Book Description
An elegy for our changing landscape by a master photographer.
Since making his earliest documentary photographs in the 1950s, David Plowden has honored those proud structures and places that America has discarded—from brawny commercial and industrial centers to small towns and farms. He reveres the honest work and spirit that built them. But the scene has changed much in the last five decades, and what's left of the honesty of small communities and the working of the land is all but gone, dealt a death blow by outsourcing, conglomerization, and our incessant drive to buy cheap at any cost. The America of these photographs is a bittersweet reminder of things once cherished and a life no longer possible. Deserted Main Streets and crumbling facades stare at us blindly. Abandoned houses and buildings reach back to ground. Plowden's work is a sad symphony—incomparably and irresistibly beautiful, while reminding us of our loss. 77 duotone photographs.
Customer Reviews:
Each page is a whole chapter.......2007-06-18
This is a gorgeous book. If a picture is normally worth a thousand words, Plowden's images are each whole chapters. They convey so much both by what they show and by what they leave out. Skillfully taken and carefully printed, they contain a sumptuous wealth of detail which forces the viewer to linger on each image and contemplate it. Plowden is an American master.
Book Description
Space age architecture American architect John Lautner (1911-1994) is responsible for some of the most original buildings of the space age and, indeed, the 20th century. The residences he designed in the Los Angeles area, including the Chemosphere House and the Silvertop, are synonymous with the hopes and dreams of an entire era. Characterized by sweeping rooflines, glass-paneled walls, and steel beams, his buildings displayed a combination of fantasy and minimalism, often integrating water and incorporating surrounding landscapes. Lautner always placed great importance on the relationship between humans, space, and nature.
Customer Reviews:
A lot for the money.......2007-05-12
Most books on Lautner (my father) are out of print and expensive. This one is a great small book that makes a terrific gift or handy guide. Some new pictures, some different buildings from Campbell-Lange's other Lautner book.
Average customer rating:
|
Disappearing Architecture: From Real to Virtual to Quantum
Aaron Betsky ,
Ole Bouman ,
David Deutsch ,
Elizabeth Diller/Ricardo Scofidio ,
Monika Fleischmann/Wolfgang Strauss ,
Sulan Kolatan/William Mac Donald ,
William J. Mitchell ,
Kas Oosterhuis ,
Hani Rashid ,
Jeffrey Shaw ,
Peter Weibel , and
Peter Zoller
Manufacturer: Birkhäuser Basel
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 Criticism
| Architecture
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Architecture
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
Study & Teaching
| Architecture
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
General
| History & Periods
| Architecture
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
History
| Business & Culture
| Computers & Internet
| Subjects
| Books
Computer Design
| Microprocessors & System Design
| Hardware
| Computers & Internet
| Subjects
| Books
Similar Items:
-
Tooling (Pamphlet Architecture)
-
Algorithmic Architecture
-
Crib Sheets: Notes on Contemporary Architectural Conversation
-
Diller + Scofidio: Eyebeam Atelier of New Media & Technology: The Charles and Ray Eames Lecture
-
Emergence: Morphogenetic Design Strategies (Architectural Design)
ASIN: 3764372753 |
Book Description
The creation of new environments through the use of developments in Information Technology is significantly altering not only architecture itself but also the roles and tasks of the architects. Architecture can no longer be described in the terms we are familiar with since it no longer corresponds to the form of architecture as we know it: an inclusive and exclusive structure, clearly defined, with a single interior and a single exterior. For architects, the challenge of the future will increasingly lie in creatively coming to terms with hybrid environments, understanding and exploiting the design potential of digital spaces within the physical world, and redefining the role of architecture within a visually dominated culture. This volume presents a valuable and attractive contribution to the contemporary discussion on this subject.
Customer Reviews:
A "Must Have" For All Barn Lovers.......2001-06-29
As John Fitchen's, "The New World Dutch Barn" has been out of print for so many years and interest in NWDBs has increased over the last few years Gregory Huber's edited 2nd Edition is a much welcomed addition to any barn research library.
Mr. Huber's new material as presented in the chapter Introduction to the Second Edition and in the Appendices C. New Checklist of Dutch Barns and D. Huber's responses to Fitchen's text and the Glossary have made this second edition even more valuable than the first edition to the NWDB enthusiast. The leaving intact of the original edition gives the new barn researcher a chance to own the best of both worlds.
Mr. Huber's description of the five fundamental forms of NWDBs along with all of the exceptions and regional variances may possibly bring to the forefront hitherto undocumented barns. As Mr. Huber points out, there are more altered than unaltered barns and knowing a lot of the possibilities will aid NWDB enthusiasts.
I strongly recommend this second edition as required reading for serious NWDB lovers and barn lovers in general.
