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Composed of ten essays and an epilogue that trace the history of contemporary form as an evolving poetic of structure and construction, the book's analytical framework rests on Frampton's close readings of key French and German, and English sources from the eighteenth century to the present.Kenneth Frampton's long-awaited follow-up to his classic A Critical History of Modern Architecture is certain to influence any future debate on the evolution of modern architecture. Studies in Tectonic Culture is nothing less than a rethinking of the entire modern architectural tradition. The notion of tectonics as employed by Frampton—the focus on architecture as a constructional craft—constitutes a direct challenge to current mainstream thinking on the artistic limits of postmodernism, and suggests a convincing alternative. Indeed, Frampton argues, modern architecture is invariably as much about structure and construction as it is about space and abstract form.Composed of ten essays and an epilogue that trace the history of contemporary form as an evolving poetic of structure and construction, the book's analytical framework rests on Frampton's close readings of key French and German, and English sources from the eighteenth century to the present. He clarifies the various turns that structural engineering and tectonic imagination have taken in the work of such architects as Perret, Wright, Kahn, Scarpa, and Mies, and shows how both constructional form and material character were integral to an evolving architectural expression of their work. Frampton also demonstrates that the way in which these elements are articulated from one work to the next provides a basis upon which to evaluate the works as a whole. This is especially evident in his consideration of the work of Perret, Mies, and Kahn and the continuities in their thought and attitudes that linked them to the past.Frampton considers the conscious cultivation of the tectonic tradition in architecture as an essential element in the future development of architectural form, casting a critical new light on the entire issue of modernity and on the place of much work that has passed as "avant-garde."A copublication of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies and The MIT Press.

How visual art has been enriched by dance, and dance has been shaped by art, in unprecedented and exciting ways for the past fifty years.Move. Choreographing You explores the interaction between visual art and dance since the 1960s. This beautifully illustrated book, published in connection with a major exhibition, focuses on visual artists and choreographers who create sculptures and installations that direct the movements of audiences—making them dancers and active participants. Move shows that choreography is not merely about the notation of movement on paper or in film but about the ways the body inhabits sculpture and installations.The book documents some of the diverse but interconnected ways that visual art and choreography have come together over the past fifty years. Among the artists whose work helped to forge the art-dance connection are Allan Kaprow, Robert Morris, Lygia Clark, Bruce Nauman, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Franz West, Mike Kelley, Isaac Julien, and William Forsythe. Artists from a younger generation who helped to bring the worlds of art and dance together are also looked at—Trisha Donnelly, Christian Jankowski, and Tino Sehgal among them. Move also features new commissions by leading international artists and reconstructions of important works from the past as well as an illustrated contextual archive and timeline.

An analysis of two heuristic strategies for the development of mechanistic models, illustrated with historical examples from the life sciences.

An insider's view of the history of discovery and invention.

One critical change in how people work, argues Larry Hirschhorn, is that they are expected to bring more of themselves psychologically to the job. To facilitate this change, it is necessary to create a new culture of authority—one in which superiors acknowledge their dependence on subordinates, subordinates can challenge superiors, and both are able to show their vulnerability.For many companies, the past decade has been marked by a sense of turbulence and redefinition. The growing role of information technologies and service businesses has prompted companies to reconsider how they are structured and even what business they are in. These changes have also affected how people work, what skills they need, and what kind of careers they expect. One critical change in how people work, argues Larry Hirschhorn, is that they are expected to bring more of themselves psychologically to the job. To facilitate this change, it is necessary to create a new culture of authority—one in which superiors acknowledge their dependence on subordinates, subordinates can challenge superiors, and both are able to show their vulnerability. In the old culture of authority, people suppressed disruptive feelings such as envy, resentment, and fear of dependency. But by depersonalizing themselves, they became "alienated"; in the process, the work of the organization suffered. In building a new culture of authority, we are challenged to express these feelings without disrupting our work. We learn how to bring our feelings to our tasks. The first chapters of the book examine the covert processes by which people caught between the old and new culture of authority neither suppress nor express their feelings. Feelings are activated but not directed toward useful work. The case studies of this process are instructive and moving. The book then explores how organizations can create a culture of openness in which people become more psychologically present. In part, the process entails an understanding of the changes taking place in how we experience our own identity at work and that of "others" in society at large. To do this, the book suggests, we need a social policy of forgiveness and second chances.

