She crafts a fresh approach that exposes the real-world impact of ideas in philosophy, science, art, literature, and film--voices that surround us in the classroom, in the movie theater, and in our living rooms.A former agnostic, Pearcey offers a persuasive case for historic Christianity as a holistic and humane alternative. She equips readers to counter the life-denying worldviews that are radically restructuring society and pervading our daily lives. Whether you are a devoted Christian, determined secularist, or don't know quite where you stand, reading Saving Leonardo will unsettle established views and topple ideological idols. Includes more than 100 art reproductions and illustrations that bring the book's themes to life.

    In the essay, originally published in Spanish in 1925, Ortega grappled philosophically with the newness of nonrepresentational art and sought to make it more understandable to a public confused by it. Many embraced the essay as a manifesto extolling the virtues of vanguard artists and promoting their efforts to abandon the realism and the romanticism of the nineteenth century.The dehumanization of the title, which was meant descriptively rather than pejoratively, referred most literally to the absence of human forms in nonrepresentational art, but also to its insistent unpopularity, its indifference to the past, and its iconoclasm. Ortega championed what he saw as a new cultural politics with the goal of a total transformation of society.Ortega was an immensely gifted writer in the best belletristic tradition. His work has been compared to an iceberg because it hides the critical mass of its erudition beneath the surface, and because it is deceptive, appearing to be more spontaneous and informal than it really is.Princeton published the first English translation of the essay paired with another entitled Notes on the Novel. Three essays were later added to make an expanded edition, published in 1968, under the title The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture and Literature .

    Harry Sword traces the line from neolithic Indo-European traditions to the modern underground by way of mid-20th Century New York, navigating a beguiling topography of archeoacoustics, ringing feedback, chest plate sub bass, avant-garde eccentricity, and fervent spiritualism. From ancient beginnings to bawdy medieval troubadours, Sufi mystics to Indian raga masters, North Mississippi bluesmen to cone-shattering South London dub reggae sound systems, Hawkwind's Ladbroke Grove to the outer reaches of Faust, Ash Ra Temple and sonic architects like La Monte Young, Brian Eno, and John Cale, the opium-fueled fug of The Theatre of Eternal Music to the caveman doom of Saint Vitus, the cough syrup reverse hardcore of Swans to the seedy VHS hinterland of Electric Wizard, ritual amp worship of Earth and Sunn O))) and the many touch points in between, Monolithic Undertow probes the power of the drone: something capable of affording womb-like warmth or evoking cavernous dread alike.This story does not start in the twentieth century underground: the monolithic undertow has bewitched us for millennia. The book takes the drone not as codified genre but as an audio carrier vessel deployed for purposes of ritual, personal catharsis, or sensory obliteration, revealing also a naturally occurring auditory phenomenon spanning continents and manifesting in fascinatingly unexpected places.Monolithic Undertow will be a book about music and the very human need for transcendence and intoxication through sound. It seeks to reveal the drone as a tool of personal liberation that exists far outside the brittle confines of commodity culture.

    In particular, his residential work has been the subject of continuing interest and controversy. Wright's Fallingwater (1935), the seminal masterpiece perched over a waterfall deep in the Pennsylvania highlands, is perhaps the best-known private house in the history of the world. In fact, Wright's houses-from his Prairie style Robie House (1906) in Chicago, to the Storer (1923) and Freeman (1923) houses in Los Angeles, and Taliesen West (1937) in the Arizona desert-are all touchstones of modern architecture. For the first time, all 289 extant houses are shown here in exquisite color photographs. Along with Weintraub's stunning photos and a selection of floor plans and archival images, the book includes text and essays by several leading Wright scholars. Frank Lloyd Wright: The Houses is an event of great importance and a major contribution to the literature on this titan of modern architecture.

    Professor Twombly's introduction and headnotes offer incisive commentary on the texts.

     Homeowners and renters of all means dream of having a beautiful home. The media makes it look so easy, but many of us have less to work with and still long to live in style. Affordable Interior Design makes luxury an affordable reality. In this DIY home decorating handbook, Helmuth reveals insider tips and her tried-and-tested methods for choosing colors, creating a gallery wall, how to use accent tables, entry benches, rugs, and more! Helmuth has shared her affordable design advice and step-by-step approaches with millions through live teaching workshops, guest columns, television appearances, and interviews. Now, she has distilled her expertise into this practical guide. The chapters follow her secret design formula and include creating a design budget, mapping out floor plans, selecting a color palette, and accessorizing like a stylist. It’s time to start living in the home of your dreams without maxing out your credit cards. Learn how with Affordable Interior Design!

    Along with commercial and dwelling units, temples, palaces, and cathedrals, Zevi treats structures such as fountains, columns, and monuments, subjecting them all to aesthetic, cultural, and functional criteria and explaining them in easily understood terms. Beautifully illustrated with examples from the entire history of the art, this is one of the most stimulating and provocative books ever written on the history and purpose of architecture.

