Today, we believe that the map is a copy of the Earth, without realizing that the opposite is true: in our culture the Earth has assumed the form of a map. In Blinding Polyphemus, Franco Farinelli elucidates the philosophical correlation between cultural evolution and shifting cartographies of modern society, giving readers an interdisciplinary study that attempts to understand and redefine the fundamental structures of cartography, architecture, and the notion of “space.”...

This study examines the influence of perspective on architecture, highlighting how critical historical changes in the representation and perception of space continue to inform the way architects design.Since its earliest developments, perspective was conceived as an exemplary form of representation that served as an ideal model of how everyday existence could be measured and ultimately judged. Temple argues that underlying the symbolic and epistemological meanings of perspective th...

This award-winning science history explores our evolving image of the globe—and how it has shifted our relationship to the world.Long before we had the ability to photograph the earth from space—to see our planet as it would be seen by the Greek god Apollo—images of the earth as a globe had captured popular imagination. In Apollo's Eye, geographer Denis Cosgrove examines the historical implications for the West of conceiving and representing the earth as a ...

In this acclaimed art anthology, a prestigious group of artists, critics, and literati offer their incisive reflections on the questions of beauty, past, present, and future, and how it has become a domain of multiple perspectives.Here is Meyer Schapiro’s skeptical argument on perfection . . . contributions from artists as profound as Louise Bourgeois and Agnes Martin . . . and reflections of critics, curators, and philosophers on the problems of beauty and relativism. Readers will...

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the work and thought of Umberto Eco - one of the most important writers in Europe today.

How architecture can move beyond the contemporary enthusiasms for the technically sustainable and the formally dazzling to enhance our human values and capacities.Architecture remains in crisis, its social relevance lost between the two poles of formal innovation and technical sustainability. In Attunement, Alberto Pérez-Gómez calls for an architecture that can enhance our human values and capacities, an architecture that is connected—attuned—to its locati...

When it was first released in 1962, The Shape of Time presented a radically new approach to the study of art history. Drawing upon new insights in fields such as anthropology and linguistics, George Kubler replaced the notion of style as the basis for histories of art with the concept of historical sequence and continuous change across time. Kubler’s cl...

"In his most ambitious work to date, [Edney] questions the very concept of 'cartography' to argue that this flawed ideal has hobbled the study of maps." —Susan Schulten, author of A History of America in 100 MapsOver the past four decades, the volumes published in the landmark History of Cartography series have both chronicled and encouraged scholarship about maps and mapping practices across time and space. As the current director of the project that has p...

A vision of architecture that transcends concerns of form and function and finds the connections between the architect's wish to design a beautiful world and architecture's imperative to provide a better place for society.The forced polarity between form and function in considerations of architecture—opposing art to social interests, ethics to poetic expression—obscures the deep connections between ethical and poetical values in architectural tradition. Architectur...

Continuing the themes that have been addressed in The Humanities in Architectural Design and The Cultural Role of Architecture, this book illustrates the important role that a contradiction between form and function plays in compositional strategies in architecture. The contradiction between form and function is seen as a device for poetic expression, for the expression of ideas, in architecture.Here the role of the terms "form" and "function" are analyzed through...

The work of contemporary Italian thinkers, what Roberto Esposito refers to as Italian Theory, is attracting increasing attention around the world. This book explores the reasons for its growing popularity, its distinguishing traits, and why people are turning to these authors for answers to real-world issues and problems. The approach he takes, in line with the keen historical consciousness of Italian thinkers themselves, is a historical one. He offers insights into the great "unphilosophi...

This edited collection addresses the vital role of the imagination in the critical interpretation of architectural representations. By challenging the contemporary tendency for computer-aided drawings to become mere ‘models’ for imitation in the construction of buildings, the articles explore the broader range of methods and meanings at stake in the creation and interpretation of architectural drawings, models, images and artefacts.These critical – and often practice-led – investig...