Nye uses energy as a touchstone to examine the lives of ordinary people engaged in normal activities.

An insider's account of the art and artists of the most interesting Russian artistic phenomenon since the Russian Avant-Garde.

Tschumi introduces the "concept-form”: a concept generating a form, or a form generating a concept.Event-Cities 4 is the latest in the Event-Cities series from Bernard Tschumi, documenting recent built and theoretical projects in the context of his evolving views on architecture, urbanism, and design. Event-Cities C4 follows directly from the work ofEvent-Cities 3, which examined the interaction of architectural content, concept, and context. This volume takes the interaction a step further, looking at a series of projects for which program or context are insufficient as a generative conceptual strategy, hence requiring a different approach. Tschumi has said, "Over the past years, there is one word I have almost never used, except in order to attack it: 'form.'” In Event-Cities 4, Tschumi introduces the "concept-form”: a concept generating a form, or a form generating a concept, so that one reinforces the other. The concept may be programmatic, technological, or social. The form may be singular or multiple, regular or irregular. Concept-forms act as organizing devices or common denominators for the multiple dimensions of programs and their evolution over time, and drive the projects featured in this book. Highlights include master plans for a pair of media-based work spaces and cultural campuses in Singapore and Abu Dhabi; a major master plan for a financial center with 40,000 projected inhabitants in the Dominican Republic; the innovative Blue Residential Tower in New York City; a group of museums and cultural buildings in France, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and South Korea; a pedestrian bridge in France; and a "multi-programmatic” furniture piece, the TypoLounger. The book contains more than twenty of the Tschumi firm's recent projects, showcasing the most current and forward-looking designs of one of the world's leading architectural practices.

An argument that the idea of sacrifice, with all its political baggage, opens new paths to environmental sustainability.

An analysis of the people and groups who have emerged to challenge the increasingly intrusive ways personal information is captured, processed, and disseminated.

Going beyond the 'blackness' of black art to examine the integrative and interdisciplinary practices of Kara Walker, Fred Wilson, Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, and William Pope.L-five contemporary black artists in whose work race plays anything but a defining role.

What every parent needs to know about negotiating, incentives, outsourcing, and other strategies to solve the economic management problem that is parenting.

An introduction to the global carbon cycle and the human-caused disturbances to it that are at the heart of global warming and climate change.

Works by a pre-Pop, post-abstract expressionist generation of artists who rejected painterly expression and embraced the object.As the 1950s became the 1960s, a new generation of artists around the globe rejected direct painterly expression and returned decisively to the object. Moving away from abstract expressionism and toward the sensibility that would become Pop, these artists—among them Raymond Hains, Martial Raysse, Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, and Robert Rauschenberg—effectively established a new set of artistic paradigms that would influence the decade ahead. New Realisms: 1957-1962 maps this international field of artistic practice, showcasing more than 200 works by artists of the period. The title echoes the name of the French movement of the 1960s "Nouveau Réalisme.” Indeed, the work of the Nouveaux Réalistes group anchors the book (and the exhibition it accompanies), but at the same time, New Realisms represents a wider range of related instincts, diversely expressed. The emphasis is on a constellation of activities in play before the new critical terms and categories of Pop Art were set in stone. The book views the emerging artistic scene from the other end of the telescope, as it were: from a European perspective rather than from that of American Pop Art. New Realisms is emphatically hybrid, encompassing the initiatives of the French group as well as trajectories in New York that stretched from painting to "Environment” to Happening.Artists include: Arman, George Brecht, Cesar, Christo, Gérard Deschamps, Jim Dine, François Dufrêne, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Raymond Hains, Allan Kaprow, Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama, Roy Lichtenstein, Piero Manzoni, Claes Oldenburg, Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, Mimmo Rotella, Niki de Saint Phalle, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, Robert Watts, and Robert Whitman.Essays by: Julia Robinson, Hannah Feldman, Agnes Berecz, Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh.Exhibition: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; June 19th-October 4th, 2010.Distributed by the MIT Press for the Reina Sofia Museum

This is designed for the cancer patient or health professional who seeks a comprehensive overview of the available choices both in treatment and in living with cancer. Included are evaluations of a wide range of complementary therapies and traditional medicines from around the world.

