The first university-level textbook on the power, condition, and expanse of contemporary fine art drawing A Companion to Contemporary Drawing explores how 20th and 21st century artists have used drawing to understand and comment on the world. Presenting contributions by both theorists and practitioners, this unique textbook considers the place, space, and history of drawing and explores shifts in attitudes towards its practice over the years. Twenty-seven essays discuss how drawing emerges from the mind of the artist to question and reflect upon what they see, feel, and experience. This book discusses key themes in contemporary drawing practice, addresses the working conditions and context of artists, and considers a wide range of personal, social, and political considerations that influence artistic choices. Topics include the politics of eroticism in South American drawing, anti-capitalist drawing from Eastern Europe, drawing and conceptual art, feminist drawing, and exhibitions that have put drawing practices at the centre of contemporary art. This textbook: Demonstrates ways contemporary issues and concerns are addressed through drawing Reveals how drawing is used to make powerful social and political statements Situates works by contemporary practitioners within the context of their historical moment Explores how contemporary art practices utilize drawing as both process and finished artifact Shows how concepts of observation, representation, and audience have changed dramatically in the digital era Establishes drawing as a mode of thought Part of the acclaimed Wiley Blackwell Companions to Art History series, A Companion to Contemporary Drawing is a valuable text for students of fine art, art history, and curating, and for practitioners working within contemporary fine art practice.

Commissioning is coming of age.

Savvy building owners have adopted commissioning as an effective way to improve the facility acquisition process. Green building initiatives have embraced commissioning as a way of assuring quality in the delivery of high-performance buildings. This long-established quality control process for building mechanical systems is emerging as a broader construction management tool improving nearly all aspects of a project.

What exactly is this thing called commissioning? Principles of Building Commissioning answers this fundamental question with the first all-inclusive, practical guide to the application of the principles of commissioning. The book clarifies the underlying philosophy of commissioning: the why, what, when, and who of this process. Shaped by the ASHRAE Guideline 0 view of the world of commissioning, Building Commissioning:

Maps out the territory of commissioning

Outlines its defining characteristics

Explains its flow of processes

Demystifies its documentation

Making the fundamentals of commissioning accessible to all parties--building owners and operators, architects and engineers, users and suppliers--who may be called upon to join the commissioning team for a particular project, Building Commissioning serves as the professional's road map to the commissioning process, from the predesign phase through occupancy.

The Archbasilica of St John Lateran is the world's earliest cathedral. A Constantinian foundation pre-dating St Peter's in the Vatican, it remains the seat of the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, to this day. This volume brings together scholars of topography, archaeology, architecture, art history, geophysical survey and liturgy to illuminate this profoundly important building. It takes the story of the site from the early imperial period, when it was occupied by elite housing, through its use as a barracks for the emperor's horse guards to Constantine's revolutionary project and its development over 1300 years. Richly illustrated throughout, this innovative volume includes both broad historical analysis and accessible explanations of the cutting-edge technological approaches to the site that allow us to visualise its original appearance.

How "drowned town" literature, road movies, energy landscape photography, and "death train" narratives represent the brutality of industrial infrastructures.In this book, Michael Truscello looks at the industrial infrastructure not as an invisible system of connectivity and mobility that keeps capitalism humming in the background but as a manufactured miasma of despair, toxicity, and death. Truscello terms this "infrastructural brutalism"--a formulation that not only alludes to the historical nexus of infrastructure and the concrete aesthetic of Brutalist architecture but also describes the ecological, political, and psychological brutality of industrial infrastructures. Truscello explores the necropolitics of infrastructure--how infrastructure determines who may live and who must die--through the lens of artistic media. He examines the white settler nostalgia of "drowned town" fiction written after the Tennessee Valley Authority flooded rural areas for hydroelectric projects; argues that the road movie represents a struggle with liberal governmentality; considers the ruins of oil capitalism, as seen in photographic landscapes of postindustrial waste; and offers an account of "death train narratives" ranging from the history of the Holocaust to postapocalyptic fiction. Finally, he calls for "brisantic politics," a culture of unmaking that is capable of slowing the advance of capitalist suicide. "Brisance" refers to the shattering effect of an explosive, but Truscello uses the term to signal a variety of practices for defeating infrastructural power. Brisantic politics, he warns, would require a reorientation of radical politics toward infrastructure, sabotage, and cascading destruction in an interconnected world.

