Here is the world's most famous master plan for seizing and holding power. Astonishing in its candor The Prince even today remains a disturbingly realistic and prophetic work on what it takes to be a prince . . . a king . . . a president. When, in 1512, Machiavelli was removed from his post in his beloved Florence, he resolved to set down a treatise on leadership that was practical, not idealistic. In The Prince he envisioned would be unencumbered by ordinary ethical and moral values; his prince would be man and beast, fox and lion. Today, this small sixteenth-century masterpiece has become essential reading for every student of government, and is the ultimate book on power politics.
Une célébration de la baignade - piscines, saunas, plages, bains rituels, huttes de sudation, etc. - à travers le prisme de l'architecture et du paysage.
Ce livre historique abondamment illustré raconte comment quelques riches américaines, en tant que clientes et porteuses d'influence, ont favorisé l'émergence de la haute couture française à la fin du XIXe siècle.
Essays on a range of photographic topics by the recently appointed chief curator of photography at MoMA.
This volume offers a selection of essays by the renowned photography historian Clément Chéroux. Chéroux, appointed chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 2020, takes on a variety of topics, from the history of vernacular photography to the influence of documentary photography on Surrealism. The texts, published together in one volume for the first time and newly translated into English, reflect the breadth of Chéroux's thinking, the rigor of his approach, and his endless curiosity about photographs.
In this strikingly designed and generously illustrated volume, Chéroux presents unique case studies and untold stories. He discusses ways of sharing images, from the nineteenth century to the digital age; considers the utopian ideals of early photography; and analyzes the duality of amateur photography. Among other things, he describes the appeal of photographs snapped from a speeding train and explains historical value of first-generation prints of photographs. Through an analysis of key photographs taken on 9/11, Chéroux shows that the same six images were seen again and again in the press. Widely ranging, erudite, and engaging, these essays present Chéroux's innovative investigations of the histories of photography.
B>An argument against the ideology of domesticity that separates work from home; lavishly illustrated, with architectural proposals for alternate approaches to working and living.br>;/b>br>br>Despite the increasing numbers of people who now work from home, in the popular imagination the home is still understood as the sanctuary of privacy and intimacy. Living is conceptually and definitively separated from work. This book argues against such a separation, countering the prevailing ideology of domesticity with a series of architectural projects that illustrate alternative approaches. Less a monograph than a treatise, richly illustrated, the book combines historical research and design proposals to reenvision home as a cooperative structure in which it is possible to live and work and in which labor is socialized beyond the family--freeing inhabitants from the sense of property and the burden of domestic labor.;br>;br>The projects aim to move the house beyond the dichotomous logic of male/female, husband/wife, breadwinner/housewife, and private/public. They include the reinvention of single-room occupancy as a new model for affordable housing; the reimagining of the simple tower-and-plinth prototype as host to a multiplicity of work activities and enlivening street life; and a plan for a modular, adaptable structure meant to house a temporary dweller. All of these design projects conceive of the house not as a commodity, the form of which is determined by its exchange value, but as an infrastructure defined by its use value.br>;br>br>br>;
A meticulously created facsimile edition of a classic work on design by the progenitor of today's information design.
Long before the internet and its vast stores of information in digital form, information in analog form needed to be organized so that it was legible and accessible. One designer who revolutionized the presentation of printed information was modernist pioneer Ladislav Sutnar (1897-1976). In 1950, Sutnar and architect K. Lonberg-Holm published Catalog Design Progress, a guide to modernizing the design of printed materials through typographic simplicity, compositional ingenuity, and navigational devices that signal the logical flow of information. This meticulously created facsimile of the original book illustrates and enacts Sutnar's ideas, making clear their continuing influence on graphic design.
In the book, Sutnar contrasts his design style with the conglomeration of text and pictures that characterized earlier printed material. He identifies and illustrates visual features, including typography, pictures and charts, and covers, and shows how the arrangement and organization of visual units allows information to flow smoothly. For this edition, the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Art and Design at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic, has carefully recreated the original, with redrawn figures, retouched photos, re-typeset texts, five-color printing, and spiral binding. A separate reader's guide by celebrated design historian Steven Heller accompanies the book. Both book and guide are packaged in a slipcase.
