Search results for ""Author West 8 Urban Design"

This book is a welcome and timely analysis of how global economic and financial powerhouses in Asia also aim to become global cultural cities. It critically examines the tension between top-down policies implemented by strong states to boost urban culture, which are typically focused on the hardware of iconic venues, museums, and opera houses mostly designed by famous western architects, and the need for freedom to enable more organic cultural initiatives rooted in local practices.'- Robert C. Kloosterman, University of Amsterdam, the NetherlandsWhile global cities have mostly been characterized as sites of intensive and extensive economic activity, the quest for global city status also increasingly rests on the creative production and consumption of culture and the arts. Arts, Culture and the Making of Global Cities examines such ambitions and projects undertaken in five major cities in Asia: Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei and Singapore.Providing a thorough comparison of their urban imaging strategies and attempts to harness arts and culture, as well as more organically evolved arts activities and spaces, this book analyses the relative successes and failures of these cities. Offering rich ethnographic detail drawn from extensive fieldwork, the authors challenge city strategies and existing urban theories about cultural and creative clusters and reveal the many complexities in the art of city-making.This noteworthy study will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as academics from a variety of disciplines ranging from urban and cultural geography to Asian studies. Arts and cultural policy makers and artists will also find this a fascinating read.Contents: 1. Arts spaces, New Urban Landscapes and Global Cultural Cities PART I 2. The National Grand Theatre in a City of Monuments: Discourse and Reality in the Construction of Beijing's New Cultural Space 3. Rivalling Beijing and the World: Realizing Shanghai's Ambitions through Cultural Infrastructure 4. Hong Kong's Dilemmas and the Changing Fates of West Kowloon Cultural District 5. The Making of a 'Renaissance City': Building Cultural Monuments in Singapore 6. In Search of New Homes: The Absent New Cultural Monument in Taipei PART II 7. Cultural Creativity, Clustering and the State in Beijing 8. Remaking Shanghai's Old Industrial Spaces: The Growth and Growth of Creative Precincts 9. Factories and Animal Depots: The 'New' Old Spaces for the Arts in Hong Kong 10. Reusing Old Factory Spaces in Taipei: The Challenges of Developing Cultural Parks 11. From Education to Enterprise in Singapore: Converting Old Schools to New Artistic and Aesthetic Use 12. Culture, Globalization and Urban Landscapes References Index

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Rotterdam’s West 8 is not only one of the largest, but also one of the best-known and most active design firms working in Europe today in the field of "urban design and landscape architecture." The phrase suggests the firm’s strongly interdisciplinary orientation between landscape architecture and town planning. Its projects are provocative, avant-garde in the typically Dutch manner, and not afraid of contact with popular culture. They were created in close collaboration with such architects as Richard Rogers, Steven Holl, Dominique Perrault, Rem Koolhaas, Renzo Piano, and many others. The founder and director of the firm and its most highly visible figure is Adriaan Geuze, who is the author of this book. Classics such as the Swiss Expo.02 park in Yverdon-les-Bains and Chiswick Park in London stand alongside current projects including Moscow Luxury Village, One North Park in Singapore, the Jubilee Gardens in London and Madrid Rio, the spectacular design for the city centre of the Spanish capital.

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The punk movement of the 1970s to early 1980s is examined as an art movement through archive research, interviews, and art historical analysis. It is about pop, pain, poetry, presence, and about a ‘no future’ generation refusing to be the next artworld avant-garde, instead choosing to be the ‘rear-guard’. Skov draws on personal interviews with punk art protagonists from London, New York, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Berlin, among others the members Die Tödliche Doris (The Deadly Doris), members of Værkstedet Værst (The Workshop Called Worst), Nina Sten-Knudsen, Marc Miller, Diana Ozon, Hugo Kaagman, as well as email correspondence with Jon Savage, Anna Banana, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. A large portion of the discussed materials stem from the protagonists' private archives, while some very public—scandalous and spectacular—events are discussed, too, such as the Prostitution exhibition at the ICA in London in 1976 and Die Große Untergangsshow (The Grand Downfall Show) in West-Berlin in 1981. The examined materials cover almost all media: paintings, drawings, bricolages, collages, booklets, posters, zines, installations, sculptures, Super 8 films, documentation of performances and happenings, body art, street art. What emerges is how crucial the concept of history was in punk at that point in time. The punk movement's rejection of the tale of progress and prosperity, as it was being propagated on both sides of the iron curtain, evidently manifested itself in punk visual art too. Central to the book is the thesis that punks placed themselves as the rear-guards, not the avant-gardes, a statement which was in made by Danish punks in 1981, when they called themselves “bagtropperne". Behind the rear-guard watchword was the rejection of the inherent notion of progress that the avant-garde name brings with it; how could a "no future" movement want to lead the way? Although aimed at students and scholars of art, design, music and performance history, the subject as well as the author’s accessible, occasionally playful style will no doubt draw readers with an interest in punk, music, and urban histories.

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The punk movement of the 1970s to early 1980s is examined as an art movement through archive research, interviews, and art historical analysis. It is about pop, pain, poetry, presence, and about a ‘no future’ generation refusing to be the next artworld avant-garde, instead choosing to be the ‘rear-guard’. Skov draws on personal interviews with punk art protagonists from London, New York, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Berlin, among others the members Die Tödliche Doris (The Deadly Doris), members of Værkstedet Værst (The Workshop Called Worst), Nina Sten-Knudsen, Marc Miller, Diana Ozon, Hugo Kaagman, as well as email correspondence with Jon Savage, Anna Banana, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. A large portion of the discussed materials stem from the protagonists' private archives, while some very public—scandalous and spectacular—events are discussed, too, such as the Prostitution exhibition at the ICA in London in 1976 and Die Große Untergangsshow (The Grand Downfall Show) in West-Berlin in 1981. The examined materials cover almost all media: paintings, drawings, bricolages, collages, booklets, posters, zines, installations, sculptures, Super 8 films, documentation of performances and happenings, body art, street art. What emerges is how crucial the concept of history was in punk at that point in time. The punk movement's rejection of the tale of progress and prosperity, as it was being propagated on both sides of the iron curtain, evidently manifested itself in punk visual art too. Central to the book is the thesis that punks placed themselves as the rear-guards, not the avant-gardes, a statement which was in made by Danish punks in 1981, when they called themselves “bagtropperne". Behind the rear-guard watchword was the rejection of the inherent notion of progress that the avant-garde name brings with it; how could a "no future" movement want to lead the way? Although aimed at students and scholars of art, design, music and performance history, the subject as well as the author’s accessible, occasionally playful style will no doubt draw readers with an interest in punk, music, and urban histories.

Read more less