Monrovia Modern
Monrovia Modern

Author: Danny Hoffman

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2017-08-17

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0822373084

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Monrovia Modern Danny Hoffman uses the ruins of four iconic modernist buildings in Monrovia, Liberia, as a way to explore the relationship between the built environment and political imagination. Hoffman shows how the E. J. Roye tower and the Hotel Africa luxury resort, as well as the unfinished Ministry of Defense and Liberia Broadcasting System buildings, transformed during the urban warfare of the 1990s from symbols of the modernist project of nation-building to reminders of the challenges Monrovia's residents face. The transient lives of these buildings' inhabitants, many of whom are ex-combatants, prevent them from making place-based claims to a right to the city and hinder their ability to think of ways to rebuild and repurpose their built environment. Featuring nearly 100 of Hoffman's color photographs, Monrovia Modern is situated at the intersection of photography, architecture, and anthropology, mapping out the possibilities and limits for imagining an urban future in Monrovia and beyond.

1887
1887

Author: Richard Singer

Publisher:

Published: 2020-06

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780578693835

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The story of Monrovia, California's beginnings and the people who created a city.

Los Angeles Modern
Los Angeles Modern

Author:

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2008-10-21

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0847830675

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The birthplace of American modernism, Los Angeles is the epicenter for a new way of living for the last one hundred years, as manifested in its cutting-edge architecture and design. With roots in the innovative houses by Frank Lloyd Wright, Greene & Greene, and Rudolph Schindler in the early twentieth century, this constantly evolving city became a crucible of modern living. Inspired by the International Style, architects and designers in Los Angeles developed their own individual styles with a rare sensitivity to site, landscape, and human scale. This brand of modernism, blurring the boundaries of indoors and outdoors, has since been imitated from Seattle to Sydney. Acclaimed architecture and design photographer Tim Street-Porter captures the best Modernist architecture of Los Angeles, from the seminal Neutra houses to the idiosynchratic structures by Frank Gehry. With iconic buildings by Craig Ellwood, Pierre Koenig, John Lautner, Charles and Ray Eames, and Oscar Niemeyer, among others, L.A. Modern presents the full spectrum of Los Angeles modernism in gorgeous new color photography.

Making L.A. Modern
Making L.A. Modern

Author: Michael Boyd

Publisher: Rizzoli Publications

Published: 2018-04-03

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0847861538

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This is the definitive volume on Craig Ellwood, a visionary architect, designer, and tastemaker often called the “California Mies van der Rohe.” Craig Ellwood, “the Cary Grant of architecture,” was one of the most visible faces of California mid-century modernism. He was known as much for his exquisitely designed, minimalist structures as he was for his exuberant lifestyle. This book celebrates and explores the glamour of Ellwood’s work, life, myth, and career. Through photographs, primarily of the iconic houses he designed in Southern California during the 1950s and ’60s, we see a life of refined decadence, expressed through gorgeous architecture, fast cars, beautiful women, Hollywood style, palm trees, swimming pools, and minimalist design—all in the context of the Southern California postwar building boom. This volume will appeal to design junkies, architecture buffs, students of modernism, and anyone interested in problem-solving and elegant solutions.

New Mediums, Better Messages?
New Mediums, Better Messages?

Author: David Lewis

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0198858752

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY 3.0 IGO International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The notion of development influences and is influenced by all aspects of human life. Social science is but one representational option among many for conveying the myriad ways in which development is conceived, encountered, experienced, justified, courted, and/or resisted by different groups at particular times and places. As international development has become more quantitative and economics-centred, there is an enduring sense that what is measured (and thus 'valued' and prioritized) may have become too narrow, that the powers of prediction claimed by some areas of economics and management may have overreached, and that the human dimension is in danger of being lost. Reflecting this concern, New Mediums, Better Messages? contributes to new conversations between science, social science, and the humanities around the roles of different kinds of knowledge, stories, and data play in relation to global development. It brings together a team of multidisciplinary contributors to explore popular representions of development, including music, blogs, and fiction.

Quinine's Remains
Quinine's Remains

Author: Townsend Middleton

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024-05-21

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 0520399137

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. What happens after colonial industries have run their course—after the factory closes and the fields go fallow? Set in the cinchona plantations of India’s Darjeeling Hills, Quinine’s Remains chronicles the history and aftermaths of quinine. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria’s only remedy until the twentieth-century advent of synthetic drugs, and it was vital to the British Empire. Today, the cinchona plantations—and the roughly fifty thousand people who call them home—remain. Their futures, however, are unclear. The Indian government has threatened to privatize or shut down this seemingly obsolete and crumbling industry, but the plantation community, led by strident trade unions, has successfully resisted. Overgrown cinchona fields and shuttered quinine factories may appear the stuff of postcolonial and postindustrial ruination, but quinine’s remains are not dead. Rather, they have become the site of urgent efforts to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. Quinine's Remains offers a vivid historical and ethnographic portrait of what it means to forge life after empire.

