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Richard Neutra
Life and Shape
In print again for the first time since 1962, the autobiography of this legendary architect provides insights into the life of one of modernism's most influential architects. With a new foreword by Dion Neutra.
"Since he followed it all of his life, Richard Neutra (1892-1970) must have relished the maxim of the Greek philosopher Socrates: 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' In his books, articles, lectures, correspondence, and even casual conversations, Neutra constantly examined, not only his own life, but the lives of others - present and past - and the human and natural world they inhabited. Nowhere was this truer than in his autobiography Life and Shape first published in 1962, which now, after years of being out of print, has again happily come back to life.
As opposed to Survival Through Design (1954), his superb collection of densely philosophical essays, Neutra took a different tack in Life and Shape, following a lighter and more deliberately relaxed approach. It was as if the usually serious and intense Neutra was giving himself permission to reveal his richly ironic sense of humor and to probe areas in his personal experience which he had not examined as closely before. These included hitherto unrecorded memories of his parents, siblings, and his childhood and education in imperial Vienna, his numbing experiences as an Austrian artillery officer in World War I, and the beginnings of his architectural consciousness in his response to the work of Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, Erich Mendelsohn, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. As in the autobiographies of Sullivan and Wright, Life and Shape concentrates on Neutra's earlier years, both in Europe and America. While he naturally recounts his memories of such well-known commissions as the Lovell Health House (1929), his own Van der Leeuv Research House (1933) and the von Sternberg House (1935), he also muses on such less famous buildings as the small, and now virtually forgotten, Mosk House (1933). "Life and Shape" also confirms Neutra's obsession with the passage of time and his firm resolution never to waste it. Like Sullivan and Wright, Neutra eschewed writing a factual chronicle, and - at the age of 70 - composed instead a meditation on the aspects of his life and work that seemed, in retrospect, to be the most interesting and significant. He felt no need to try to "include everything" but rather to present an honest recounting of his memory of his life. In writing my ownRichard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture [Oxford University Press, 1982; Rizzoli Press, 2006], I relied on Life and Shape when I wanted an account of Neutra's experiences told in his own authentic voice. For future generations of architects, historians, and readers, it is good to have it back." -Thomas S. Hines
UCLA Professor Emeritus of History and Architecture, author
of "Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture"
Available from Amazon (also in UK, Germany, France, Canada, and Japan)
Gad Granach
Where Is Home?
Stories from the Life of a German-Jewish Emigre
"Did you come here out of personal conviction or are you from Germany?" was the question German Jews were asked when they arrived in Palestine in 1933. Few came out of conviction. The majority of the sixty thousand German Jews who arrived in the then-British mandate came because they had no other option. Palestine was not the land of their dreams, but rather a place of asylum where one would have to start life anew. Doctors became bus drivers, lawyers raised chickens, and artists worked as waiters. For the young, however, immigration to Palestine was a great adventure, the beginning of a new life free from old conventions and, sometimes, the beginning as well of a life or death battle.
Gad Granach still went by Gerhard when he arrived at Haifa Harbor at the age of twenty-one. The son of a famous actor in Berlin and of a politically engaged mother, he was not one of those who came out of conviction. He made the best of it, whether working as a reserve policeman for the British, a construction worker in Tel Aviv, or a locomotive driver along the Dead Sea. He encountered a land of neither milk nor honey, and took part in five major wars and a number of smaller ones, wishing all the while that God would "choose" another people and leave the Jews in peace.
"A charismatic witness to the Berlin of the 1930s, Israel during its kibbutz years, and present-day Jerusalem."
- Hellmuth Karasek, Der Tagesspiegel
"A contemporary from whom one always desires another sentence." - Elke Schmitter, Die Zeit
"A Charlie Chaplin of the pen. This is how a book about Israel should be." - ZDF, Aspekte
"Filled with a wonderful, lively sense of humour"
- Der Spiegel magazine
"Granach is highly entertaining as well as thought provoking. A supreme raconteur." - Elke Schubert, Sueddeutsche Zeitung
"An absolute must-read!" - Radio Bayern
Martin Richardson South Croxted: A Memoir
A childhood memoir of South London during the swinging 1960s and 1970s, miniskirts and the Beatles, where life was anything but normal. From villains and bent coppers to gunrunning in Africa and imprisonment, all brought to a focus by an IRA terrorist assassination plot that punctuated the end of an era. This is the story of small time scoundrel, Victor Richardson, a character larger than life but smaller than human, seen through the eyes of his son, Martin, who pieces together fragments from the past to present an insightful picture of gangland London at its height, painting an autobiographical account of his father's ill-fated life.
From the back cover South Croxted is one of the longest roads in South London. It is also the boundary between the London boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark. It is an A-road, the A2199, and the main north-south arterial road for West Dulwich, meeting the east-west A205 South Circular next to West Dulwich railway station. It comprises two roads: the northern half is Croxted Road and at its southern end, after Park Hall Road, it becomes South Croxted. It stretches from the dizzy heights of Crystal Palace, where one can admire an unbroken vista of the City of London from Gipsy Hill, down toward Herne Hill where its once famous Velodrome played host to the 1948 Olympic cycling track races, and beyond that, the constantly changing ethnic mix of Brixton.
During the tenebrous sixties and lucent seventies, South Croxted was brought to the attention of the world press reporting on underworld crime and an IRA assassination attempt. We can never know the true story, the factuality of what occurred in South Croxted, because so much was hidden, or has been forgotten, Only through letters, photographs and newspaper articles can we extract a history, together with my own account of my family's harrowing journey through early memoir. In unravelling my father's involvement I hoped to understand my own, hoped to find something that made sense of that time, but instead, I found a place far more unpredictable than one could ever imagine. The road was far from straight...
