The Living City

Author: Roberta Brandes Gratz
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 9780471144250
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

Book Description
THE LIVING CITY "An intelligent analysis. Sensible, undoctrinaire, evengood-humored. An appealing mixture of passion and clinicaldispassion." -Washington Post Book World "The best antidote I've read to the doom-and-gloom propheciesconcerning the future of urban America." -Bill Moyers "This is fresh and fascinating material; it is essential forunderstanding not only how to avoid repeating terrible mistakes ofthe past, but also how to recover from them." -Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great AmericanCities From coast to coast across America there are countless urbansuccess stories about rejuvenated neighborhoods and resurgentbusiness districts. Roberta Brandes Gratz defines the phenomenon as"urban husbandry"-the care, management, and preservation of thebuilt environment nurtured by genuine participatory planningefforts of government, urban planners, and average citizens.

The Loneliest Americans

Author: Jay Caspian Kang
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0525576231
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
A “provocative and sweeping” (Time) blend of family history and original reportage that explores—and reimagines—Asian American identity in a Black and white world “[Kang’s] exploration of class and identity among Asian Americans will be talked about for years to come.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, NPR, Mother Jones In 1965, a new immigration law lifted a century of restrictions against Asian immigrants to the United States. Nobody, including the lawmakers who passed the bill, expected it to transform the country’s demographics. But over the next four decades, millions arrived, including Jay Caspian Kang’s parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. They came with almost no understanding of their new home, much less the history of “Asian America” that was supposed to define them. The Loneliest Americans is the unforgettable story of Kang and his family as they move from a housing project in Cambridge to an idyllic college town in the South and eventually to the West Coast. Their story unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding Asian America, as millions more immigrants, many of them working-class or undocumented, stream into the country. At the same time, upwardly mobile urban professionals have struggled to reconcile their parents’ assimilationist goals with membership in a multicultural elite—all while trying to carve out a new kind of belonging for their own children, who are neither white nor truly “people of color.” Kang recognizes this existential loneliness in himself and in other Asian Americans who try to locate themselves in the country’s racial binary. There are the businessmen turning Flushing into a center of immigrant wealth; the casualties of the Los Angeles riots; the impoverished parents in New York City who believe that admission to the city’s exam schools is the only way out; the men’s right’s activists on Reddit ranting about intermarriage; and the handful of protesters who show up at Black Lives Matter rallies holding “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” signs. Kang’s exquisitely crafted book brings these lonely parallel climbers together and calls for a new immigrant solidarity—one rooted not in bubble tea and elite college admissions but in the struggles of refugees and the working class.

Sustainable Houses and Living in the Hot-Humid Climates of Asia

Author: Tetsu Kubota
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811084653
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 546

Book Description
This book provides information on the latest research findings that are useful in the context of designing sustainable houses and living in rapidly growing Asian cities. The book is composed of seven parts, comprising a total of 50 chapters written by 53 authors from various countries, mainly in the Asian region. Part I introduces vernacular houses in different Asian countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Nepal, China, Thailand and Laos. Parts II and III then explore in depth indoor adaptive thermal comfort and occupants’ adaptive behavior, focusing especially on those in hot-humid climates. Part IV presents detailed survey results on household energy consumption in various tropical Asian cities, while Part V analyses the indoor thermal conditions in both traditional houses and modern houses in these countries. Several real-world sustainable housing practices in Asian cities are reviewed in the following part. The final part then discusses the vulnerability of expanding Asian cities to climate change and urban heat island. Today, approximately 35-40% of global energy is consumed in Asia, and this percentage is expected to rise further. Energy consumption has increased, particularly in the residential sector, in line with the rapid rise of the middle class. The majority of growing Asian cities are located in hot and humid climate regions, and as such there is an urgent need for designers to provide healthy and comfortable indoor environments that do not consume non-renewable energy or resources excessively. This book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in sustainable house design in the growing cities of Asia.

New Asian Style

Author: Jane Doughty Marsden
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
ISBN: 1462906613
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Book Description
More than ever before, interior design is a global affair. And more than ever, Westerners are eager to try out elements of Asian design. This book is the ultimate resource for professional and amateur designers seeking to recreate the mysterious elegance, balance, and beauty of Asian design. Through the magic of Masano Kawana's beautiful full-color photography, New Asian Style explores more than 30 stunning contemporary houses and homes from Singapore, all of which stand as examples of decorating and style that transcend their Eastern origins. In an effort to help designers pick up Asian ideas for their own settings, Jane Marsden's essays examine what elements make Asian style and how they might be captured in new settings anywhere in the world.

Loft Living

Author: Sharon Zukin
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813513898
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Behind the dirty, cast-iron facades of nineteenth-century loft buildings, an elegant style of life developed during the 1960s and 1970s. This style of life -- of using the city as a consumption mode -- was tied to the presence of artists, whose "happenings," performances, and studio spaces shaped a public perception of the good life at the center of the city.

Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit?

Author: Steve Lowe
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 0446543403
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
An encyclopedic attack on modern culture so hilariously bitter that it actually becomes uplifting. Based on two runaway UK bestsellers, this new American edition has been ingeniously adapted and features exclusive new material for US audiences by Brendan Hay, a former Daily Show headline producer and contributing writer to America: The Book. If you hate chick lit, Che Guevara merchandise, pop Kabbalah, cosmetic-surgery-gone-wrong-as-tv-programming, DVDs with ads you can't skip, or any of a few hundred other insanely annoying modern things, then this book will finally lend creedence to your frustrations. Say NO to the awful ideas, terrible people, useless products, and infuriating doublespeak that increasingly dominates our lives. Never before has there been a book so completely full of shit. Clearly, it isn't just you...

