Utopian Adventure: The Corviale Void
Utopian Adventure: The Corviale Void

Author: Victoria Watson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-17

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 1317002946

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book is about contemporary issues in architecture and urbanism, taking the form of a project for The Corviale Void, a one kilometre long strip of urban space, immured in the notorious Corviale housing development in the Southwestern sector of Rome. Corviale is a bizarre object, single-minded in its idea, the history of Corviale can be traced to debates in Italian architecture culture of the 1960’s, including Aldo Rossi’s objection to urbanisation, as articulated in his books and projects. On the one hand the project for the Corviale Void begins with one of the original theorists of modern urbanisation and architecture, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, looking into his fascination with the insides of walls. On the other hand the project begins with a new material form, The Air Grid. Like the forms appearing in Piranesi’s etchings, Air Grid is made from a kind of hatching, but Air Grid is hatched out of colour vectors, literally drawn into the air. The human eye is easily mesmerised by the Air Grid, scanning back and forth it reads the colour form as animated, in some sense alive. At the same time as the Italian architects were engaged in those activities that would eventually give birth to the Corviale Void, the painter Yves Klein, was creating The Architecture of the Air. Klein’s work is of special interest to the project of the Corviale Void because of the important role of colour in the development of his thinking about architecture. By attending to Klein’s parallel inquiry Air Grid is brought into dialogue with the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, who was one of the first thinkers to develop a physiological theory of colour. The important thing about Schopenhauer’s thinking is the careful way he looked at physiological phenomena, regarding them as directly informed by metaphysical powers; for Schopenhauer Architecture too is a physiological matter and hence metaphysical. The concluding proposal for the Corviale Void presents a metaphysical archite

Utopian Adventure
Utopian Adventure

Author: Victoria Watson

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13: 1409409910

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This unique book is about contemporary issues in architecture and urbanism, taking the form of a project for The Corviale Void, a one kilometre long strip of urban space, immured in the notorious Corviale housing development in Rome. It begins with one of the original theorists of modern urbanisation and architecture, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, looking into his fascination with the insides of walls, and on the other hand explores a new material form, The Air Grid, which like the forms appearing in Piranesi's etchings, is made from a kind of hatching, but it is hatched out of colour vectors, literally drawn into the air.

Utopian Thought in the Western World
Utopian Thought in the Western World

Author: Frank Edward MANUEL

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 907

ISBN-13: 0674040562

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The authors have structured five centuries of utopian invention by identifying successive constellations, groups of thinkers joined by common social and moral concerns. Within this framework they analyze individual writings, in the context of the author's life and of the socio-economic, religious, and political exigencies of his time.

Utopian Generations
Utopian Generations

Author: Nicholas Brown

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-01-10

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1400826837

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Utopian Generations develops a powerful interpretive matrix for understanding world literature--one that renders modernism and postcolonial African literature comprehensible in a single framework, within which neither will ever look the same. African literature has commonly been seen as representationally naïve vis-à-vis modernism, and canonical modernism as reactionary vis-à-vis postcolonial literature. What brings these two bodies of work together, argues Nicholas Brown, is their disposition toward Utopia or "the horizon of a radical reconfiguration of social relations.? Grounded in a profound rethinking of the Hegelian Marxist tradition, this fluently written book takes as its point of departure the partial displacement during the twentieth century of capitalism's "internal limit" (classically conceived as the conflict between labor and capital) onto a geographic division of labor and wealth. Dispensing with whole genres of commonplace contemporary pieties, Brown examines works from both sides of this division to create a dialectical mapping of different modes of Utopian aesthetic practice. The theory of world literature developed in the introduction grounds the subtle and powerful readings at the heart of the book--focusing on works by James Joyce, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ford Madox Ford, Chinua Achebe, Wyndham Lewis, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Pepetela. A final chapter, arguing that this literary dialectic has reached a point of exhaustion, suggests that a radically reconceived notion of musical practice may be required to discern the Utopian desire immanent in the products of contemporary culture.

Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel
Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel

Author: Jason H. Pearl

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2014-10-01

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 0813936241

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Historians of the Enlightenment have studied the period’s substantial advances in world cartography, as well as the decline of utopia imagined in geographic terms. Literary critics, meanwhile, have assessed the emerging novel’s realism and in particular the genre’s awareness of the wider world beyond Europe. Jason Pearl unites these lines of inquiry in Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel, arguing that prose fiction from 1660 to 1740 helped demystify blank spaces on the map and make utopia available anywhere. This literature incorporated, debunked, and reformulated utopian conceptions of geography. Reports of ideal societies have always prompted skepticism, and it is now common to imagine them in the future, rather than on some undiscovered island or continent. At precisely the time when novels began turning from the fabulous settings of romance to the actual locations described in contemporaneous travel accounts, a number of writers nevertheless tried to preserve and reconfigure utopia by giving it new coordinates and parameters. Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and others told of adventurous voyages and extraordinary worlds. They engaged critically and creatively with the idea of utopia. If these writers ultimately concede that utopian geographies were nowhere to be found, they also reimagine the essential ideals as new forms of interiority and sociability that could be brought back to England. Questions about geography and utopia drove many of the formal innovations of the early novel. As this book shows, what resulted were new ways of representing both world geography and utopian possibility.

Utopia
Utopia

Author: Thomas More

Publisher: e-artnow

Published: 2019-04-08

Total Pages: 105

ISBN-13: 8027303583

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.

Adventure Capitalism
Adventure Capitalism

Author: Raymond Craib

Publisher: PM Press

Published: 2022-07-05

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1629639273

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Imagine a capitalist paradise. An island utopia governed solely by the rules of the market and inspired by the fictions of Ayn Rand and Robinson Crusoe. Sound far-fetched? It may not be. The past half century is littered with the remains of such experiments in what Raymond Craib calls “libertarian exit.” Often dismissed as little more than the dreams of crazy, rich Caucasians, exit strategies have been tried out from the southwest Pacific to the Caribbean, from the North Sea to the high seas, often with dire consequences for local inhabitants. Based on research in archives in the US, the UK, and Vanuatu, as well as in FBI files acquired through the Freedom of Information Act, Craib explores in careful detail the ideology and practice of libertarian exit and its place in the histories of contemporary cap­italism, decolonization, empire, and oceans and islands. Adventure Capitalism is a global history that intersects with an array of figures: Fidel Castro and the Koch brothers, American segregationists and Melanesian socialists, Honolulu-based real estate speculators and British Special Branch spies, soldiers of fortune and English lords, Orange County engineers and Tongan navigators, CIA operatives and CBS news executives, and a new breed of techno-utopians and an old guard of Honduran coup leaders. This is not only a history of our time but, given the new iterations of privatized exit—seasteads, free private cities, and space colonization—it is also a history of our future.

A Modern Utopia
A Modern Utopia

Author: H. G. Wells

Publisher: tredition

Published: 2022-05-03

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 3347637275

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A Modern Utopia - H. G. Wells - A Modern Utopia is a dystopian book by H. G. Wells. In his preface, Wells says that A Modern Utopia would be the last of a series of volumes on social problems. This book is a tale of two travelers who fall into a space-warp and suddenly find themselves upon a Utopian Earth controlled by a single World Government. It is told to us by a sketchily described character known only as the Owner of the Voice. Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography and autobiography. His work also included two books on recreational war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is sometimes called the "father of science fiction. During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the "Shakespeare of science fiction", while American writer Charles Fort referred to him as a "wild talent". Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption per work – dubbed "Wells's law" – leading Joseph Conrad to hail him in 1898 as "O Realist of the Fantastic!". His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), which was his first novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898) and the military science fiction The War in the Air (1907). Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.

Utopia Drive
Utopia Drive

Author: Erik Reece

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2016-08-09

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0374710759

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

For Erik Reece, life, at last, was good: he was newly married, gainfully employed, living in a creekside cabin in his beloved Kentucky woods. It sounded, as he describes it, "like a country song with a happy ending." And yet he was still haunted by a sense that the world--or, more specifically, his country--could be better. He couldn't ignore his conviction that, in fact, the good ol' USA was in the midst of great social, environmental, and political crises--that for the first time in our history, we were being swept into a future that had no future. Where did we--here, in the land of Jeffersonian optimism and better tomorrows--go wrong? Rather than despair, Reece turned to those who had dared to imagine radically different futures for America. What followed was a giant road trip and research adventure through the sites of America's utopian communities, both historical and contemporary, known and unknown, successful and catastrophic. What he uncovered was not just a series of lost histories and broken visionaries but also a continuing and vital but hidden idealistic tradition in American intellectual history. Utopia Drive is an important and definitive reconstruction of that tradition. It is also, perhaps, a new framework to help us find a genuinely sustainable way forward. " ... an engaging exploration -- and example -- of the fruitful tunnel-visions of dreamers turned doers." - Publishers Weekly