A photographic survey of the robotic face of Tokyo buildings and an argument that robot aesthetics plays a central role in architectural history.
In Tokyoids, architect François Blanciak surveys the robotic faces omnipresent in Tokyo buildings, offering an architectural taxonomy based not on the usual variables--size, material, historical style--but on the observable expressions of buildings. Are the eyes (windows) twinkling, the mouth (door) laughing? Is that balcony a howl of distress? Investigating robot aesthetics through his photographs of fifty buildings, Blanciak argues that the robot face originated in architecture--before the birth of robotics--and has played a central role in architectural history.
Blanciak first puts the robot face into historical perspective, examining the importance of the face in architectural theory and demonstrating that the construction of architecture's emblematic portraits triggered the emergence of a robot aesthetics. He then explores the emotions conveyed by the photographed buildings' robot faces, in chapters titled "Awe," "Wrath," "Mirth," "Pain," "Angst," and "Hunger." As he does so he considers, among other things, the architectural relevance of Tokyo's ordinary buildings; the repression of the figural in contemporary architecture; an aesthetic of dismemberment, linked to the structure of the Japanese language and local building design; and the influence of automation technology upon human interaction.
Part photographic survey, part theoretical inquiry, Tokyoids upends the usual approach to robotics in architecture by considering not the automation of architectural output but the aesthetic properties of the robot.
A concise introduction to the history and methods of espionage, illustrated by spy stories from antiquity to todays high-tech world.
Espionage is one of the most secret of human activities. It is also, as the popularity of spy stories suggests, one of the most intriguing. This book pulls the veil back on the real world of espionage, revealing how spying actually works. In a refreshingly clear, concise manner, Kristie Macrakis guides readers through the shadowy world of espionage, from the language and practice of spycraft to its role in international politics, its bureaucratic underpinnings, and its transformation in light of modern technology. Espionage is a mirror of society and human foibles with the added cloak of secrecy and deception. Accordingly,
Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of "common" people and less immodest in their erections of "heroic," self-aggrandizing monuments. This revision includes the full texts of Part I of the original, on the Las Vegas strip, and Part II, "Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed," a generalization from the findings of the first part on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl. (The final part of the first edition, on the architectural work of the firm Venturi and Rauch, is not included in the revision.) The new paperback edition has a smaller format, fewer pictures, and a considerably lower price than the original. There are an added preface by Scott Brown and a bibliography of writings by the members of Venturi and Rauch and about the firm''s work.
A bold new spatial perspective on modern sculpture, with 800 color images of work by artists including Henry Moore, Lygia Clark, Anish Kapoor, and Ana Mendieta.
This monumental, richly illustrated volume from ZKM Karlsruhe approaches modern sculpture from a spatial perspective, interpreting it though contour, emptiness, and levitation rather than the conventional categories of unbroken volume, mass, and gravity. It examines works by dozens of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists, including Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Lygia Clark, Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, Ana Mendieta, Fujiko Nakaya, Tomás Saraceno, and Alicja Kwade. The large-scale book contains over 800 color images.
Negative Space comes out of an epic exhibition at ZKM, and volume editor Peter Weibel (Chairman and CEO of ZKM) takes a curatorial approach to the topic. The last exhibition to deal comprehensively with the question "What is modern sculpture?" was at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1986. Weibel and ZKM pick up where the Pompidou left off, examining sculptures not as figurative, solid, and self-contained monoliths but in terms of open and hollow spaces; reflection, light, shadow; innovative materials; data; and the moving image. Weibel puts advances in science, architecture, and mathematics in the context of avant-garde sensibilities to show how modern sculpture significantly deviates from the work of the past. Texts in the volume include an introduction and twelve chapters written by Weibel with contributions by cocurators as well as facsimiles and reproductions of artist-authored manifestos.
