From Symbolic Temple To Dematerialization

This book is the result of the extension and improvement of the article that, with the same title, was published in issue 38 of June 2017 of the digital journal BiD: textos universitaris de biblioteconomia i documentació. This expansion and improvement has consisted in the addition of new sections that complement and deepen the argumentation already expressed in the article, together with the inclusion of new bibliographical references, as well as the presence of an epilogue that, as a kind of philosophical and professional reflection, serves as a conclusion. In addition, a prologue has also been included, by the architect Josep Maria Miró i Gellida -responsible for the Nitidus studios- and who is the author of the future Provincial Public Library of Barcelona, which has yet to be built (and which is one of the oldest and most persistent demands of the librarian collective in Catalonia). As with the publication of the article, the book also aims to establish an evolution in the architecture of libraries throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. This evolution highlights the different transformations that the library buildings have undergone, adapting to different forms, but above all to respond to the different social and cultural realities and also changing characteristics of each period and each historical moment. It proposes an evolution divided into 5 major architectural transformations. For each of these five transformations, one or more paradigmatic libraries from around the world are presented, clearly exemplifying the transformation to which reference is to be made. Each presentation is accompanied by an explanation of its main characteristics in terms of spaces and architecture, to finally argue this decision based on quotations from external sources and also with its own argumentation. It should be noted that quotations from other languages have been translated into Spanish. The result is a chronological and historical evolution that serves to frame and contextualize, ultimately, the fifth and final current transformation of libraries. The book also includes an extensive bibliography that should serve as a starting point for future and new studies on the subject. This book talks about the libraries of the Mancomunitat de Catalunya; of the Stockholm Public Library, the work of Erik Gunnar Asplund; from the Viipuri Library of Alvar Aalto; of the Exeter Library, work of Louis I. Kahn; of the Media Library of Sendai, work of Toyo Ito; from the University Library of Amsterdam, the work of Ira Koers and Roelof Mulders; from the Library of the Art University of Mushino de Sou Fujimoto, among many others.

The twentieth-century discovered the concept of sacred place largely through the work of Martin Heidegger and Mircea Eliade. Their writings on sacred place respond to the modern manipulation of nature and secularization of space, and so may seem distinctively post-modern, but their work has an important and unacknowledged precedent in the Neoplatonism of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism traces the appearance and development of sacred place in the writings of Neoplatonists from the third to ninth centuries, and sets them in the context of present-day debates over place and the sacred.

The only dictionary of its kind, this greatly expanded second edition lists objects, concepts, traits and situations ancient and modern and gives their appropriate symbols. A companion to Symbolism: A Comprehensive Dictionary (2012), this volume presents symbols and their referents in reverse association (but is not simply a reconfiguring of information). Examples: a symbol for "hell" is descending stairs; an attribute of Saint Benedict is a raven; joy after sorrow is signified by the gemstone amber. Ethnic, literary, artistic, religious, heraldic, numerological, folkloric, occult and psychological usages are included.

Marcus Moberg offers a new model of religion and religious life in the post-war era, through focusing on the role of markets and media as vectors of contemporary social and cultural change – and therefore institutional religious change. While there is wide agreement among sociologists of religion that there this area is transforming on a global scale, there is less agreement about how these changes should best be approached and conceptualized. In a time of accelerating institutional religious decline, institutional Churches have become ever more susceptible to market-associated discourse and language and are ever more compelled to adapt to the demands of the present-day media environment. Using discourse analysis, Marcus Moberg tracks how new media and marketing language and concepts have entered Christian thinking and discourse. Church, Market, and Media develops a framework that approaches changes in the contemporary religious field in direct relation to the changing socioeconomic makeup of contemporary societies on the whole. Through focusing on the impact of markets and media within the contemporary religious setting of mainline institutional Christian churches in the Western world, the book outlines new avenues for further theorizing the study of religious change.

A major participant in the influential Tel Quel group in France, Jean-Joseph Goux here offers a bold reevaluation of both the Marxist economic model and the Freudian concept of the unconscious. Symbolic Economies makes available for the first time in English generous selections from Goux's Freud, Marx: Economie et symbolique (1973) and Les iconoclastes (1978). Goux brings the theories of historical materialism and of psychoanalysis into play to illuminate and enrich each other, and undertakes a compelling integration of the contributions of structuralism and post-structuralism. Looking closely at the work of such major figures as Lacan, Derrida, and Nietzsche, Goux extends the implications of Marxism and Freudianism to an interdisciplinary semiotics of value and proposes a radical concept of exchange. Literary theorists, philosophers, social scientists, cultural historians, and feminist critics alike will welcome this important and provocative work.

Symbolic Landscapes presents a definitive collection of landscape/place studies that explores symbolic, cultural levels of geographical meanings. Essays written by philosophers, geographers, architects, social scientists, art historians, and literati, bring specific modes of expertise and perspectives to this transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary study of the symbolic level human existential spatiality. Placing emphasis on the pre-cognitive genesis of symbolic meaning, as well as embodied, experiential (lived) geography, the volume offers a fresh, quasi-phenomenological approach. The editors articulate the epistemological doctrine that perception and imagination form a continuum in which both are always implicated as complements. This approach makes a case for the interrelation of the geography of perception and the geography of imagination, which means that human/cultural geography offers only an abstraction if indeed an aesthetic geography is constituted merely as a sub-field. Human/cultural geography can only approach spatial reality through recognizing the intimate interrelative dialectic between the imaginative and perceptual meanings of our landscapes/place-worlds. This volume reinvigorates the importance of the topic of symbolism in human/cultural geography, landscape studies, philosophy of place, architecture and planning, and will stand among the classics in the field.

In Chosen Places, Constructing New Jerusalems in Slavia Orthodoxa, Jelena Erdeljan examines the Old Testament topic of the divinely-chosen status of Jerusalem and the phenomenon of translatio Hierosolymi in visual culture, based on the examples of Constantinople, Turnovo, Belgrade, and Moscow.