Even though these systems are essential, when was the last time you gave them much thought? Not only is infrastructure shrouded in mystery, much of it is woefully out of date--bridges are falling, public transportation is overcrowded, and most roads haven't been updated since the 1950s. In On the Grid, Scott Huler sets out to understand all of the systems that shape our society--from transportation, water, and garbage to the Internet coming through our cable lines.He begins his entertaining, fascinating journey at his house in Raleigh, North Carolina, and travels everywhere from the inside of a storm water pipe to the sewers of ancient Rome. Each chapter follows one element of infrastructure back to its source. Huler visits power plants, watches new asphalt pavement being laid, and traces a drop of water backward from his faucet to the Gulf of Mexico. He reaches out to guides along the way, both the workers who operate these systems and the people who plan them.A mesmerizing and hilarious narrative, On the Grid is filled with amazing insights, interviews, and stories that bring an overlooked but indispensable subject to life. You'll never look at your day the same way again.

    Using 28 of the best designed homes from around the country, Susanka brings these concepts to life with 150 powerful and inspirational examples: from something as simple as placing a rug under a table to renovating a whole second floor. Home by Design shows homeowners a new way to look at their spaces and provides ideas for how to make each home reach its full potential.

    The few buildings he was able to design during the 1920s, when he also spent much of his time painting and writing, brought him to the forefront of modern architecture, though it wasnt until after World War II that his epoch-making buildings were constructed, such as the Unite dHabitation in Marseilles and the Church of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp. About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Architecture Series features:an introduction to the life and work of the architect the major works in chronological order information about the clients, architectural preconditions as well as construction problems and resolutions a list of all the selected works and a map indicating the locations of the best and most famous buildings approximately 120 illustrations (photographs, sketches, drafts and plans)

    This work features chapters ranging from a study of industrial and brutalist aesthetics in Britain, the Sexpol of Wilhelm Reich in film and design, and the alienation effects of Brecht and Hanns Eisler on record and on screen.

    This collection of sixteen essays is at once philosophic, practical, and visionary. It is an effort to open discussion about the unique experience of Native Americans and offers a concise reference for administrators, educators, students and community leaders involved with Indian Education.

    Consequently, they have been the subject of much utopian thinking about alternatives. But at the same time, they are also the centers of capital accumulation, and therefore the frontline for struggles over who has the right to the city, and who dictates the quality and organization of daily life. Is it the developers and financiers, or the people?Rebel Cities places the city at the heart of both capital and class struggles, looking at locations ranging from Johannesburg to Mumbai, and from New York City to Sao Paulo. By exploring how cities might be reorganized in more socially just and ecologically sane ways, David Harvey argues that cities can become the focus for anti-capitalist resistance.

    Increasingly this term is used to illustrate a bewildering array of ideas from key lines and the occult, to urban walking and political radicalism. But where does it come from and what exactly does it mean? This book examines the origins of psychogeography in the Situationist Movement of the 1950s, exploring the theoretical background and its political applications as well as the work of early practitioners such as Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem. Elsewhere, psychogeographic ideas continue to find retrospective validation in much earlier traditions from the visionary writing of William Blake and Thomas De Quincey to the rise of the flaneur on the streets of 19th century Paris and on through the avant-garde experimentation of the Surrealists. These precursors to psychogeography are discussed here alongside their modern counterparts, for today these ideas hold greater currency than ever through the popularity of writers and filmmakers such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, Stewart Home and Patrick Keiller. From Urban Wandering to Cognitive Mapping, from the Derive to Detournement, psychogeography provides us with new ways of apprehending our surroundings, transforming the familiar streets of our everyday experience into something new and unexpected. This guide conducts the reader through this process, offering both an explanation and definition of the terms involved, and an analysis of the key figures and their work as well as practical information on psychogeographical groups and organizations.

    While this recovery invokes a return of past traditions and ideas, it also implies renewal, invention, and transformation. Recovering Landscape collects a number of essays that discuss why landscape is gaining increased attention today, and what new possibilities might emerge from this situation. Themes such as reclamation, urbanism, infrastructure, geometry, representation, and temporality are explored in discussions drawn from recent developments not only in the United States but also in the Netherlands, France, India, and Southeast Asia. The contributors to this collection, all leading figures in the field of landscape architecture, include Alan Balfour, Denis Cosgrove, Georges Descombes, Christophe Girot, Steen Hoyer, David Leatherbarrow, Bart Lootsma, Sebastien Marot, Anuradha Mathur, Marc Treib, and Alex Wall.