Experiments in architectural education in the post-World War II era that challenged and transformed architectural discourse and practice.
In the decades after World War II, new forms of learning transformed architectural education. These radical experiments sought to upend disciplinary foundations and conventional assumptions about the nature of architecture as much as they challenged modernist and colonial norms, decentered building, imagined new roles for the architect, and envisioned participatory forms of practice. Although many of the experimental programs were subsequently abandoned, terminated, or assimilated, they nevertheless helped shape and in some sense define architectural discourse and practice. This book explores and documents these radical pedagogies and efforts to defy architecture's status quo.
The experiments include the adaptation of Bauhaus pedagogy as a means of "unlearning" under the conditions of decolonization in Africa; a movement to design for "every body," including the disabled, by architecture students and faculty at the University of California, Berkeley; the founding of a support network for women interested in the built environment, regardless of their academic backgrounds; and a design studio in the USSR that offered an alternative to the widespread functionalist approach in Soviet design. Viewed through their dissolution and afterlife as well as through their founding stories, these projects from the last century raise provocative questions about architecture's role in the new century.
The first comprehensive history in English of film at the Bauhaus, exploring practices that experimented with film as an adaptable, elastic "polymedium." With Design in Motion, Laura Frahm proposes an alternate history of the Bauhaus--one in which visual media, and film in particular, are crucial to the Bauhaus's visionary pursuit of integrating art and technology. In the first comprehensive examination in English of film at the Bauhaus, Frahm shows that experimentation with film spanned a range of Bauhaus practices, from textiles and typography to stage and exhibition design. Indeed, Bauhausler deployed film as an adaptable, elastic "polymedium," malleable in shape and form, unfolding and refracting into multiple material, aesthetic, and philosophical directions.
Frahm shows how the encounter with film imbued the Bauhaus of the 1920s and early 1930s with a flexible notion of design, infusing painting with temporal concepts, sculptures with moving forms, photographs with sequential aesthetics, architectural designs with a choreography of movement. Frahm considers, among other things, student works that explored light and the transparent features of celluloid and cellophane; weaving practices that incorporate cellophane; experimental films, social documentaries, and critical reportage by Bauhaus women; and the proliferation of film strips in posters, book covers, and other typographic work.
Viewing the Bauhaus's engagement with film through a media-theoretic lens, Frahm shows how film became a medium for "design in motion." Movement and process, rather than stability and fixity, become the defining characteristics of Bauhaus educational, aesthetic, and philosophical ethos.
B>A philosophical guide to passengerhood, with reflections on time, space, existence, boredom, our sense of self, and our sense of senses./b>br>br>While there are entire bookstore sections--and even entire bookstores--devoted to travel, there have been few books on the universal experience of being a passenger. With this book, philosopher Michael Marder fills the gap, offering a philosophical guide to passengerhood. He takes readers from ticketing and preboarding (preface and introduction) through a series of stops and detours (reflections on topics including time, space, existence, boredom, our sense of self, and our sense of senses) to destination and disembarking (conclusion).;br>;br>Marder finds that the experience of passengers in the twenty-first century is experience itself, stretching well beyond railroad tracks and airplane flight patterns. On his journey through passengerhood, he considers, among many other things, passenger togetherness, which goes hand in hand with passenger loneliness; flyover country and the idea of placeness; and Descartes in an airplane seat. He tells us that the word metaphor means transport in Greek and discusses the gray area between literalness and metaphoricity; explains the connection between reading and riding; and ponders the difference between destination and destiny. Finally, a Beckettian disembarking: you might not be able to disembark, yet you must disembark. After the voyage in the world ends, the journey of understanding begins.
An account of the life and work of a once-famous self-taught American artist of the 1940s, and a study of how artists go missing from public memory.
A garment worker and slipper manufacturer with no training in art, Morris Hirshfield was never expected to make history. Against all odds, his wildly stylized paintings of female figures, often nude, animals, and landscapes became internationally known in the 1940s. Admired by Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and the French surrealists, his peak moment of visibility occurred in 1943, when the Museum of Modern Art mounted a one-man show of his work. The exhibition was widely reviewed--though mostly reviled--by the press, who jeeringly crowned Hirshfield "Master of the Two Left Feet" for his tendency to display the female body in that unorthodox fashion.
