Recent Reading No. 2
Posted in Reviews on Mon May 14, 07 by Kyle under Books and Architecture.
This should really be titled Recent Reading No 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, et al. because I all I have been doing recently is organizing after having moved to a new apartment, reading books and working, working, working. Hence the cavernous silence on this very site lately. What can I say, books are much easier than the blogosphere to curl up with in bed when you are tired. Anyway, here is a partial recap of what has been attracting my attention.
New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age by Robert A. M. Stern, et. al. (The Monacelli Press, 1999)
The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton. (Pantheon, 2006).
Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England by Judith Flanders. (HarperPerennial, 2004)
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Good-bye, Mr. Chippendale
Posted in Reviews on Wed Dec 20, 06 by Kyle under Books and Decorative Arts.
I recently found a book at the San Francisco library titled Good-bye, Mr. Chippendale by Terence Harold Robsjohn-Gibbings. Before I had even turned beyond the copyright page something caught my eye that told me how wide a gulf stood between the period when this book was written and the present era.
The book begins with a disclaimer that:
This book has been produced in full compliance with all government regulations for the conservation of paper, metal, and other essential materials.
This simple perfunctory sentence said a lot about the mentality and material circumstances of the United States at the time. In fact, the book dates from 1944, nearly a year before the end of World War II on September 2, 1945. Material deprivation and the rationing of materials needed to fuel the war effort was still in full effect and this siege mentality seeps into the book. The author elaborates on two main thematic points throughout the course of the book.
The first theme is a snappy, verging on glib and flippant, anecdotal summation of the history of interior decoration in America especially vis-à-vis the establishment of the antiques collecting “industry”. Which you are soon informed, as if the title of the book did not make it abundantly clear, he throughly deplores…
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Fashion:The Mirror of History
Posted in Reviews on Wed Nov 15, 06 by Kyle under Books and Fashion.
I must extend my most sincere digital apologies for neglecting this blog for aeons of internet time. Life and work have been keeping me quite busy lately. Furthermore after sitting at a computer all day long who wants to do so for one’s miniscule remainder of the evening..? I’ve been finding myself inclined to recline in bed and read the evening away instead of basking away the night in the phosphorescent rays of of the blogosphere.
Halloween festivities revived my interest in a good costume, so in my spare moments I’ve been reading through Fashion: The Mirror of History by Michael and Ariane Batterberry. It is quite the compendious tome, and thusly I haven’t finished it yet. I have managed to read my way from Ur and Egypt all the way up to the court finery of baroque-era France. Only a couple more centuries to make it through…
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Single-Storied America
Posted in Reviews on Fri Oct 13, 06 by Kyle under Books and Photography.
People joke about the four remaining ostensibly communist countries of the world, North Korea, China, Cuba, and the People’s Republic of Berkeley mistaking the distinctly un-blue collar but earnestly organic, macrobiotic, imported French blue-cheesed, “animal companion”ed, more terroir, not war on terror sensibility of Bay Areans for communist ideology.
After all vegans nearly starve themselves for a smug sense of superiority on the world dietary stage much like North Korea starves its people to fund a weapons program to give their leaders a smug sense of superiority on the world political stage. Cubans and nearly-elderly acid heads alike expend enormous amounts of energy and resourcefulness to maintain a fleet of decrepit, rusted, flamboyantly psychedelically colored, hopelessly out of date cars that have been strained by use for almost half a century. Of course, it must be noted that the hippies got their cars and vans from Germany, and the Cubans got theirs from the United States and the old Soviet Union, but that is but a minor point of contention. Like the new market fixated People’s Republic of China certain intrepid BoHo’s have become adept at selling the accouterments of the spiritual culture of Tibet to our craven capitalist souls and heading straight to Banana Republic, the Farmer’s Market, the new subdivision, and the luxury high-rise with the resulting profits.
Taken individually one could easily dismiss these similarities as happenstance or mere conspiratorial talk radio fodder. That is until one comes across a little red book, well, actually a medium red and grey book entitled Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers. This book with its expository title, originally published as Single-Storied America in the Soviet Union is the travelogue of two satirical Soviet journalists as they drive across America in from New York City to San Francisco and back taking sharp, witty verbal and photographic snapshots the entire way.
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Recent Reading No. 1
Posted in Reviews on Mon Oct 2, 06 by Kyle under Books and Painting.
A great as the internet is, I still revel in the depth and breadth that a good book can bring to a subject. Not to mention the fact that one does not have to wait for it to download, and you never get a busy cursor. So in light of that, and the fact that I have actually have made the time to read, I’d like to share some of what has be occupying my time lately.
Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture by Malcolm Barnard. (Palgrav, 2001)
American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the America Experience by Barbara Novak. (Harper & Row, 1979)
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The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture
Posted in Reviews on Wed Aug 16, 06 by Kyle under Architecture and Books.
One of the books that I have been reading lately is George Hersey’s The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture: Speculation on Ornament from Vitruvius to Venturi from the MIT Press. As the title of the book suggests the author examines the original significance and meaning behind what we now consider the ornamental aspects of Classical Greek architecture and shows how they were much more than mere decoration to the Greeks, Romans and Europeans of the Renaissance. Before reading the book I was already familiar with some of the information that he retells, for instance Vitruvius’s account of the origin of the Corinthian order. Callimachus the sculptor and architect was supposedly inspired to create the signature form of the Corinthian capital when he saw an acanthus plant that had grown up around a basket covered with a tile full of mourning mementos that had been placed over the grave of a Corinthian maiden.
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