    This book is devoted to the legendary world of fashion, from its origins in the late nineteenth century to the present. Which social, historical, and cultural developments coalesced to allow fashion to become what it is today? Which designers had especially significant impact on their fashion era with extensive portraits of the ground-breaking fashion icons and countless expressive photographs. The result is a comprehensive portrayal of the rapid development of fashion from the liberation of women from the corset all the way to the minimalist and luxurious, playful and sober, conservative and revolutionary creations of modern designers.

    He looks at writers from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Mark Twain and T. S. Eliot, artists like Dürer, and architects such as Pugin and Viollet-le-Duc. He explains the different ways in which Jane Austen, Madame de Stael, and George Eliot struggled to make their voices heard in the masculine hubbub. Victor Hugo allows him to ask, "Can imaginative genius coexist with low intelligence?" Johann Sebastian Bach gives him the opportunity to focus on the role of genetics in creativity and to explore the strange world of the organ loft. Louis Comfort Tiffany takes him into the technology of glass-making and the tragic vagaries of aesthetic fashion. Some essays make illuminating comparisons: of Turner with his contemporary the Japanese master Hokusai, and of the two great dress designers, Balenciaga and Dior. The final essay examines those two inventive geniuses, Picasso and Disney, and asks which had the greater influence on the visual arts of the twentieth century -- and beyond.Paul Johnson believes that creation is a mysterious business that cannot be satisfactorily analyzed. But it can be illustrated in such a way as to bring out its salient characteristics. That is the purpose of this instructive and witty book.

    Here, the author provides a lively historical context for critical play through 20th-century art movements, connecting subversive game design to subversive art.

    Integrating social history with economic and architectural analysis, and taking into account such factors as the availability of cheap land, inexpensive building methods, and rapid transportation, Kenneth Jackson chronicles the phenomenal growth of the American suburb from the middle of the 19th century to the present day. He treats communities in every section of the U.S. and compares American residential patterns with those of Japan and Europe. In conclusion, Jackson offers a controversial prediction: that the future of residential deconcentration will be very different from its past in both the U.S. and Europe.

    Like civilization, play requires structure and participants willing to create within limits. Starting with Plato, Huizinga traces the contribution of Homo Ludens, or "Man the player" through Medieval Times, the Renaissance, and into our modern civilization. Huizinga defines play against a rich theoretical background, using cross-cultural examples from the humanities, business, and politics. Homo Ludens defines play for generations to come."A happier age than ours once made bold to call our species by the name of Homo Sapiens. In the course of time we have come to realize that we are not so reasonable after all as the Eighteenth Century with its worship of reason and naive optimism, though us; "hence moder fashion inclines to designate our species asHomo Faber Man the Maker. But though faber may not be quite so dubious as sapiens it is, as a name specific of the human being, even less appropriate, seeing that many animals too are makers. There is a third function, howver, applicable to both human and animal life, and just as important as reasoning and making--namely, playing. it seems to me that next to Homo Faber, and perhaps on the same level as Homo Sapiens, Homo Ludens, Man the Player, deserves a place in our nomenclature. "--from the Foreward, by Johan Huizinga

    She introduces us to and takes us into the homes of these unusually creative people, who share her belief that thrift, economy, and ingenuity translate into high style indeed. There are before-and-after pictures, tips on repair and storage hints on how to bargain, ideas for themed collections and even a list of what to bring on junking expeditions. The author reveals the price of almost every one of the hundreds and hundreds of items pictured, and best of all provides a directory to more than two "junking sites" nationwide. American Junk is a one-of-a-kind book for those who appreciate the rare, the idiosyncratic, and the unexpected - those who realize that there are as many kinds of junk as there are individuals.

    Up and Down Stairs brings to life this hierarchy, showing how large numbers of people lived together under strict segregation and how sometimes this segregation was broken, as with the famous marriage of a squire to his dairymaid at Uppark. Jeremy Musson captures the voices of the servants who ran these vast houses and made them work. From unpublished memoirs to letters, wages, and newspaper articles, he pieces together their daily lives from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. The story of domestic servants is inseparable from the story of the country house as an icon of power, civilization, and luxury. This is particularly true with the great estates such as Chatsworth, Hatfield, Burghley and Wilton. Jeremy Musson looks at how these grand houses were, for centuries, admired and imitated around the world.