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Sanford Kwinter
Professor Department of Architecture |
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Far From Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture
Sanford Kwinter, edited by Cynthia Davidson
Barcelona/New York, Actar, 2008
Sanford Kwinter ponders the complex encounters between technology, culture, and architecture. Critical essays offer an extended meditation on infrastructure, war, computation, mechanical and material intelligence, and other multivariate facets of modernity. Far-reaching in scope, Far from Equilibrium amounts to a performance in writing of what Kwinter describes as radical anamnesis: the imagination's escape from the sterile logic of what is. Compiling over a decade of architectural and critical writings, many published here for the first time, Far From Equilibrium is essential reading for anyone interested in the state of architecture and criticism today. A primer for (re)thinking design in the 21st century.
Reviews:
"Far from Equilibrium is one of those rare works, an insider’s critique." — Artforum
"In a distinctly Kwinter-esque voice of commentary, reflection and critique, Far From Equilibrium delivers us ever closer to the possibility of a renewal of thought relating to practices and issues architectural." — Architectural Review
"A great point of departure if you’re willing to re-think design in the new millenium." — Lodown Magazine
"Its seductive appearance aside, I was struck by how formative Kwinter's work has been in my thinking and in architecture culture as a whole over the last two decades. It's a must-buy." — Kazys Varnelis
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Architectures of Time:
Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture
Sanford Kwinter, MIT Press, 2002
In Architectures of Time, Sanford Kwinter offers a critical guide to the modern history of time and to the interplay between the physical sciences and the arts. Tracing the transformation of twentieth-century epistemology to the rise of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, Kwinter explains how the demise of the concept of absolute time, and of the classical notion of space as a fixed background against which things occur, led to field theory and a physics of the "event." He suggests that the closed, controlled, and mechanical world of physics gave way to the approximate, active, and qualitative world of biology as a model of both scientific and metaphysical explanation.
Kwinter examines theory of time and space in Einstein's theories of relativity and shows how these ideas were reflected in the writings of the sculptor Umberto Boccioni, the town planning schema of the Futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the writings of Franz Kafka. He argues that the writings of Boccioni and the visionary architecture of Sant'Elia represent the earliest and most profound deployments of the concepts of field and event. In discussing Kafka's work, he moves away from the thermodynamic model in favor of the closely related one of Bergsonian duree, or virtuality. He argues that Kafka's work manifests a coherent cosmology that can be understood only in relation to the constant temporal flux that underlies it.
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Mood River
Jeff Kipnis, Sanford Kwinter, Jose Oubrerie, Chee Perlman, Philip Johnson, Tracey Emin (Authors)
Sherri Geldin (Contributor),
Wexner Center for the Arts, 2002
From an i-MAC computer to a Karim Rashid trashcan to a Philippe Starck stool to an Issey Miyake coat to a Frank Gehry building, design shapes our sense of being in today's world. Mood River examines the cornucopia of objects that form the complex visual fabric of our lives, titillate our senses, modulate our moods, and pique our desires. By scanning contemporary art and design, and loosely organizing thousands of sundry objects into four categories of moods--Bliss, Ecstasy, Rage, and Trauma--Mood River aims to arouse a deep respect for the complex economic, technical, and aesthetic processes that join the diverse elements of our material life into that most elusive of unities: a world.
Mutations
Rem Koolhaas, Stefano Boeri, Sanford Kwinter, Harvard Design School Project on the City
ACTAR arc en rêve centre d'architecture, 2001
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The Harvard Design School Project on the City began as a response to a pervasive condition of architectural practice, in which the architect is asked to intervene in, but never to appreciate or understand, a given situation. An architect's interests are ultimately determined by a series of random encounters with projects and clients that do not allow an independent investigation of issues or conditions outside their field of vision. Thus architects operate, be definition, with ulterior motives; the capacity for independent analysis, research or investigation is simply not within their repertoire. It is becoming increasingly important for architects to operate on a level independent of architecture, in order to understand, at the most basic level, the phenomena affecting the development of architecture and the city. The Project on the City is an investigation of a series of issues related to the urban condition. These issues have been chosen to reflect certain pertinent, unusual, or unknown conditions of the urban mutations taking place at this moment in the world. The project has no connection with design: it is a pure research project, conducted by thesis students who explore a specific subject each year.
