Surface in architecture has had a deeper and a more pervasive presence in the practice and theory of the discipline than is commonly supposed. Orientations to the surface emerge, collapse, and reappear, sustaining it as a legitimate theoretical and artefactual entity, despite the (twentieth-century) disciplinary definition of architecture as space, structure, and function. Even though surface is defended for its pervasiveness (Kurt Forster), its function as a theoretical motif with generative power (Andrew Benjamin), and in constituting the operative principles of modern architecture as a visual phenomenon (Mark Wigley), it occupies the interstice, or the space of the unconscious within architectural discourse, from where it defends its legitimacy as architecturally valuable or ‘functional,’ as opposed to merely visually pleasurable. Surface and Deep Histories positions surface within the scholarship of critical theory and design-based approaches, and invites academics and designers, and art and architectural historians based in Australia to consider the uses, figurations, scales, and typologies of surfaces. The collection choreographs contributions that focus on a variety of topics, such as montage and construction of colonial modernity and visual culture (Molly Duggins); wallpaper, rational space, and femininity (Anna Daly); the inter-constituted nature of bodies, clothes, and cities (Stella North); the reconstruction of the urban surface through a true integration of information and topology (M Hank Haeusler); James Fergusson’s theory of ornament (Peter Kohane); traditional and new verandahs in Australia (Chris Brisbin); contradictory effects of surface in Green architecture debates (Flavia Marcello and Ian Woodcock); and the thickness of thin curtain walls in contemporary Australian architecture (Anuradha Chatterjee). Surface and Deep Histories shows that surface is not thin — spatially or conceptually. It demonstrates that the practice of surface is simultaneously superficial and pervasive, symbol and space, meaningful and functional, static and transitory, and object and envelope.

“Tells the story . . . of how ‘natural philosophers’ developed the ideas of geology accepted today . . . Fascinating.” —San Francisco Book Review Earth has been witness to dinosaurs, global ice ages, continents colliding or splitting apart, and comets and asteroids crashing, as well as the birth of humans who are curious to understand it. But how was all this discovered? How was the evidence for it collected and interpreted? In this sweeping and accessible book, Martin J. S. Rudwick, the premier historian of the Earth sciences, tells the gripping human story of the gradual realization that the Earth’s history has not only been long but also astonishingly eventful. Rudwick begins in the seventeenth century with Archbishop James Ussher, who famously dated the creation of the cosmos to 4004 BC. His narrative later turns to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when geological evidence was used—and is still being used—to reconstruct a history of the Earth that is as varied and unpredictable as human history. itself. Along the way, Rudwick rejects the popular view of this story as a conflict between science and religion and shows how the modern scientific account of the Earth’s deep history retains strong roots in Judeo-Christian ideas. Extensively illustrated, Earth’s Deep History is an engaging and impressive capstone to Rudwick’s distinguished career. “Deftly explains how ideas of natural history were embedded in cultural history.” —Nature “An engaging read for nonscientists and specialists alike.” —Library Journal “Wonderfully erudite and absorbing.” —Times Literary Supplement “Fascinating, well written, and novel . . . Essential.” —Choice “Thrilling.” —London Review of Books

One afternoon in late April 1859 two geologically minded businessmen, John Evans and Joseph Prestwich, found and photographed the proof for great human antiquity. Their evidence — small, hand-held stone tools found in the gravel quarries of the Somme among the bones of ancient animals — shattered the timescale of Genesis and kicked open the door for a time revolution in human history. In the space of a calendar year, and at a furious pace, the relationship between humans and time was forever changed. This interpretation of deep human history was shaped by the optimistic decade of the 1850s, the Victorian Heyday in the age of equipoise. Proving great human antiquity depended on matching the principles of geology with the personal values of scientific zeal and perseverance; qualities which time-revolutionaries such as Evans and Prestwich had in abundance. Their revolution was driven by a small group of weekend scientists rather than some great purpose, and it proved effective because of its bonds of friendship stiffened by scientific curiosity and business acumen. Clive Gamble explores the personalities of these time revolutionaries and their scientific co-collaborators and adjudicators — Darwin, Falconer, Lyell, Huxley, and the French antiquary Boucher de Perthes — as well as their sisters, wives, and nieces Grace McCall, Civil Prestwich, and Fanny Evans. As with all scientific discoveries getting there was often circuitous and messy; the revolutionaries changed their minds and disagreed with those who should have been allies. Gamble's chronological narrative reveals each step from discovery to presentation, reception, consolidation, and widespread acceptance, and considers the impact of their work on the scientific advances of the next 160 years and on our fascination with the shaping power of time.

