Concepts and Influences

Concepts and Influences

Author: Rifat Chadirji

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13:

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First published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.


Modernism and the Middle East

Modernism and the Middle East

Author: Sandy Isenstadt

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2011-03-01

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0295800305

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This provocative collection of essays is the first book-length treatment of the development of modern architecture in the Middle East. Ranging from Jerusalem at the turn of the twentieth century to Libya under Italian colonial rule, postwar Turkey, and on to present-day Iraq, the essays cohere around the historical encounter between the politics of nation-building and architectural modernism's new materials, methods, and motives. Architecture, as physical infrastructure and as symbolic expression, provides an exceptional window onto the powerful forces that shaped the modern Middle East and that continue to dominate it today. Experts in this volume demonstrate the political dimensions of both creating the built environment and, subsequently, inhabiting it. In revealing the tensions between achieving both international relevance and regional meaning, Modernism in the Middle East affords a dynamic view of the ongoing confrontations of deep traditions with rapid modernization. Political and cultural historians, as well as architects and urban planners, will find fresh material here on a range of diverse practices.


Architectural Excellence in Islamic Societies

Architectural Excellence in Islamic Societies

Author: Ashraf M. Salama

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-15

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1351057472

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This book discusses architectural excellence in Islamic societies drawing on textual and visual materials, from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT, developed over more than three decades. At the core of the discussion are the efforts, processes, and outcomes of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (AKAA). The AKAA recognises excellence in architectural and urban interventions within cities and settlements in the Islamic world which are continuously challenged by dramatic changes in economies, societies, political systems, decision-making, and environmental requirements. Architectural Excellence in Islamic Societies responds to the recurring question about the need for architectural awards, arguing that they are critical to validating the achievements of professional architects while making their contributions more widely acknowledged by the public. Through analysis and critique of over sixty awarded and shortlisted projects from over thirty-five countries, this book provides an expansive look at the history of the AKAA through a series of narratives on the enduring values of architecture, architectural and urban conservation, built environment sustainability, and architectural pluralism and multiple modernities. Architectural Excellence in Islamic Societies will appeal to professionals and academics, researchers, and upper-level students in architectural history and theory and built environment related fields.


Baghdad Arts Deco

Baghdad Arts Deco

Author: Caecilia Pieri

Publisher: American Univ in Cairo Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789774163562

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An homage to the modern architectural landscape of Iraq. Despite dictatorship, international sanctions, and the ravages of war, Baghdad endures with a surprisingly exceptional modern architectural heritage. This beautifully illustrated study reveals the splendors of early twentieth-century architecture that still stand on the streets of Iraq's capital. From 1920 to 1950, in the process of nation-building, Baghdad was transformed into a true city built of brick, one that became the harbinger of the Arab architectural renaissance, its local traditions reinterpreted and adapted into a modern vernacular style. Caecilia Pieri's documentation foregrounds the physical reality of modern Baghdad, very different from the image that we normally receive from the media. She draws on a number of unpublished sources and documents, to present Baghdad's architecture in a historical perspective, and her striking photographs taken between 2003 and 2006 document the residential areas of the twentieth-century city, providing an unprecedented resource for historians, urban planners, and general readers interested in discovering a new face of a world capital. With essays by Rifat Chadirji, Ihsan Fethi, and Naïm Kattan.


Environmental Communications

Environmental Communications

Author: Mark Wasiuta

Publisher: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City

Published: 2021-06-29

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9781941332122

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Formed by a group of young architects, photographers, and psychologists in the Venice Beach of the late 1960s, Environmental Communications honed an image practice that constituted a new visual syntax for the late twentieth century city. The group speculated that their "environmental photography" would alter architecture and transform the consciousness of architecture students by way of the ubiquitous architecture slide library. Through their media experiments, events, and slide catalogs, they positioned themselves as interpreters and purveyors of new trends, assembling a lively body of populist and radical design imagery that undermined the canons defined by the prevailing institutions of architectural design. In reproducing the group's photography, booklets, and ephemera, Environmental Communications: Contact High records and critically reflects upon the work of this West Coast media collective.


