Customer Reviews:
Good Reference.......2007-05-13
This book is a fantastic reference for those interested in architecture or who just like to look at amazing houses. if you like this book, look into the rest of the series. Over all, a great book.
Wonderful Book of Contemporary Homes.......2003-12-10
I love this book. Contemporary architecture is often misunderstood and misrepresented by focusing on the extreme or most useless of structures. In this book Ojeda takes us into some of the most beautiful, yet utilitarian, contemporary homes from the Arizona desert to Manhattan. He explains the design choices made and more importantly why they were made for the different designs. Included in the book are numerous beautiful photos of the different projects and architectural sketches of the projects.
This book would be a wonderful 'idea book' for an architect, or someone like me who is looking for ideas to give to an architect in preparation for building a new house. It is also a simply beautiful book to look at and learn from, both in design concepts specifically, and in building materials as well. I highly endorse this book as one of the best illustrated generalist books available on contemporary architecture. The ideas you will get for your own home alone are worth the cost.
sweet book.......2003-09-07
While not an architect or builder, I am browsing various ideas and methods. This is a great book for getting all the flavors from concrete prefab and rammed-earth to wood-frame with copper exteriors. In one case, a pre-fabbed house is given a timeline picture page showing the construction progress to finish. The pictures are nearly perfect, both encompassing and detailed with briefs that are pretty informative for their length. It's the information that you want with little else. Materials, construction methods and in most cases, cost. Excellent diagrams and cross-sections too. Worth it for someone who wants to build but isn't sure about the materials and methods they want to use, as well as sighting some good ideas.
A must have for Architects and Do-it Yourselfers alike!.......2001-01-08
The second covering houses and one of several in a series that highlight and describe the potential of American domestic architecture. It illustrates the possibilities and alternatives to the popular Martha Stewart/Bob Villa suburban style that has taken away so much recognition from American architects. Stunning photographs and simple detail drawings illustrate several different homes; each with it's own character.
If you are a do-it-yourself type or looking to hire an architect, this is a great place to start. This book will illustrate how a much a professionally designed house stands out from the Home Depot remodel or typical "custom" suburban home designed by a contractor.
If you are an architect, this is a great reference for residential projects illustrating rigorous use of materials and simplicity of concept, without the heavy "archispeak". It is also a great primer for potential clients, exposing them to the possibilities of design.
Book Description
The Anatomical, Physiological and Embryological Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci
With more than 1200 reproductions of drawings by the master's own hand, this book is the definitive and most complete collection of Leonardo's anatomical drawings currently in print. Here Leonardo's notebooks have been arranged according to the systems of the body in order to indicate the full extent of his anatomical work. This book will captivate curious laymen, medical professionals, and art and history enthusiasts alike. Also included are:
• Translations of Leonardo's anatomical notes which were written in his cryptic reverse handwriting. These translations provide an unusual glimpse into Leonardo's creativity and genius.
•Extensive commentary from the editors.
•A thorough background of Leonardo's life that reintroduces him to the world not just as a master artist, but as a brilliant scientist.
Average customer rating:
- When the over-educated write about Transhumanism....
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Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over (Leonardo Books)
Ollivier Dyens
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0262042002 |
Amazon.com
"Are we not men," bark the creatures residing in H.G. Wells's fantasy island, and cultural critic Ollivier Dyens looks into the issue in his book Metal and Flesh. Arguing that culture has redefined and even supplanted biology, he wants us to see and perhaps guide the changes we're wreaking on our bodies and the world.
Incorporating literary analysis and deft sociological synopsis, Dyens shows the reader how we have embraced technology so thoroughly that we are practically helpless without it. But ultimately, he says, our nature is still cultural, and he is surprisingly optimistic (if wary) about our lives, even if he's informed by the cyberpunk canon, Kafka, and 1984. As he says near the book's close: "We are not becoming cyborgs but sketches, pictures, writings, songs, and dances. Within us, all phenomena intermingle." Postmodern or Zen--Dyens leaves the reader with a warm, but restless, inner glow. --Rob Lightner
Book Description
For more than 3,000 years, humans have explored uncharted geographic and spiritual realms. Present-day explorers face new territories born from the coupling of living tissue and metal, strange lifeforms that are intelligent but unconscious, neither completely alive nor dead. Our bodies are now made of machines, images, and information. We are becoming cultural bodies in a world inhabited by cyborgs, clones, genetically modified animals, and innumerable species of human/information symbionts.
