We are conditioned over time to regard environmental forces such as dust, mud, gas, smoke, debris, weeds, and insects as inimical to architecture. Much of today's discussion about sustainable and green design revolves around efforts to clean or filter out these primitive elements. While mostly the direct result of human habitation, these 'subnatural forces' are nothing new. In fact, our ability to manage these forces has long defined the limits of civilized life. From its origins, architecture has been engaged in both fighting and embracing these so-called destructive forces. In Subnature, David Gissen, author of our critically acclaimed Big and Green, examines experimental work by today's leading designers, scholars, philosophers, and biologists that rejects the idea that humans can somehow recreate a purely natural world, free of the untidy elements that actually constitute nature. Each chapter provides an examination of a particular form of subnature and its actualization in contemporary design practice. The exhilarating and at times unsettling work featured in Subnature suggests an alternative view of natural processes and ecosystems and their relationships to human society and architecture. R&Sie(n)'s Mosquito Bottleneck house in Trinidad uses a skin that actually attracts mosquitoes and moves them through the building, while keeping them separate from the occupants. In his building designs the architect Philippe Rahm draws the dank air from the earth and the gasses and moisture from our breath to define new forms of spatial experience. In his Underground House, Mollier House, and Omnisport Hall, Rahm forces us to consider the odor of soil and the emissions from our body as the natural context of a future architecture. [Cero 9]'s design for the Magic Mountain captures excess heat emitted from a power generator in Ames, Iowa, to fuel a rose garden that embellishes the industrial site and creates a natural mountain rising above the city's skyline. Subnature looks beyond LEED ratings, green roofs, and solar panels toward a progressive architecture based on a radical new conception of nature.

This important volume describes the art created in the second millennium B.C. for royal palaces, temples, and tombs from Mesopotamia, Syria, and Anatolia to Cyprus, Egypt, and the Aegean.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Edited by curator Masimilliano Gioni, this book focuses in particular on Koons' art as seen in relation to contemporary American culture. With his aesthetics of plenitude and his pop-up dreams of social mobility and acceptance, throughout his career Koons has composed a "fantasy America [...] custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions" -to use Warhol's description of his own interpretation of American culture. Through the inclusion of source materials, personal recollections and biographical narratives, the book reads each of Koons' celebrated series through the prism of his biography and the ways in which his individual history intersects with that of his country and culture. Ranging from his upbringing in rural Pennsylvania to his fascination for popular culture and vernacular art, the publication composes an unconventional view of Jeff Koons and his work, retracing the personal influences and cultural histories that have shaped Koons's unique formal vocabulary. Published to accompany the major exhibition in Doha in March 2021, the catalogue features an interview with Jeff Koons by the curator, and essays by the well-known art critic Dodie Kazanjian and the Qatari-American writer and artist Sophia Al Maria.

"Materials for Design provides the foundation for a strong design sensibility intertwined with material knowledge. Divided into five sections - glass, concrete, wood, metal, and plastic - Materials for Design makes a thorough study of each material's properties, history, permutations, and production techniques. Sixty case studies by today's most inventive architects from around the world - including Baumschlager + Eberle, Sean Godsell, Werner Sobek, and ARO - show these materials put to imaginative use, illustrating how their application informed each building's ultimate form and structure."--BOOK JACKET.