Acclaimed Spanish visual artist, sculptor, designer and engraver Jaume Plensa is renowned for his ability to weave spirituality, corporeality, and collective memory into his sculptures and installations, using a wide range of materials. Many of his iconic sculptures can be found in public spaces, in some of the most evocative places in the world. The city of Leuven now joins this list with the acquisition by KU Leuven of The Four Elements, the first permanent sculpture by Jaume Plensa in Belgian public space. The sculpture The Four Elements consists of two parts in bronze, located in two places, the gallery of the KU Leuven University Library and the newly created St-Raphaël Square. The first part, Fire, commemorates the resurrection of the University Library after the devastating fire of World War I. Water, Earth, Air, the second part, rises like a totem pole on a new urban site that is a meeting point for health care and medicine. This collection of essays documents how the two parts of the sculpture and its two sites represent a broader trinity of interaction and togetherness: between the university and the city and its public spaces, between research and art, between the study of health (in this case the brain) and organizing care.

New York magazine was born in 1968 after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea.

Communication has often been understood as a realm of immaterial, insubstantial phenomena—images, messages, thoughts, languages, cultures, and ideologies—mediating our embodied experience of the concrete world. Communication Matters challenges this view, assembling leading scholars in the fields of Communication, Rhetoric, and English to focus on the materiality of communication. Building on the work of materialist theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and Henri Lefebvre, the essays collected here examine the materiality of discourse itself and the constitutive force of communication in the production of the real. Communication Matters presents original work that rethinks communication as material and situates materialist approaches to communication within the broader "materiality turn" emerging in the humanities and social sciences. This collection will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in Media, Communication Studies, and Rhetoric. The book includes images of the digital media installations of Francesca Talenti, Professor, Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence (RBA) is a national award for urban places that promotes innovative thinking about the built environment. Established in 1987, the award celebrates urban places distinguished by quality design-design that considers form in conjunction with social, economic, and environmental issues.