NOVEMBER LIST
Claes Oldenburg: Writing on the Side 1956-1969
by Achim Hochdörfer
moma publisher 2013
In the early 1960s, Claes Oldenburg redefined the concept of sculpture. Published in conjunction with a comprehensive exhibition of the artists early work, "Claes Oldenburg: Selected Writings 1956-1969" gathers together in a single volume the artist's key writings from the 1960s and several years from either side of the decade. Much of the publication comprises of previously unpublished material, including sections of an extensive diary the artist kept during the formative years of the 1960s, and selection from an autobiographical manuscript that Oldenburg wrote in 1971. The book also reprints seminal texts related to Oldenburgs early exhibitions, a selection of scripts for the accompanying Happenings and related interviews. "Claes Oldenburg: Selected Writings 1956-1969" provides insight into the artists working process through a transformative period of his long career.
Imparare dalla Luna
Stefano Catucci
Quodlibet 2013
La Luna torna al centro dei programmi di esplorazione dello spazio e i suoi futuri visitatori troveranno ad attenderli un’attrattiva senza paragoni: i primi parchi archeologici della presenza umana fuori dalla Terra.
Già in previsione delle missioni robotiche che si annunciano sulla Luna entro il 2015, la Nasa ha proposto di limitare l’avvicinamento ai siti storici degli allunaggi per proteggere le zone calpestate dagli astronauti più di quarant’anni fa e tutelarle da possibili contaminazioni.
Quale valore possiamo però attribuire alle tracce lasciate dagli uomini sulla Luna? E perché considerare come un tesoro culturale anche i rottami, gli scarti, la zavorra in cui consiste la maggior parte degli oggetti che vi si trovano?
Imparare dalla Luna significa esaminare i paradossi della sua imminente trasformazione in museo per ricavare indicazioni su fenomeni che oggi, sulla Terra, rappresentano l’altra faccia del dominio della tecnica: la logica del turismo, il nostro rapporto feticistico con le cose del passato, la confusione fra testimonianza storica e spettacolo. Significa, in altre parole, provare a risvegliarsi dal xx secolo e dai modelli di sviluppo che l’hanno caratterizzato sfruttando la scia dell’impresa più straordinaria, popolare ed enigmatica che gli uomini abbiano compiuto in quell’epoca.
Out of Hand Materializing the Postdigital
Black dog publishing 2013
Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital will explore the many areas of 21st-century creativity made possible by advanced methods of computer-assisted production known as digital fabrication. In today’s postdigital world, artists are using these means to achieve levels of expression never before possible – an explosive, unprecedented scope of artistic expression that extends from sculptural fantasy to functional beauty. Out of Hand will be the first major museum exhibition to examine this interdisciplinary trend through the pioneering works of more than 80 international artists, architects, and designers, including Ron Arad, Barry X Ball, Zaha Hadid, Stephen Jones, Anish Kapoor, Allan McCollum, Marc Newson, and Roxy Paine. Represented will be some of the most compelling creations from the past decade ranging from sculpture and furniture to fashion and transport.
Les Visionnaires
Une autre histoire de l’architecture
A film by Julien Donada
based on an original idea by Marie-Ange Brayer
Produced by Rebecca Houzel for Petit à Petit Production.
Length: 71 minutes
The 1960s saw the emergence of a young generation of archi- tects who rejected the doxa of hyper-functionalism, and dreamed of another way of conceiving both city and habitat. Be it spatial and moveable cities, bubble, underground or flying homes and houses, etc., architecture became an area of experi- mentation borne along by technological innovation and open to many different territories.
This film, made by Julien Donada, delves into the fantastic world of architectural utopias, relying on the leading works in the Frac Centre collection, and on the testimony of many figures in that generation. For the first time the general public is being offered an original historical reading of “visionary” projects which have today become icons of contemporary culture.