Emilio Sanchez Fonts (1921-1999) was a Cuban American artist known for his architectural paintings, drawings, and graphic prints of New York, Latin America, and the Caribbean. As a realist artist, he was attracted to folklore and the vernacular, with architectural scenes of everyday life taking preference over the great historical narratives of western civilization. His keen eye and remarkable ability to edit incidental elements also made him a painter of dreamlike architectural enigmas, as if the buildings he depicted existed only in memory. Sanchez's work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington DC), the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana (Havana), the Museo de Arte Moderno (Bogota), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He received First Prize at the 1974 San Juan Biennial in, Puerto Rico, and was awarded the CINTAS Fellowship in the Visual Arts (1989-90). His remarkable story, like that of his tragic country, is a tale of powerful contrasts, intense light, and mysteriously penetrating shadows.

Atmosphere, Cinema, Architecture: Thematic Reflections on Ambiance and Place explores cinema and architecture as ambient and affective settings or circumstances that can enable the emergence of atmosphere. This book is an interdisciplinary reading of cinematographic practice which develops useful implications for spatial composition in art and architectural design. The way a film is set up, directed, composed, framed, and technically constructed can provide parallels, analogies and metaphors for the spatial organisation of cities, landscapes and buildings. Likewise, the way a built setting is conceived and devised can inform approaches to framing and spatial organisation in cinematography. The book begins on a personal note with a series of recollected atmospheric experiences, leading to an investigation of ambiguity and consilient discrepancy as circumstantial conditions necessary for the production of atmosphere. The mood of melancholia is explored to show the pivotal role that ambiguity, discrepancy and irresolution play in its distinctive ambiance. Atmosphere is then defined as an emergent condition arising between an ambient, affective circumstance and a mooded human being. The book then moves to analyse the inherent conditions in the setup of filmic and architectural settings that render them atmospheric. Reference is made to the cinema of Bresson, Resnais, Lynch, Tarr, Malik and Campion, and to Romanesque tympanae, the architectonic scenography of Franz Kafka's novel The Castle and the work of Spanish architects Flores Prats. The concluding section, Anatomy of Atmosphere, is a lexicon of concepts, themes and tactics around atmosphere that might usefully inform creative practice.

Icons of Sound: Voice, Architecture, and Imagination in Medieval Art brings together art history and sound studies to offer new perspectives on medieval churches and cathedrals as spaces where the perception of the visual is inherently shaped by sound. The chapters encompass a wide geographic and historical range, from the fifth to the fifteenth century, and from Armenia and Byzantium to Venice, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela. Contributors offer nuanced explorations of the intangible sonic aura produced in these places by the ritual music and harness the use of digital technology to reconstruct historical aural environments. Rooted in a decade-long interdisciplinary research project at Stanford University, Icons of Sound expands our understanding of the inherently intertwined relationship between medieval chant and liturgy, the acoustics of architectural spaces, and their visual aesthetics. Together, the contributors provide insights that are relevant across art history, sound studies, musicology, and medieval studies.

After decades of research on minds and brains and a decade of conversations with architects, Michael Arbib presents When Brains Meet Buildings as an invitation to the science behind architecture, richly illustrated with buildings both famous and domestic. As he converses with the reader, he presents action-oriented perception, memory, and imagination as well as atmosphere, aesthetics, and emotion as keys to analyzing the experience and design of architecture. He also explores what it might mean for buildings to have "brains" and illuminates all this with an appreciation of the biological and cultural evolution that supports the diverse modes of human living that we know today. These conversations will not only raise the level of interaction between architecture and neuroscience but, by explaining the world of each group to the other, will also engage all readers who share a fascination with both the brains within them and the buildings around them. Michael Arbib is a pioneer in the interdisciplinary study of computers and brains and has long studied brain mechanisms underlying the visual control of action. His expertise makes him a unique authority on the intersection of architecture and neuroscience.