Moholy-Nagy

Moholy-Nagy

Author: Matthew S. Witkovsky

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 9780300214796

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"Moholy-Nagy: Future Present is published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art."


Building Iran

Building Iran

Author: Talinn Grigor

Publisher: Fastprint Publishing

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781934772782

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Revolution and tradition are two sides of the same coin in Talinn Grigor's book on Iranian architecture. It starts in 1925 after Reza Pahlavi seized control of the country, but it arcs back to Ancient and Medieval Persia. Not that the government was rejecting modernity. IT instead promoted a reconstruction of the past that would aid efforts to make modern Iran an independent nation with an irrefutable claim to existence and power. Prodigious archival research informs Grigor's account of the excavations and discoveries Iranian authorities used to construct monuments to national heroes like Omar Khayyam, an important mathematician and astronomer of the 11th century as well as the author of the 'Rubauyat'. Grigor also brings immense knowledge to her lively discussions of the modern idiom integrated into such retrospective monuments and buildings. This book is the first in English to study 20th century Iranian architecture within the historical contexts that shaped its from and significance. The corpus of photographs will help the many readers unfamiliar with the architectural riches of Iran. Current turbulence and misunderstanding with the Middle East highlight the important of Grigor's book. ILLUSTRATIONS: 158


The Monument

The Monument

Author: Kanan Makiya

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2003-12-31

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 0857714880

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In Baghdad, an enormous monument nearly twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe towers over the city. Two huge forearms emerge from the ground, clutching two swords that clash overhead. Those arms are enlarged casts of those of Saddam Hussein, showing every bump and follicle. The "Victory Arch" celebrates a victory over Iran (in their eight-year-long war) that never happened. This text is a study of the interplay between art and politics - of how culture, normally an unquestioned good, can play into the hands of a power with devastating effects. Kanan Makiya uses the culture invented by Saddam Hussein as a window into the nature of totalitarianism and shows how art can become the weapon of dictatorship. Under Saddam Hussein, culture connived in his evil - this text explains how. It should be useful reading for anyone concerned with the power of culture and the culture of power.


Architecture in the 20th Century

Architecture in the 20th Century

Author: Udo Kultermann

Publisher: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13:

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A comprehensive guide to 20th-century architecture which places design in its historical, sociological and political context. Intended as a text, but useful to professionals, it covers all periods, types and movements including examples from the Third World and Eastern Europe. Four parts examine puristic tendencies, organic architecture, urban arch.


Information Fall-Out: Buckminster Fuller's World Game

Information Fall-Out: Buckminster Fuller's World Game

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2018-05

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9783037785539

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Buckminster Fuller's humanitarian take on the war game Initially proposed for the US Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, Buckminster Fuller's World Game was an educational simulation intended to create solutions for overpopulation and the uneven distribution of global resources. An alternative to war games, it uses Fuller's Dymaxion map and requires a group of players to cooperatively solve a set of metaphorical scenarios, thereby challenging the nation-state perspective with a more holistic "total world" view. The World Game was played for the first time in 1969 in New York, and evolved over the next decade. Proposals for World Game centers described a vast computerized network that could process, map and visualize environmental information drawn from (among other sources) Russian and American spy satellites. Fuller claimed that their optical sensors and thermographic scanners could detect the location and quantity of water, grain, metals, livestock, human populations or any other conceivable form of energy. Despite Fuller's plans for a photogenic, televisual and cybernetic form of mass participation, through Fuller's life the World Game remained largely speculative and pedagogical. It appeared primarily through copious research reports, resource studies and ephemeral workshops. The book tracks this textual dimension by assembling documents related to various instances of the World Game conceived, proposed and played from 1964 to 1982, examining the World Game as a system for environmental information and as a process of resource administration.