Juhani Pallasmaa
DIE AUGEN DER HAUT Architektur und die Sinne
First German edition of Juhani Pallasmaa's classic of architectural theory, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Foreword by Steven Holl. Translated by Andreas Wutz.
Erstmalig 1996 (in englischer Sprache) veroeffentlicht, ist Die Augen der Haut inzwischen zu einem Klassiker der Architekturtheorie geworden, der weltweit zur Pflichtlektuere von Architekturschulen gehoert. Das Buch besteht aus zwei Essays. Der Erste gibt einen Ueberblick ueber die historische Entwicklung des okularzentrischen Paradigmas in der westlichen Kultur seit der griechischen Antike sowie ueber dessen Einfluss auf unsere Erfahrung von Welt und die Eigenschaften von Architektur. Der zweite Essay untersucht, welche Rolle die anderen Sinne bei authentischen Erfahrungen von Architektur spielen, und weist einen Weg in Richtung einer multisensorischen Architektur, welche ein Gefuehl von Zugehoerigkeit und Integration ermoeglicht.
Seit der Erstveroeffentlichung des Buchs hat die Rolle des Koerpers und der Sinne ein gesteigertes Interesse sowohl in der Architekturphilosophie als auch im Architekturunterricht erfahren. Die neue, ueberarbeitete und ergaenzte Ausgabe dieses wegweisenden Werks wird nicht nur Architekten und Studenten dazu anregen, eine ganzheitlichere Architektur zu entwerfen, sondern sie wird auch den Durchschnittsleser in der Wahrnehmung seiner Umgebung bereichern.
"Seit Architektur - Erlebnis (1959) des daenischen Architekten Steen Eiler Rasmussen hat es keine Schrift mehr von derartig grosser Praegnanz und Klarheit gegeben, welche Studenten und Architekten in diesen kritischen Zeiten dabei helfen kann, eine Architektur des 21. Jahrhunderts zu entwickeln." - Steven Holl
JUHANI PALLASMAA ist einer der angesehensten finnischen Architekten und Architekturtheoretiker. In allen Bereichen seiner theoretischen und gestalterischen Taetigkeit - welche Architektur, Grafik-Design, Staedteplanung und Ausstellungen umfasst - betont er stets die zentrale Rolle von Identitaet, Sinneserfahrung und Taktilitaet.
Three-Dimensional Imaging TechniquesTakanori Okoshi A seminal early text on lenticular and holographic imaging, Takanori Okoshi's Three-Dimensional Imaging Techniques provides analysis and insights into the fundamentals of 3D perception and the creation of 3D imagery as well as a history of its technological development. Instructors may request an evaluation copy for this title. Available from Amazon (also in UK, Germany, France, Canada, and Japan)
Richard Neutra
Vida y forma
Autobiografia de Richard Neutra "Puesto que la siguio durante toda su vida, Richard Neutra (1892-1970) debia apreciar la maxima de Socrates, el gran filosofo griego: "una vida sin examen no tiene objeto de vivirla para el hombre". En sus libros, en sus conferencias, incluso en sus conversaciones informales, Neutra reexaminaba constantemente no solo su propia vida, sino tambian la vida de los demas - presente y pasada - y el mundo, natural y humano, en que habitaban. En ningun otro lugar se hace esto mas patente que en "Vida y forma", su autobiografia publicada por primera vez en 1962, y que ahora, tras anos de estar descatalogada, ha vuelto felizmente a la vida. A diferencia de "Disenar para sobrevivir" (1954), su magnifica coleccion de ensayos, profunda y filosofica, Neutra opta por otro enfoque en "Vida y forma", y adopta un acercamiento mas ligero y desenfadado. Parece como si Neutra, normalmente tan serio y vehemente, se diera aqui permiso para mostrar su ironico sentido del humor y para sondear determinadas areas de su experiencia personal que nunca antes habia examinado tan de cerca. Esto incluye recuerdos hasta ese momento no contados de sus padres y hermanos, de su infancia, y de su educacion en la Viena imperial, asi como de sus duras experiencias como oficial de la artilleria austriaca en la Primera Guerra Mundial y de los inicios de su conciencia arquitectonica en respuesta a las obras de Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, Erich Mendelsohn, Louis Sullivan y Frank Lloyd Wright. Al igual que las autobiografias de Sullivan y Wright, "Vida y forma" se concentra en los primeros anos de Neutra, tanto en Europa como en America. Como es natural relata en sus memorias los encargos mas conocidos como la Lovell Health House (1929), su propia Van der Leeuw Research House (1933) y la casa Von Sternberg, pero tambien se detiene en algunas construcciones mucho menos famosas como la pequena y casi ignorada casa Mosk (1933). "Vida y forma" tambien confirma la obsesion de Neutra con el paso del tiempo y su firme resolucion de no perderlo nunca. Como Sullivan y Wright, Neutra evita escribir una cronica de los hechos, para proponer mas bien, a sus setenta anos, una meditacion sobre los aspectos de su vida y su trabajo que retrospectivamente le parecen mas interesantes y significantes. En vez de "incluirlo todo", prefiere presentar un relato honesto de la memoria de su vida. Al escribir mi propio libro "Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture" (Oxford University Press, 1982; Rizzoli Press, 2006), me base en "Vida y forma" siempre que necesite presentar las experiencias de Neutra con su autentica voz. Para las generaciones futuras de arquitectos, historiadores y lectores, es una gran noticia tener este libro disponible de nuevo." - Thomas S. Hines
Profesor emerito de Histora y arquitectura, Universidad de California Los Angeles
Available from Amazon.es in Spain (also in the US and UK)
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