ContentsStatistics Céline Rozenblat
How to Build a City Roman Operating System
(Harvard Project on the City)
Amale Andraos, Rami El-Samahy, Patricia Heyda, Jennifer Lee, Christina Long, Allyson Mendenhall, Francisco Meza, Hunter Ford Tura, Peter ZellnerThe Roman System, or the Generic in All Times and Tenses Jean Attali
Telegram from Nowhere Mckenzie Wark
Fragments of Net-Theory Nadia Tazi
What's New About the New Media? Friedrich Kittler
A Mutation of Political Economy as a Whole Yann Moulier Boutang
Looking Like Flames and Falling Like Stars, Kosovo, the First Internet War Thomas Keenan
Breakthrough to the World Code: etoy's Concept of Net Architecture Reinhold Grether
The Global City: Introducing a Concept and its History
Saskia SassenShopping (Harvard Project on the City)
Tae-Wook Cha, Chuihua Judy Chung, Jutiki Gunter, Daniel Herman, Hiromi Hosoya, Sze Tsung Leong, Kiwa Matsushita, John McMorrough, Juan Palop Casado, Markus Schaefer, Tran Vinh, Srdjan Jovanovich Weiss, Louise Wyman
Control Space Sze Tsung LeongPhotographic Dossier
Europa -- Francesco Jodice
Europa -- Jordi Bernadó
America -- Alex MacLean
China -- Jordi Bernadó
Urban Africa -- Edgar Cleijne
A Surpassing Mutation -- Jean AttaliPDR Pearl River Delta (Harvard Project on the City)
Bernard Chang, Mihai Craciun, Nancy Lin, Yuyang Liu, Katherine Orff, Stephanie Smith, Rem KoolhaasUSE Uncertain States of Europe Stefano Boeri and Multiplicity
Notes for a Research Program Stefano BoeriUSE CasesNotes for a Cultural History Between Uncertainty and the Contemporary Urban Condition Yorgos Simeoforidis
Post it City: The Other European Public Spaces Giovanni La Varra
Unstable Geographies Valentin Blum
Observe and Interact Lorenzo Romito
Green is the Color Mirko Zardini
Cityscapes Gabriele Basilico
Smooth Space Aldo Bonomi
Strata, Not Mutations Eduard Bru
The New Landscape Bart Lootsma
Temporary Habits Francesco Jodice
The American City -- Sanford Kwinter, Daniela Fabricus
Urbanism: An Archivist's Art?
Television: The Infrastructural Revolution
Generica
Houston™
Contract with America
American Noir
DossierLagos (Harvard Project on the City)
Pierre Belanger, Chuihua Judy Chung, Joshua Comaroff, Michael Cosmas, Sonal Gandhi, A. David Hamilton, Lan-ying Ip, Jeannie Kim, Gullivar Shepard, Reshma Singh, Nathaniel Slayton, James Stone, Sameh WahbaUrban Rumors -- a project curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
produced in collaboration with Fri-Art, Fribourg, Switzerland
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Zone 6: Incorporations
Edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter
This volume of Zone presents a diverse group of reflections and interventions on the fate of the body and of subjectivity within twentieth-century modernity. Essays, image-text projects, photographic dossiers, and philosophical and scientific articles examine the multiple emergences over the last 100 years of new models of life based on technological and biological developments, whose roots go back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but whose full expression is only beginning to emerge.
These new transformations and modalities are discussed and figured in relation to an older set of models that long ago began to dissolve - the classical notions of unity, interiority, and organism. In its heterogeneous approach, Zone 6: Incorporations provides a rich cartographic description of the particular capacities and trajectories of the contemporary body drawing on the work of neurologists, anthropologists, filmmakers, architects, philosophers, historians, biologists, dancers, novelists, and artists.
Contributors include: Paul Rabinow, Eve Sedgwick, François Dagognet, Peter Eisenman, J. G. Ballard, Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze, Klaus Theweleit, Elaine Scarry, Francisco Varela, Liz Diller, Ric Scofidio, John O'Neill, Manuel DeLanda, and Ana Barado.
About the Editors
Jonathan Crary is Professor of Art History at Columbia University. A founding editor of Zone Books, he is the author of Techniques of the Observer (MIT Press, 1990) and coeditor of Incorporations (Zone Books, 1992). He has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, Mellon, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Sanford Kwinter is a New York-based writer. He teaches design in the School of Architecture at Rice University.
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Rem Koolhaas: Conversations With Students, 1991
Rem Koolhaas, edited by Sanford Kwinter
Rice University School of Architecture, 1996, 1991
Rem Koolhaas: Conversations With Students, is a pocketbook manifesto. In these transcriptions of a lecture and seminar given at Rice University in 1991, Koolhaas argues for architects to come empty handed into the spaces and processes of the free-form contemporary city; and to approach these conditions without the embarrassment of modernism, optimistically but without hope. Reflecting on OMA's work of the late 1980s, and the Houston skyline, Koolhaas makes a manifesto of the "too-large building." The BIG building effects its surroundings through its willful ignorance of them, and creates admixtures of difference, congestion and possibility within its own vast bulk. Through BIGNESS (an) architecture is achieved which sits comfortably in low slung development and becomes its own city.
ContentsLecture 1/21/91
Seminar 1/21/91
Flying the Bullet, or When Did the Future Begin?
by Sanford Kwinter
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Zone 1/2: The Contemporary City
Edited by Michel Feher and Sanford Kwinter
MIT Press, 1987
This inaugural double issue of the serial publication ZONE examines the physical, political, and perceptual transformations redefining the contemporary city.
These transformations are explored through historical studies of transformations in the urban system, through theoretical essays which map out the evolution of related social and economic structures (such as the state, the family, and the factory), and through experimental artist projects and critical dossiers.
Some of the many contributors to this issue include: Christopher Alexander, John Baldessari, Gilles Deleuze, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, William Labov, Michael Piore, and Paul Virilio
About the Editors
Michel Feher is a founding editor and publisher of Zone Books. He is the author of Powerless by Design: The Age of the International Community and the editor of Fragments for a History of The Human Body (with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi).
Sanford Kwinter is a New York-based writer. He teaches design in the School of Architecture at Rice University. .