Ollivier Dyens’s Metal and Flesh is about two closely related phenomena: the technologically induced transformation of our perceptions of the world and the emergence of a cultural biology. Culture, according to Dyens, is taking control of the biosphere. Focusing on the twentieth century--which will be remembered as the century in which the living body was blurred, molded, and transformed by technology and culture--Dyens ruminates on the undeniable and irreversible human/machine entanglement that is changing the very nature of our lives.
Customer Reviews:
When the over-educated write about Transhumanism...........2002-01-21
A "cyborg," for those of you who don't know, is defined by Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary as "a human being who is linked ... to one or more mechanical devices upon which some of his vital physiological functions depend."
On pages 82-83 of the book under review, Dyens writes that:
"The cyborg is nothing but a fusion between biology and culture, and, as such, it marks the end of living beings as defined by our current conceptions. The cyborg is a semantic transformation of the body; it is a living being whose identity, history, and presence are formulated by technology and defined by culture. It is a body free of dualities, guilt, sexual repression, and frustration.... [T]he cyborg is a sexless living being, man, woman, and machine all at once. The cyborg is the obliteration of the biological."
Consider that in recent months Vice President Dick Cheney had a defibrillator implanted into his chest to help along his damaged heart, and talkshow host Rush Limbaugh has gotten a cochlear implant to try to correct his hearing loss. Do their workaday borg implants mean that their bodies are now "free of dualities, guilt, sexual repression, and frustration"? Have they experienced "the obliteration of the biological"?
Of course not. What foolishness. Only an over-educated literary intellectual could have written nonsense like this. Not that long ago, humanist brainiacs like Dyens were writing similar things about test-tube babies. Then such babies came along, healthy, cute and cooing, and all talk about their dehumanized status has disappeared. Today the prospect of cloned human babies generates similar over-heated rhetoric, which will sound silly when a real human clone comes along and seems perfectly normal.
Dyens doesn't fall into the "repugnantist" camp headed by Leon Kass, however. He writes sympathetically about where the convergence of computing, communications, biotechnology and the whole information paradigm seems to be taking us. He understands that something very important is happening to the a "human condition" once thought to be essentially inalterable. Only his bookish relationship to these ideas blinds him to the realities of the people who are trying to instantiate them into their lives, not to make some arcane philosophical point, necessarily, but rather to try to survive. Perhaps he should get out of academia once in awhile and go meet some cryonicists and immortalists, who are quite ordinary people seeking physically possible futuristic technologies to save their lives.
Average customer rating:
- This Reader Delivers The Goods
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The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy
Manufacturer: Routledge
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Binding: Paperback
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Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
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Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes (Worlds of Desire: The Chicago Series on Sexuality, Gender, and Culture)
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Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History
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Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India
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Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State
ASIN: 0415910056 |
Book Description
The Gender/Sexuality Reader is a sophisticated survey of the best recent work on bodies and desires across cultures and through time. Foregrounding ethnographic studies and social history, this anthology brings together an unusually broad selection of essays across the disciplines--essays that link the typically segregated topics of desire, demography, and nationalism; bodily adornment and violence against women; colonialism, gender, race, and sexuality.
The settings of these rich studies are diverse: the contemporary United States, haunted by spectres of race and sex; post-Maoist China, whose love affair with the commodity draws on images of white-skinned women; modern clinics and hospitals, where new medical technologies pose unprecedented dilemmas; sexual subcultures as diverse as the lesbian community of San Francisco and carnival worlds in Brazil; and historical periods ranging from classical antiquity to postmodern Egypt. The topics these essays treat are likewise diverse and engaging: eugenics in Singapore, the political and economic context of motherhood in Brazil, rape and the inner lives of black American women, sex/culture wars in the US, the precariousness of sexual identity--and its political implications--in Nicaragua, and media representations of Africa.
