Olin Library: Art & Art History: New Books/DVDs - 2016/08 (titles A-F)

Outspoken, provocative, and prolific, the artist Ai Weiwei is an international phenomenon. In recent years, he has produced an astonishingly varied body of work while continuing his role as activist, provocateur, and conscience of a nation. Ai Weiwei is under "city arrest" in Beijing after an 81-day imprisonment; he is accused of tax evasion, but many suspect he is being punished for his political activism, including his exposure of shoddy school building practices that led to the deaths of thousands of children in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. In 2009, he was badly beaten by the police during his earthquake investigations. Ai Weiwei's work reflects his multiple artistic identities as conceptual artist, architect, filmmaker, designer, curator, writer, and publisher.

The great Renaissance artist Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530) rivals Leonardo da Vinci as one of history's most accomplished draftsmen. Moving beyond the graceful elegance of his contemporaries, such as Raphael and Fra Bartolommeo, he brought unprecedented realism to his drawings through the rough and rustic use of chalk in his powerfully rendered life and compositional studies. With an immediacy few other Renaissance artists possess, del Sarto's work has proven to be inspirational and compelling to later audiences, with admirers such as Degas and Redon. This lavishly illustrated book reveals del Sarto's dazzling inventiveness and creative process, presenting fifty core drawings on paper together with a handful of paintings.

Buildings are not benign; rather, they commonly manipulate and abuse their human users. Architectural Agents makes the case that buildings act in the world independently of their makers, patrons, owners, or occupants. And often they act badly. Treating buildings as bodies, Annabel Jane Wharton writes biographies of symptomatic structures in order to diagnose their pathologies.

Portable architecture grabs the imagination of both designers and the people who use it, and for this reason the frequently dynamic form that it adopts is often a fascinating example of where we are today in architectural development as well as an intriguing insight into where we might be headed. This book examines the development of portable, transportable, demountable and temporary architecture from prehistory to the present day.

As a building type, art museums are unparalleled for the opportunities they provide for architectural investigation and experimentation. They are frequently key components of urban revitalization and often push the limits of building technology.... This book provides explicit and comprehensive coverage of the most important museums built in the first ten years of the 21st Century in the United States and Europe. ... Richly designed with full technical illustrations and sections the book includes the work of Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Peter Cook & Colin Fournier, Renzo Piano, Yoshi Taniguchi, Herzog & de Meuron, Jean Nouvel, SANAA, Daniel Libeskind, Diller Scofidionbsp;& Renfro, Steven Holl, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Bernard Tschumi, Sauerbruch Hutton, and Shigeru Ban & Jean de Gastines. Together these diverse projects provide a catalogue of design solutions for the contemporary museum and a snapshot of current architectural thought and culture.

Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere--the paradigmatic city of ruins--and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit's decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster--in short, the failure of capitalism.

Celebrating an experimental decade in the career of Alex Katz, this book introduces audiences to a relatively unknown body of his work. Coming of age as an artist in the 1950s, Alex Katz set out to reinvent representational painting in the wake of Abstract Expressionism. At first, Katz struggled to find an audience, destroying hundreds of canvases. This book surveys the artwork that survived from this momentous decade, one in which he first painted outdoors, innovated with collages, and met Ada del Moro, his wife and muse. The essays in this book contextualize Katz's painting, consider how he and his peers looked at one another, mined 19th-century portraiture, and borrowed from television, advertising, and cinema. The result is a fascinating study of a young artist laying the groundwork for an astonishingly successful career. Fans of Katz will be inspired by the radicality of his early work, and those being introduced to the artist will be struck by its freshness and relevance.

Each year, North Americans spend as much money fixing up their homes as they do buying new ones. This obsession with improving our dwellings has given rise to a multibillion-dollar industry that includes countless books, consumer magazines, a cable television network, and thousands of home improvement stores. Building a Market charts the rise of the home improvement industry in the United States and Canada from the end of World War I into the late 1950s. Drawing on the insights of business, social, and urban historians, and making use of a wide range of documentary sources, Richard Harris shows how the middle-class preference for home ownership first emerged in the 1920s--and how manufacturers, retailers, and the federal government combined to establish the massive home improvement market and a pervasive culture of Do-It-Yourself.

One of the most prolific and influential landscape architects of the twentieth century, Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009) was best known for the FDR Memorial in Washington, D.C., and Sea Ranch, the iconic planned community in California. These projects, as well as vibrant public spaces throughout the country--from Ghirardelli Square and Market Street in San Francisco to Lovejoy Fountain Park in Portland and Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis--grew out of a participatory design process that was central to Halprin's work and is proving ever more relevant to urban design today.

For those who don't know, Halprin designed the fountain on Park Central Square in Springfield. We are lucky to have a small piece of his oeuvre here in the Ozarks.

The Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century was home to one of the greatest flowerings of painting in the history of Western art. Freed from the constraints of royal and church patronage, artists created a rich outpouring of naturalistic portraits, genre scenes and landscapes that circulated through a newly open market to patrons and customers at every level of Dutch society. Their closely observed details of everyday life offer a wealth of information about the possessions, activities and circumstances that distinguished members of social classes, from the nobility to the urban poor.

The practice of architecture has changed dramatically in recent years through digital technologies, material science, and new structural possibilities. Images of striking new buildings from around the world have become a part of our visual culture. What is less known, but perhaps more important, is how the architects who created these marvelous buildings were educated. This is the first volume to comprehensively consider the role of architectural education in the twenty-first century. Many students come to architecture relatively late in their education, so it is in college where they come into contact with those who will influence their entire careers. Many top schools are run by leading global practitioners, who, some might argue, have more lasting influence as educators than as architects. The wide range of pedagogical philosophies and practical lessons, set out in specially commissioned essays, creates a fascinating picture of how our ideas and practices of architecture are formed, nurtured, and ultimately built for the world to see.