The City on Display: Architecture Festivals and the Urban Commons reflects on the biennials, triennials, and other festivals of architecture and design that have been held over the last two decades, as they expand and transform in response to the exigencies of 'planetary urbanisation'. Joel Robinson examines the development of these large-scale, international, and perennial exhibitions as they address such challenges as urban regeneration, heritage preservation, climate change, and the migration crisis. Homing in on examples of festivals in Venice, Rotterdam, Oslo, Tallinn, Sharjah, Seoul, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong, the author describes how they alter the public spaces that host them, either through civic boosterism and gentrification, on the one hand, or through a reassertion of the urban commons and the right to the city, on the other hand. He attempts to thematise the architecture festival's relationship with the city and interrogate its potential as a forum for global debate about the emergencies of the urban condition. This book will be beneficial for students and academics of architecture and urbanism, and especially those who have an interest in how the city gets exhibited at such festivals and even reimagined as something other than it currently is.

"Exploring Art and Visual Culture: A Reader" brings together essential primary texts by artists, critics and art historians ranging from the medieval period right through to our own times. There is no other reader available that covers such an extensive period. Selected by leading academics in their field, and published in conjunction with the Open University, the reader will be an essential sourcebook for every student of art history as well as all those seeking a greater understanding of art and of the cultural and historical context in which it is made. "The Reader" is organised in three parts. The first section, Medieval to Renaissance, 1000 - 1600, includes extracts from the writings of the Venerable Bede, Vasari, Bernard of Clairvaux, Aristotle, Erwin Panofsky, Nikolaus Pevsner, Erasmus and Walter Pater, among others, and sections on sacred art, Gothic architecture, the art of the crusades and the Renaissance. The second part Patronage to the Public Sphere, 1600 - 1850 includes texts by W.J.T. Mitchell, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Crowe, Richard Shiff and Caspar David Freidrich and examines the city and the country, the golden age of Dutch painting, London and Paris, landscape design, exploration, neoclassicism and the birth of Romanticism. The section on Exploring Art from Modernity to Globalisation, 1850 - 2010 includes writings by Marinetti, Gauguin, John Ruskin, William Morris, John Berger, Clement Greenberg, Lucy Lippard and Miwon Kwon examining modernism, the rise of abstraction, conceptual art and globalisation.

Among the most lasting works of architecture are the tomb and the monument. The fact that these have outlasted other kinds of edifice would suggest that the question of death was historically of paramount importance to architecture - at least in the West. But what about more recently? Scholarship in twentieth-century architectural history seems to have neglected the question of death, being more concerned with the heroic or utopian side of modernism. Taking issue with the story of twentieth-century architecture as it is often told, this book seeks to address a lacuna in scholarship. It examines the work of three major architects of the last century, who evinced a strong concern with the funerary genre throughout their lives. Of greater importance, it argues that certain of the more reflexive or progressive approaches to funerary design at this time were marked by a rejection of the traditional language of the monument, which denied the temporal nature of this world, and colored instead by the Romantic tropes of ruin and decay - tropes evocative of the transience of things and the cycles of life.