A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa
A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa

Author: Roy Richard Grinker

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-02-06

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 1119251486

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An essential collection of scholarly essays on the anthropology of Africa, offering a thorough introduction to the most important topics in this evolving and diverse field of study The study of the cultures of Africa has been central to the methodological and theoretical development of anthropology as a discipline since the late 19th-century. As the anthropology of Africa has emerged as a distinct field of study, anthropologists working in this tradition have strived to build a disciplinary conversation that recognizes the diversity and complexity of modern and ancient African cultures while acknowledging the effects of historical anthropology on the present and future of the field of study. A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa is a collection of insightful essays covering the key questions and subjects in the contemporary anthropology of Africa with a key focus on addressing the topics that define the contemporary discipline. Written and edited by a team of leading cultural anthropologists, it is an ideal introduction to the most important topics in the field, both those that have consistently been a part of the critical dialogue and those that have emerged as the central questions of the discipline’s future. Beginning with essays on the enduring topics in the study of African cultures, A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa provides a foundation in the contemporary critical approach to subjects of longstanding interest. With these subjects as a groundwork, later essays address decolonization, the postcolonial experience, and questions of modern identity and definition, providing representation of the diverse thinking and scholarship in the modern anthropology of Africa.

Heritage and Democracy
Heritage and Democracy

Author: Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2023-05-23

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 0813070368

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Examining cultural heritage within the context of democracy Cultural heritage is a powerful tool in society, capable of producing both social harms as well as social goods and benefits, which can be distributed unevenly via political channels. Reaching across disciplines and national boundaries, this volume examines cultural heritage work within the context of both democratic institutions and democratic practices, including participatory, deliberative, and direct democratic practices. Case studies highlight how democratic politics and cultural heritage shape, impact, and depend upon one another. The rising crisis of democracy across the globe brings these dynamics into sharp relief. The unfinished and fragile nature of democratic politics shines a spotlight on both its shortcomings and its aspirational potential. This is a paradox that heritage practitioners and stakeholders navigate daily, serving as both critics and collaborators of democracy. At the same time that heritage practice embraces participatory approaches, it must also address the challenge of reconciling multiple, often unequal, and frequently incompatible claims for control over heritage. Grappling with democracy’s crises also increasingly means recognizing the power of heritage to reinforce or undermine democracy. These essays ask: What are the democratic motives of heritage practice? Why do democracies need heritage? How do the social and cultural referents of heritage infuse democratic practices? Emphasizing the interplay of heritage and democracy in practices and institutions across scales of governance, Heritage and Democracy pinpoints a dynamic that has not been widely examined. Contributors: Stacey L. Camp | Jon D. Daehnke | Kasey Diserens Morgan | Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann | Dorothy Ann Engmann | Bobbie Foster Bhusari | Peter G. Gould | Erin A. Hogg | Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels | Magda E. Mankel | Chelsea H. Meloche | George P. Nicholas | Ellen J. Platts | Jasmine Reid | Paul A. Shackel | John R. Welch A volume in the series Cultural Heritage Studies, edited by Paul A. Shackel

The Aesthetics of Belonging
The Aesthetics of Belonging

Author: Claudia Gastrow

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2024-10-25

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1469682192

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

After centuries of colonial rule, the end of Angola's three-decade civil war in 2002 provided an irresistible opportunity for the government to reimagine the Luanda cityscape. Awash with petrodollars cultivated through strategic foreign relationships, President Jose Eduardo dos Santos rolled out a national reconstruction program that sought to transform Angola's capital into what he considered to be a modern, world-class metropolis. Until funds dried up in 2014, the program—in conjunction with sweeping private investments in real estate—involved mass demolitions of vernacular architecture to make way for high-rise buildings, large-scale housing projects, and commercial centers. The program thus underestimated the values enshrined in the materials and designs of Luanda's existing "informally" constructed neighborhoods, or musseques. The Aesthetics of Belonging explores the political significance of aesthetics in the remaking of the city. Claudia Gastrow's archival and ethnographic work, which includes interviews with city planners, architects, nonprofit leaders, and urban dwellers, shows how government infrastructure projects and foreign-inspired designs came to embody displacement and exclusion for many. This, Gastrow argues, catalyzed a countermovement, an aesthetic dissent rooted in critically reframing informal urbanism as Indigenous—a move that enabled the possibility of recognizing the political potential of informal settlements as spaces that produce belonging.

Capoeira Connections
Capoeira Connections

Author: Katya Wesolowski

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2023-01-17

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1683403460

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of Duke University. A portrait of the game of capoeira and its practice across borders Originating in the Black Atlantic world as a fusion of dance and martial art, capoeira was a marginalized practice for much of its history. Today it is globally popular. This ethnographic memoir weaves together the history of capoeira, recent transformations in the practice, and personal insights from author Katya Wesolowski’s thirty years of experience as a capoeirista. Capoeira Connections follows Wesolowski’s journey from novice to instructor while drawing on her decades of research as an anthropologist in Brazil, Angola, Europe, and the United States. In a story of local practice and global flow, Wesolowski offers an intimate portrait of the game and what it means in people’s lives. She reveals camaraderie and conviviality in the capoeira ring as well as tensions and ruptures involving race, gender, and competing claims over how this artful play should be practiced. Capoeira brings people together and yet is never free of histories of struggle, and these too play out in the game’s encounters. In her at once clear-sighted and hopeful analysis, Wesolowski ultimately argues that capoeira offers opportunities for connection, dialogue, and collaboration in a world that is increasingly fractured. In doing so, capoeira can transform lives, create social spheres, and shape mobile futures. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.