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

The Qur'an makes rich references to light, tying it to revelation, and light consequently permeates the culture and visual arts of the Islamic lands. God Is the Light of the Heavens and the Earth explores the integral role of light in Islamic civilization across a wide range of media, from the Qur'an and literature to buildings, paintings, performances, photography, and other works produced over the past 14 centuries. A team of international experts conveys current scholarship on Islamic art in a manner that is engaging and accessible to the general reader. The objects discussed include some of the first identifiable works of Islamic art--modest oil lamps inscribed in Arabic, which developed into elaborately decorated metal and glass lamps and chandeliers. Later, photography, which creates images with light, was readily adopted in Islamic lands, and it continues to provide inspiration for contemporary artists. Generously illustrated with specially commissioned, sumptuous color photographs, this book shows the potential of light to reveal color, form, and meaning.

Often problematically labeled as "Brutalist" architecture, the concrete buildings that transformed Boston during 1960s and 1970s were conceived with progressive-minded intentions by some of the world's most influential designers, including Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, I. M. Pei, Henry Cobb, Araldo Cossutta, Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell, Paul Rudolph, Josep Lluís Sert, and The Architects Collaborative. As a worldwide phenomenon, building with concrete represents one of the major architectural movements of the postwar years, but in Boston it was deployed in more numerous and diverse civic, cultural, and academic projects than in any other major U.S. city. After decades of stagnation and corrupt leadership, public investment in Boston in the 1960s catalyzed enormous growth, resulting in a generation of bold buildings that shared a vocabulary of concrete modernism. The period from the 1960 arrival of Edward J. Logue as the powerful and often controversial director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority to the reopening of Quincy Market in 1976 saw Boston as an urban laboratory for the exploration of concrete's structural and sculptural qualities.

This book explores the history, design techniques, materials, craftsmanship, and socio-economic contexts of these works. Fifty-five examples of Islamic carpets are illustrated with new photographs and revealing details. Walter B. Denny situates these carpets within the cultural and social realm of their production, be it in a nomadic encampment, a rural village, or an urban workshop.

How do we accommodate a growing urban population in a way that is sustainable, equitable, and inviting? This question is becoming increasingly urgent to answer as we face diminishing fossil-fuel resources and the effects of a changing climate while global cities continue to compete to be the most vibrant centers of culture, knowledge, and finance. Jan Gehl has been examining this question since the 1960s, when few urban designers or planners were thinking about designing cities for people. But given the unpredictable, complex and ephemeral nature of life in cities, how can we best design public infrastructure--vital to cities for getting from place to place, or staying in place--for human use? Studying city life and understanding the factors that encourage or discourage use is the key to designing inviting public space. In How to Study Public Life Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre draw from their combined experience of over 50 years to provide a history of public-life study as well as methods and tools necessary to recapture city life as an important planning dimension. This type of systematic study began in earnest in the 1960s, when several researchers and journalists on different continents criticized urban planning for having forgotten life in the city.

Despite the ever-growing sophistication of synthetic and digital tools, it's the natural world that captures the imaginations of today's vanguard designers. By looking to nature as a teacher rather than simply as a source for raw materials, pioneers in the emerging biomimicry movement are developing design methods and materials to create intelligent buildings that emulate life itself. InHypernatural architecture and material experts Blaine Brownell and Marc Swackhamer present an international collection of forty-two case studies that illustrate astonishing new applications possible in this rapidly growing field, from Echoviren, a botanical pavilion that was designed to wilt into its surrounding redwood forest in Northern California, to the MIT Media Lab's Silk Pavilion, constructed by the threads of silkworms as they passed over scaffolding. Together, these projects show that by looking to nature, design can be a tool that makes our built environment more efficient, sustainable, and, most of all, livable.

The advent of the airplane and skyscraper in 1920s and '30s America offered the population an entirely new way to look at the world: from above. The captivating image of an airplane flying over the rising metropolis led many Americans to believe a new civilization had dawned. In Impossible Heights, Adnan Morshed examines the aesthetics that emerged from this valorization of heights and their impact on the built environment. The lofty vantage point from the sky ushered in a modernist impulse to cleanse crowded twentieth-century cities in anticipation of an ideal world of tomorrow. Inspired by great new heights, American architects became central to this endeavor and were regarded as heroic aviators. Combining close readings of a broad range of archival sources, Morshed offers new interpretations of works such as Hugh Ferriss's Metropolis drawings, Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion houses, and Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Transformed by the populist imagination into "master builders," these designers helped produce a new form of visuality: the aesthetics of ascension. By demonstrating how aerial movement and height intersect with popular "superman" discourses of the time, Morshed reveals the relationship between architecture, art, science, and interwar pop culture. Featuring a marvelous array of never before published illustrations, this richly textured study of utopian imaginings illustrates America's propulsion into a new cultural consciousness.

Winner of the ACSA/AIA Housing Design Education Award! There is an increased interest among architects, urban specialists and design professionals to contribute to solve "the housing problem" in developing countries. The Invisible Housestakes us on a journey through the slums and informal settlements of South Africa, India, Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador, Cuba, Haiti and many other countries of the Global South, revealing the challenges of, and opportunities for, improving the fate of millions of poor families. Stressing the limitations of current approaches to housing development, Gonzalo Lizarralde examines the short-, mid- and long-term consequences of housing intervention. The book covers - among others - the issues of planning, design, infrastructure and project management. It explains the different variables that need to be addressed and the causes of common failures and mistakes, while outlining successful strategies based on embracing a sustained engagement with the complexity of processes that are generally invisible.

  Few figures tower over modern architecture and city life like Le Corbusier. His dramatic rethinking of the principles and aims of architectural design made a profound impression on the spaces of twentieth-century cities and the ways that people lived in them.             Le Corbusier--The Measure of Man offers the most up-to-date picture we have of Le Corbusier's achievement. A new generation of researchers and curators looks in particular at his life-long study of the human proportion and how the human body should be housed. Created to accompany a breathtakingly ambitious retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the book traces Le Corbusier's life and work from his earliest days through his greatest successes and lasting influences. It covers not only his iconic building designs and bold plans for city centers, but also presents a substantial exploration of his achievements as a painter and sculptor as well.             Lavishly illustrated with nearly five hundred images--three-quarters of them in full color--Le Corbusier--The Measure of Man is an incredible celebration of the master architect's achievement. Introducing him afresh form today's perspective,  it will be absolutely essential for both his admirers and critics.