U.S. landscape ordinances

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Henry Southworth Allen

This is a book about how it feels to be alive in America at century's end - the Edens and the wastelands, the psychic heft of it all, our ghosts, hopes, myths, and heroes. It's about who we are, who we think we are, and how we'll remember the way we were. Henry Southworth Allen, prizewinning culture critic for the Washington Post, finds his characters for this drama in latterday demigods: Jack Kennedy, Miss America, Ralph Lauren, Mickey Mouse, Ingrid Bergman, the yeoman farmer (as seen in Rhonda Long, 15, grooming a black Angus at a state fair), physicist Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair, three generations of Wyeths painting elegies to an age when the Anglo-Saxon ruled, and the ageless Zsa Zsa Gabor sidling across a hotel room in satin mules. With elegance, energy, and wit, Allen describes an era when "heaven is a dream of endless second chances and everything else bristles with doom.". Americans strive endlessly, he says, to be saved from that doom - sweating in aerobics classes and shivering in forests primeval. We believe in the redeeming powers of summer houses, the FBI, the common many, the good war, journeys into space, "the sacramental power of guns, the sanctity of little white towns in New Hampshire, and the proposition that the secret of success is knowing how to go precisely too far enough.". He sees with an anthropological eye, which is to say he sees meaning - the meaning of our periodic fits of national gloom, of an Age of Consumption, of wilderness, Vietnam, innocence, and all the other symbols that float through the national psyche "like one of those mammoth American flags waving over a Cadillac dealership...proudly hailed by a country that rarely stops to think about them at all."

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[Augustin Ioan

Acest volum explorează noile dimensiuni ale arhitecturii memoriei, de la arhitectura memorială, adică a arhitecturii destinate să aducă aminte, să co-memoreze în spaţiul public evenimente, de regulă violente şi tragice, la arhitectura în relaţie cu timpul în general, în sensul statutului său de condensator temporal. În acest sens, memoria intervine ca trăsătură proprie obiectului arhitectural şi sunt discutate câteva instanţe ale acestei capacităţi memorializante a obiectului de arhitectură, mai cu seamă a celui religios. În câteva texte succesive se discută problema originii arhitecturii, a caracterului său arhival şi a modului cum dispare arhitectura--Publisher Igloo This volume explores the new dimensions of the architecture of memory, from memorial architecture, ie architecture designed to remember, to co-memorize in public space events, usually violent and tragic, to architecture in relation to time in general, in the sense of its status of temporary capacitor. In this sense, memory intervenes as a characteristic of the architectural object and several instances of this memorializing capacity of the architectural object, especially of the religious one, are discussed. Several successive texts discuss the problem of the origin of architecture, its archival character and how architecture disappears - Publisher Igloo

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Michael S. Sherry

Today it is widely recognized that gay men played a prominent role in defining the culture of mid-20th-century America, with such icons as Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Montgomery Clift, and Rock Hudson defining much of what seemed distinctly "American" on the stage and screen. Even though few gay artists were "out," their sexuality caused significant anxiety during a time of rampant antihomosexual attitudes. Michael Sherry offers a sophisticated analysis of the tension between the nation's simultaneous dependence on and fear of the cultural influence of gay artists.

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Text, Wolfgang Pehnt

"Early in the 20th century, Robert Bosch, the founder of the Stuttgart technology business, built a villa on the hills east of the city. It was half Palladian, half in the reform style of the period before the First World War. The building was to meet the head of the company's need for prestige, and to provide a private refuge thanks to the pleasant qualities of its large park and open position. The foundation of the same name is now housed in the Villa Bosch, but the space available has not been adequate for some time. As the company also needed rooms for seminars and other events, a decision was taken to build new accommodation next to the villa." "Seven well-known teams took part in a restricted competition, including Tadao Ando, Richard Meier and Richard Rogers. The commission went to Peter Kulka, based in Cologne and Dresden. He found a convincing solution to the problem of leaving the dominance of the old building untouched and at the same time making the new accommodation attractive in its own right. He came up with a second >>villa<< slightly below the first one, precise in its volume and minimalist in its resources. The building responds impressively to the challenges of the topography, the landscape around it and its neighbouring building." "Kulka's work combines transparency with physical presence, structural austerity with poetry. This villa suburbana represents a milestone in his career. Kulka, born in 1937, was a pupil of Selman Selmanagic and worked with Hermann Henselmann, Hans Scharoun and in various partnerships before setting up his own practice in 1979. He has been seen as a member of the German architectural avant-garde since his Dresden parliament building (1991-94)."--BOOK JACKET.