Essays on the changing relationship of the human body and architecture.

Site and Composition examines design strategies and tactics in site making. It is concerned with the need for a renewed understanding of the site in the twenty-first century and the need for a critical position regarding the continued tendency to view the site as an isolated ‘fragment’ severed from its wider context. The book argues revisiting the traditional instruments or means of both siting and composition in Architecture to explore their true potential in achieving connections between site and context. Through the various examples studied here it is suggested that such instrumental means have the potential for achieving greater poetic outcomes. The book focuses on the works of twentieth century architects of wide-ranging persuasion – Peter Eisenman, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvaro Siza, Herzog and de Meuron, and Charles Correa, for example – who have strived in quite different ways to achieve deeper engagement with the physical qualities of place and context. Departing from a reconsideration of the fragment, Site and Composition emphasises the role of the ‘positive fragment’ in achieving both historical continuity and renewed wholeness. The potential of both planimetric and sectional compositional methods are explored, emphasising the importance of reciprocity between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ – between fragment and the whole, as well as materiality. Written in a clear and accessible manner, this book makes vital reading for both researchers and students of architecture and urbanism.

Part treatise, part critique, part call to action, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice is a journey into the uncanny realities revealed to us in the great works of art of the past and present. Received opinion holds that art is culturally-determined and relative. We are told that whether a picture, a movement, a text, or sound qualifies as a "work of art" largely depends on social attitudes and convention. Drawing on examples ranging from Paleolithic cave paintings to modern pop music and building on the ideas of James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Gilles Deleuze, Carl Jung, and others, J.F. Martel argues that art is an inborn human phenomenon that precedes the formation of culture and even society. Art is free of politics and ideology. Paradoxically, that is what makes it a force of liberation wherever it breaks through the trance of humdrum existence. Like the act of dreaming, artistic creation is fundamentally mysterious. It is a gift from beyond the field of the human, and it connects us with realities that, though normally unseen, are crucial components of a living world. While holding this to be true of authentic art, the author acknowledges the presence—overwhelming in our media-saturated age—of a false art that seeks not to liberate but to manipulate and control. Against this anti-artistic aesthetic force, which finds some of its most virulent manifestations in modern advertising, propaganda, and pornography, true art represents an effective line of defense. Martel argues that preserving artistic expression in the face of our contemporary hyper-aestheticism is essential to our own survival. Art is more than mere ornament or entertainment; it is a way, one leading to what is most profound in us. Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice places art alongside languages and the biosphere as a thing endangered by the onslaught of predatory capitalism, spectacle culture, and myopic technological progress. The book is essential reading for visual artists, musicians, writers, actors, dancers, filmmakers, and poets. It will also interest anyone who has ever been deeply moved by a work of art, and for all who seek a way out of the web of deception and vampiric diversion that the current world order has woven around us.

This study offers a comprehensive examination of the work of the young poet and scholar, Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-1975) in the context of a literary-critical revolution of the late sixties and seventies and evaluates her work against contemporary debates in poetry and poetics. Gareth Farmer explores Forrest-Thomson’s relationship to the conflicting models of literary criticism in the twentieth century such as the close-reading models of F.R Leavis and William Empson, postructuralist models, and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Written by the leading scholar on Forrest-Thomson’s work, this study explores Forrest-Thomson’s published work as well as unpublished materials from the Veronica Forrest-Thomson Archive. Drawing on close readings of Forrest-Thomson’s writings, this study argues that her work enables us reevaluate literary-critical history and suggests new paradigms for the literary aesthetics and poetics of the future.