An interdisciplinary anthology exploring alternatives to the principles of commercial markets that dominate contemporary life. The essays in this volume apply an experimental ethos to collaborative cultural production. Expanding the fields of art, design, and architectural research, contributors provide critical reflection on collaborative practice-based research. The volume builds on a pop-up market hosted by the London-based arts cluster Critical Practice that sought to creatively explore existing structures of evaluation and actively produce new ones. Assembled by lead editor Marsha Bradfield, the essays contextualize the event within London's long history of marketplaces, offer reflections from the stallholders, and celebrate its value system, particularly its critique of econometrics. A glossary rounds off the text and opens up the publication as a resource.

Contemporary Art About Architecture is the first to take up its topic in a sustained and explicit manner and the first to advance the idea that contemporary art increasingly functions as a form of architectural history, theory and analysis. It examines a diverse group of artists - including Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Matthew Barney, Monika Sosnowska, Pipo Nguyen-duy, Paul Pfeiffer and Mies van der Rohe - in conjunction with the vernacular, canonical, and fantastical structures engaged by their work.

"The relationship between contemporary architecture and nature is fundamental to today's creativity. Some architects reject nature or imagine that they can create an artificial world of their own - while others are seeking new ways, aided by science and the computer, to chart new directions for the buildings of tomorrow. From ecologically-oriented designs to the most astonishing new forms, this book shows how essential nature remains to architecture."--BOOK JACKET.

How do buildings act with people and among people in the performances of life? This collection of essays reveals a deep alliance between architecture and the performing arts, uncovering its roots in ancient stories, and tracing a continuous tradition of thought that emerges in contemporary practice. With fresh insight, the authors ask how buildings perform with people as partners, rather than how they look as formal compositions. They focus on actions: the door that offers the possibility of making a dramatic entrance, the window that frames a scene, and the city street that is transformed in carnival. The essays also consider the design process as a performance improvised among many players and offer examples of recent practice that integrates theater and dance. This collection advances architectural theory, history, and criticism by proposing the lens of performance as a way to engage the multiple roles that buildings can play, without reducing them to functional categories. By casting architecture as spatial action rather than as static form, these essays open a promising avenue for future investigation. For architects, the essays propose integrating performance into design through playful explorations that can reveal intense relationships between people and place, and among people in place. Such practices develop an architectural imagination that intuitively asks, 'How might people play out their stories in this place?' and 'How might this place spark new stories?' Questions such as these reside in the heart of all of the essays presented here. Together, they open a position in the intersection between everyday life and staged performance to rethink the role of architectural design.

This text summarises and contextualises the ideas that formed visual arts practices this century. Art, design and architecture are located in their social and political contexts, and the ideas of modernism are traced from the development of industrialised Europe at the turn of the century to the post-industrial, post-colonial present. The complex relationship between modernism and postmodernism in the visual arts is examined and the book concludes with a review of the global impact of the new technologies on art and design production.

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