Project of Crisis
Manfredo Tafuri and Contemporary Architecture
Marco Biraghi
The MIT PressCambridge, Mass. 2013
The subject of this volume is the “project of crisis,” or progetto di crisi, of the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri (Rome, 1935-Venice, 1994). Progetto di crisi is a quintessentially Tafurian term that can assume many different, nuanced meanings. Progetto, often translated as design, is more broadly used in Italian, and can mean project, plan, and even architecture. It can also imply a projection or an intention. Hence progetto di crisi cannot be literally translated, but alludes to the productive possibilities of crisis. It is a condition, but also a chance. This multiplicity of meanings also allows me to make an immediate disclaimer here: I have no pretense of painting an exhaustive picture of Tafuri’s world, nor do I intend to confront the intellectual biography of one of the most complex and influential figures of the late twentieth century.
Architetture resistenti
Progettare il futuro come bene comune
Raul Pantaleo - Marta Gerardi - Luca Molinari
Raul Pantaleo - Marta Gerardi - Luca Molinari
Settembre 2013
Viaggio nei luoghi italiani e negli edifici-simbolo di un'Architettura Civile e Sostenibile. Un manifesto a fumetti per la bellezza, l'etica, l'innovazione, la cultura e la tutela del paesaggio.
Gli stabilimenti Olivetti a Pozzuoli, il Museo dell'Olocausto nella Risiera di San Sabba a Trieste, il Parco Archeologico di Selinunte a Trapani, il Museo della Memoria a Bologna, l'Auditorium dell'Aquila. Le Architetture Resistenti come l'acqua, la terra, l'aria che respiriamo, fanno parte del nostro quotidiano e ci aiutano a vivere meglio. Sono militanti, coraggiose, visionarie, celebrano la voglia di resistere: al fascismo, alla speculazione, all'economia selvaggia, all'ingiustizia, alla devastazione dell'ambiente, alla barbarie. Rifiutano la spettacolarizzazione e la monetizzazione della realtà, la concezione degli architetti come divi dello spettacolo, la moda effimera e superficiale. Ritrovano etica e creatività, diritti ed innovazione, bellezza e futuro, partecipazione e consapevolezza, l'architettura come mezzo e non come fine, o forse solo come bene comune.
Nendo
catalog exibition
Gestalten 2013
The renowned Japanese design company Nendo, structured around chief designer Oki Sato, has been dedicated a solo exhibit in Tokyo this month.The show is entitled “Playful Shadowz” and features roughly 50 pieces from the Nendo collection including furniture, lightings and interior products that have never been released in Japan before. Additionally, the company's more artistic pieces on the subject of “black” including thin black lines (released in 2010 in London) and K% (released in Milano Salone in 2012) are on display at the special event space. Gestalten is pleased to publish a monograph with Nendo this summer.
The Architecture of Failure
Douglas Murphy
Zero Books 2012
This book proposes a theory of architectural failure; a radical way to approach memory and history in the city. Against those who considerarchitecture to be a wholly optimistic activity, this book shows how the history of modern architecture is inextricably tied to ideas of failure and ruin. By means of an original reading of the earliest origins of modernism, the Architecture of Failure exposes the ways in which failure has been suppressed, ignored and denied in the way we design our cities. It examines the 19th century fantasy architecture of the iron and glass exhibition palaces, strange, unprecedented, dream-like structures, almost all now lost, existing only as melancholy archive fragments; it traces the cultural legacy of these buildings through the heroics of the early 20th century, post-war radicals and recent developments, discussing related themes in art, literature, politics and philosophy. Critiquing the capitalist symbolism of the self-styled contemporary avant-garde, the book outlines a new history of contemporary architecture, and attempts to recover a radical approach to understanding what we build. Douglas Murphy blogs at http://www.youyouidiot.blogspot.com
Architecture a modern view
Richard Rogers
Thames & Hudson (re-print 2013)
The crisis of modern architecture is part of a much larger crisis involving the whole question of the way we live and how we use the resources of our planet. Poor design, monotony, and inhuman scale are the results not of lack of talent nor the failures of the Modern Movement, but of a surrender to selfish interests and short-sighted economies. Richard Rogers, perhaps the most original and inventive architect at work today, is a frequent commentator on the contemporary scene. In this book, available again after some years out of print, it is especially valuable to have his philosophy of design so succinctly summarized. As a practising architect, he is in the best possible position to appreciate how economic forces can create or frustrate good design. His book is illustrated largely by examples drawn from his own work, making it a professional record as well as a manifesto for the future.
