Interactive Architecture includes contributions from the worlds of architecture, industrial design, computer programming, engineering, and physical computing. The book examines the vanguard movement from all sides, including its sociological and psychological implications as well as its potentially beneficial environmental impact
Category Archive: book reviews
The world of fashion and design is inundated with a seemingly endless list of rules. Think of “Less is More,” “Form Follows Function,” “Keep it Simple,” “Dress Your Age,” and the list goes on and on. They’re familiar sayings that some designers consider to be valuable words of wisdom, which serve as a guiding line and source of inspiration. To others, these rules are mere restrictions: design dogmas and fashion formulae that need to be bended, twisted or broken altogether
A comprehensive, timely international survey that addresses the relationship between art and electronic technology, this volume explores the presence and meanings of mechanics, light, graphics, robots, virtual reality and the Web in the art and visual culture of the last hundred years. It also considers the reaction, development and future of artistic practice in the face of new technology
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Like paper projects designed in the absence of “real” architecture, installations offer architects another way to engage in issues critical to their practice. Direct experimentation with architecture’s material and social dimensions engages the public around issues in the built environment that concern them and expands the ways that architecture can participate in and impact people’s everyday lives
Paper conquers the third dimension and demonstrates the undreamed-of possibilities it holds today for lightweight construction, product design, fashion and art
Digital Fabrications explores the methods architects use to calibrate digital designs with physical forms. The book is organized according to five types of digital fabrication techniques: tessellating, sectioning, folding, contouring, and forming. Projects are shown both in their finished forms and in working drawings, templates, and prototypes, allowing the reader to watch the process of each fantastic construction unfold
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The book compiles over 400 pages of exciting ideas, never before seen experiments, self initiated projects and commercial work from Germans working and studying at home and abroad, as well as non-Germans working and studying in Germany
Whether it’s from a hotel room in Vegas, secret prisons in Kabul, buried CIA aircraft in Central American jungles, Washington, D.C., suburbs, or a trailer in Shoshone Indian territory, Paglen’s reporting is impassioned, rigorous, relentless–and eye-opening. Blank Spots on the Map is an exposé of a world that, officially, isn’t even there
Photojournalist Geert Van Kesteren shows the disorienting reality of war-torn Iraq as he chronicles the lives of ordinary Iraqi people living in Baghdad, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey during 2006 and 2007. The book and exhibition combines Van Kesteren’s professionally photographed images with the stories of Iraqis in their own words and hundreds of cell phone pictures and digital snap shots taken by the Iraqis themselves. Some reveal places that journalists dare not tread
A photo of a secret CIA prison. A map designed to help visitors reach Malibu’s notoriously inaccessible public beaches. Guidebooks to factories, prisons, and power plants in upstate New York. These are some of the more than one hundred projects represented in Experimental Geography, a collection of visual research and mapmaking from the past ten years
This volume includes a monumental stash of documentary photographs, ephemera, documents, transcripts and original writings on all things related to the oil crisis–from Jimmy Carter to underground utopias. Reproductions cover everything from impossible traffic jams leading up to empty gas stations to board games with names like Energy Quest and Petrol
The guide offers a concise, up-to-date- and insightful presentation of European museums, art institutions, galleries, art fairs, biennials, and works of art in public space. It focuses on giving both the knowledgeable insider and the casual novice a brief and easy-to-use synopsis of European art highlights that are musts on the itinerary of anyone interested in contemporary art
Just found out that the utterly brilliant and fascinating thesis that Otto von Busch presented last year at the University of Gothenburg is available as an online PDF. So leave Dan Brown on the shelves and take this one on the beach this Summer, ok?
‘Digital By Design’ is a wide-ranging survey that considers the work of those visionaries who are reimagining the relationship between technology, design products, immersive environments and human interaction for the twenty-first century. The result is a captivating assessment of pioneering approaches in art and design that encompasses a broad spectrum of humanist values, humor, magic and sensory experiences
The first monography is the one of a painter who portrays contemporary life through cables, joysticks, feet and routers. The second book is a delightfully designed bible of a font which was highly popular in the Middle Ages and then got to bear the stigma of being associated with nazi propaganda
The book highlights a current trend in international graphic design: more and more visual designers are staging their compositions as three-dimensional scenarios, in order to turn them into posters, magazine covers, web sites, and animated films
This provocative collection of photography, essays, and maps looks at infrastructure as a way of mapping our place in the city and affecting change through architecture
Shoot an Iraqi is equally pertinent reading for those who seek insight into the current conflict in Iraq, and for those fascinated by interactive art technologies and the ever-expanding world of online gaming
A new generation of architects in a country whose building rhythm over the last decade has been unstoppable, as China’s architects are making their mark within the backdrop of an avalanche of world class architecture stars
A paper celebration of 5 fantastic editions of a workshop that gathers artists, academics, designers, industry representatives and academics who share their passion for the way ubiquitous computing is modifying the consumption, sharing and creation of music
What if you built the whole mass of western europe in 20 years? What if 400 million farmers then moved in? What would it look like? How would it work? Would you be able to go to sleep at night? And if you did, would you dream of somewhere else …?
Bright catalogs the state of the art of illumination and its use in architecture, design and interactive installations. Some projects are so astonishing that you forget the building underneath the light show, others act more as subtle enhancement of a building or environment
Campanella’s book examines the forces behind China’s urban revolution. It traces both the historical precedents and the increasingly globalized information, ideas, and trends that have combined to create a new Chinese landscape
Full-color publication of the complete Ant Farm Timeline, as well as Allegorical Time Warp: The Media Fallout (1969) and an archival dossier on Ant Farm’s Truckstop Network (1970-1972)
In Hitchcock’s film, architecture plays a key role. Having worked as a set designer in the ’20s, Hitchcock remained intensely concerned with the art direction of his films. He also made some remarkable single-set films that deal with the way the confines of the set relate to those of the architecture on screen
Barking coats, hidden messages in the tablecloth, fermented dresses, sensitive shoes and sensual switches
In her installation and book, Ines Doujak criticizes the way multinational corporations reap profits by taking out patents on indigenous plants, food, knowledge, even human tissues from developing countries and turn them into lucrative products. Without sharing the benefits with the country of origin
Confronted by shifting densities and uncharted urban transformations, Crisis tackles the conflict between the physical limits of architectural design and the demands on the practice for an updated social relevance
10 maps and 10 essays about social issues from globalization to garbage; surveillance to extraordinary rendition; statelessness to visibility; deportation to migration
In Sensorium, contemporary artists and writers explore the implications of the techno-human interface
Putting play on the urban agenda, with an emphasis on spontaneity, creativity and a top-down approach
A selection of graphic design studios from Spain
When graphic design enters the third dimension and plays with our perception of space
The U.S.-Mexico border: too often its complexities are viewed through the lens of illegal immigration, ignoring a multitude of critical issues such as health, the environment, drug trafficking, free trade, and post-9/11 security
Natural Architecture, by Alessandro Rocca (Amazon USA and UK). Publisher Princeton Architectural Press says: Natural Architecture presents sixty-six […]
SHD Super Holland Design, edited by Tomoko Sakamoto and Ramon Prat. (Amazon USA). Publisher Actar says: The anxiously […]
Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects, by Tom Igoe (whom i interviewed over a year […]
Kitchen Budapest is a brand new media lab for researchers who are not only interested in the convergence […]
Hand Job: A Catalog of Type, curated by Michael Perry. Amazon USA and UK. Publisher Princeton Architectural Press […]
Spacecraft Fleeting Architecture and Hideouts, edited by Robert Klanten and Lukas Feireiss (Amazon USA and UK.) Publisher Die […]