Machines For Living

Download or read book Machines for Living written by Victoria Rosner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Changes in the routines of domestic life were among the most striking social phenomena of the period between the two World Wars, when the home came into focus as a problem to be solved: re-imagined, streamlined, electrified, and generally cleaned up. Modernist writers understood themselves to be living in an epochal moment when the design and meaning of home life were reconceived. Moving among literature, architecture, design, science, and technology, Machines for Living shows how the modernization of the home led to profound changes in domestic life and relied on a set of emergent concepts, including standardization, scientific method, functionalism, efficiency science, and others, that form the basis of literary modernism and stand at the confluence of modernism and modernity. Even as modernist writers criticized the expanding reach of modernization into the home, they drew on its conceptual vocabulary to develop both the thematic and formal commitments of literary modernism. Rosner's work develops a new methodology for interdisciplinary modernist studies and shows how the reinvention of domestic life is central to modernist literature.

Download or read book The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution written by Susan Hockfield and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Entertaining and prescient…Hockfield demonstrates how nature’s molecular riches may be leveraged to provide potential solutions to some of humanity’s existential challenges." —Adrian Woolfson, Science A century ago, discoveries in physics came together with engineering to produce an array of astonishing new technologies that radically reshaped the world: radios, televisions, aircraft, computers, and a host of still-evolving digital tools. Today, a new technological convergence—of biology and engineering—promises to create the tools necessary to tackle the threats we now face, including climate change, drought, famine, and disease World-renowned neuroscientist and academic leader Susan Hockfield describes the most exciting new developments and the scientists and engineers who helped to create them. Virus-built batteries. Cancer-detecting nanoparticles. Computer-engineered crops. Together, they highlight the promise of the technology revolution of the twenty-first century to overcome some of the greatest humanitarian, medical, and environmental challenges of our time.

Download or read book Towards a New Architecture written by Le Corbusier and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 1986-01-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering proclamation by the great architect expounds Le Corbusier's technical and aesthetic theories, views on industry, economics, the relation of form to function, "mass-production spirit," and much more. Profusely illustrated with over 200 line drawings and photographs of Le Corbusier's buildings and other important structures.

Download or read book Sublime Dreams of Living Machines written by Minsoo Kang and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-14 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the dawn of European civilization to the twentieth century, the automaton—better known today as the robot—has captured the Western imagination and provided a vital lens into the nature of humanity. Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must trace the origins of these ideas and examine how they were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West. Kang tracks the first appearance of the automaton in ancient myths through the medieval and Renaissance periods, marks the proliferation of the automaton as a central intellectual concept in the Scientific Revolution and the subsequent backlash during the Enlightenment, and details appearances in Romantic literature and the introduction of the living machine in the Industrial Age. He concludes with a reflection on the destructive confrontation between humanity and machinery in the modern era and the reverberations of the humanity-machinery theme today. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines is an ambitious historical exploration and, at heart, an attempt to fully elucidate the rich and varied ways we have utilized our most uncanny creations to explore essential questions about ourselves.

Download or read book Living Machines written by E. Michael Jones and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Inhabited Machines written by Moritz Gleich and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2022-12-19 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around 1800, one of the most influential architectural concepts of the last 250 years emerged—that of built spaces as technical devices. Climate, morality, and comfort are the three main themes of this study, and each is vividly examined in separate chapters through synchronous comparison and with the help of examples. The emergence of corresponding metaphors, knowledge, and construction forms is traced over a period of about 70 years. The author focuses particularly on the operative dimension of architecture. Thus, the book provides a historical perspective on a key topic for the future of architecture. The book is aimed at readers interested in architecture, technology or the cultural history of building and living.

Download or read book Space Is the Machine written by Bill Hillier and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-04-12 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 'The Social Logic of Space' was published in 1984, Bill Hillier and his colleagues at University College London have been conducting research on how space features in the form and functioning of buildings and cities. A key outcome is the concept of 'spatial configuration' meaning relations which take account of other relations in a complex. New techniques have been developed and applied to a wide range of architectural and urban problems. The aim of this book is to assemble some of this work and show how it leads to a new type of theory of architecture, an analytic theory in which understanding and design advance together. The success of configurational ideas in bringing to light the spatial logic of buildings and cities suggests that it might be possible to extend these ideas to other areas of the human sciences where problems of configuration are critical.