Terra Sorta Firma

Download or read book Terra-Sorta-Firma written by Fadi Masoud and published by Actar D, Inc.. This book was released on 2021-05-15 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical and interdisciplinary exploration of our world’s continuously urbanizing and expanding coastline. For centuries, cities have grown and expanded onto previously saturated grounds; “reclaiming” land from estuaries, marshes, mangroves, and seabeds. While these artificial coastlines are sites of tremendous real estate, civic, and infrastructural investments, they are also the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Terra-Sorta-Firma documents the global extent of reclaimed coastal lands, and provides a framework for comparison across varying geographies, cultures, and histories. It renders visible the ubiquity and precarity of urban coastal reclamation in an age of increased environmental and economic indeterminacy. It challenges designers, developers, policymakers, engineers, and urbanists to reconsider the design and construction of land itself, and to re-imagine this most fundamental of all infrastructures along a gradient of inundation.

Download or read book Designing Landscape Architectural Education written by Rosalea Monacella and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-09-09 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No single project or endeavour is immune to the issues that the climate crisis brings. The climate crisis encompasses a broad register of "symptoms" – increased global temperatures and sea-level rise, droughts and extreme bushfire events, salinification and desertification of fertile land, and the list goes on. It reveals and amplifies complex causal relationships that are inherently present and traverse scales, sectors and communities divulging a range of impacts and inequalities. This publication asks designers and academic practitioners to describe their own work through an ecological lens, and then to articulate design approaches for developing new practices in landscape architecture teaching. Designing Landscape Architectural Education: Studio Ecologies for Unpredictable Futures, the Landscape Architecture Design Studio Companion, serves as a resource for academic practitioners in the preparation and delivery of "design-research studios" and students seeking guidance for design methodologies as a part of their landscape architectural education. It draws on the manifold issues of the climate crisis as a set of drivers to examine the utilisation of a range of innovative design approaches to address the current and future priorities of the discipline. The landscape architecture discipline is evolving rapidly to respond to both a broadening and intensification of changes in the environmental, social and political conditions. These changing conditions require innovation that extend the core competencies of landscape architects. This book addresses two fundamental questions – what are the design competencies required of landscape architects to equip them to deal with the complexities brought forth by contemporary society, and as a result, how could we design the future design studio?

Download or read book Island of Clouds written by Gerald Brennan and published by Tortoise Books. This book was released on 2017-05-08 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: April, 1972. Three legendary astronauts embark on mankind’s boldest space voyage yet—a yearlong mission to fly past our nearest planetary neighbor, Venus. What follows will be a journey more harrowing than any of them can imagine. Island of Clouds, the first full-length novel in the Altered Space series, is a gripping space epic based on NASA mission proposals from the late 1960s. Touching on literary influences ranging from Borges and Bukowski to the Book of Job, this story of exploration also offers a literary probing of the dark reaches of human nature: alcoholism, capitalism, authority, fatherhood, and the ephemeral nature of desire. The titles in the Altered Space series are wholly separate narratives, but all deal with the mysteries of space and time, progress and circularity. Each one is an ensō of words in which orbits of spacecraft, moons, planets, and people allow us fresh perspectives on the cycles of our own lives.

Download or read book Bats in the Belfry, by Design written by Titus Stauffer and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Fifty years after the fact, we learned that the American government had injected its citizens with plutonium, without their knowledge or consent. What else have they been up to without telling us? In Titus Stauffer's explosive techno-thriller you'll discover a few possible answers. Be forewarned , however, what you discover can be deadly!"--Back cover.

Download or read book Life Through the Ages written by Charles Robert Knight and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new edition of a classic first book about the life of the past

Download or read book Turbulence written by David Szalay and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice* A “masterful” (The Washington Post), “cathartic” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), novel about twelve people, mostly strangers, and the surprising ripple effect each one has on the life of the next as they cross paths while in transit around the world—from the Booker Prize–shortlisted author of All That Man Is. In this “compelling” (The Christian Science Monitor), “crisp and clever” (Vanity Fair) novel, Szalay’s diverse protagonists circumnavigate the planet in twelve flights, from London to Madrid, from Dakar to Sao Paulo, to Toronto, to Delhi, to Doha, en route to see lovers or estranged siblings, aging parents, baby grandchildren, or nobody at all. Along the way, they experience the full range of human emotions from loneliness to love and, knowingly or otherwise, change each other in one brief, electrifying interaction after the next. Written with magic and economy, “Szalay explores the miraculous ability of our shared humanity to lift us from loneliness” (Esquire) and delivers a dazzling portrait of the interconnectedness of the modern world.

Download or read book The Threefold Logic of Advanced Architecture written by Manuel Gausa and published by Actar. This book was released on 2021-05-15 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the last 30 years, Advanced Architecture has consolidated an interactive and informational logic that differs from that of Modernity and Postmodernity. This logic is threefold; it is modulated through three coexisting protocols -modes of action- whose peaks of intensity occur in three different decades: Conformative Protocols (1990-2000), Distributive Protocols (2000-2010) and Expansive Protocols (2010-2020). This work proposes a threefold cultural narrative whose interactive and informational logic differs from that of modernity and postmodernity. It positions three different ethos by critically approaching the architectural side of a cultural mutation that has been affecting the Western experimental areas of knowledge and practice since the end of the last century. A transformative process constituted by a constellation of transdisciplinary manifestations, accelerations, turns, shortcuts and clusterizations that by no means can be read under one single epistemological umbrella. In this sense, rather than approaching the practice of architecture focusing on its disciplinary inner specificity, this book approaches the research of experimental architecture focusing on its extra-disciplinary entanglements. It argues that a vast multiplicity of fields of knowledge participates in a cultural endeavour modulated through three protocols -forms of action- that singularize three decades: Conformative Protocols (1990-2000), Distributive Protocols (2000-2010) and Expansive Protocols (2010-2020). These three periods shouldn't be read as three hermetic and concatenated monades, but as three different modulations of the same narrative, that is, as three overlapping and coexisting systems whose peaks of intensity occur in three different decades. However, the main purpose of this book is not limited to unveiling the ethos of these three conjugations. It also aims at using this framework as a "time-field", a narrative map that moves from the classificatory to the cartographical in order to vectorize the last 30 years of experimental architecture. In this sense, this book argues that this threefold set of protocols represents the progressive attempt to constitute critical interiorities "looking for" and "produced through" interactions that are increasingly more intimate and whose agents are increasingly more diverse. A tendency oriented towards the consolidation of an "intimacy between strangers" that highly resonates with the cultural and technological landscape in which experimental architecture operates.