This book features projects, developed during the artist Allan Wexler's forty-five-year career, which mediate the gap between fine and applied art using the mediums of architecture, sculpture, photography, painting, and drawing. Wexler's production can be broadly described as tactile poetry composed by re-framing the ordinary with the intention of sustaining a narrative about landscape, nature, and the built environment that highlights the intriguing and surprising characteristics latent in the elements and rituals that pervade daily life. His work demonstrates a commitment to re-evaluating basic assumptions about our relationship to the built and natural environments. Organized thematically across four categories--abstraction, landscape, private space, and public places--this publication is a richly illustrated cross section of Wexler's multi-scale, multi-media work, featuring his own writings, narratives, and reflections.
Drawing on (s)cul(p)tural paradigms as diverse as paper-doll books, Mad magazine fold-ins and exploded schematic diagrams, the artists in The Paper Sculpture Book offer a hands-on, self-contained art show. Artworks meant to be cut out by the reader and assembled using very basic materials such as tape and rubber bands have been designed by 29 established and emerging contemporary artists, including The Art Guys, Minerva Cuevas, Seong Chun, Nicole Eisenman, Spencer Finch, Rachel Harrison, Stephen Hendee, Patrick Killoran, Glenn Ligon, Helen Mirra, David Shrigley, Sarah Sze, Chris Ware and Allan Wexler. Fred Tomaselli merges images from a birding book and an outdoor-clothing catalogue to create an ironic yet beautiful aviary. Janine Antoni's Crumple provides precise instructions for recreating a crumpled ball of paper, while Luca Buvoli invites the reader to take a pop-up flying lesson from the mysterious Professor M.a.S. Obviously, these are not your elementary-school paper airplanes.
De Re Aedificatoria, by Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), was the first modern treatise on the theory and practice of architecture. Its importance for the subsequent history of architecture is incalculable, yet this is the first English translation based on the original, exceptionally eloquent Latin text on which Alberti's reputation as a theorist is founded.
A call for landscape architects to leave the office and return to the garden. Addressing one of the most repressed subjects in landscape architecture, this book could only have been written by someone who is both an experienced gardener and a landscape architect. With Overgrown, Julian Raxworthy offers a watershed work in the tradition of Ian McHarg, Anne Whiston Spirn, Kevin Lynch, and J. B. Jackson. As a discipline, landscape architecture has distanced itself from gardening, and landscape architects take pains to distinguish themselves from gardeners or landscapers. Landscape architects tend to imagine gardens from the office, representing plants with drawings or other simulations, whereas gardeners work in the dirt, in real time, planting, pruning, and maintaining. In Overgrown, Raxworthy calls for the integration of landscape architecture and gardening. Each has something to offer the other: Landscape architecture can design beautiful spaces, and gardening can enhance and deepen the beauty of garden environments over time. Growth, says Raxworthy, is the medium of garden development; landscape architects should leave the office and go into the garden in order to know growth in an organic, nonsimulated way. Raxworthy proposes a new practice for working with plant material that he terms “the viridic” (after “the tectonic” in architecture), from the Latin word for green, with its associations of spring and growth. He builds his argument for the viridic through six generously illustrated case studies of gardens that range from “formal” to “informal” approaches—from a sixteenth-century French Renaissance water garden to a Scottish poet-scientist's “marginal” garden, barely differentiated from nature. Raxworthy argues that landscape architectural practice itself needs to be “gardened,” brought back into the field. He offers a “Manifesto for the Viridic” that casts designers and plants as vegetal partners in a renewed practice of landscape gardening.
A thought-provoking, gorgeously illustrated gift book that will spark your creativity and help you rediscover your passion with “simple, low-stakes activities [that] can open up the world.”—The New York Times Welcome to the era of white noise. Our lives are in constant tether to phones, to email, and to social media. In this age of distraction, the ability to experience and be present is often lost: to think and to see and to listen. Enter Rob Walker's The Art of Noticing—an inspiring volume that will help you see the world anew. Through a series of simple and playful exercises—131 of them—Walker maps ways for you to become a clearer thinker, a better listener, a more creative workplace colleague, and finally, to rediscover what really matters to you.
