2006-10-22

Herzog & De Meuron : Natural History
Edited by Philip Urspung
ISBN : 3-03778-049-5

More than any of their contemporaries, Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron are challenging the boundaries between architecture and art. 'Natural History' explores that challenge, examining how the work of this formidable pair has drawn upon the art of both past and present, and brought architecture into dialogue with the art of our time.

Echoing an encyclopedia, this publication reflects the natural history museum structure of the exhibition which it accompanies, organised by the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Models and projects by Herzog & de Meuron, as well as by other artists, are structured around six thematic portfolios that suggest an evolutionary history of the architects' work: Appropriation & Reconstruction, Transformation & Alienation, Stacking & Compression, Imprints & Moulds, Interlocking Spaces, and Beauty & Atmosphere.

Each section is introduced with a statement from Herzog, and more than 20 artists, scholars, and architects have contributed essays, including Carrie Asman, Georges Didi-Huberman, Kurt W. Forster, Boris Groys, Ulrike Meyer Stump, Peggy Phelan, Thomas Ruff, Rebecca Schneider, Adolf Max Vogt, and Jeff Wall.
This is a new paperback edition.



Jimmy Corrigan : The Smartest Kid on Earth
Chris Ware
ISBN : 0375404538

Ware's graphically inventive, wonderfully realized novel-in-comics follows the sad fortunes of four generations of phlegmatic, defeated men while touching on themes of abandonment, social isolation and despair within the sweeping depiction of Chicago's urban transformation over the course of a century. Ware uses Chicago's World's Colombian Exposition of 1893, the great world's fair that signaled America's march into 20th-century modernity, as a symbolic anchor to the city's development and to the narrative arc of a melancholic family as haplessly connected as are Chicago's random sprawl of streets and neighborhoods. In 1893, nine-year-old Jimmy Corrigan is abandoned atop a magnificent fair building by his sullen, brutish father ("I just stood there, watching the sky and the people below, waiting for him to return. Of course he never did"). Nearly a century later, another Jimmy CorriganDthe absurdly ineffectual, friendless grandson of that abandoned childDreceives a letter from his own long-absent, feckless father, blithely and inexplicably requesting him to come and visit. Ware's surprisingly touching story recounts their strange and pathetically funny reunion, invoking the emotional legacy of the great-grandfather's original act of desertion while presenting a succession of Corrigan men far more comfortable fantasizing about life than living it. The book is wonderfully illustrated in full color, and Ware's spare, iconic drawing style can render vivid architectural complexity or movingly capture the stark despondency of an unloved child.

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Books bought:
-Herzog & De Meuron : Natural History--Edited by Philip Urspung
-Jimmy Corrigan : The Smartest Kid on Earth--Chris Ware

Books read:
-สู่หลังสมัยใหม่ (Introducing Postmodern)--Ziauddin Sardar and Patrick Curry แปลโดย วรนุช จรุงรัตนาพงศ์
-Jimmy Corrigan : The Smartest Kid on Earth--Chris Ware