Over 60 years on from its inception, the celebrated Fun Palace civic project – developed in the 1960s by the radical theatre director Joan Littlewood and the architect Cedric Price – continues to capture the architectural imagination. Despite the building itself never being realized, much of the previous analysis of the Fun Palace has been devoted to Price and his drawings. The critical role that Littlewood played, however, remains largely unrecognized by architectural scholarship, and a w...

2022 PROSE Award Finalist in Architecture and Urban Planning2022 Association for Latin American Art Arvey Foundation Book Award, Honorable MentionThroughout the early twentieth century, waves of migration brought working-class people to the outskirts of Buenos Aires. This prompted a dilemma: Where should these restive populations be situated relative to the city’s spatial politics? Might housing serve as a tool to discipline their behavior?Enter Anto...

Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance proposes that the concept of curating is a complex field of enquiry. By drawing together artists, curators, architects and cultural theorists, it proposes new approaches to curating and ways of developing critical enquiry about this increasingly expanding field. Focusing on pertinent issues in curating contemporary art and performance, the book's four parts examine forms of thinking in contemporary curating; curating and the inte...

Samba is Brazil’s “national rhythm,” the foremost symbol of its culture and nationhood. To the outsider, samba and the famous pre-Lenten carnival of which it is the centerpiece seem to showcase the country’s African heritage. Within Brazil, however, samba symbolizes the racial and cultural mixture that, since the 1930s, most Brazilians have come to believe defines their unique national identity.But how did Brazil become “the Kingdom of Samba” only a few decades after abolishing slav...

This lively text provides a candid inquiry into the contemporary means by which architects get work and (for better or worse) become famous. In response to the reciprocal relationship between publicity and everyday architectural practice, this book examines the mechanisms by which architects seek publicity and manage to establish themselves and their work ahead of their colleagues. Through the essays of specialist contributors, this book enables the reader to understand the complex relatio...

Set against a backdrop of breathtaking natural beauty, Brazil’s striking Modernist architecture has long garnered international acclaim. But these well-known works are not fully reflective of the built environment of Brazil, and in this volume, Richard Williams unearths the surprisingly rich and influential architectural heritage of Brazil.Spanning the period from the 1930s to the present, Williams focuses on key issues such as the use of historic architecture, the importance of lei...

What is the point of graphic design? Is it advertising or is it art? What purpose does it serve in our society and culture? Malcolm Barnard explores how meaning and identity are at the core of every graphic design project and argues that the role and function of graphic design is, and always has been, communication. Drawing on a range of theoretical approaches including those of Derrida, Saussure, Foucault, and Barthes, and taking examples from advertising, magazines, illustration, website...

"Latin America" is a concept firmly entrenched in its philosophical, moral, and historical meanings. And yet, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo argues in this landmark book, it is an obsolescent racial-cultural idea that ought to have vanished long ago with the banishment of racial theory. Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea makes this case persuasively.Tenorio-Trillo builds the book on three interlocking steps: first, an intellectual history of the concept of Latin Americ...

Brazilian Art under Dictatorship is a sophisticated analysis of the intersection of politics and the visual arts during the most repressive years of Brazil's military regime, from 1968 until 1975. Raised in Rio de Janeiro during the dictatorship, the curator and art historian Claudia Calirman describes how Brazilian visual artists addressed the political situation and opened up the local art scene to new international trends. Focusing on innovative art forms infused with a politic...

This study explores artistic choices in cinema exhibition, focusing on film theaters, film festivals, and film archives and situating film-curating issues within an international context. Artistic and commercial film availability has increased overwhelmingly as a result of the digitization of the infrastructure of distribution and exhibition. The film trade's conventional structures are transforming and, in the digital age, supply and demand can meet without the intervention of traditional...

The term Latin America refers to the Portuguese and Spanish-speaking states created in the early 1820s following the wars of independence, states that differed enormously in geographical and demographical scale, ethnic composition and economic resources, yet shared distinct historical and cultural traits. Specially-commissioned essays by leading experts explore the unity and diversity of the region's cultural expressions. These essays analyse history and politics from the nineteenth centur...

Historians are increasingly looking beyond the traditional, and turning to visual, oral, aural, and virtual sources to inform their work. The challenges these sources pose require new skills of interpretation and require historians to consider alternative theoretical and practical approaches.In order to help historians successfully move beyond traditional text, Sarah Barber and Corinna Peniston-Bird bring together chapters from historical specialists in the fields of fine art, phot...