordinary career not only as a prolific artist but also as an insatiable collector. Don't miss the catalogue.

Figura, sfondo, schemi configurazionali

                 Due saggi sull'architettura di Costantino Dardi

Federico Bilò

Editrice Dedalo Roma 2012

Un piccolo libro che raccoglie de testi sul lavoro di Costantino Dardi. Il primo esamina quei progetti che pongono la questione del disegno degli spazi aperti. Il secondo cerca di mettere a fuoco la nozione cardine della metodologia compositiva elaborata dall'architetto.

Citizens of No Place

An Architectural Graphic Novel 

Jimenez Lai

Princeton Architectural Press 2011

Architecture has become an increasingly interdisciplinary profession, and the language with which architects envision and articulate their ideas has radically diversified in recent years. Architect Jimenez Lai has pioneered an unexpected and wholly unique approach that moves beyond contemporary architectural renderings and models. Citizens of No Place is a groundbreaking graphic novel on architecture and urbanism. Inspired by the theoretical drawings of paper architects, Lai uses manga-style storyboards to explore the role of fantasy and storytelling in architecture, and in the process ushers in the next generation of theory and criticism. A key reference for representational techniques, Citizens of No Place showcases provocative design examples for architecture studio courses at all levels.

 The Draftery

 Narrative ExhortationsEssay by Athanasiou Geolas; Drawings and writing by Dan Wood, Anasthasia Geolas, Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciou, Luke Pearson, Thomas Hillier; Jesen Tanadi (Ed.)

La Grammatica della Fantasia

Gianni Rodari

Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi

'Quello che io sto facendo è di ricercare le "costanti" dei meccanismi fantastici, le leggi non ancora approfondite dell'invenzione, per renderne l'uso accessibile a tutti. Insisto nel dire che, sebbene il Romanticismo l'abbia circondato di mistero e gli abbia creato attorno una specie di culto, il processo creativo è insito nella natura umana ed è quindi, con tutto quel che ne consegue di felicità di esprimersi e di giocare con la fantasia, alla portata di tutti'. Da questa ricerca, che Gianni Rodari ha condotto per molti anni, è nata questa Grammatica della fantasia, una proposta concreta che intende rivendicare all'immaginazione lo spazio che deve avere nella vita di ciascuno. Attraverso le più svariate tecniche dell'invenzione, Rodari ci offre con questo suo libro non un 'Artusi delle favole' ma un efficace ed utile strumento 'a chi crede nella necessità che l'immaginazione abbia il suo posto nell'educazione; a chi ha fiducia nella creatività infantile; a chi sa quale valore di liberazione possa avere la parola'.

NB 

I Linguaggi della Comunicazione

Foreste Urbane

Primo periodico italiano dedicato ai linguaggi della comunicazione, inaugura una nuova serie di uscite monografiche all’insegna dell’interazione tra dominio della parola e dominio dell’immagine, per svelare complementarietà inattese.

Thomas Heatherwick

Making

The Monacelli Press

The first retrospective publication on the work of award-winning designer Thomas Heatherwick (the subject of a 2012 exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum) offers an in-depth look at all aspects of the innovator's creative, design, and manufacturing processes.
Heatherwick is known as one of the greatest innovators of our era, and for the first time, this publication provides an inside look at the creation and development of his projects. It answers the one question always asked of Heatherwick's work: How did he do that?
The book covers the studio's complete output over more than fifteen years—some 170 projects—including designs large and small: zippered bags that can be expanded to five times their size, a bridge that rolls open and closed, the in-progress one-million-square-foot mall in Hong Kong and glass bridge in London.

Francesca Woodman

Some three decades after her untimely suicide at the age of 22, Francesca Woodman remains a powerful presence in photography. As a young artist exploring themes of the female body and its perceived impermanence, her work immediately became a focus for feminist theorists and art historians around the world. But as is often the case with an artist's work viewed posthumously through the lens of tragedy, that's only a part of the story. 

Louis Kahn 

The Power of Architecture

As the first comprehensive publication on this architect in twenty years, the book Louis Kahn – The Power of Architecture presents all of his important projects. In scholarly essays by prominent experts on Kahn, the inspirational sources, contextual background and influences of his work are discussed, reflecting the current status of research on this subject.  

Alternative Histories

New York Art Spaces, 1960-2010

The Mitt press

This groundbreaking book--part exhibition catalogue, part cultural history--chronicles alternative art spaces in New York City since the 1960s. Developed from an exhibition of the same name at Exit Art,Alternative Histories documents more than 130 alternative spaces, groups, and projects, and the significant contributions these organizations have made to the aesthetic and social fabric of New York City. Alternative art spaces offer sites for experimentation for artists to innovate, perform, and exhibit outside the commercial gallery-and-museum circuit. In New York City, the development of alternative spaces was almost synonymous with the rise of the contemporary art scene. Beginning in the 1960s and early 1970s, it was within a network of alternative sites--including 112 Greene Street, The Kitchen, P.S.1, FOOD, and many others--that the work of young artists like Yvonne Rainer, Vito Acconci, Gordon Matta-Clark, Ana Mendieta, David Wojnarowicz, David Hammons, Adrian Piper, Martin Wong, Jimmie Durham, and dozens of other now familiar names first circulated. 

Oblique Drawings

A History of Anti-Perspective

By Massimo Scolari

                                          The Mitt press

For more than half a century, Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form has dominated studies of visual representation. Despite the hegemony of central projection, or perspective, other equally important methods of representation have much to tell us. Parallel projection can be found on classical Greek vases, in Pompeiian frescoes, in Byzantine mosaics; it returned in works of the historical avant-garde, and remains the dominant form of representation in China. In Oblique Drawing, Massimo Scolari investigates “anti-perspective” visual representation over two thousand years, finding in the course of his investigation that visual and conceptual representations are manifestations of the ideological and philosophical orientations of different cultures. Images prove to be not just a form of art but a form of thought, a projection of a way of life.