THE WHOLE EARTH: CALIFORNIA AND THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE OUTSIDE
Diedrich Diederichsen, Anselm Franke (eds.)
Sternberg Press, co-published with Haus der Kulturen der Welt
July 2013, English
26 x 35 cm, 208 pages, 350 colour and b/w illustrations, softcover
ISBN 978-3-943365-64-1
This month, we made editors’ picks of our own favourite tomes from the last twelve months. From tales of 750 families squatting in a 45-storey tower to a 27-kilometre tunnel made just for two protons to meet, we've been reading around the subject in the crazy world of architecture and beyond. Happy holidays!
“The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside” at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt was hands-down one of the best exhibitions anywhere this year. Using Stewart Brand’s seminal Whole Earth Catalog as a foundation for a thorough cataloguing and re-vivifying of 60s counter-culture – from eco-consciousness to cybernetics – curatorial power-duo Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke assembled a mind-blowing amount of visual material. The exhibition has yielded an equally dense, rich, and fascinating catalogue, whose format is arguably better suited to present the overflowing subject matter and its documentation. Whether or not you saw the show, this book is a stand alone gem. Part historical study, part retro-futurism, and wholly relevant, this publication belongs on your bookshelf right alongside the original catalogues from 1968-72. (ew)
INSIDE CERN
Andri Pol
European Organisation for Nuclear Research
Andri Pol and Lars Müller (eds.)
Lars Müller
2014, English
20 x 27.5 cm, 432 pages, 295 illustrations, softcover
ISBN 978-3-03778-262-0
An opulent new photo essay that is a treat for closet nerds everywhere. Swiss photographer Andri Pol was granted access to the European Organisation for Nuclear Research’s inner sanctum near Geneva. The CERN complex houses 2,500 employees dedicated to investigating the origin of matter and, by default, humanity’s most fundamental questions: What are we? Where are we going? Where do we come from?
Pol’s documentary images reveal charmingly domestic and surprisingly humorous insights into everyday life at nerd central. It might suck up billions of CHF annually, with no expense spared on its spectacular custom-made hardware such as the 27-km-long underground Large Hadron Collider, but CERN’s shabby 1950s office spaces populated by boffins in shorts and sandals (with socks of course), maltreated pot plants, mountains of paper and impromptu pin-boards, reveal a world refreshingly devoid of aesthetic considerations. People here clearly have far more important things to think about.
See our interview with Andri Pol and a selection of images from the book here. (sl)
ARCHITECTURE AND CAPITALISM
1845 to the Present
Peggy Deamer, Ed.,
Routledge, 2014
264 pages,
Paperback/Hardback, 15.7 x 23.4 mm
With new essays by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Ellen Dunham-Jones, Keller Easterling, Lauren Kogod, Robert Hewison, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Robin Schuldenfrei, Deborah Gans, Simon Sadler, Nathan Rich, and Michael Sorkin.
ISBN 978-0-415-53488-8 / 978-0-415-53487-1
OK, it might seem a bit of a heavy subject for Christmas. But hey: think Scrooge. Money has always been part of the Festive Season, which now appears as primarily a celebration of another big “C” word: capitalism. This book, tightly edited by Peggy Deamer, gives a series of incisive cuts through architecture and capitalism’s often rather cosy co-existence (architecture as built-capital and all that) with a series of newly commissioned essays from the likes of Deborah Gans, Michael Sorkin and Pier Vittorio Aureli.
The timescale covers the last 150 years – from boomtime Chicago and the breaking of the construction unions to Dometime London – or rather the ill-begotten Millennium Dome’s search for meaning – via the Werkbund, Bauhaus, Le Corbusier and Rem Koolhaas, the new Indian city of Gurgaon and the recent Occupy protests. It throws light on the Ghosts of Architecture Past, Present and Yet to Come. (rgw)
TORRE DAVID – INFORMAL VERTICAL COMMUNITIES
Edited by Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner (Urban Think-Tank)
Photos by Iwan Baan
Hardcover, 416pp., 406 illustrations, 16.5x24 cm
Lars Mueller Publishers, Zurich, 2013
ISBN: 978-3-03778-298-9
www.lars-mueller-publishers.com
www.torredavid.com
Architecture meets life in the concrete structures of Torre David, a 45-storey office high-rise in Caracas that was abandoned half-finished when Venezuela’s economy collapsed in 1994. In the years following, 750 families moved into the structure, filling the empty floors with self-built homes and infrastructure including a gym, a church, grocery stores and hair salons. In this book, a handful of essays and particularly hundreds of photos by the inevitable Iwan Baan brilliantly portray the history and the daily life of this “Informal Vertical Community”. The compendium stretches this intense case study far beyond Urban-Think Tank’s 2012 exhibition about building, for which they won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. The clash of the formal and the informal, the improvised and the permanent have never come across in a more inspiring way than in this book. If you are considering tucking Rudofsky’s classic Architecture Without Architects under the Christmas tree this year (which is also a good idea!) think of this as a more current version. (fh)
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