Rolland Miner, Director, NWDB Survey 2000
Fitchen is back. bigger and better!.......2001-06-28
Finally this classic and enduring book on the Dutch Barn is again available, now in an updated version. No one has spent more time going over, first hand, the barns first studied by Fitchen. Now Fitchen's original material is available without having to scour the used book stores. The new material by Huber brings up to date the first field work done by John fitchen in the 1960's. Any one with even the slightest interest in Early American Dutch Architecture must get this book. Not only does this book fully explain the barn , but the reader can easily then understand how the same basic construction procedures apply to the Dutch House.
Average customer rating:
|
Disappearing Ontario
Ron Brown
Manufacturer: Polar Bear Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Canada
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 189675712X |
Average customer rating:
|
The Disappearing City
Manufacturer: William Farquhar Payson
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
General
| Architecture
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: B000E7UJUA |
Amazon.com
This volume is laden with gorgeous photos and helpful tips. Chapter 1, "Candle Style," demonstrates beautiful ways to decorate with all kinds of candles. Chapter 2, "Candlemaking," covers the basic equipment and techniques for creating dipped, molded, rolled, carved, scented, stenciled, gold-leafed, and candy-twist candles, among others. Chapter 3, "Containers for Candles," is full of creative ideas for crafting candleholders; with the help of The New Candle Book, you can display your candles in decorated bottles and jars, a tasseled candelabra, mosaic holders, copper sconces, candle shades, or even an intricately braided salt-dough candleholder--you'll learn to make them all.
Customer Reviews:
Best candle book I've read so far!.......2000-04-18
The only shame in Amazon is that you can't flip through the full-page, full-color illustrations and really get a feel for how helpful this book is! Learn the basics as well as creative ways to make candles with informative step-by-steps, with nothing left to the imagination.
Average customer rating:
- A truly beautiful collection that instills a great appreciation for the wide open spaces of nature in the reader
- Excerpts from review by Christopher Wiebe, Dec 4, 2005, Vue Weekly, Edmonton
|
Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views
Sharon Butala ,
David Carpenter , and
Helen Marzolf
Manufacturer: The University of Alberta Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Collections, Catalogues & Exhibitions
| Photography
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Photography
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
Nature & Wildlife
| Photography
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
General
| How-to
| Photography
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
Pictorial
| Reference & Tips
| Travel
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Canada
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Look Inside Travel Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Similar Items:
-
Saskatchewan: Centennial Edition 1905-2005 (Canada Series)
ASIN: 088864454X |
Book Description
Decidedly quirky in their vision yet punctuated with breath-taking beauty these photographs rejoice in a Saskatchewan landscape known only to insiders. From brash to subtle, John Conway's keen eye for unusual detail, colour, and irony celebrates an unsung landscape with warm affection and brilliant light. With essays by Sharon Butala, David Carpenter, and Helen Marzolf, this fine blending of text and image will both surprise and invite wonder on the occasion of Saskatchewan's centennial. “John Conway's photos, startlingly original in their view of this province, have captured exactly what strangers have failed to see…” Sharon Butala “These images speak eloquently to me of the hopes of people like my grandparents, hopes dashed and tattered and rising once again, upbeat and sassy…” David Carpenter
Customer Reviews:
A truly beautiful collection that instills a great appreciation for the wide open spaces of nature in the reader.......2006-03-03
Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views is a stunning, full-color photographic gallery of Saskatchewan's countryside. Only the barest minimum of commentary supplements this collection of stunning images of grasses, open parklands, crop fields, prairie, snowfields, hills and more. A truly beautiful collection that instills a great appreciation for the wide open spaces of nature in the reader. Award-winning photographer John Conway proves his exquisite gift in this superb compilation particularly for those who appreciate the majesty of landscape photography.
Excerpts from review by Christopher Wiebe, Dec 4, 2005, Vue Weekly, Edmonton.......2006-01-15
...And now, the University of Alberta Press has published John Conway's amazing collection of photographs, Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views. The fruit of 12 years of photographing the province's changing countryside, the collection is an unlikely centennial gift that grapples with the tensions between the province's collective imagination and the testament of the land. Conway's photographs are driven by questions: there is beauty here, yes, but it is not a pretty postcard end in itself; rather, the beauty is a crowbar used to pry open our habitual ways of seeing-the way we edit and ignore much of what we see around us. The result is a book that is soul-searching, ironic, invigourating, depressing, demystifying, and yet, in the end, that celebrates the enduring power of place and the transformative potential of dreams.