These essays develop the insights of social constructionism, showing how gender, sexuality, and power are historically connected and practically intertwined. Taken together, they also extend the reach of this approach, concretely connecting gender/sexuality to class, race, and nation.
Contributors make use of postmodernism's topical mobility and cultural studies' thematic range while--in the best of the social science tradition--never losing sight of biology, political economy, and history. The editors' introduction situates this ground-breaking, contemporary work in the rise of feminist, gay poststructuralist, and political-economic theories, and illuminates the changing political contestations at the heart of embodied desire.
Customer Reviews:
This Reader Delivers The Goods.......2003-11-22
A lot of books in the field give lip service to the idea that gender, sexuality, race, and class are somehow "connected" or "interconnected." This big book shows, convincingly, how they're connected--both historically, and in the present. The text includes stimulating essays on the history of colonialism and modern medicine; well-wrought ethnographic case studies on gender, race, and sexuality; and content-based theory (i.e., theory based on some empirical evidence). An indespensible resource for courses in gender, sexuality, lesbigay studies, and critical race studies.
Book Description
This magnificently illustrated book accompanies the most ambitious exhibition in the Hayward Gallery's program for the year 2000. Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo da Vinci to Now is a ground-breaking exhibition with the potential to be a visual, cultural, and academic revelation with profound impact. The project encourages a new way of looking at visual objects from the territories that are conventionally labeled "medicine" and "art."
The human body is an astounding feat of engineering. For centuries man has striven to understand its complexities, both artistically and anatomically, often resorting to human dissection. Illustrating the point at which medicine and art collide, Know Thyself brings together an extraordinary range of more than 250 objects from more than eighty medical and art museums and collections worldwide. Works of art from across the centuries include the anatomical drawings of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Dürer, and Stubbs, seventeenth-century portraits of surgeons and paintings by great masters including Rembrandt, Hogarth, Courbet, Gericault, and Degas. These works will be shown in a new context alongside medical instruments, prints, and drawings used in the medical study of the human face and body, and life-size anatomical models.
Today, as forensic and medical sciences advance as never before--with the development of genetic fingerprinting, cryogenics, and designer babies--artists continue to find inspiration in the human body. Video installations, photography, and sculpture will present new perspectives on the historic material. The eight contemporary artists involved range from internationally celebrated video artists Bill Viola and Tony Oursler, to younger artists like Gerhard Lang, Christine Borland, and Marc Quinn.
Customer Reviews:
A spectacularly successful foray addressing Science and Art.......2001-12-30
In this extraordinarily interesting book, a catalogue that accompanied an exhibition in England in 1999 - 2000, the authors and curators present figurative painting and sculpting in a fresh and original fashion. Dipping into the engravings of Vesalius and the amazingly detailed wax recreations of anatomic dissections which populated Medical Schools for centuries, we are introduced to an art form that preceeded drawing from the model in the studio. Never meant to be "art", these dissection models were high science at the same time serving to "glorify the magnificence of God's creation of man". Whatever the initial inspiration, when placed side by side with the Renaissance paintings of the various anatomy lessons (such as the fmous Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp) from Rembrandt through the 19th century to the present day explorations by the likes of Bill Viola and Tony Oursler they serve to enhance our understanding and appreciation for our own bodies as corporal science and as vessels of art. What a fine exhibition this must have been! Fortunately the thought vested in this significant collaboration has been captured in time in the form of this beautifully illustrated and documented book. Only one complaint: Why was this luxurious volume printed only in paperback form? This is an art book worthy of any artist committed to the figure and to all of us who admire figurative painting, sculpture and the wonder of the human form.
The art of dissection.......2001-04-03
This is one of the most fascinating art books to cross my path in some time. The subject is the artistic representation of human anatomy.
This is the occasion for a fascinating tour of curiosa. Of course, you have a sequence of Dutch and American anatomy theatre group portraits. More interesting is the sculptures in wax of dissection, surgical, and anatomical models, handmade by what were apparently a group of mostly Italian scupltors. A fellow named Clemente Susini was apparently the Michaelangelo of this field. What makes these interesting is that they are not, as in the -Gray's Anatomy- images, merely displayed. Many are dramatically posed, in the overdone, theatrical poses of baroque painting. The image of them gesticulating as they spill their guts is mildly disconcerting.