Mammoths and dinosaurs, tropical forests in northern Europe and North America, worldwide ice ages, continents colliding and splitting apart, comets and asteroids crashing catastrophically onto the Earth - these are just some of the surprising features of the eventful history of our planet, stretched out over several billion years. But how was it all discovered, how was the evidence for the Earth’s long history collected and interpreted, and what sorts of people put together this reconstruction of a deep past that no human beings could ever have witnessed? In Earth’s Deep History, Martin J. S. Rudwick tells the gripping story of the gradual realization that the Earth’s history has not only been unimaginably long but also astonishingly eventful in utterly unexpected ways. Rudwick, the world’s premier historian of the Earth sciences, is the first to make the story of the discovery of the Earth’s deep history attractively accessible to readers without prior knowledge of either the history or the science, and in so doing he reveals why it matters to us today.

What is the place of materiality—the expression or condition of physical substance—in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in virtual forms? In Surface, cultural critic and theorist Giuliana Bruno deftly explores these questions, seeking to understand materiality in the contemporary world. Arguing that materiality is not a question of the materials themselves but rather the substance of material relations, Bruno investigates the space of those relations, examining how they appear on the surface of different media—on film and video screens, in gallery installations, or on the skins of buildings and people. The object of visual studies, she contends, goes well beyond the image and engages the surface as a place of contact between people and art objects. As Bruno threads through these surface encounters, she unveils the fabrics of the visual—the textural qualities of works of art, whether manifested on canvas, wall, or screen. Illuminating the modern surface condition, she notes how façades are becoming virtual screens and the art of projection is reinvented on gallery walls. She traverses the light spaces of artists Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Tacita Dean, and Anthony McCall; touches on the textured surfaces of Isaac Julien’s and Wong Kar-wai’s filmic screens; and travels across the surface materiality in the architectural practices of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Herzog & de Meuron to the art of Doris Salcedo and Rachel Whiteread, where the surface tension of media becomes concrete. In performing these critical operations on the surface, she articulates it as a site in which different forms of mediation, memory, and transformation can take place. Surveying object relations across art, architecture, fashion, design, film, and new media, Surface is a magisterial account of contemporary visual culture.

In attending to surfaces, as they wrap, layer and grow within sentient bodies, material formations and cosmological states, this volume presents a series of ten anthropological studies stretching across five continents and in observation of earthly practices of making, knowing, living and dying. Through theoretically reflecting on time spent with Aymara and Mapuche Andean cultures; the Malagasy people of Madagascar; craftspeople and designers across Europe and Oceania; amongst the architectures of Australia and South Korea and within the folds of books, screens, landscape and the sea, the anthropologists in this volume communicate diverse ways of considering, working with and knowing surfaces. Together, these writings advance a knowledge of the world which resists any definitive settlement of existential categories and rather seeks to know the world in its emergence and transformation, as entities grow, cohere, shift, dissolve, decay and are reborn through the contact and exchange of surfaces, persisting with varying time, power and effect. The book principally invites readers from anthropology, the creative arts and environmental studies, but also across the wider humanities and social sciences as well as those in neighbouring scientific fields of archaeology, biology, geography, geoscience, material science, neurology and psychology interested in the intersections of mind, body, materials and world.

Blends insights from several disciplines to offer a general theory of social evolution.