This new study explores the development of the window, showing how it both transformed human experience by increasing access to light and air and changed our perception of architectural space Christopher Masters celebrates the multiple roles of the window in architecture by providing engaging commentaries on over 80 exceptional buildings of all types, both ancient and modern. The unique selection ranges from the Pantheon in Rome, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, and the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto to Walter Gropius's Bauhaus in Dessau, Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal in New York, Jean Nouvel's Louvre Abu Dhabi, and Dorte Mandrup's Icefjord Centre in Greenland. Featuring more than 100 superb photographs, this is an intriguing and accessible survey of a formerly neglected subject in architectural history.

This book examines the notion of 'the homely' which rests at the foundation of Gaston Bachelard's concrete metaphysics. In order to trace the development of this effaced notion through the history of contemporary Continental philosophy and literature, this study progresses along two distinct arcs. One is presented in a traditional chronological fashion whereby the reader is invited to dig down into the enormous chasm set forth in Martin Heidegger's writing and its reception; become lost in Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves; climb out from this labyrinth into the maternal home; and, finally, come slowly to rest in Gaston Bachelard's concrete metaphysics. Then a Bachelardian topoanalysis is applied to these images drawn from philosophy and literature, metaphysical and concrete expression, in order to follow a second, more significant arc along which progressively more primal spaces are uncovered. This second arc leads back, ultimately, to the foundation of concrete metaphysics: home. Through this topoanalysis the author articulates a fundamental insight about the human desire to have 'a place of one's own', a warm and comfortable, fixed and fixing space in which to set ourselves apart from the strife and turmoil of 'The World'.

Anyone with an interest in buildings and the built environment would do well to purchase a copy of Owen Hopkins' book. - Monocle This innovative and unique book is a visual guide to the buildings that surround us. Architectural features are pinpointed and labelled on images of buildings so that, unlike with other architectural dictionaries, you don't have to know the name before looking it up. Clear line drawings and extensive colour photographs illustrate each of the main building types, from forts to churches, stately homes to skyscrapers. The individual structural elements and materials common to all buildings are then explained, whether in Classical, Gothic or Modernist style. A comprehensive glossary completes the book. This revised edition includes an expanded section on modern structures and materials, as well as the latest styles and concepts from the last ten years. A must for all lovers of architecture and those who would like to learn more Over 11,000 copies sold in English worldwide Covers all key building types and styles, from cathedrals to skyscrapers, Classical to contemporary. Each building type is illustrated with extensive photographs and annotated drawings Contains a comprehensive glossary of architectural terms

A captivating exploration of Britain's most iconic contemporary buildings, from the Barratt home to the Millennium Dome. 'A love letter to contemporary buildings and a fantastic account of recent British history, rich in humour.' NINA STIBBE 'Brilliant, encyclopaedic, funny and often cutting.' DANNY DORLING 'An eloquent, witty, passionate tour of Britain since the 1980s.' JOHN BOUGHTON 'Recounts the stories of our lived landscapes with wit, passion and a shot of anger.' TOM DYCKHOFF 'Grindrod has spoken to everyone and his observations are humane and acute.' OWEN HATHERLEY Wimpey homes. Millennium monuments. Riverside flats. Wind farms. Spectacular skyscrapers. City centre apartments. Out of town malls. The buildings designed in our lifetimes encapsulate the dreams and aspirations of our culture, while also revealing the sobering realities. Whether modest or monumental, they offer a living history of Britain, symbols of the forces that have shaped our modern landscape and icons in their own right. ICONICON is an enthralling journey around the Britain we have created since 1980: the horrors and delights, the triumphs and failures. From space-age tower blocks to suburban business parks, and from postmodernist exuberance to Passivhaus eco-efficiency, this is at once a revelatory architectural grand tour and an endlessly witty and engaging piece of social history.