Topographies Of Light

This collection explores the various forms of narrative, semiotic, and technological mediation that shape the experience of place. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi have assembled a wide array of scholars who give a unique perspective on the phenomenology of place.

This book investigates the function of topographical names and descriptions in a variety of narratives, poems, and philosophical or theoretical texts, primarily from the 19th and 20th centuries, but including also Plato and the Bible. Topics include the initiating efficacy of speech acts, ethical responsibility, political or legislative power, the translation of theory from one topographical location to another, the way topographical delineations can function as parable or allegory, and the relation of personification to landscape.

This book provides a current overview of the theoretical and experimental aspects of some interferometry techniques applied to Topography and Astronomy. The first two chapters comprise interferometry techniques used for precise measurement of surface topography in engineering applications; while chapters three through eight are dedicated to interferometry applications related to Earth's topography. The last chapter is an application of interferometry in Astronomy, directed specifically to detection of planets outside our solar system. Each chapter offers an opportunity to expand the knowledge about interferometry techniques and encourage researchers in development of new interferometry applications.

Architectural Topographies is a critical dictionary for architects and landscape architects in which the graphic lexicon can be read from a beginning, the ground, to a conclusion, the specific case studies. Meant as a tool to help you recognise, analyse, choose, and invent solutions, the book's key words refer to the physical and material relationship between construction and ground; to where and how the link is built; to the criteria, methods, and tools used to know and transform the ground; and to the possible approaches to the place and their implications on the way the earth is touched. Fifty case studies by forty-six of the greatest architects of the previous hundred years are represented throughout in sectional drawings which place the buildings along the same ground plane to illustrate how the key words might be combined and to show each architect's position on their built work in relation to all the others. Includes projects by Alvar Aalto; Tadao Ando; Gunnar Asplund; Atelier Bow-Wow; João Batista Vilanova Artigas; Patrick Berger; Mario Botta; Marcel Breuer; Erik Bryggman; Gonçalo Byrne; David Chipperfield; Le Corbusier; Sverre Fehn; Aurelio Galfetti, Flora Ruchat, and Ivo Trumpy; Dick Van Gameren; Herzog and De Meuron; Steven Holl; Arne Jacobsen; Kengo Kuma; Anne Lacaton and Jean Philippe Vassal; Adalberto Libera; Frank Lloyd Wright; Paulo Mendes da Rocha; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Enric Miralles and Carme Pinos; Glenn Murcutt; Juan Navarro Baldeweg; Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey; Jan Olav Jensen and Børre Skodvin; John Pawson; Giuseppe Perugini, Mario Fiorentino, and Nello Aprile; Renzo Piano; Georges-Henry Pingusson; Rudolph Schindler; Roland Simounet; Alvaro Siza; Luigi Snozzi; Alejandro de la Sota; Eduardo Souto de Moura; Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson; Fernando Tavora; Jørn Utzon; Livio Vacchini; Francesco Venezia, Roberto Collovà, and Marcella Aprile; Amancho Williams; and Peter Zumthor.

Adopting an integrated approach, this book covers experiments, theory, and emerging applications. In the first part surfaces are described that change from flat to either a random corrugated or to a well-structured structure, while the second part deals with those surface structures integrated in the coating surface where the structures change their shape or dimension when addressed by an external trigger. A variety of materials are addressed, including liquid crystal polymers, hydrogels, hard acrylates, and soft silicones. The whole is rounded off by a discussion of various applications, including surface controlled flows in microfluidic systems. Of interest to chemists and engineers, researchers in industry and academia, as well as those working in the paint industry and hydrodynamics.

This book brings together experts in the fields of art history, visual arts, music, cultural geography, curatorial practice and landscape architecture to explore the role of material memory in the post-industrial landscape and the ways in which that landscape can act as a site for many forms of creative practice. It examines the role of material memory in the siting of public artworks and politically inspired installation art within the socio-economic post-industrial landscape. The post-industrial ruin as a place for innovation in the curatorial process is also investigated, as are social memory and the complexities of inscribing memory into places. A number of chapters focus on photography and its important role in recording memory as transformation, abandonment and erosion. Artists and musicians present personal case studies examining the siting of permanent and temporary artworks which can invoke memory of both culture and place. The land itself and its associated histories of post-industry are explored in artistic terms investigating dislocation, wasted spaces and extinction. Landscape architects and cultural geographers explore the aesthetic of the urban ruin, its natural and human ecologies and the re-wilding of urban spaces. The volume provokes discussion by a group of diverse experts on a very contemporary subject.

This qualitative study asks whether structural transformation brought about by modernization in contemporary urban India can induce growing equality in the sense of mutual respect between the lower and the middle classes. From the idographic context of female domestic workers and their employers in Chennai (Tamil Nadu) a general type of modernity for the periphery is outlined. Even though changes in this relation are apparent and various forms of respect and recognition are developing, the deep hierarchical differences persist despite - or precisely because of - modernity in the form of capitalism. Johanna Vogel (Dr.) studied Intercultural Business Studies at the University of Passau and received 2017 her PhD in Human Geography at the University of Bayreuth.

This book examines dystopian fiction’s recent paradigm shift towards urban dystopias. It links the dystopian tradition with the literary history of the novel, spatio-philosophical concepts against the backdrop of the spatial turn, and systems-theory. Five dystopian novels are discussed in great detail: China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) and The City & The City (2009), City of Bohane (2011) by Kevin Barry, John Berger’s Lilac and Flag (1992), and Divided Kingdom (2005) by Rupert Thomson. The book includes chapters on the literary history of the dystopian tradition, the referential interplay of maps and literature, urban spaces in literature, borders and transgressions, and on systems-theory as a tool for charting dystopian fiction. The result is a detailed overview of how dystopian fiction constantly adapts to – and reflects on – the actual world.