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Co-authored by two esteemed writers, "Writing Well," is a
beautifully-written and thoroughly readable guide to the craft of
writing prose. Donald Hall, National Book Critics Circle Award
winner and Pulitzer Prize nominee, and Sven Birkerts, recipient of
awards from the National Book Critics Circle and PEN, bring their
talents to this concise, lively text that covers all aspects of
writing but is best known for its signature chapters on words,
sentences, and paragraphs. Writing Essays, Words, Sentences,
Paragraphs, Grammar General Interest; Improving Writing
Latvian-born architect Gunnar Birkerts belongs to the second wave
of modernists who arrived in the United States from abroad, a group
that includes Kevin Roche and Cesar Pelli among others. Educated at
the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, Birkerts worked first with
Eero Saarinen in his now-legendary office in Bloomfield Hills,
Michigan, and later was chief designer for Minoru Yamasaki. At that
time both Saarinen and Yamasaki were developing their distinctive
architectural signatures and building their international renown.
Subsequently Birkerts established his own practice, evolving a
design process and a philosophy with its own original profile. His
approach does not seek a "right style for the job" in the manner of
Saarinen. From the first, Birkerts' work was tied to a program as
well as a particular context -- a place -- to the extent that it
became expressive of the surrounding landscape and accommodating to
the existing vernacular. Birkerts' designs, from the Federal
Reserve Bank in Minneapolis to the Corning Museum of Glass to the
Houston Arts Museum and recently the Latvian National Library,
shows him exploring with ever greater resource and inventiveness
the expressive possibilities of symbol and metaphor. Form, he
believes, expresses function, and does so with its own rich,
meaningful vocabulary. Birkerts uses visual metaphors to link
program, client, and landscape in a resonant solution. His
methodology of using metaphor -- meaning -- as a first principle,
as a generator of design concept, is unusual in the profession, but
it is vitally connected to his Latvian heritage and his family
background as the son of a folklorist and writer. This heritage is
given a new turn here, for the biographical text of the book has
been written by his son, Sven Birkerts, who is a noted literary
critic and author of the influential book The Gutenberg Elegies:
The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. He has also written a
memoir, My Sky Blue Trades which describes at some length his
coming of age struggles with his architect father. Now, years
later, Sven brings his cultural perspectives as well as his family
insights to bear, offering a unique portrait of a life and career.
History and description are enlivened throughout by observations
and reflections on the career -- the destiny -- of this master of
the expressive concept. The book is richly illustrated and
complemented by descriptive assessments of the projects by Martin
Schwartz, who is an architect and writer and who teaches at
Lawrence Technical University in Southfield, Michigan.
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Agape Agape (Paperback)
William Gaddis; Introduction by Sven Birkerts; Afterword by Joseph Tabbi
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R402
R331
Discovery Miles 3 310
Save R71 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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William Gaddis published four novels during his lifetime, immense and complex books that helped inaugurate a new movement in American letters. Now comes his final work of fiction, a subtle, concentrated culmination of his art and ideas. For more than fifty years Gaddis collected notes for a book about the mechanization of the arts, told by way of a social history of the player piano in America. In the years before his death in 1998, he distilled the whole mass into a fiction, a dramatic monologue by an elderly man with a terminal illness. Continuing Gaddis's career-long reflection on those aspects of corporate technological culture that are uniquely destructive of the arts, Agape Agape is a stunning achievement from one of the indisputable masters of postwar American fiction.
The Art Of series is a new line of books reinvigorating the
practice of craft and criticism. Each book will be a brief, witty,
and useful exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a
writer impassioned by a singular craft issue. The Art Of volumes
will provide a series of sustained examinations of key but
sometimes neglected aspects of creative writing by some of
contemporary literature's finest practioners. In "The Art of Time
in Memoir", critic and memoirist Sven Birkerts examines the human
impulse to write about the self. By examining memoirs such as
Vladimir Nabokov's "Speak, Memory"; Virginia Woolf's unfinished "A
Sketch of the Past"; and Mary Karr's "The Liars' Club", Birkerts
describes the memoirist's essential art of assembling patterns of
meaning, stirring to life our own sense of past and present.
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Revolutions of the Heart (Hardcover)
Yahia Lababidi; Foreword by David Lazar; Preface by Sven Birkerts
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R1,150
R932
Discovery Miles 9 320
Save R218 (19%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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