How New York City subways signage evolved from a "visual mess” to a uniform system with Helvetica triumphant.For years, the signs in the New York City subway system were a bewildering hodge-podge of lettering styles, sizes, shapes, materials, colors, and messages. The original mosaics (dating from as early as 1904), displaying a variety of serif and sans serif letters and decorative elements, were supplemented by signs in terracotta and cut stone. Over the years, enamel signs identifying stations and warning riders not to spit, smoke, or cross the tracks were added to the mix. Efforts to untangle this visual mess began in the mid-1960s, when the city transit authority hired the design firm Unimark International to create a clear and consistent sign system. We can see the results today in the white-on-black signs throughout the subway system, displaying station names, directions, and instructions in crisp Helvetica. This book tells the story of how typographic order triumphed over chaos.The process didn't go smoothly or quickly. At one point New York Times architecture writer Paul Goldberger declared that the signs were so confusing one almost wished that they weren't there at all. Legend has it that Helvetica came in and vanquished the competition. Paul Shaw shows that it didn't happen that way—that, in fact, for various reasons (expense, the limitations of the transit authority sign shop), the typeface overhaul of the 1960s began not with Helvetica but with its forebear, Standard (AKA Akzidenz Grotesk). It wasn't until the 1980s and 1990s that Helvetica became ubiquitous. Shaw describes the slow typographic changeover (supplementing his text with more than 250 images—photographs, sketches, type samples, and documents). He places this signage evolution in the context of the history of the New York City subway system, of 1960s transportation signage, of Unimark International, and of Helvetica itself.

Essays that pay tribute to the wide-ranging influence of the late Herbert Simon, by friends and colleagues.Herbert Simon (1916-2001), in the course of a long and distinguished career in the social and behavioral sciences, made lasting contributions to many disciplines, including economics, psychology, computer science, and artificial intelligence. In 1978 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his research into the decision-making process within economic organizations. His well-known book The Sciences of the Artificial addresses the implications of the decision-making and problem-solving processes for the social sciences.This book (the title is a variation on the title of Simon's autobiography, Models of My Life) is a collection of short essays, all original, by colleagues from many fields who felt Simon's influence and mourn his loss. Mixing reminiscence and analysis, the book represents "a small acknowledgment of a large debt."Each of the more than forty contributors was asked to write about the one work by Simon that he or she had found most influential. The editors then grouped the essays into four sections: "Modeling Man," "Organizations and Administration," "Modeling Systems," and "Minds and Machines." The contributors include such prominent figures as Kenneth Arrow, William Baumol, William Cooper, Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Kahneman, David Klahr, Franco Modigliani, Paul Samuelson, and Vernon Smith. Although they consider topics as disparate as "Is Bounded Rationality Unboundedly Rational?" and "Personal Recollections from 15 Years of Monthly Meetings," each essay is a testament to the legacy of Herbert Simon—to see the unity rather than the divergences among disciplines.

How concept, context, and content interact in architecture; provocative examples from recent projects by Bernard Tschumi.In Event-Cities 3, Bernard Tschumi explores the complex and productive triangulation of architectural concept, context, and content. There is no architecture without a concept, an overriding idea that gives coherence and identity to a building. But there is also no architecture without context—historical, geographical, cultural—or content (what happens inside). Concept, context, and content may be in unison or purposely discordant. Against the contextualist movement of the 1980s and 1990s, which called for architecture to blend in with its surroundings, Tschumi argues that buildings may or may not conform to their settings—but that the decision should always be strategic.Through documentation of recent projects—including the new Acropolis Museum in Athens, a campus athletic center in Cincinnati, museums in Sao Paolo, New York, and Antwerp, concert halls in France, and a speculative urban project in Beijing—Tschumi examines different ways that concept, context, and content relate to each other in his work. In the new Acropolis Museum, for example, Tschumi looks at the interaction of the concept—a simple and precise museum with the clarity of ancient Greek buildings—with the context (its location at the base of the Acropolis, 800 feet from the Parthenon) and the content, which incorporates archaeological excavations on the building site into the fabric of the museum. Through provocative examples, Tschumi demonstrates that the relationship of concept, context, and content may be one of indifference, reciprocity, or conflict—all of which, he argues, are valid architectural approaches. Above all, he suggests that the activity of architecture is less about the making of forms than the investigation and materialization of concepts.

The first book to address children's statelessness and lack of legal status as a human rights issue.

A psychologist's impassioned call to stop labeling our traumatized war veterans as mentally ill and a guide to how every citizen can help returning vets.

A sociotechnical investigation of ubiquitous computing as a research enterprise and as a lived reality.