The first photograph depicts a Yellowhead highway billboard that read "Future Home of Something." It's a poignant beginning for the exploration of a province that in its settlement phase was figured as a blank canvas awaiting European narratives. After establishing the familiar pastoral genre (bison spread on bald, snowy prairie) Conway shifts to the unexpected, to Saskatchewan's recreation as an industrial/scientific landscape. Many of these photographs centre around a manmade object that dialogues with or "interprets" its landscape context: signs next to plots of experimental crops; a row of piebald, rusting oil tanks in crop of barley; a tousled, Edward Burtnysky-esque grain tarp on a desolate field. In another, a pile of rocks and glacial erratics, plucked by a rock-picker from a stony field, becomes a sort of modern drumlin left behind by modern farming ideologies. Elsewhere, an abandoned farmstead (covered with decades of high-school grad graffiti) becomes a stage for different rites of passage, while a landscape and animal mural in Duck Lake conveniently ignores the 1885 battle that put it on the map.
Throughout, Conway records the land's exquisite, subtle range of texture, as well as the centrality of the sky where the drama of light and clouds plays out. He captures, as few others have, the gorgeous clarity of winter light on the prairies-the pinkish-white light at the horizon dissipating to powdery cobalt-a light that moves me in ways that exceed mountains or seascapes. Though Conway occasionally places short texts alongside the photographs, the reader for the most part is left to identify their own thematic progression.
In the 1970s, writers asserted that Western Canada needs to be "written into being." This makes sense. But the visual representations of a place are of similar importance. Saskatchewan's image continues to be swaying fields of grain, hip-roofed barns and grain elevators, a land still knit together in a gloriously productive quarter-section patchwork. Fact is, family farms have dwindled and agribusiness now exploits the land on a mass scale-filling sloughs, bulldozing copses and shelterbelts...
This disjuncture, between imagination and what one finds in the field, is what Conway records in his brilliant collection of photographs. Art historian Helen Marzolf's introductory essay theorizes Conway's "post-pastoral" photographs, seeing them as visual anecdotes that correct "the distorting lens of nostalgia" and act as unflinching "witness to inexorable change." I would add that Conway picks up where people like poet Andy Suknaski or photographer Sandra Semchuk left off in their explorations of ancestral legacies and prairie landscape. By comparison, Conway's vision is in a sense depersonalized, though no less valuable. Untouched by layers of family memory, he examines the land through the lens of public history and the collective imagination.
Alberta thirsts for this kind of "revisionist" book. The lunar devastation of the tar sands, the boreal forests slashed by seismic lines, the blighting of rural landscapes with dumps and power projects that benefit urban dwellers: all these cry out for a skilled photographer's eye. But Alberta just may be too jittery with its own adrenaline these days to be so thoughtful. Saskatchewan has won and lost at Lady Fortune's wheel and in doing so has developed a lovely, quiet grace. Uncommon Views beautifully captures these provincial qualities in rich tableaux that captivates, surprises and challenges. By framing typical, "forgettable" views, Conway reveals, as Sharon Butala writes, "what strangers have failed to see, and what it would not occur to us to explain to others."
Book Description
Though it has often been passionately criticized--as fraudulent, exploitative, even pagan--the American funeral home has become nearly as inevitable as death itself, an institution firmly embedded in our culture. But how did the funeral home come to hold such a position? What is its history? And is it guilty of the charges sometimes leveled against it? In Rest in Peace, Gary Laderman traces the origins of American funeral rituals, from the evolution of embalming techniques during and after the Civil War and the shift from home funerals to funeral homes at the turn of the century, to the increasing subordination of priests, ministers, and other religious figures to the funeral director throughout the twentieth century. In doing so he shows that far from manipulating vulnerable mourners, as Jessica Mitford claimed in her best-selling The American Way of Death (1963), funeral directors are highly respected figures whose services reflect the community's deepest needs and wishes. Indeed, Laderman shows that funeral directors generally give the people what they want when it is time to bury our dead. He reveals, for example, that the open casket, often criticized as barbaric, provides a deeply meaningful moment for friends and family who must say goodbye to their loved one. But he also shows how the dead often come back to life in the popular imagination to disturb the peace of the living. Drawing upon interviews with funeral directors, major historical events like the funerals of John F. Kennedy and Rudolf Valentino, films, television, newspaper reports, proposals for funeral reform, and other primary sources, Rest in Peace cuts through the rhetoric to show us the reality--and the real cultural value--of the American funeral.