After the artist's death in 1946, his work was largely forgotten, but in Master of the Two Left Feet, art historian Richard Meyer rediscovers Hirshfield for twenty-first-century audiences, offering full-color reproductions that capture the vibrant imagination and sheer visual pleasure of Hirshfield's paintings. The book also features a catalog of works compiled by curator Susan Davidson which provides the most comprehensive documentation of the artist's work ever assembled.
Ten years in the making, Master of the Two Left Feet presents Hirshfield's unlikely career as a painter not only as a missing episode in the history of twentieth-century art but as a case study of the ways in which artists go missing from historical knowledge and public memory. By looking closely at Hirshfield and his milieu in 1940s Brooklyn, Meyer demonstrates how much we have yet to learn, and to see, of the visual past.
The book accompanies the exhibition "Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered," at the American Folk Art Museum, New York City, September 22, 2022-January 27, 2023.
The complex appropriation of Piranesi by modern literature, photography, art, film, and architecture.
The etchings of the Italian printmaker, architect, and antiquarian Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) have long mesmerized viewers. But, as Victor Plahte Tschudi shows, artists and writers of the modern era found in these works--Piranesi's visions of contradictory space, endless vistas, and self-perpetuating architecture--a formulation of the modern. In Piranesi and the Modern Age, Tschudi explores the complex appropriation and continual rediscoveries of Piranesi by modern literature, photography, art, film, and architecture. Tracing the ways that the modern age constructed itself and its origin through Piranesi across genres, he shows, for example, how Piranesi's work formulates the ideas of "contrast" in photography, "abstraction" in painting and "montage" in cinema.
Piranesi's modern-day comeback, Tschudi argues, relied on new dimensions found within his work that inspired attempts to inscribe within them a world that was very modern. For more than a century, these interpretations have helped legitimize new forms, theories, technologies, and movements. Tschudi examines, among other things, how Piranesi's disturbing prison interiors--the Carceri--became modern metaphors for the mind; how Alfred H. Barr and the Museum of Modern Art made the case for Piranesi's alleged abstraction in the 1930s; and how Sergei Eisenstein reinvented Piranesi as a progenitor of his own innovative filmmaking techniques. Tschudi's exploration of Piranesi's influence on modern architectural discourse includes interviews with such distinguished architects as Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, Steven Holl, and Rem Koolhaas. Generously illustrated, Piranesi and the Modern Age offers an entirely new reading of Piranesi's work.
A lively, informative, and engaging guide to gender by an author-illustrator who helps readers understand the multiplicity of answers to "What even is gender?" Queer, cisgender, transgender, nonbinary, androgynous, maverique, intergender, genderfluid. Louie and their cat (a.k.a. "Cat") take you on a journey through the world of gender--without claiming to have it all figured out or knowing the perfect definition for this widely complex subject. Gender is tricky to understand because it's a social construct intersecting with many other parts of our identity, including class, race, age, religion. For a long time, people thought of gender as binary: male/female, pirate/princess, sports/shopping. Now, we're starting to understand it's not that simple. That's what this book is about: figuring out what gender means, one human being at a time, and giving us new ways to let the world know who we are.
Boy, girl, either/or, neither/nor, everything in between: gender is a spectrum, and it's hard to know where you fit, especially when your position isn't necessarily fixed--and the spectrum keeps expanding. That's where Rethinking Gender can help: it gives you a toolbox for empathy, understanding, and self-exploration. Louie's journey includes a deep dive into the historical context of LGBTQIA+ rights activism and the evolution of gender discourse, politics, and laws--but it also explores these ideas through the diversity of expressions and experiences of people today.
In Rethinking Gender Louie offers a real-world take on what it means to be yourself, see yourself, and see someone else for who they are, too.
