Cities of Words

Author: Stanley Cavell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674018184
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 475

Book Description
Since Socrates and his circle first tried to frame the Just City in words, discussion of a perfect communal life--a life of justice, reflection, and mutual respect--has had to come to terms with the distance between that idea and reality. Measuring this distance step by practical step is the philosophical project that Stanley Cavell has pursued on his exploratory path. Situated at the intersection of two of his longstanding interests--Emersonian philosophy and the Hollywood comedy of remarriage--Cavell's new work marks a significant advance in this project. The book--which presents a course of lectures Cavell presented several times toward the end of his teaching career at Harvard--links masterpieces of moral philosophy and classic Hollywood comedies to fashion a new way of looking at our lives and learning to live with ourselves. This book offers philosophy in the key of life. Beginning with a rereading of Emerson's "Self-Reliance," Cavell traces the idea of perfectionism through works by Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, and Rawls, and by such artists as Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, and Shakespeare. Cities of Words shows that this ever-evolving idea, brought to dramatic life in movies such as It Happened One Night, The Awful Truth, The Philadelphia Story, and The Lady Eve, has the power to reorient the perception of Western philosophy.

Cities of Words

Author: Stanley Cavell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674018181
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 484

A Pattern Language

Author: Christopher Alexander
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190050357
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 1216

Book Description
You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.

The Language of Cities

Author: Deyan Sudjic
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241188059
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
The director of the Design Museum defines the greatest artefact of all time: the city We live in a world that is now predominantly urban. So how do we define the city as it evolves in the twenty-first century? Drawing examples from across the globe, Deyan Sudjic decodes the underlying forces that shape our cities, such as resources and land, to the ideas that shape conscious elements of design, whether of buildings or of space. Erudite and entertaining, he considers the differences between capital cities and the rest to understand why it is that we often feel more comfortable in our identities as Londoners, Muscovites, or Mumbaikars than in our national identities.

Cities in Translation

Author: Sherry Simon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136629890
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
All cities are multilingual, but there are some where language relations have a special importance. These are cities where more than one historically rooted language community lays claim to the territory of the city. This book focuses on four such linguistically divided cities: Calcutta, Trieste, Barcelona, and Montreal. Though living with the ever-present threat of conflict, these cities offer the possibility of creative interaction across competing languages and this book examines the dynamics of translation in its many forms. By focusing on a category of cities which has received little attention, this study contributes to our understanding of the kinds of language relations that sustain the diversity of urban life. Illustrated with photos and maps, Cities in Translation is both an engaging read for a wide-ranging audience and an important text in advancing theory and methodology in translation studies.

If Mayors Ruled the World

Author: Benjamin R. Barber
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030016467X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434

Book Description
"In the face of the most perilous challenges of our time--climate change, terrorism, poverty, and trafficking of drugs, guns, and people--the nations of the world seem paralyzed. The problems are too big for governments to deal with. Benjamin Barber contends that cities, and the mayors who run them, can do and are doing a better job than nations. He cites the unique qualities cities worldwide share: pragmatism, civic trust, participation, indifference to borders and sovereignty, and a democratic penchant for networking, creativity, innovation, and cooperation. He demonstrates how city mayors, singly and jointly, are responding to transnational problems more effectively than nation-states mired in ideological infighting and sovereign rivalries. The book features profiles of a dozen mayors around the world, making a persuasive case that the city is democracy's best hope in a globalizing world, and that great mayors are already proving that this is so"--

The Last Kind Word

Author: David Housewright
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 125000960X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
Millionaire and unlicensed P.I. Rushmore McKenzie agrees to go undercover to help the ATF track a cache of stolen gunsNafter all, what could possibly go wrong?

Invisible Cities

Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 054413320X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 179

Book Description
Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.

Writing About Architecture

Author: Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 1616890533
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
Extraordinary architecture addresses so much more than mere practical considerations. It inspires and provokes while creating a seamless experience of the physical world for its users. It is the rare writer that can frame the discussion of a building in a way that allows the reader to see it with new eyes. Writing About Architecture is a handbook on writing effectively and critically about buildings and cities. Each chapter opens with a reprint of a significant essay written by a renowned architecture critic, followed by a close reading and discussion of the writer's strategies. Lange offers her own analysis using contemporary examples as well as a checklist of questions at the end of each chapter to help guide the writer. This important addition to the Architecture Briefs series is based on the author's design writing courses at New York University and the School of Visual Arts. Lange also writes a popular online column for Design Observer and has written for Dwell, Metropolis, New York magazine, and The New York Times. Writing About Architecture includes analysis of critical writings by Ada Louise Huxtable, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Muschamp, Michael Sorkin, Charles Moore, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Jane Jacobs. Architects covered include Marcel Breuer, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Field Operations, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Frederick Law Olmsted, SOM, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Atlas of Cities

Author: Paul Knox
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400851947
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
A unique, stunningly illustrated look at the origins, development, and future prospects of cities More than half the world's population lives in cities, and that proportion is expected to rise to three-quarters by 2050. Urbanization is a global phenomenon, but the way cities are developing, the experience of city life, and the prospects for the future of cities vary widely from region to region. The Atlas of Cities presents a unique taxonomy of cities that looks at different aspects of their physical, economic, social, and political structures; their interactions with each other and with their hinterlands; the challenges and opportunities they present; and where cities might be going in the future. Each chapter explores a particular type of city—from the foundational cities of Greece and Rome and the networked cities of the Hanseatic League, through the nineteenth-century modernization of Paris and the industrialization of Manchester, to the green and "smart" cities of today. Expert contributors explore how the development of these cities reflects one or more of the common themes of urban development: the mobilizing function (transport, communication, and infrastructure); the generative function (innovation and technology); the decision-making capacity (governance, economics, and institutions); and the transformative capacity (society, lifestyle, and culture). Using stunning info-graphics, maps, charts, tables, and photographs, the Atlas of Cities is a comprehensive overview of the patterns of production, consumption, generation, and decay of the twenty-first century’s defining form. Presents a one-of-a-kind taxonomy of cities that looks at their origins, development, and future prospects Features core case studies of particular types of cities, from the foundational cities of Greece and Rome to the "smart" cities of today Explores common themes of urban development, from transport and communication to lifestyle and culture Includes stunning info-graphics, maps, charts, tables, and photos Cities Featured: Abuja, Alexandria, Amsterdam, Athens, Augsburg, Babylon, Beijing, Berlin, Brasilia, Bruges, Budapest, Cairo, Canberra, Chandigarh, Chicago, Constantinople, Curitiba, Detroit, Dubai, Dublin, Düsseldorf, Florence, Frankfurt, Freiburg, Geneva, Ghent, Glasgow, Güssing, Hong Kong, Innsbruck, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karachi, Knossos, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, Lübeck, Manchester, Marseille, Masdar City, Mexico City, Miami, Milan, Mumba, Mumbai, Nairobi, New York, Paris, Pella, Portland, Rome, San Francisco, Santorini, São Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai, Sheffield, Singapore, Sparta, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Sydney, Syracuse, Tokyo, Vancouver, Venice, Vienna, Washington, D.C., Wildpoldsried