Customer Reviews:
The flip side of the "American Way of Death" debate.......2003-09-12
A few years ago, I read Jessica Mitford's "American Way of Death Revisited" a 1998 update of her classic book about the funeral industry. I came away with an extremely unfavorable opinion of the funeral industry as a whole. So when I saw "Rest In Peace", I thought that it might be a good idea to give consideration to the opposing viewpoint. Gary Laderman's sympathetic portrait of the funeral business makes some very valid points. He traces the origins of the industry from Civil War times and the gradual transition from funerals conducted at the home to the modern concept of the funeral home. Today's funeral director has assumed a myriad of responsibilities formerly left to the family. Laderman points out that conscientious funeral directors are on call 24 hours a day/7 days a week and make great sacrifices in their personal lives to take care of grief stricken families in their time of need. And the influx of immigrants from Spanish speaking countries, Asia and the Middle East has certainly complicated the task as funeral directors scramble to meet the particular needs of those indivduals.
The author does devote several pages to what most people consider to be the real problem in the funeral business today.
Two or three major corporations are beginning to dominate the industry. Led by Houston based SCI Corp., these companies have been buying up local funeral homes at an alarming rate. What is most deceptive about this practice is that they usually keep the same name, giving customers the impression that the business is still locally owned and operated. Furthermore, these giant corporations are vertically integrating, meaning that they now also own all or a piece of casket companies, florists etc. Inevitably, this kind of control results in price fixing and higher costs to consumers. These giant corporations have read the demographics and have determined that as the "baby boom" generation ages death will be a most profitable business in the coming decades. These corporations now control nearly a quarter of all of the funeral homes in this country. The author quotes a funeral director who makes the point "There's a big difference between corporations and family run funeral homes. Corporations are an assembly line. When you've got them in your office sell them everything you can. The interest of the sole proprietor is providing good service, helping a family through trying times." The author also discusses cremation and some of the alternative funeral services that are now emerging. All in all, I found this book to be a worthwhile read, though a bit long winded at times. I think it is very important that people become conversant in these issues before they are in the position of having to plan a funeral themselves. I would strongly recommend reading both Ladermans work as well as Jessica Mitford's offering to get a balanced view of the issues involved.
A Never-to-Be-Reconciled Fact of Life.......2003-09-05
This is an unusual book because its faults are not that of the author, but that of American culture. A very detailed and informative history of death care in our society is laid out here, but the reading becomes repetitive and boring due to the fact that, as mortal beings, we cannot come to resolve issues about death. Topics such as embalming, the moral character of funeral directors, the viewing of the body, and the role of religion seem to be things that throughout the decades we are always circling around but never really confronting. Therefore, the same debates keep coming up on the same subjects. The most important point I take from this book is that we will never come to terms with death, but will always be psychologically held prisoners by the thought of it.
Morticians & Memory Images.......2003-01-28
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this thought-provoking book concerning the management of human dead bodies in America. Though it is a scholarly work, it is filled with interesting anecdotes. Especially intriguing are accounts of the Kennedy family's private moments beside the dead President's open casket, the riots at the public viewing of Rudolph Valentino's body in New York, and the various ways in which death has been portrayed in the media. As a cultural history of the American funeral industry, it reveals morticians to be something other than stereotypical manipulative businessmen. Rather, many are "artists" who perform a significant service. Their skill at embalming and artistry in cosmetic preparation of dead bodies produces an all-important final "memory image" of the lost loved one for surviving family members and friends. This book provides an insightful perspective on a dark, but essential, subject.
Books:
- Achieving Sustainable Freshwater Systems: A Web Of Connections
- Acid Toxicity and Aquatic Animals (Society for Experimental Biology Seminar Series)
- Add 10 Years to Your Life with some of Best of Dr. Douglass
- Adenoviral Vectors for Gene Therapy
- Advances in Cancer Research, Volume 86 (Advances in Cancer Research)
- Advances in Chromatography; Volume 2
- America's Ancient Forests: From the Ice Age to the Age of Discovery
- Antibodies, Antigens, and Molecular Mimicry, Volume 178: Volume 178: Antibodies, Antigens and Molecular Mimicry (Methods in Enzymology)
- Artificial Liver Support (Falk Symposium)
- Audio- and Video-Based Biometric Person Authentication: Third International Conference, AVBPA 2001 Halmstad, Sweden, June 6-8, 2001. Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- The Pipe Fitter's and Pipe Welder's Handbook Revised Edition
- Mapping the Terrain of the Heart: Passion, Tenderness, and the Capacity to Love
- DAVID CHIPPERFIELD 1991-2006
- Evaluation of Potential Changes to the Space Shuttle Orbiter's Flight Control System to Increase Dir
- History: Fiction or Science
- Law, Business, and Society
- Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety Jig
- Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art
- Die Halle = Hall 26 = Il Padiglione: Fur Die = for the = Per LA Deutsche Messe Ag Hannover
- Slipper Orchids of Borneo
Bridges: The Spans of North America
David Plowden: The American Barn
Small Town America
Imprints: David Plowden : A Retrospective
Approaching Nowhere: Photographs
