Search results for ""Author Brian McGrath""

Poetry is dead. Poetry is all around us. Both are trite truisms that this book exploits and challenges. In his 1798 Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth anticipates that readers accustomed to the poetic norms of the day might not recognize his experiments as poems and might signal their awkward confusion upon opening the book by looking round for poetry, as if seeking it elsewhere. Look Round for Poetry transforms Wordsworth’s idiomatic expression into a methodological charge. By placing tropes and figures common to Romantic and Post-Romantic poems in conjunction with contemporary economic, technological, and political discourse, Look Round for Poetry identifies poetry’s untimely echoes in discourses not always read as poetry or not always read poetically. Once one begins looking round for poetry, McGrath insists, one might discover it in some surprising contexts. In chapters that spring from poems by Wordsworth, Lucille Clifton, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, McGrath reads poetic examples of understatement alongside market demands for more; the downturned brow as a figure for economic catastrophe; Romantic cloud metaphors alongside the rhetoric of cloud computing; the election of the dead as a poetical, and not just a political, act; and poetic investigations into the power of prepositions as theories of political assembly. For poetry to retain a vital power, McGrath argues, we need to become ignorant of what we think we mean by it. In the process we may discover critical vocabularies that engage the complexity of social life all around us.

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The discipline of urban design is undergoing a rapid expansion and realignment. It is experiencing a shift from a profession dominated by architects and planners, directed at urban development, to a more expansive set of practices engaging new forms of social and environmental ecologies, as cities worldwide adapt to economic restructuring, mass migrations and climate change. Bringing together classic and new texts from the last 40 years, this AD Reader focuses attention on the critical tools needed to understand how cities have been designed and constructed and then changed over time. This enables new ways of envisioning how cities must be conceived and adapted in the future to the dual conditions of rapid urbanisation and economic restructuring, coupled with unpredictable environmental conditions due to climate change. With its emphasis on both urban design and the ecological, this book brings together key articles that point the way forward for reconciling the often conflicting concerns of urbanism and environmentalism. Twenty-three texts are organised into four distinct sections, covering metropolitan architecture, the sprawling megalopolis, the megacity and the recently emerging metacity. These are broadly chronological and highlight the recent thinking behind some of the key urban developments, ranging from the art of traditional city-making covered by European architects and historians in the late 20th century to contemporary Tokyo described by Atelier Bow-Wow. Features original texts from: Reyner Banham, Rem Koolhaas, Aldo Rossi, Colin Rowe, David Grahame Shane, Bernard Tschumi, Oswald Mathias Ungers, and Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. Contains newly commissioned texts from: Mary Cadenasso, Sharon Haar and Victoria Marshall, Carlos Leite, Steward TA Pickett and Albert Pope. Includes new translations of important essays by Vittorio Gregotti and Paola Viganò. Topics range from the European historic city to the Las Vegas Strip and the megacity of São Paulo, taking in the global sustainable city.

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Poetry is dead. Poetry is all around us. Both are trite truisms that this book exploits and challenges. In his 1798 Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth anticipates that readers accustomed to the poetic norms of the day might not recognize his experiments as poems and might signal their awkward confusion upon opening the book by looking round for poetry, as if seeking it elsewhere. Look Round for Poetry transforms Wordsworth’s idiomatic expression into a methodological charge. By placing tropes and figures common to Romantic and Post-Romantic poems in conjunction with contemporary economic, technological, and political discourse, Look Round for Poetry identifies poetry’s untimely echoes in discourses not always read as poetry or not always read poetically. Once one begins looking round for poetry, McGrath insists, one might discover it in some surprising contexts. In chapters that spring from poems by Wordsworth, Lucille Clifton, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, McGrath reads poetic examples of understatement alongside market demands for more; the downturned brow as a figure for economic catastrophe; Romantic cloud metaphors alongside the rhetoric of cloud computing; the election of the dead as a poetical, and not just a political, act; and poetic investigations into the power of prepositions as theories of political assembly. For poetry to retain a vital power, McGrath argues, we need to become ignorant of what we think we mean by it. In the process we may discover critical vocabularies that engage the complexity of social life all around us.

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The discipline of urban design is undergoing a rapid expansion and realignment. It is experiencing a shift from a profession dominated by architects and planners, directed at urban development, to a more expansive set of practices engaging new forms of social and environmental ecologies, as cities worldwide adapt to economic restructuring, mass migrations and climate change. Bringing together classic and new texts from the last 40 years, this AD Reader focuses attention on the critical tools needed to understand how cities have been designed and constructed and then changed over time. This enables new ways of envisioning how cities must be conceived and adapted in the future to the dual conditions of rapid urbanisation and economic restructuring, coupled with unpredictable environmental conditions due to climate change. With its emphasis on both urban design and the ecological, this book brings together key articles that point the way forward for reconciling the often conflicting concerns of urbanism and environmentalism. Twenty-three texts are organised into four distinct sections, covering metropolitan architecture, the sprawling megalopolis, the megacity and the recently emerging metacity. These are broadly chronological and highlight the recent thinking behind some of the key urban developments, ranging from the art of traditional city-making covered by European architects and historians in the late 20th century to contemporary Tokyo described by Atelier Bow-Wow. Features original texts from: Reyner Banham, Rem Koolhaas, Aldo Rossi, Colin Rowe, David Grahame Shane, Bernard Tschumi, Oswald Mathias Ungers, and Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. Contains newly commissioned texts from: Mary Cadenasso, Sharon Haar and Victoria Marshall, Carlos Leite, Steward TA Pickett and Albert Pope. Includes new translations of important essays by Vittorio Gregotti and Paola Viganò. Topics range from the European historic city to the Las Vegas Strip and the megacity of São Paulo, taking in the global sustainable city.

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This is the first textbook for architectural drawing with the computer that is based on understanding how digital drawing fundamentally differs from drawing with lead pencils on drafting boards. Cinemetrics: Architectural Drawing Today demonstrates a cinematically-inspired, cybernetically imaged, architectural drawing system for thinking about architecture as embedded in relationships within the world at large. It opens up the possibility of inventing new ways of building as framing flowing matter in order to live a philosophy of ?newness?. The authors, who have for fifteen years collaborated in teaching architectural students, link the architectural drawing text with research in the expanded field of architecture, which includes neurology, biology, ecology, physics, sustainability and philosophy. The book is written in an accessible and direct tone. Providing both an understanding of the visual perception behind drawing and practical exercises, it is set to become the key text book on the subject at both undergraduate and graduate level. It is highly illustrated with black and white diagrams and drawings.

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Will cities exist in the next century? Or will everywhere be urban? Contemporary communication and transportation networks allow for greater urban dispersal, yet cities continue to centralise great densities of activities and innovations. What form will the 21st century city take? And what role will architects and urban designers take in shaping the future form of the city? The sensing of the city -- remotely and up close -- addresses an immense variety of issues, relating to the problems and complexities of contemporary and future urban design. Pulls together work by architects and urban designers at the forefront in their utilisation of remote sensing and telecommunications tools. Provides concise and accessible information on new scientific theories and technologies for a general architecture and urban design professional and student readership Features spectacular satellite and night-time light imagery Includes critical discussion on the politics of mass media and urban morphogenesis -- who will be the actors in shaping and designing the future of cities? It will have an interdisciplinary appeal - of interest to a wider audience of urban studies and future studies in general.

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