Ruins: Documents of Contemporary Art
Edited by Brian Dillon
Published by Whitechapel Gallery
Softcover, 240 pages, no illustrations
ISBN: 978–0–85488–193–2
Finnish Architecture with an Edge
Edited and written by Tarja Nurmi
Photographs by Kari Palsila
Published by Maahenki, Helsinki, 2013
Hardcover, 215 x 275 mm, 280 pages
ISBN: 978-952-5870-69-5
Part of Whitechapel Gallery’s current Documents book series, which considers key themes and ideas in contemporary art, this anthology of extracts and essays unravels and explores the recent obsession with decay and so-called “ruin lust” in art, architecture, and cultural practice. The book is clearly organised in four sections: “Modernity in Ruins,” “The Military-Industrial Sublime,” “Drosscape,” “The Future Now,” showing how the idea of the ruin has been institutionalised and transformed from a product of a utopian failure into a subject of inspiration and interest. One downside is that the book contains no images as reference – although, conversely, this also makes it a rich exercise for the imagination. (gl)
With thoughtful texts and packed with pictures, this book acts as a useful primer for recent key projects and developments in Finnish architecture. It includes recent housing, transport, commercial, educational and cultural projects, but also looks further afield to Finnish practices working abroad, in particular the extraordinary scale and materiality of the recently-completed Wuxi Grand Theatre on the shore of Lake Taihu, China by PES-Architects. (rw)
Encyclopedia of Flowers
Flower Works by Makoto Azuma
Photograhs by Shunsuke Shiinoki
Lars Müller Publishers, 2012
Paperback in transparent slipcase, 16.5 × 24.8 cm, 512 pages, 203 color illustrations, English
ISBN 978-3-03778-313-9
Stun-ning-ly BEAUTIFUL. Rarely are images of death this haunting, or simultaneously suggestive of life and rebirth. This volume is a record of the Japan-based image work created by the flower arrangements of Makoto Azuma and the photography of Shunsuke Shiinoki, going far beyond images into the reality of our human environment and its flora. Azuma and Shinoki’s work is about cycles of existence, cultivated nature: with the number of newly-invented flowers too numerous to name; and unstable, human-influenced nature – as cherry blossoms worldwide become mysteriously whiter. The images are still as death on the page, but are riotous representations of life, radiating something true and deep about the realm of the soul, poetics, aesthetics. The notes for “Whole,” a section of the book, sum up the rationale behind the Encylopedia: “Any sense of seasons, the particularity of a climate, or the special quality of a breed no longer possesses a fixed definition. Chaos. A microcosm of the world we live in.” The lush hyperstatic photographs contain mixtures of cultivation, manipulation and virgin nature as complex in the miniature as any city, any landscape, anything wrought by the natural and, in the end, human hand. (jb)
Concrete: Photography and Architecture
Edited by Fotomuseum Winterthur
Scheidegger & Spiess, 2013
Text in English and German
Hardback, 21 x 28 cm, 440 pages, 156 color and 157 b/w illustrations
Concrete: Photography and Architecture offers an enjoyable and surprising roller coaster ride through almost 200 years of "taking pictures of buildings.“ A rather idiosyncratic structure with chapters going from “Power, Boundaries, Security” to “Paris” and from “Construction, Decay, Destruction” to “Calkutta,” it includes pictures from Joseph Nicéphore Nièpces, Julius Shulman, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Gordon Matta-Clark, Denise Scott-Brown and Robert Venturi, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Georg Aerni, and too many more to mention. Turning its pages is a constantly surprising ride indeed, spanning space and time and offering with its unusual combinations new perspectives on the big topic of how to put architecture (and sometimes people) in pictures. (fh)
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