Wexler's compulsive gambling spiraled out of control....after forty-plus years in recovery, he's become a nationally known expert on gambling addiction.
A celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of USM's pioneering modular system within the greater context of architecture and design In 1965, leading Swiss furniture company USM patented its signature modular furniture system, USM Haller. This flexible storage solution for both home and office was inspired by Fritz Haller’s modular architecture and designed for infinite reuse and reconfiguration. Considered a design classic, USM Haller is included in the collections of major museums including MoMA and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Released as part of USM’s fiftieth-anniversary celebration of this iconic furniture design, Rethink the Modular examines the role of unit-based systems in the wider context of architecture and design. It combines previously published writings, specially commissioned essays from thinkers and innovators John Thackara and Rick Poyner, and interviews with leading figures in the design world that explain how the concept of the modular influences their work. Interspersed with visual material, the texts reveal the many possibilities created by balancing structure with flexibility, and seek to redefine the place of modularity in modern design history.
An award-winning conflict consultant offers a new path to take when agreement and collaboration seem impossible, and teaches us that when conflict resolution fails, we can achieve freedom instead—even without others’ cooperation. A founding CEO and his top salesperson are engaged in a heated clash over her compensation package. A mother and daughter are locked in a nasty cycle of blame and attack. A high-profile executive team is struggling with aggressive political infighting. In all these cases, every effort to talk it out has been unsuccessful. Where can you turn when your attempts to resolve conflict fail? Most approaches emphasize collaboration. You are supposed to sit down, calmly talk through your differences, and find a solution. But what if nothing seems to work, no matter what you do? When situations resist resolution, the Optimal Outcomes Method teaches us conflict freedom. This innovative method, based on Dr. Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler’s training at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, two decades as a consultant to Fortune 500 and high-growth CEOs and senior teams, grassroots work with Middle East leaders, US government-funded research on terrorism, and her popular course at Columbia University,Optimal Outcomesreveals eight groundbreaking practices proven to help people everywhere free themselves from conflict. With inspiring stories from clients, students, and Dr. Goldman-Wetzler’s own life lighting the way, you’ll learn to observe complex situations with clarity, access your shadow values (things you really care about but have been unwilling to admit), and take bold, simple, surprising action. Optimal Outcomes blends mindfulness, Jungianpsychology, and practical, step-by-step advice to free anyone from seemingly impossible conflict. Applying the practices, you’ll reach your Optimal Outcome—which may be vastly different from what you originally imagined, but more satisfying than you ever dreamed possible.
Spolia is what historians call the ancient practice of recycling of building materials, and until recently it was deemed rather inconvenient as it contaminates an understanding of history as a linear progression of time. It is both constructive (re-use) and destructive ("spoils" imply conquest, destruction and uprooting). Yet as a way of engagement with historic artefacts, spolia opens a new door into the creation of built form. This publication is an inventory of the processes of spolia, a distinctive cultural practice from the ancient times to ours, framing the necessity for the spoliation of the American 20th century--its materials, inventions, aesthetics and debris. The book will contain appropriated and repurposed images, drawings, and texts presented as a series of unbound plates affording multiple ways of sorting, comparing, mixing, and reusing. The book consists of antecedents of ancient and contemporary spolia in the form of images, texts and drawing, composed of an introductory Bound Volume and a Loose Inventory, a collection of plates. Both the Volume and Inventory address the idea of spolia through the primary lenses of Form, Material, Type and Tech; and the contents of the Inventory are sorted, at least initially, according to those categories. The loose plates can be also organized chronologically, alphabetically, programmatically, volumetrically, chromatically, etc., and, of course, sorted randomly. The introductory Bound Volume contains a foreword, a series of essays, illustrated footnotes and an afterword. The essays are essentially short "chapters" on the phenomenon of spolia in art, architecture, design & landscape composed by the author out of short fragments provided by prominent academics, curators and practicioners (detailed below). The Bound Volume is followed by the Inventory, a collection of loose plates with images on recto and text on verso. Recto contains photographs of buildings & objects, drawings & diagrams, paintings reproductions, and book spread reprints where contemporary spolia is case-studied. On each plate's verso is an accompanying explanatory/exploratory text by the author.
