Origins of Form

Origins of Form PDF Author: Christopher Williams
Publisher: Architectural Book Publishing
ISBN: 1589799364
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Book Description
Origins of Form is about the shape of things. What limits the height of a tree? Why is a large ship or office building more efficient than a small one? What is the similarity between a human rib cage and an airplane or a bison and a cantilevered bridge? How might we plan for things to improve as they are used instead of wearing out? The author has chosen eight criteria that constitute the major influences on three-dimensional form. These criteria comprise the eight chapters of the book: each looks at form from entirely different viewpoints. The products of both nature and man are examined and compared. This book will make readers—especially those who design and build—aware of their physical environment and how to break away from previously held assumptions and indifference about the ways forms in our human environment have evolved. It shows better ways to do things. The author’s practical, no-nonsense approach and his exquisite drawings, done especially for this volume, provide a clear understanding of what can and cannot be; how big or small an object should be, of what material it will be made, how its function will relate to its design, how its use will change it, and what laws will influence its development. The facts and information were gathered from many sources: the areas of mechanics, structure, and materials; geology, biology, anthropology, paleobiology, morphology and others. These are standard facts in these areas of specialization, but they are also essential to the designer’s overall knowledge and understanding of form. The result is an invaluable work for students, designers, architects, and planners, and an informed introduction to a fascinating subject for laymen.

Voicing America

Voicing America PDF Author: Christopher Looby
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226492834
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
Voicing America should find an appreciative audience, not only among those interested in the study of language in America, but also among early Americanists in general, literary critics and historians, and political scientists and philosophers interested in theories of nationalism.

Japanese Stone Gardens

Japanese Stone Gardens PDF Author: Stephen Mansfield
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
ISBN: 1462905986
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
Gain some new ideas along with the principles and history of Japanese stone gardening with this useful and beautiful garden design book. Japanese Stone Gardens provides a comprehensive introduction to the powerful mystique and dynamism of the Japanese stone garden—from their earliest use as props in animistic rituals, to their appropriation by Zen monks and priests to create settings conducive to contemplation and finally to their contemporary uses and meaning. With insightful text and abundant imagery, this book reveals the hidden order of stone gardens and in the process heightens the enthusiast's appreciation of them. The Japanese stone garden is an art form recognized around the globe. These meditative gardens provide tranquil settings, where visitors can shed the burdens and stresses of modern existence, satisfy an age-old yearning for solitude and repose, and experience the restorative power of art and nature. For this reason, the value of the Japanese stone garden today is arguably even greater than when many of them were created. Fifteen gardens are featured in this book: some well known, such as the famous temple gardens of Kyoto, others less so, among them gardens spread through the south of Honshu Island and the southern islands of Shikoku and Kyushu and in faraway Okinawa.

Origins of the Mass Party

Origins of the Mass Party PDF Author: Edwin F. Ackerman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197576508
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
"This book argues that the mass party emerged as the product of two distinct but related 'primitive accumulations' - the dismantling of communal land tenure and the corresponding dispossession of means of local administration. It illustrates this argument by studying the party central to one of the longest regimes of the 20th century - the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in Mexico, which emerged as a mass party during the 1930s and 1940s. I place the PRI in comparative perspective, studying the failed emergence of Bolivsia's Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) (1952-1964), attempted under similar conditions as the Mexican case. Why was party emergence successful in one case but not the other? As the book shows, the PRI emerged as a mass party in areas in Mexico where land privatization was more intensive and communal village government was weakened, enabling the party's construction and subsequent absorption of peasant unions and organizations. To the extent that the MNR's saw organizational successes, these were limited precisely to areas in Bolivia with similar agrarian structures as those where the PRI succeeded in Mexico. Ultimately, the overall strength of communal property holding and concomitant traditional political authority structures blocked the emergence of the MNR as a mass party. In the parts of Mexico and Bolivia where economic and political expropriation was more pronounced, there was a critical mass of individuals available for political organization, with articulatable interests, and a burgeoning cast of professional politicians, that facilitated connections between the party and the peasantry. The opposite occurred in the areas of the countries were communal property and governmental forms were stronger"--

The Footnote

The Footnote PDF Author: Anthony Grafton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674307605
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
In this engrossing account, footnotes to history give way to footnotes as history, recounting in their subtle way the curious story of the progress of knowledge in written form.

Moral Origins

Moral Origins PDF Author: Christopher Boehm
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
ISBN: 0465020488
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434

Book Description
A noted anthropologist explains how our sense of ethics has changed over the course of human evolution. By the author of Hierarchy of the Forest.

Caste

Caste PDF Author: Isabel Wilkerson
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0593230272
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 545

Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions—now with a new Afterword by the author. #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews Winner of the Carl Sandberg Literary Award • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • National Book Award Longlist • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist • PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlist • Kirkus Prize Finalist “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.” In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.

The Origins of Political Order

The Origins of Political Order PDF Author: Francis Fukuyama
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847652816
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 529

Book Description
Nations are not trapped by their pasts, but events that happened hundreds or even thousands of years ago continue to exert huge influence on present-day politics. If we are to understand the politics that we now take for granted, we need to understand its origins. Francis Fukuyama examines the paths that different societies have taken to reach their current forms of political order. This book starts with the very beginning of mankind and comes right up to the eve of the French and American revolutions, spanning such diverse disciplines as economics, anthropology and geography. The Origins of Political Order is a magisterial study on the emergence of mankind as a political animal, by one of the most eminent political thinkers writing today.
Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Rits Blog by Crimson Themes.