Böcker utgivna av MIT Press Ltd

A classic examination of superb design through the centuries.Widely regarded as a classic in the field, Experiencing Architecture explores the history and promise of good design. Generously illustrated with historical examples of designing excellence—ranging from teacups, riding boots, and golf balls to the villas of Palladio and the fish-feeding pavilion of Beijing's Winter Palace—Rasmussen's accessible guide invites us to appreciate architecture not only as a profession, but as an art that shapes everyday experience.In the past, Rasmussen argues, architecture was not just an individual pursuit, but a community undertaking. Dwellings were built with a natural feeling for place, materials and use, resulting in "a remarkably suitable comeliness.” While we cannot return to a former age, Rasmussen notes, we can still design spaces that are beautiful and useful by seeking to understand architecture as an art form that must be experienced. An understanding of good design comes not only from one's professional experience of architecture as an abstract, individual pursuit, but also from one's shared, everyday experience of architecture in real time—its particular use of light, color, shape, scale, texture, rhythm and sound. Experiencing Architecture reminds us of what good architectural design has accomplished over time, what it can accomplish still, and why it is worth pursuing. Wide-ranging and approachable, it is for anyone who has ever wondered "what instrument the architect plays on.”

"A brilliant account of the politics of shit. It will leave you speechless."Written in Paris after the heady days of student revolt in May 1968 and before the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, History of Shit is emblematic of a wild and adventurous strain of 1970s' theoretical writing that attempted to marry theory, politics, sexuality, pleasure, experimentation, and humor. Radically redefining dialectical thought and post-Marxist politics, it takes an important—and irreverent—position alongside the works of such postmodern thinkers as Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard. Laporte's eccentric style and ironic sensibility combine in an inquiry that is provocative, humorous, and intellectually exhilarating. Debunking all humanist mythology about the grandeur of civilization, History of Shit suggests instead that the management of human waste is crucial to our identities as modern individuals—including the organization of the city, the rise of the nation-state, the development of capitalism, and the mandate for clean and proper language. Far from rising above the muck, Laporte argues, we are thoroughly mired in it, particularly when we appear our most clean and hygienic. Laporte's style of writing is itself an attack on our desire for "clean language." Littered with lengthy quotations and obscure allusions, and adamantly refusing to follow a linear argument, History of Shit breaks the rules and challenges the conventions of "proper" academic discourse.

In a daring revisionist history of modern architecture, Mark Wigley opens up a new understanding of the historical avant-garde. He explores the most obvious, but least discussed, feature of modern architecture: white walls. Although the white wall exemplifies the stripping away of the decorative masquerade costumes worn by nineteenth-century buildings, Wigley argues that modern buildings are not naked. The white wall is itself a form of clothing—the newly athletic body of the building, like that of its occupants, wears a new kind of garment and these garments are meant to match. Not only did almost all modern architects literally design dresses, Wigley points out, their arguments for a modern architecture were taken from the logic of clothing reform. Architecture was understood as a form of dress design.Wigley follows the trajectory of this key subtext by closely reading the statements and designs of most of the protagonists, demonstrating that it renders modern architecture's relationship with the psychosexual economy of fashion much more ambiguous than the architects' endlessly repeated rejections of fashion would suggest. Indeed, Wigley asserts, the very intensity of these rejections is a symptom of how deeply they are embedded in the world of clothing. By drawing on arguments about the relationship between clothing and architecture first formulated in the middle of the nineteenth century, modern architects in fact presented a sophisticated theory of the surface, modernizing architecture by transforming the status of the surface.White Walls, Designer Dresses shows how this seemingly incidental clothing logic actually organizes the detailed design of the modern building, dictating a system of polychromy, understood as a multicolored outfit. The familiar image of modern architecture as white turns out to be the effect of a historiographical tradition that has worked hard to suppress the color of the surfaces of the buildings that it describes. Wigley analyzes this suppression in terms of the sexual logic that invariably accompanies discussions of clothing and color, recovering those sensuously colored surfaces and the extraordinary arguments about clothing that were used to defend them.

"A critical examination of psychopathy research and the discriminatory use of the disorder in the criminal justice system"--

How the surge in aerial technologies, such as drones and satellites, influences visual culture beyond the screen.The smooth flight from aerial overview to intimate close-up in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) exemplifies the concept of proxistant vision: a combination of proximity and distance, close-up and overview, detail, and the big picture in a unified visual form. In Proxistant Vision, Synne Bull and Dragan Miletic develop the concept of proxistant vision and trace its emergence as a visual paradigm of the twenty-first century. As exemplified by Google Earth’s digital swipe between globe perspective and street-level detail, proxistant vision currently proliferates across digital geography, computer games, architectural models, data visualizations, and CGI cinema. It is defined as the combination of proximity and distance in a single image, across a dynamic flight, or zoom. Pointing to the surge in aerial imaging and remote sensing technologies such as drones and satellites, the book moves beyond the screen to include the kinetic architecture of rides and urban observation wheels. The key objective of this study is threefold: to trace the genealogy and understand the technical operation of proxistance as it traveled from periphery to center in the twenty-first century; to explore its alternative potentialities in contemporary art practices; and finally, to reflect critically on the worldviews underpinning different modalities of proxistance in times of environmental crisis. The authors show how the powerful effect of combining proximity and distance, which was already in place with the earliest cartographic inscriptions, has taken precedence on and beyond our screens today.

"This is a history of CHAT (Cultural-Historical Activity Theory): where it came from, how it developed, what challenges it faces when applied to technologically mediated post-bureaucratic work, and how we might further develop it to better address those challenges"--

"Dietary choices greatly impact one's health and environmental footprint, yet making the right choices is a deep scientific challenge well outside most laypersons' scientific background"--

An investigative history of the closure of Harvard University’s geography program in the mid-twentieth century due to homophobia and wider institutional politics.Let Geography Die tells the little-known and oft-misunderstood story of geographical research and education at Harvard University. In investigative fashion, Alison Mountz and Kira Williams unearth the personal and institutional secrets that drove the sudden closure of Harvard’s geography program at the precise moment that it reached its apex. At the heart of this narrative are the hidden personal lives of the queer men recruited to build the geography program—the same ones who were later blamed for its demise. Chief among these figures is Derwent Whittlesey, who eventually became Harvard’s last lone geography professor, once the program he had so successfully built was closed around him. The book weaves together several histories at once: the enactment of homophobic policies under McCarthyism designed to purge queer people from university campuses and government offices; a university President with little regard for the social sciences on a personal mission to dissolve geographic education; fierce, if failed, university politicking to rescue and then resuscitate the program; personal queer lives hidden in plain sight on the edge of campus; and two contemporary queer political geographers on a mission to memorialize the queer people blamed for society’s ills. Let Geography Die exposes the truth behind this important story—as well as its wider haunting of an entire discipline 75 years later—while also restoring the humanity of the central characters involved, especially Derwent Whittlesey.