Questions explored in Rethinking Gender include:
What is cisgender? Dysphoria? Non-binary? Intersex? Intersectionality?Are sex and gender biological? Cultural? Social? Personal?What do race, religion, age, and education have to do with it?How do we recognize stereotypes, and what can we do about them?Do physical characteristics determine sex, and, if not, what does?How common is it not to fit in the box checked M or F?When is surgery or medical intervention called for, and who gets to decide?How have ideas about gender changed over time?What is gender identity, how do we know ours, and how do we talk to someone whose gender is different from our own?
An idiosyncratic guidebook to architectural (and other) wonders of Italy, accompanied by the author's own witty illustrations.
In Some Reasons for Traveling to Italy, architect Peter Wilson offers a Grand Tour of Grand Tours, providing an idiosyncratic guidebook to architectural (and other) wonders of Italy, illustrated by his own witty watercolors and sketches. Wilson chronicles the reasons that people throughout history have traveled to Italy--ranging from "To Be the Subject of an Equestrian Painting by Uccello in Florence Cathedral" to "To Rebuild Herculaneum in Malibu" (the desire of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty in the 1970s)--while giving readers a deeper understanding of Italy's architectural habitat and cultural mythology.
In Wilson's narratives and anecdotes, place names function as talismans; the events may not tally with recorded history, or with the exact topographies of actual places. Wilson offers historical reworkings, appropriations, and an architect's scrutiny of certain Italian tropes. He recounts that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, set out "To Flee England Out of Embarrassment" after breaking wind when he bowed to Queen Elizabeth I; French novelist Stendhal went "To Discover an Anti-France"; and an English architect went "To Get Some Ideas for a Mausoleum." At the first Venice Biennale of Architecture in 1980, a dapper architect found that he had come to Italy "To Fall Overboard in a White Suit," the artist Cy Twombly went simply "To See," and Wilson himself found that he was "Captured by the Ospedale Degli Innocenti," enchanted by the sight of Brunelleschi's architrave.
Essays and reminiscences by one of the preeminent art historians of our time, spanning more than four decades.
An Oblique Autobiography assembles a new collection of essays and reminiscences by one of the preeminent art historians of our time. Spanning more than four decades of Yve-Alain Bois's work as a scholar, journal editor, and occasional curator, this volume traces a deeply personal itinerary through an important era of art history, in which the discipline--in part occasioned by Bois's own journey from France to the United States--was significantly reformulated by new methodologies.
Detailing Bois's early relationships with figures such as Roland Barthes, Hubert Damisch, Lygia Clark, and Jacques Derrida, as well as his extended engagements with Rosalind Krauss, Ellsworth Kelly, and Martin Barré, these essays track Bois's intellectual commitments against the backdrop of an evolving academic field. With texts that range from academic journal articles to obituaries, written from 1976 to 2021, An Oblique Autobiography reveals the range of Bois's authorial voice and offers a remarkable self-portrait of one of art history's primary protagonists.
B>Why, surrounded by screens and smart devices, we feel a deep connection to the analog--vinyl records, fountain pens, Kodak film, and other nondigital tools./b>br>br>Were surrounded by screens; our music comes in the form of digital files; we tap words into a notes app. Why do we still crave the realness of analog, seeking out vinyl records, fountain pens, cameras with film? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Robert Hassan explores our deep connection to analog technology. Our analog urge, he explains, is about what weve lost from our technological past, something thats not there in our digital present. Were nostalgic for what we remember indistinctly as somehow more real, more human. Surveying some of the major developments of analog technology, Hassan shows us whats been lost with the digital.br>;br>Along the way, he discusses the appeal of the 2011 silent, black-and-white Oscar-winning film The Artisu>t/u>; the revival of the non-e-book book; the early mechanical clocks that enforced prayer and worship times; and the programmable loom. He describes the effect of the typewriter on Nietzsches productivity, the pivotal invention of the telegraph, and the popularity of the first televisions despite their iffy picture quality.br>The transition to digital is marked by the downgrading of human participation in the human-technology relationship. We have unwittingly unmoored ourselves, Hassan warns, from the anchors of analog technology and the natural world. Our analog nostalgia is for those ancient aspects of who and what we are.