VARIOUS SMALL BOOKS
Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha
MIT Press 2013
edited by Jeff Brouws, Wendy Burton and Hermann Zschiegner
The boos is a collection of pictures and essays showing how other artists have copied, parodied or otherwise paid homage to these works. It begins with a book cover that echoes Ruscha’s signature typographic style and then works its way chronologically through the artist’s numerous acolytes.
With his books, Ruscha expanded the artist’s field of permissible subjects, approaches, and methods. With VARIOUS SMALL BOOKS, various artists pay tribute to Ed Ruscha and extend the legacy of his books.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the artist Ed Ruscha created a series of small photo-conceptual artist’s books, among them Twentysix Gas Stations, Various Small Fires, Every Building on the Sunset Strip,Thirtyfour Parking Lots, Real Estate Opportunities, and A Few Palm Trees. Featuring mundane subjects photographed prosaically, with idiosyncratically deadpan titles, these “small books” were sought after, collected, and loved by Ruscha’s fans and fellow artists. Over the past thirty years, close to 100 other small books that appropriated or paid homage to Ruscha’s have appeared throughout the world. This book collects ninety-one of these projects, showcasing the cover and sample layouts from each along with a description of the work. It also includes selections from Ruscha’s books and an appendix listing all known Ruscha book tributes.
Post-Digital Print
the Mutation of Publishing Since 1894
by Alessandro Ludovico
Onomatopee 2012
In this post-digital age, digital technology is no longer a revolutionary phenomenon but a normal part of everyday life. The mutation of music and film into bits and bytes, downloads and streams is now taken for granted. For the world of book and magazine publishing however, this transformation has only just begun.
Still, the vision of this transformation is far from new. For more than century now, avant-garde artists, activists and technologists have been anticipating the development of networked and electronic publishing. Although in hindsight the reports of the death of paper were greatly exaggerated, electronic publishing has now certainly become a reality. How will the analog and the digital coexist in the post-digital age of publishing? How will they transition, mix and cross over?
In this book, Alessandro Ludovico re-reads the history of the avant-garde arts as a prehistory of cutting through the so-called dichotomy between paper and electronics. Ludovico is the editor and publisher of Neural, a magazine for critical digital culture and media arts. For more than twenty years now, he has been working at the cutting edge (and the outer fringes) of both print publishing and politically engaged digital art.
The Kent State Forum on the City: MADRID
Paola Giaconia, Eugenio Pandolfini (editors),
dpr-barcelona, 2013.
The publication goes beyond the traditional concept of a book: it is a manual, a tool to understand the transformation of Madrid in the past years. It will allow the reader to get to know the projects which represent such transformation and locate, classify, activate and even transform this content.
As a tool to enhance conversation and exchange of knowledge, "The Kent State Forum on the City: MADRID" is a multi-platform project: Book + Web + App, all of them complementary and inter-connected, reflecting new trends in publishing practice through the acts of research, archive and exchange. It won't be static: it will grow by expanding its contents with new projects and transformations in the years to come. This way all the books and cities will be interconnected and will make it easier to understand transformations underway in a wider territory: Europe.
Discussing Madrid offers insight into how the creativity of architects, along with the wisdom of politicians and administrators, can help develop new processes of transformation that are able to positively change the face of a city. Madrid can be observed as a prototype, repeating conditions typical in contemporary Western cities.
IF YOU ARE IN LONDON JUST DOWNLOAD
THE LONDON BOOKSHOP MAP
a different walk in the city
106 independent
bookshops
Independent bookshops fill the gaps left by high street chains, stocking thoughtful and idiosyncratic choices of books rather than market-driven selections. They sustain local interests and offer different ways for communities to participate in a range of cultural activities. They are crucial platforms for alternative publishing. The fourth issue of The London Bookshop Map will feature work by Dora García and be launched at the London Art Book Fair on Thursday 12 September 2013.