Terraria Gigantica

In a new approach to environmental photography, Dana Fritz explores the world’s largest enclosed landscapes: Arizona’s Biosphere 2, Cornwall’s Eden Project, and Nebraska’s Lied Jungle and Desert Dome at the Henry Doorly Zoo. In these vivaria, plants are grown amid carefully constructed representations of the natural world to entertain and educate tourists while also supporting scientific research. Together, these architectural and engineering marvels stand as working symbols of our complex relationship with the environment. Giant terraria require human control of temperature, humidity, irrigation, insects, weeds, and other conditions to create otherwise impossible ecosystems. While technical demands inform the design of these spaces, the juxtapositions of natural and artificial elements generate striking visual paradoxes that can go unnoticed. Here Fritz turns away from visitors’ prepared sight lines, revealing alternate views that dispel the illusion of natural conditions. Inviting questions about what it means to create and contain landscapes, Terraria Gigantica inspires contemplation of our ecological future.

In a new approach to environmental photography, Dana Fritz explores the world's largest enclosed landscapes: Arizona's Biosphere 2, Cornwall's Eden Project, and Nebraska's Lied Jungle and Desert Dome at the Henry Doorly Zoo. In these vivaria, plants are grown amid carefully constructed representations of the natural world to entertain and educate tourists while also supporting scientific research. Together, these architectural and engineering marvels stand as working symbols of our complex relationship with the environment. Giant terraria require human control of temperature, humidity, irrigation, insects, weeds, and other conditions to create otherwise impossible ecosystems. While technical demands inform the design of these spaces, the juxtapositions of natural and artificial elements generate striking visual paradoxes that can go unnoticed. Here Fritz turns away from visitors' prepared sight lines, revealing alternate views that dispel the illusion of natural conditions. Inviting questions about what it means to create and contain landscapes, Terraria Gigantica inspires contemplation of our ecological future.

This companion investigates the ways in which designers, architects, and planners address ecology through the built environment by integrating ecological ideas and ecological thinking into discussions of urbanism, society, culture, and design. Exploring the innovation of materials, habitats, landscapes, and infrastructures, it furthers novel ecotopian ideas and ways of living, including human-made settings on water, in outer space, and in extreme environments and climatic conditions. Chapters of this extensive collection on ecotopian design are grouped under five different ecological perspectives: design manifestos and ecological theories, anthropocentric transformative design concepts, design connectivity, climatic design, and social design. Contributors provide plausible, sustainable design ideas that promote resiliency, health, and well-being for all living things, while taking our changing lifestyles into consideration. This volume encourages creative thinking in the face of ongoing environmental damage, with a view to making design decisions in the interest of the planet and its inhabitants. With contributions from over 79 expert practitioners, educators, scientists, researchers, and theoreticians, as well as planners, architects, and engineers from the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia, this book engages theory, history, technology, engineering, and science, as well as the human aspects of ecotopian design thinking and its implications for the outlook of the planet.

Reider tells the tangled tale of the creation, and eventual disintegration, of the experimental eco-utopia known as Biosphere 2.

Cig Harvey's third monograph, You An Orchestra You A Bomb , is a vibrant and bold book; possibly her most beautiful to date. It explores the photographer's relationship with life itself. It is a book about paying attention to and appreciating the fragile present. You An Orchestra You A B omb captures moments of awe, makes icons of the everyday, and looks at life on the threshold between magic and disaster. Cig has always experienced the world viscerally but after a traumatic event, a raw heightened awareness of temporary nature of life permeates this new work. Through breathless moments of beauty, her images propel us to fathom the sacred in the split seconds of everyday. Cig's photographs are interwoven with her int imate poetry in this hauntingly beautiful book.

William Abranowicz has photographed Greece for over a decade and his images show all dimensions of Greek life: its stores and cafes, its ancient ruins, its craggy mountains and its villages rising out of brilliant aquamarine waters. Collectively these photographs convey what makes up present day Greece. Abranowicz's photographs are held in public and private collections including the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and the International Center for Photography in New York and have been featured in many publications, including the Conde Nast Traveler, Martha Stewart Living and the New York Times Magazine. SELLING POINTS -William Abranowicz's work has appeared in nearly every major publication in the United States, Europe and Asia including The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Town and Country, Martha Stewart Living, Elle Décor, and Stern -Features an introduction by Louis de Bernières author of the award-winning and international bestseller Captain Corelli's Mandolin 85 colour photographs

In 2007, American photographer Sharon Core (born 1965) encountered the work of the early nineteenth-century American still-life painter Raphael Peale (1774-1825). Peale's images of fruit, cakes and vegetables are famed for their uncanny realism, and they inspired Core to undertake a series of photographs titled Early American, a brilliant exploration of trompe l'oeil's relationship to photography, and of photography's relationship to the past. Core replicates as closely as possible the subject matter, lighting and compositional characteristics of Peale's paintings. She describes an extraordinarily intensive preparation for the project, researching and acquiring period porcelain and glass and growing, from heirloom seeds, varieties of fruits and vegetables that were in existence in the early nineteenth century. "Through these efforts," she writes, "I hoped to achieve a mirroring of Peale's painstaking painting process, and the themes that lie under their surfaces." This volume reproduces the 31 images comprising this ambitious enterprise.