Drawings And Digressions

Rivers is considered by many scholars to be the "Godfather" and "Grand Father" of Pop art, because he was one of the first artists to really merge non-objective, non-narrative art with narrative and objective abstraction. This is a collection of his works from his long career.

Containing the quaint legends of his infancy, an account of his stay in Florence, the garden of lost opportunities, return home on the track of Columbus, his struggle in New York in war-time coinciding with that of the nation, his prolonged stay in Rome, and likewise his prattlings upon art, tamperings with literature, struggles with verse, and many other things, being a portrait of himself from youth to age.

An unprecedented eyewitness account of the New York School, as seen between the lines of O'Hara's poetry Joe LeSueur lived with Frank O'Hara from 1955 until 1965, the years when O'Hara wrote his greatest poems, including "To the Film Industry in Crisis," "In Memory of My Feelings," "Having a Coke with You," and the famous Lunch Poems—so called because O'Hara wrote them during his lunch break at the Museum of Modern Art, where he worked as a curator. (The artists he championed include Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, Joan Mitchell, and Robert Rauschenberg.) The flowering of O'Hara's talent, cut short by a fatal car accident in 1966, produced some of the most exuberant, truly celebratory lyrics of the twentieth century. And it produced America's greatest poet of city life since Whitman. Alternating between O'Hara's poems and LeSueur's memory of the circumstances that inspired them, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara is a literary commentary like no other—an affectionate, no-holds-barred memoir of O'Hara and the New York that animated his work: friends, lovers, movies, paintings, streets, apartments, music, parties, and pickups. This volume, which includes many of O'Hara's best-loved poems, is the most intimate, true-to-life portrait we will ever have of this quintessential American figure and his now legendary times.

Most architectural books written by practising architects fall into two categories: theoretical texts, or monographs that describe and illustrate the author's projects. This book combines both, as it explores and illustrates the methodological journey required to translate a concept to a drawing and a drawing to a building. Organised into three essays Urban Collage, Ground Surface, Shadows and Lines, the book examines how conceptual threads begin to compose a specific architectural design 'language' and how they interweave from one direction to another. Importantly, the projects that illustrate the text also demonstrate how imperative or marginal the original ideas become and, to an extent they demonstrate the design process: its successes, illogicality and failures.