There is an extensive discussion of écorché figures, flayed figures that display skinless human musculature. Collections of skeletons and bones, often arranged dramatically rather than clinically, are also featured. There is a large selection of ethnological portraits, and photographs of the insane.
The text is largely sympathetic to these forgotten creators who sought to combine art and science. Identity politics and post-structuralist hoodoo intrudes only slightly on the text, much less than you'd fear given these subjects. A fascinating book for those who are not easily disturbed.
Average customer rating:
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Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology (Leonardo Books)
Susan Kozel
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0262113104 |
Book Description
In Closer, Susan Kozel draws on live performance practice, digital technologies, and the philosophical approach of phenomenology. Trained in dance and philosophy, Kozel places the human body at the center of explorations of interactive interfaces, responsive systems, and affective computing, asking what can be discovered as we become closer to our computers--as they become extensions of our ways of thinking, moving, and touching.
Performance, Kozel argues, can act as a catalyst for understanding wider social and cultural uses of digital technology. Taking this one step further, performative acts of sharing the body through our digital devices foster a collaborative construction of new physical states, levels of conscious awareness, and even ethics. We reencounter ourselves and others through our interactive computer systems. What we need now are conceptual and methodological frameworks to reflect this.
Kozel offers a timely reworking of the phenomenology of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This method, based on a respect for lived experience, begins by listening to the senses and noting insights that arrive in the midst of dance, or quite simply in the midst of life. The combination of performance and phenomenology offered by Closer yields entwinements between experience and reflection that shed light on, problematize, or restructure scholarly approaches to human bodies using digital technologies.
After outlining her approach and methodology and clarifying the key concepts of performance, technologies, and virtuality, Kozel applies phenomenological method to the experience of designing and performing in a range of computational systems: telematics, motion capture, responsive architectures, and wearable computing.
The transformative potential of the alchemy between bodies and technologies is the foundation of Closer. With careful design, future generations of responsive systems and mobile devices can expand our social, physical, and emotional exchanges.
Book Description
Here are clear reproductions of over 1200 anatomical drawings by one of humanity's greatest geniuses — still considered, nearly five centuries later, the finest ever rendered. Admired by artists and scientists alike. 215 plates including studies of the osteological, myological, nervous, respiratory, alimentary, and genito-urinary system.
Customer Reviews:
Not for me.......2006-03-15
If you are thinking that buying this book would help you learning a secret of leonardo's drawing, this is not that book you are looking for . You would learn better with bridgeman's anatomy book or somebody else. This book is pure anatomy and science.
If you like reading texts and texts, then this is probably for you, but not me.
Leonardo's Masterpiece.......2000-01-28
Leonardo Da Vinci's anatomical drawings, due to his extreme curiosity, became one of his most profound works to date. Published by Dover from the original text 1952. The book is set up in 2 columns and broken up into headers of different anatomical structures; either of bones, muscles, ventricles of the heart or brains. The chapters are broken into systems: nervous, cardiovascular, myological, osteological, respitory, alimentary and others. Within the text there are italicized words. These are the words written on the drawing itself, in Leonardo's usual backward writing style. Some of you might be curious, beyond the drawings themselves to read what Leonardo thought at the time. And from there is the authors commentary. For those interested in anatomy, drawing, painting or anything in the art field, this book is highly reccoemended, for it has limitless reference value. I continually look at it for my drawings. One will also notice that many of the "models" are of the same body or person. This is because Leonardo asked a friend on his deathbed if he could cut him up, dissect him and then draw him. The friend, of course, consented to this, and so we have Leonardo's masterpiece. Highly reccomended! Also reccomended is his Notebooks, also printed by Dover.
Average customer rating:
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Leonardo da Vinci Anatomy of the Human Body
Manufacturer: Giunti
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 8809214846 |
Product Description
Anatomy and Drawing of the Human Body by Leonardo da Vinci.
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