An introduction to a broad range of topics in deep learning, covering mathematical and conceptual background, deep learning techniques used in industry, and research perspectives. "Written by three experts in the field, Deep Learning is the only comprehensive book on the subject." --Elon Musk , cochair of OpenAI; cofounder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX Deep learning is a form of machine learning that enables computers to learn from experience and understand the world in terms of a hierarchy of concepts. Because the computer gathers knowledge from experience, there is no need for a human computer operator to formally specify all the knowledge that the computer needs. The hierarchy of concepts allows the computer to learn complicated concepts by building them out of simpler ones; a graph of these hierarchies would be many layers deep. This book introduces a broad range of topics in deep learning. The text offers mathematical and conceptual background, covering relevant concepts in linear algebra, probability theory and information theory, numerical computation, and machine learning. It describes deep learning techniques used by practitioners in industry, including deep feedforward networks, regularization, optimization algorithms, convolutional networks, sequence modeling, and practical methodology; and it surveys such applications as natural language processing, speech recognition, computer vision, online recommendation systems, bioinformatics, and videogames. Finally, the book offers research perspectives, covering such theoretical topics as linear factor models, autoencoders, representation learning, structured probabilistic models, Monte Carlo methods, the partition function, approximate inference, and deep generative models. Deep Learning can be used by undergraduate or graduate students planning careers in either industry or research, and by software engineers who want to begin using deep learning in their products or platforms. A website offers supplementary material for both readers and instructors.
A systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations. Growth has been both an unspoken and an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving. It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies; it shapes the capabilities of our extraordinarily large brains and the fortunes of our economies. Growth is manifested in annual increments of continental crust, a rising gross domestic product, a child''s growth chart, the spread of cancerous cells. In this magisterial book, Vaclav Smil offers systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations. Smil takes readers from bacterial invasions through animal metabolisms to megacities and the global economy. He begins with organisms whose mature sizes range from microscopic to enormous, looking at disease-causing microbes, the cultivation of staple crops, and human growth from infancy to adulthood. He examines the growth of energy conversions and man-made objects that enable economic activities--developments that have been essential to civilization. Finally, he looks at growth in complex systems, beginning with the growth of human populations and proceeding to the growth of cities. He considers the challenges of tracing the growth of empires and civilizations, explaining that we can chart the growth of organisms across individual and evolutionary time, but that the progress of societies and economies, not so linear, encompasses both decline and renewal. The trajectory of modern civilization, driven by competing imperatives of material growth and biospheric limits, Smil tells us, remains uncertain.
There's more to Banksy than the painting on the wall: the first in-depth investigation into the mysteries of the world's most famous living artist.
Banksy is the world's most famous living artist, yet no one knows who he is. For more than twenty years, his wryly political and darkly humorous spray paintings have appeared mysteriously on urban walls around the globe, generating headlines and controversy. Art critics disdain him, but the public (and the art market) love him. With this generously illustrated book, artist and critic Carol Diehl is the first author to probe the depths of the Banksy mystery. Through her exploration of his paintings, installations, writings, and Academy Award-nominated film, Exit through the Gift Shop, Diehl proves unequivocally that there's more to Banksy than the painting on the wall.
Seeing Banksy as the ultimate provocateur, Diehl investigates the dramas that unfold after his works are discovered, with all of their social, economic, and political implications. She reveals how this trickster rattles the system, whether during his month-long 2013 self-styled New York residency or his notorious Dismaland of 2015, a full-scale dystopian family theme park unsuitable for children dedicated to the failure of capitalism. Banksy's work, Diehl shows, is a synthesis of conceptual art, social commentary, and political protest, played out not in museums but where it can have the most effect--on the street, in the real world. The questions Banksy raises about the uses of public and private property, the role of the global corporatocracy, the never-ending wars, and the gap between artworks as luxury goods and as vehicles of social expression, have never been more relevant.