150 Best Loft Ideas

Author: Bridget Vranckx
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061348279
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 608

Book Description
150 Best Loft Ideas highlights the myriad ways a loft can work, and will help you create the loft you love Loft life isn't just for artists anymore. What began as an affordable alternative to the high-cost of living in Manhattan in the 1950s has become one of the most expensive and inventive ways of living today. From New York to Johannesburg, Buenos Aires to Barcelona, the lofts included in this book are variations on a simple open plan theme begun decades ago. Find lofts that double as both home and art gallery, where an artist's bedroom invades his exhibition space and the sleeping artist becomes a part of his own permanent collection. See family-inspired lofts with ample space for kids, complete with tire swings hanging from the living room ceiling. From former industrial factories, warehouses, garages, and schools, each loft featured here—whether it is a family home or bachelor pad, an office or an art gallery—offers a unique spin on the traditional concept of the loft.

Life as Art

Author: Stanley Strychacki
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1440147531
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Book Description
The experiences of Club 57’s director Stanley Strychacki, as recorded here, briefly describe many of the artworks and performances that were shown and created therein. But this is not the overriding purpose of the book. Works by the more renowned artists, such as Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat, are more fully explicated in art history books and museum and gallery catalogues. But here, these and less celebrated works are interwoven with the circumstances of the club-how it came to be, how the participants interacted, and how the things that happened were able to happen. The last of these holds the biggest key. How was it that what appeared to be a punk rock club, filled with visually outrageous, verbally incitive and overtly sexually experimental young people, was allowed to operate for five years in the basement of a church! And how did the members come up with night after night of performances, art shows, film festivals, group activities and extensively casted productions - a new program nearly every night, and all this without any of the government-sponsored funding that is so bitterly and publicly fought over today. Leonard Abrams ...The book its not perfect and short. I apologize if I didn't write about you. If you were a Club 57 member or a fan add your name, experience and feeling on this page. You can do it for yor own satisfaction, for your friends and family or for the large internet audience. I invite you to be part of New York history. I want to read your comments and feel your soul, heart and mind...

Architectural Body

Author: Madeline Gins
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817311696
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 129

Book Description
A verbal articulation of the authors' visionary theory of how the human body, architecture, and creativity define and sustain one another This revolutionary work by artist-architects Arakawa and Madeline Gins demonstrates the inter-connectedness of innovative architectural design, the poetic process, and philosophical inquiry. Together, they have created an experimental and widely admired body of work--museum installations, landscape and park commissions, home and office designs, avant-garde films, poetry collections--that challenges traditional notions about the built environment. This book promotes a deliberate use of architecture and design in dealing with the blight of the human condition; it recommends that people seek architectural and aesthetic solutions to the dilemma of mortality. In 1997 the Guggenheim Museum presented an Arakawa/Gins retrospective and published a comprehensive volume of their work titled Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die. Architectural Body continues the philosophical definition of that project and demands a fundamental rethinking of the terms “human” and “being.” When organisms assume full responsibility for inventing themselves, where they live and how they live will merge. The artists believe that a thorough re-visioning of architecture will redefine life and its limitations and render death passe. The authors explain that “Another way to read reversible destiny . . . Is as an open challenge to our species to reinvent itself and to desist from foreclosing on any possibility.” Audacious and liberating, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of 20th-century poetry, postmodern critical theory, conceptual art and architecture, contemporary avant-garde poetics, and to serious readers interested in architecture's influence on imaginative expression.

Looking for Asian America

Author:
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452913560
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 134

Book Description
“Looking for Asian America shows real people engaged in the full range of human activity. This is no small accomplishment for the photographer or his subjects. For Asian Americans it is extraordinary to be merely ordinary. To others, even if not to themselves, Asian Americans appear to be contradictions of identity—a Chinese-Yankee is a knockoff.” —Frank H. Wu, from the Foreword In search of contemporary Asian America, celebrated photographer Wing Young Huie—the only member of his family not born in China—traveled with his wife Tara through nearly forty states to explore and document the funny, touching, and sometimes strange intersection of Asian American and American cultures. Looking for Asian America illustrates their rich and surprising journey across the United States. Through Huie’s eyes, keenly aware of his own Midwestern roots and perspective, we witness such images as a Vietnamese Elvis, Miss Congeniality on her cell phone in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a Hmong street sign in rural North Carolina, a meditating Falun Gong protestor in Washington, D.C., a bubble tea Valley Girl, and a Chinese theme park in Orlando. Huie’s camera captures ABCs (American-born Chinese), FOAs (Fresh Off the Airplane), and a self-described “redneck” Chinese restaurant owner near the Okefenokee Swamp. Taken together the photographs reveal a complex portrait of the U.S. cultural landscape, and their dignified elegance invites a closer, deeper look. Accompanied by the personal reflections of both Wing and Tara Huie, the nearly one hundred spectacular photos tell a story that both mirrors and contradicts stereotypes of Asian Americans, ultimately questioning what it means to be ethnic and American in the twenty-first century. Wing Young Huie has received widespread acclaim for his works, including Lake Street USA, documenting the cultural landscape of his native Minnesota. He is a recipient of a Bush Artist Fellowship and two-time recipient of the McKnight Photography Fellowship. He lives in Minneapolis. Frank H. Wu is dean of Wayne State University Law School and the author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White. Anita Gonzalez teaches in the Master of Liberal Studies Program at the University of Minnesota.