Mutation And Morphosis

Anyone viewing what we call a landscape from a distance will recognize that it is an artifact, a habitat created by humans as part of our built environment. Designing this realm carefully is a discipline that is taking on increasing importance today. Gunter Vogt, with his practice in VOGT Landscape Architects and as a professor at ETH Zurich, has developed a set of tools and a working method that incorporate all the different dimensions of the human-designed environment, from the large-scale landscape to the small-scale urban public space.00'Mutation and Morphosis' looks at all the many aspects involved in the collective process of designing and shaping landscapes, from planning to implementation. The model as a tool and the collection as a driving force are illustrated on the basis of an astonishing variety of topics. In theoretical discussions and the examination of detailed dossiers of facts on the ground, a trajectory is traced: from the emergence of new landscapes as a result of climate change to the migration of the wolf to Central Europe, from the impact of invasive plants to the study of geological formation processes. The panorama that unfolds gives us insights into the broad context that landscape architects must consider in their work, exemplifi ed by the outstanding projects realized by VOGT.

Inspired by the architects' tradition of passing on experience in conversation form, this paperback book provides insights into the ideas, methods, and memories of one of Europe's most innovative landscape architects. In twelve concise conversations, Vogt inquires into the meaning of landscape architecture in the context of the worldwide urbanization process, and tries to define this young discipline's position. To this day, our concept of landscape appears to be influenced by an Arcadian ideal. Only when landscapes are understood on several levels, as the product of natural, cultural, and social processes, can atmospheric and living urban landscapes appropriate to the specific situation be created. Günther Vogt sees landscape architecture decidedly as part of a city, given its close relationship to topography, architecture, and infrastructure.

Fiftieth anniversary reissue of the founding media studies book that helped establish media art as a cultural category. First published in 1970, Gene Youngblood’s influential Expanded Cinema was the first serious treatment of video, computers, and holography as cinematic technologies. Long considered the bible for media artists, Youngblood’s insider account of 1960s counterculture and the birth of cybernetics remains a mainstay reference in today’s hypermediated digital world. This fiftieth anniversary edition includes a new Introduction by the author that offers conceptual tools for understanding the sociocultural and sociopolitical realities of our present world. A unique eyewitness account of burgeoning experimental film and the birth of video art in the late 1960s, this far- ranging study traces the evolution of cinematic language to the end of fiction, drama, and realism. Vast in scope, its prescient formulations include “the paleocybernetic age,” “intermedia,” the “artist as design scientist,” the “artist as ecologist,” “synaesthetics and kinesthetics,” and “the technosphere: man/machine symbiosis.” Outstanding works are analyzed in detail. Methods of production are meticulously described, including interviews with artists and technologists of the period, such as Nam June Paik, Jordan Belson, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Stan VanDerBeek, Les Levine, and Frank Gillette. An inspiring Introduction by the celebrated polymath and designer R. Buckminster Fuller—a perfectly cut gem of countercultural thinking in itself—places Youngblood’s radical observations in comprehensive perspective. Providing an unparalleled historical documentation, Expanded Cinema clarifies a chapter of countercultural history that is still not fully represented in the arthistorical record half a century later. The book will also inspire the current generation of artists working in ever-newer expansions of the cinematic environment and will prove invaluable to all who are concerned with the technologies that are reshaping the nature of human communication.

DIVLearning a new discipline is similar to learning a new language; in order to master the foundation of architecture, you must first master the basic building blocks of its language – the definitions, function, and usage. Language of Architecture provides students and professional architects with the basic elements of architectural design, divided into twenty-six easy-to-comprehend chapters. This visual reference includes an introductory, historical view of the elements, as well as an overview of how these elements can and have been used across multiple design disciplines./divDIV /divDIVWhether you’re new to the field or have been an architect for years, you’ll want to flip through the pages of this book throughout your career and use it as the go-to reference for inspiration, ideas, and reminders of how a strong knowledge of the basics allows for meaningful, memorable, and beautiful fashions that extend beyond trends./divDIV /divDIVThis comprehensive learning tool is the one book you’ll want as a staple in your library./divDIV /div

Covering more than 50 central terms and concepts in entries written by leading experts, this book offers an overview of this new subdiscipline of biology, providing the core insights and ideas that show how embryonic development relates to life-history evolution, adaptation, and responses to and integration with environmental factors.

The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people. What holds these three phenomena together is the conviction, shared by some powerful people, that the ecological threat is real and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any pretense at sharing a common future with the rest of the world. Hence their flight offshore and their massive investment in climate change denial. The Left has been slow to turn its attention to this new situation. It is still organized along an axis that goes from investment in local values to the hope of globalization and just at the time when, everywhere, people dissatisfied with the ideal of modernity are turning back to the protection of national or even ethnic borders. This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today.

Elaborates the author’s conception of plasticity by proposing a new way of thinking through Heidegger’s writings on change.

A resounding masterpiece of architectural publishing, this volume, Rizzoli's sixth on Morphosis and its founder, architect Thom Mayne, features the work of the award-winning interdisciplinary architectural and design practice over the past fourteen years. Known for its architecture of complexity, disruption, and ambiguity, Morphosis is on the cutting edge of exploration and discovery in design. Sometimes on the border of controversy with daring vision and provocative large-scale urban projects, the firm continually invites us to question what architecture is and can be while remaining sensitive to its central purpose--to provide safe, sheltering spaces for life, work, and play. This book documents the great variety of the firm's creations across the globe, a new academic building for the Cooper Union in New York, the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Texas, the Casablanca Finance City Tower in Morocco, and the Sejong M-Bridge, in Sejong City, South Korea. Like the architecture of this trailblazing firm, the book is an exhilarating demonstration of visual excitement, bold graphics, and innovative design.

This text is an introduction to the future of mass media and mass communications - cross-media communications. Cross-media is explained through the presentation and analysis of contemporary examples and project-based tutorials in cross-media development. The text introduces fundamental terms and concepts, and provides a solid overview of cross-media communications, one that builds from a general introduction to a specific examination of media and genres to a discussion of the concepts involved in designing and developing cross-media communications. There is also an accompanying DVD-ROM full of hands-on exercises that shows how cross-media can be applied. For the DVD-ROM: http: //www.lulu.com/content/817927