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A richly illustrated history of a single building, the celebrated and yet enigmatic penthouse of the wealthy playboy Charles de Beistegui, designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in late 1920s Paris. What does it take to build not only a house but a machine for amusement? In Machine à Amuser, Wim van den Bergh chronicles the genesis of the famous penthouse of French-born Mexican millionaire bachelor Charles de Beistegui. The penthouse was planned and constructed by Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeanneret and built on a rooftop site on the Champs-Élysées between 1929–1932. Retracing the evolution of this icon of modern architecture from the initial competition between Gabriel Guevrekian, André Lurçat, and Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeanneret up to the executed version, van den Bergh tells the story of a client’s ambition to build a house devoted to entertaining on one of the most well-heeled streets of Paris. Machine à Amuser also examines the cultural milieu of artists and patrons that surrounded Beistegui and which ultimately determined the apartment’s conception and use, including its rococo and surrealist-inspired interior decor. Drawing on a panoply of archival material, van den Bergh narrates the tensions that arose between client and architects as each vied for creative control of the project. As the book shows, while Le Corbusier, with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, remained the official architects of the penthouse, its famed interior was ultimately designed by the client, Charles de Beistegui. An account of a single building beloved by architects and architectural historians, Machine à Amuser tells a story that has never been told before. Van den Bergh redresses this lacuna in rich detail, revealing the history of the Beistegui penthouse, the evolution of the project, and its eventual erasure from the roofscapes of Paris.
In case there's anyone out there that has been reading the things I've been writing on my blogs, probably noticed that one of my "projects" for 2014, 2015 (and now 2016) was to read through all of Shakespeare's Works. Unfortunately, in 2014 I wasn't able to start this project (I read some Shakespeare stuff, but no plays). 2015 was where things really started shapping up Shakespeare-wise. But things were looking even better for 2016. On top of that, 2016 commemorated 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare and this special anniversary year was a truly unique opportunity to complete my quest of reading the rest of his entire body of work.
The Oxford English Dictionary is the ultimate authority on the usage and meaning of English words and phrases, and a fascinating guide to the evolution of our language. It traces the usage, meaning and history of words from 1150 AD to the present day. No dictionary of any language approaches the OED in thoroughness, authority, and wealth of linguistic information. The OED defines over half a million words, and includes almost 2.4 million illustrative quotations, providing an invaluable record of English throughout the centuries. The 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. The OED has a unique historical focus. Accompanying each definition is a chronologically arranged group of quotations that trace the usage of words, and show the contexts in which they can be used. The quotations are drawn from a huge variety of international sources - literary, scholarly, technical, popular - and represent authors as disparate as Geoffrey Chaucer and Erica Jong, William Shakespeare and Raymond Chandler, Charles Darwin and John Le Carré. In all, nearly 2.5 million quotations can be found in the OED . Other features distinguishing the entries in the Dictionary are authoritative definitions of over 500,000 words; detailed information on pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet; listings of variant spellings used throughout each word's history; extensive treatment of etymology; and details of area of usage and of any regional characteristics (including geographical origins).
A historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. The Organizational Complex is a historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. Its title refers to the aesthetic and technological extension of the military-industrial complex, in which architecture, computers, and corporations formed a network of objects, images, and discourses that realigned social relations and transformed the postwar landscape. In-depth case studies of architect Eero Saarinen's work for General Motors, IBM, and Bell Laboratories and analyses of office buildings designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill trace the emergence of a systems-based model of organization in architecture, in which the modular curtain wall acts as both an organizational device and a carrier of the corporate image. Such an image—of the corporation as a flexible, integrated system—is seen to correspond with a "humanization" of corporate life, as corporations decentralize both spatially and administratively. Parallel analyses follow the assimilation of cybernetics into aesthetics in the writings of artist and visual theorist Gyorgy Kepes, as art merges with techno-science in the service of a dynamic new "pattern-seeing." Image and system thus converge in the organizational complex, while top-down power dissolves into networked, pattern-based control. Architecture, as one among many media technologies, supplies the patterns—images of organic integration designed to regulate new and unstable human-machine assemblages.
When American architects, designers, and cultural institutions converted wartime strategies to new ends, the aggressive promotion of postwar domestic bliss became another kind of weapon. In the years immediately following World War II, America embraced modern architecture—not as something imported from Europe, but as an entirely new mode of operation, with original and captivating designs made in the USA. In Domesticity at War, Beatriz Colomina shows how postwar American architecture adapted the techniques and materials that were developed for military applications to domestic use. Just as manufacturers were turning wartime industry to peacetime productivity—going from missiles to washing machines—American architects and cultural institutions were, in Buckminster Fuller's words, turning "weaponry into livingry."This new form of domesticity itself turned out to be a powerful weapon. Images of American domestic bliss—suburban homes, manicured lawns, kitchen accessories—went around the world as an effective propaganda campaign. Cold War anxieties were masked by endlessly repeated images of a picture-perfect domestic environment. Even the popular conception of the architect became domesticated, changing from that of an austere modernist to a plaid-shirt wearing homebody. Colomina examines, with interlocking case studies and an army of images, the embattled and obsessive domesticity of postwar America. She reports on, among other things, MOMA's exhibition of a Dymaxion Deployment Unit (DDU), a corrugated steel house suitable for use as a bomb shelter, barracks, or housing; Charles and Ray Eames's vigorous domestic life and their idea of architecture as a flexible stage for the theatrical spectacle of everyday life; and the American lawn as patriotic site and inalienable right.Domesticity at War itself has a distinctive architecture. Housed within the case are two units: one book of text, and one book of illustrations—most of them in color, including advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles, architectural photographs, and more.