I Am The Architect of My Own Destruction is a collection of greeting card/Tumblr quality poetry about stars, dark personal feelings, survival, suffering, flowers, healing, existential thoughts, mental illness, melancholic love, and self-love.
Depression. It's a battle. One that too many people sadly cannot conquer, or even know how to begin to tackle. Recent studies in Australia show that a person takes their own life every three hours. Men in particular are still stigmatised when it comes to looking after their mental and emotional wellbeing, and this contributes to the fact that there are so many men who not only find themselves in a depressive state, but get stuck there; sometimes for the rest of their lives, or worse still, reaching the point of ending their own lives. Something needs to change, and stories like Rick's are exactly what are needed. Rick Williams would be considered by many to be your average, Aussie male, and there's no doubt that his story will sound awfully familiar to most young males living in today's society. As you read his brutally honest words, share in his pain, confusion and challenges, you will soon realise just how inspiring it is to find out how he has been able to overcome it. I am the Architect of my own Destruction is the powerful, real life story of this incredible young man's journey from the absolute depths of depression, to living a full and purposeful life.
Confessions of a Wallflower is a collection of poetry, prose, quotes, and personal journals about depression, self-love, love, loss, and healing. It's a journey to pain, sorrow, and suffering where the only destination is hope.
In Making Dystopia, distinguished architectural historian James Stevens Curl tells the story of the advent of architectural Modernism in the aftermath of the First World War, its protagonists, and its astonishing, almost global acceptance after 1945. He argues forcefully that the triumph of architectural Modernism in the second half of the twentieth century led to massive destruction, the creation of alien urban landscapes, and a huge waste of resources. Moreover, the coming of Modernism was not an inevitable, seamless evolution, as many have insisted, but a massive, unparalled disruption that demanded a clean slate and the elimination of all ornament, decoration, and choice. Tracing the effects of the Modernist revolution in architecture to the present, Stevens Curl argues that, with each passing year, so-called 'iconic' architecture by supposed 'star' architects has become more and more bizarre, unsettling, and expensive, ignoring established contexts and proving to be stratospherically remote from the aspirations and needs of humanity. In the elite world of contemporary architecture, form increasingly follows finance, and in a society in which the 'haves' have more and more, and the 'have-nots' are ever more marginalized, he warns that contemporary architecture continues to stack up huge potential problems for the future, as housing costs spiral out of control, resources are squandered on architectural bling, and society fractures. This courageous, passionate, deeply researched, and profoundly argued book should be read by everyone concerned with what is around us. Its combative critique of the entire Modernist architectural project and its apologists will be highly controversial to many. But it contains salutary warnings that we ignore at our peril. And it asks awkward questions to which answers are long overdue.
The city of Homs, like so many places in Syria, has suffered mass destruction since the war began in 2011. So far, the architectural response to the crisis has focused on 'cultural heritage', ancient architecture, and the external displacement of refugees, often neglecting the everyday lives of Syrians and the buildings that make up their homes and communities. In Domicide, Ammar Azzouz uses the notion of the 'home' to address the destruction in cities like Homs, the displacement of Syrian people both externally and internally, and to explore how cities can be rebuilt without causing further damage to the communities that live there. Drawing on interviews with those working in the built environment professions, both inside and outside of Syria, but also Syrians from other backgrounds who have become 'architects' in their own way as they were forced to repair and rebuild their homes by themselves, Domicide offers fresh insight into the role of the architect during time of war, and explores how the future reconstruction of cities should mirror the wants and needs, the traditions and ways of living, of local communities. Focusing on Homs but offering a blueprint for other urban areas of conflict across Syria and the wider world, the book is essential reading for researchers in architecture, urban planning, heritage studies and conflict studies.
'Imperfect Health' looks at the complexity of today's health problems juxtaposed with a variety of proposed architectural and urban solutions. Essays by Margaret Campbell, David Gissen, Carla C. Keirns, and Sarah Schrank deal with different aspects of the topic of health in the context of architecture.
After critiquing—and infuriating—the art world with The Painted Word, award-winning author Tom Wolfe shared his less than favorable thoughts about modern architecture in From Bauhaus to Our Haus. In this examination of the strange saga of twentieth century architecture, Wolfe takes such European architects as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Bauhaus art school founder Walter Gropius to task for their glass and steel box designed buildings that have influenced—and infected—America’s cities.
Robin Boyd: Late Works unveils the urban and public architectural projects designed by Robin Boyd, one of Australia's most iconic mid-century modernists, in the final decade before his untimely death in 1971. One of the few architects in Australia's history to have become a household name, Boyd rose to prominence as a public intellectual after the release of his book The Australian Ugliness in 1960, a biting attack on what he saw as the debased quality of Australia's cities and design culture. Upon its release, the book drew both condemnation and praise in Australia's media, but in the process gave Boyd a national platform from which to campaign throughout the 1960s for the betterment of Australia's built environment. Concomitant with his public pronouncements during this time, though, Boyd was hard at work attempting to prosecute his vision of a more coherent and contemporary Australian urban environment and culture. This work took the form of building and planning designs, at sometimes vast scales, that run counter to Boyd's reputation as an architect of polite modernist private houses.Robin Boyd: Late Works considers these important but largely forgotten architectural projects alongside his exhibition work, multimedia designs and his writing. Bringing to light material buried deep in the archives of several national institutions, this book documents Boyd's ambitions and struggles to shape Australia's understanding of itself as an urban nation during this time. For Boyd, the 1960s was a turbulent decade of architectural practice that, by the time of his death, had come with thwarted ambitions and high personal cost.
The phrase, ""the Culture of Death"", is bandied about as a catch-all term that covers abortion, euthanasia and other attacks on the sanctity of life. In Architects of the Culture of Death, authors Donald DeMarco and Benjamin Wiker expose the Culture of Death as an intentional and malevolent ideology promoted by influential thinkers who specifically attack Christian morality's core belief in the sanctity of human life and the existence of man's immortal soul. In scholarly, yet reader-friendly prose, DeMarco and Wiker examine the roots of the Culture of Death by introducing 23 of its architects, including Ayn Rand, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alfred Kinsey, Margaret Sanger, Jack Kevorkian, and Peter Singer. Still, this is not a book without hope. If the Culture of Death rests on a fragmented view of the person and an eclipse of God, the future of the Culture of Life relies on an understanding and restoration of the human being as a person, and the rediscovery of a benevolent God. The personalism of John Paul II is an illuminating thread that runs through Architects, serving as a hopeful antidote.
BEFORE quitting England for a first visit to Spain in the Autumn of 1869, I made up my mind both to see and draw as much of the Architectural remains of that country as the time and means at my disposal would permit; and further determined so to draw as to admit of the publication of my sketches and portions of my notes on the objects represented, in the precise form in which they might be made. I was influenced in that determination by the consciousness that almost from day to day the glorious past was being trampled out in Spain; and that whatever issue, prosperous or otherwise, the fortunes of that much distracted country might take in the future, the minor monuments of Art at least which adorned its soil, would rapidly disappear. Their disappearance would result naturally from what is called "progress" if Spain should revive; while their perishing through neglect and wilful damage, or peculation, would inevitably follow, if the ever smouldering embers of domestic revolution should burst afresh into flame. Such has been the invariable action of those fires which in all history have melted away the most refined evidences of man's intelligence, leaving behind only scanty, and often all but shapeless, relics of the richest and ripest genius.