Far from Equilibrium : Essays on Technology and Design Culture

by Kwinter, Sanford

• ISBN13: 9788496540644
• ISBN10: 8496540642
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-05-01
• Publisher: Actarbirkhauser

Summary

Far From Equilibrium ponders the complex encounters between technology, culture and architecture, offering an extended meditation on infrastructure, war, computation, the mechanical and material intelligence, and other multivariate facets of modernity. In its intensively affiliative method and far-reaching scope, Far from Equilibrium amounts to a performance in writing of what Kwinter describes (in one of the essays included) as radical anamnesis: the imagination's escape from the sterile logic of what is.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. 8
Introduction: De L'Audace	p. 16
The Mechanical Bride (Stripped Bare by her Bachelors)	p. 18
Playboys of the Western World	p. 22
Mach 1 (and Other Mystic Visitations)	p. 36
Roman Noir	p. 38
Leap in the Void: A New Organon	p. 46
Fuller Themselves	p. 56
The New Immanence	p. 58
La Trahison des Clercs (and other Travesties of the Modern)	p. 64
The "Avant-Garde" in America (or The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness)	p. 74
Space without Qualities (Post-Fordism)	p. 78
The Cruelty of Numbers	p. 92
Cobble Stones Beneath the Beach	p. 98
The Wiring and Waning of the World	p. 100
Vortex	p. 118
Architecture and the Technologies of Life	p. 128
Play Time	p. 134
Architecture and Air	p. 138
Radical Anamnesis (Mourning the Future)	p. 140
Who's Afraid of Formalism?	p. 144
What's Eating Charles Gwathmey (and his Generation)?	p. 150
Infrared, the Treason of Language, and the Failure of the Geometric Imagination	p. 156
Rational Irrationalism	p. 158
The Geometry of Cinders	p. 164
Formal, Informal and the Jewish Question	p. 176
Animal Machine	p. 178
New Babylons: Urbanism for the New Milennium	p. 182
Wildness (Prolegomena to a New Urbanism)	p. 186
A Note on the Type	p. 195
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