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Bestselling Art & Architecture Books |
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UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS What Is Contemporary Art? Terry Smith Who gets to say what counts as contemporary art? Artists, critics, curators, gallerists, auctioneers, collectors, or the public? Revealing how all of these groups have shaped today’s multifaceted definition, Terry Smith brilliantly shows that an historical approach offers the best answer to the question: What is Contemporary Art? Pbk 300pp 9780226764313 A$41.95 NZ$55.95 2009.09 more detail |
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UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS The Walls Are Talking: Wallpaper, Art and Culture Gill Saunders, Dominique Heyse-Moore, Christine Woods and Trevor Keeble Inherently ephemeral and often overlooked, wallpaper had by the late twentieth century become a bit of a joke in the decorative arts, a cliché with connotations of kitsch. But over the past decade or so, a number of contemporary avant-garde artists have created installations with backdrops of specially designed wallpaper to explore themes such as warfare, racism, gender, and sexuality. Published to accompany exhibitions at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, The Walls Are Talking situates these unique creations alongside antique papers and explains how the latter have been adapted and subverted to convey meanings wildly different from what their original designers intended. Hbk 152pp 9780984226009 A$77 NZ$99 2010.02 more detail |
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MIT PRESS SITELESS: 101 Building Forms Francois Blanciak The 1001 building forms in SITELESS include structural parasites, chain-link towers, ball-bearing floors, corrugated corners, exponential balconies, radial facades, crawling frames, forensic housing--and other architectural ideas that may require construction techniques not yet developed and a relation to gravity not yet achieved. SITELESS presents an open-ended compendium of visual ideas for the architectural imagination to draw from. Pbk 128pp 9780262026307 A$26.95 NZ$33.95 2008 more detail |
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MIT PRESS Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century William J Mitchell, Christopher E Borroni-Bird and Lawrence D Burns This book provides a long-overdue vision for a new automobile era. The cars we drive today follow the same underlying design principles as the Model Ts of a hundred years ago and the tail-finned sedans of fifty years ago. In the twenty-first century, cars are still made for twentieth-century purposes. They're well suited for conveying multiple passengers over long distances at high speeds, but inefficient for providing personal mobility within cities - where most of the world's people now live. In this pathbreaking book, William Mitchell and two industry experts reimagine the automobile, describing vehicles of the near future that are green, smart, connected, and fun to drive. They roll out four big ideas that will make this both feasible and timely. Hbk 240pp 9780262013826 A$36.95 NZ$48.95 2010.03 more detail |
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MIT PRESS Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art since the 1960s David S Rubin Although the term "psychedelic" was coined to describe hallucinatory experiences produced by drugs used psychotherapeutically, the story these images tell is about the influence of psychedelic culture on the art world - not necessarily the influence of drugs. As contemporary art evolved into a diverse and pluralistic discipline, the psychedelic evolved into a language of color and light. In Psychedelic, more than seventy-five vivid color images chart this development, exploring the art chronologically, from early Op Art through recent work using digital technology. Hbk 140pp 9780262014045 A$46.95 NZ$61 2010.04 more detail |
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CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art Mary Bergstein Photographs shaped the view of the world in turn-of-the-century Central Europe, bringing images of everything from natural and cultural history to masterpieces of Greek sculpture into homes and offices. Sigmund Freud's library-no exception to this trend-was filled with individual photographs and images in books. In Mirrors of Memory, lavishly illustrated with reproductions of the photos from Freud's voluminous collection, she argues that studying the man and his photographs uncovers a key to the origins of psychoanalysis. Hbk 232pp A$57.95 NZ$76 2010.04 more detail |
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CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya (Australian Edition - No Supplement) Roger Benjamin Icons of the Desert marks a new stage in the understanding of Aboriginal art. It is the first focussed study of a group of early boards - the founding expressions of Papunya art, painted in acrylics on masonite between 1971 and late 1972. International experts bring their scholarship to bear on the aesthetic, cultural and political dimensions of this work, the fountainhead of the historic 'dot painting' movement. Analyses of famous works by Clifford Possum or Johnny Warrangula adapting ceremonial imagery to permanent surfaces and unpublished photographs of Pintupi artists at work are among the highlights of this lavishly-produced volume. Hbk 192pp 9781934260074 A$49.95 NZ$67 2009.02 more detail |
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PRINCEON UNIVERSITY PRESS The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright: Critical Writings on Architecture Frank Lloyd Wright and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer He was the most iconoclastic of architects, and at the height of his career his output of writings about architecture was as prolific and visionary as his architecture itself. Frank Lloyd Wright pioneered a bold new kind of architecture, one in which the spirit of modern man truly "lived in his buildings." The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright is a one-volume compendium of Wright's most critically important - and personally revealing - writings on every conceivable aspect of his craft. Pbk 464pp 9780691146324 A$44.95 NZ$61 2010.02 more detail |
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NEW SOCIETY PUBLISHERS Earth-Sheltered Houses: How to Build an Affordable Underground Home Rob Roy The advantages of earth-sheltered homes include comfort, energy-efficiency, environmental harmony, low maintenance, and aesthetics. This practical guide details time-tested, easy-to-learn and affordable techniques for all parts of the construction process, including the benefits of earth roofs, as well as a comprehensive resource section. Pbk 256pp 9780865715219 A$47.95 NZ$63 2006.04 more detail |
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MIT PRESS 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School Matthew Frederick This is a book that students of architecture will want to keep in the studio and in their backpacks. It is also a book they may want to keep out of view of their professors, for it expresses in clear and simple language things that tend to be murky and abstruse in the classroom. Written by an architect and instructor who remembers well the fog of his own student days, 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School provides valuable guideposts for navigating the design studio and other classes in the architecture curriculum. Hbk 128pp 9780262062664 A$24.95 NZ$29.95 2007.09 more detail |
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