    Each architect also presents a reading list of top ten influential titles, from architectural history to theory to fiction and nonfiction, that serves as a personal philosophy of literature and history, and advice on what every young architect, scholar, and lover of architecture should read. An inspiring cross-section of notable libraries, this beautiful book celebrates the arts of reading and collecting. Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books features the libraries of:Stan AllenHenry CobbLiz Diller & Ric ScofidioPeter EisenmanMichael GravesSteven HollToshiko MoriMichael SorkinBernard TschumiTodd Williams & Billie TsienPeter Eisenman's Recommended Titles:Robert Musil, The Man Without QualitiesLe Corbusier, Vers une ArchitectureThomas Pynchon, Gravity's RainbowRobert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in ArchitectureRem Koolhaas, Delirious New YorkJacques Derrida, Of GrammatologyAndrea Palladio, The Four Books on ArchitectureWalter Benjamin, IlluminationsJames Joyce, Finnegans WakeWilliam Faulkner, Light in August

    As such, this is a critical survey of modern Western philosophy, focusing in particular on the complex relations between aesthetics, ethics & politics. Eagleton provides a brilliant & challenging introduction to these concerns, as characterized in the work of Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Lukacs, Adorno, Habermas & others. Wide in span, as well as morally & politically committed, this is his major work to date. It forms both an original enquiry & an exemplary introduction.

    Drawing upon such diverse sources as theories of Benjamin, Adorno and Horckheimer, research on the Cuna Indians, and theories of colonialism and postcolonialism, Taussig shows that the history of mimesis is deeply tied to colonialism, and more specifically, to the colonial trade's construction of "savages." With analysis that is vigorous, unorthodox, and often breathtaking, Taussig's cross-cultural discussion of mimesis deepens our understanding of the relationship between ethnography, racism and society.

    First published in German in 1985 and now available in English for the first time, Into the Universe of Technical Images outlines the history of communication technology as a process of increasing abstraction.Flusser charts how communication evolved from direct interaction with the world to mediation through various technologies. The invention of writing marked one significant shift; the invention of photography marked another, heralding the current age of the technical image. The automation of the processing of technical images carries both promise and threat: the promise of freeing humans to play and invent and the threat for networks of automation to proceed independently of humans.

    A work of creative nonfiction, the book roams through space, time and possibility, mapping cities of sound, melancholia and the afterlife, where time runs backwards or which float among the clouds. In doing so, Imaginary Cities seeks to move beyond the clichés of psychogeography and hauntology, to not simply revisit the urban past, or our relationship with it, but to invade and reinvent it. Following in the lineage of Borges, Calvino, Chris Marker and Kenneth White, the book examines the city from global macrocosm to the microcosm of its inhabitants’ perspectives. It proceeds through opium dreams, sea voyages, the hallucinations of prisoners, nocturnal decadence, impossible Soviet skyscrapers, marauding golems, subterranean civilisations, apocalyptic prophecies and the work of architectural visionaries such as Antonio Sant’Elia, Archigram and Buckminster Fuller. It rethinks the ideas of utopias and dystopias, urban exploration, alienation and resistance. It claims that the Situationists lacked ambition when they suggested, “Beneath the paving stones, the beach.” Instead, beneath the paving stones, we may just be able to discern the entire universe. Imaginary Cities demonstrates that each city dreamt up by artists, writers, architects and lunatics has a real-life equivalent and that the great Marco Polo was no liar. Imaginary Cities need not simply exist in fiction or the mind. We already inhabit them.

    Where does our current obsession for interactivity stem from? After the consumer society and the communication era, does art still contribute to the emergence of a rational society? Bourriaud attempts to renew our approach toward contemporary art by getting as close as possible to the artists works, and by revealing the principles that structure their thoughts: an aesthetic of the inter-human, of the encounter; of proximity, of resisting social formatting.

    His sustained inquiry into the paradoxical relationship of art to life and into the nature of meaning itself is brought into focus in this newly expanded collection of his most significant writings. A new preface and two new additional essays published in the 1990s bring this valuable collection up to date.

    He argues that the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as President does not necessarily signal a crucial turning point in French politics, nor require a further rightward move from competing electoral forces.To understand the significance of Sarkozy, we have to look beyond the right-wing populism and vulgarity of the man himself, and ask what he represents: a reactionary tradition that goes back to the early nineteenth century, a tradition based on fear.Badiou argues that to escape from the atmosphere of depression and anxiety that currently envelops the Left, we need to cast aside the slavish worship of electoral democracy. In a characteristically doughty and wide-ranging conclusion, Alain Badioun maps out a ‘communist hypothesis’ that can lay the basis for a genuine emancipatory politics in the twenty-first century.