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| Author | : Ian Graham |
| Publisher | : QED Publishing |
| Total Pages | : 0 |
| Release | : 2012-04 |
| Genre | : Bridges |
| ISBN | : 9781848356573 |
The tallest, the biggest, the longest and the deepest - all these amazing megastructures are revealed in detail with some incredible facts and statistics to absorb!
| Author | : Ian Abley |
| Publisher | : Academy Press |
| Total Pages | : 132 |
| Release | : 2006-04-07 |
| Genre | : Architecture |
| ISBN | : 9780470016237 |
There will be 8.3 billion human beings on Earth by 2030, and the more the better. We have the opportunity to create a world of expansive megacities - including one around old London. Doing so will advance the art, science and processes of manufacturing. But to deploy those abilities we must shrug off the dogma of sustainability that insists only small can be beautiful. Humanity has come a long way since the first modular mega-structure was built at Ur, on land that is now Iraq. There, four millennia ago, and by hand, the Sumerians built a mud-brick ziggurat to their Gods. Today, the green deities of Nature we have invented for ourselves are worshipped with humility. Eco-zealots argue against the mechanised megaforming of landscape and the modularised production of megastructures. The guest editors, Jonathan Schwinge and Ian Abley of the London based research organisation audacity, call for development on a bold scale. They argue that by rapidly super-sizing the built environment society is not made vulnerable to natural or man-made hazards, and that design innovation surpasses bio-mimicry. Designers can learn from materials scientists working at the smallest of scales, and from systems manufacturers with ambitions at the largest. This issue calls for creative thinking about typologies and topologies, and considers what that also means for Africa, China, and Russia. Megacities everywhere demand integration of global systems of transport, utilities and IT in gigantic structures, constantly upgraded, scraping both the sky and the ground, outward into the sea.
| Author | : Reyner Banham |
| Publisher | : The Monacelli Press, LLC |
| Total Pages | : 224 |
| Release | : 2020-06-16 |
| Genre | : Architecture |
| ISBN | : 1580935400 |
A long-sought reprint of this classic of architectural history and criticism, surveying a movement that would inspire architects, fantasists, and filmmakers alike. It is an architectural concept as alluring as it is elusive, as futuristic as it is primordial. Megastructure is what it sounds like: a vastly scaled edifice that can contain potentially countless uses, contexts, and adaptations. Theorized and briefly experimented with in built form in the 1960s, megastructures almost as quickly went out of fashion in the profession. But Reyner Banham's 1976 book compiled the origin stories and ongoing mythos of this visionary movement, seeking to chart its lively rise, rapid fall, and ongoing meaning. Now back in print after decades and with original editions fetching well over $100 on the secondary market, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past is part of the recent surge in attention to this quixotic form, of which some examples were built but to this day remains--decades after its codification--more of a poetic idea than a real architectural type. Banham, among the most gifted and incisive architectural critics and historians of his time, sought connections between theoretical origins in Le Corbusier's more starry-eyed drawings to the flurry of theories by the Japanese Metabolist architects, to less intentional examples in military architecture, industry, infrastructure, and the emerging instances in pop culture and art. Had he written the book a few years later he would find an abundance of examples in speculative art and science fiction cinema, mediums where it continues to provoke wonder to this day. A long-sought study by an author who combined imagination, wit, and pioneering scholarship, the republication of Megastructure is an opportunity for scholars and laypeople alike to return to the origins of this fantastic urban idea.
| Author | : Michael Carroll |
| Publisher | : Springer |
| Total Pages | : 240 |
| Release | : 2016-10-03 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 3319439642 |
Based on the latest missions results and supported by commissioned artwork, this book explores the possible lessons we may learn from exoplanets. As the number of known Earth-like objects grows significantly, the author explores what is known about the growing roster of "pale blue dots" far afield. Aided by an increased sensitivity of the existing observatories, recent discoveries by Keck, the Hubble Space Telescope, and Kepler are examined. These findings, once thought to be closer to the realm of science fiction, have fired the imaginations of the general public as well as scientists. All of us are mesmerized by the possibility of other Earth-like worlds out there. Author Michael Carroll asks the tough questions of what the expected gain is from identifying these Earth analogs spread across the Universe and the reasons for studying them. Potentially, they could teach us about our own climate and Solar System. Also explored are the more remote options of communication between or even travel to these distant yet perhaps not so dissimilar worlds.
| Author | : Douglas Murphy |
| Publisher | : Verso Books |
| Total Pages | : 298 |
| Release | : 2016-02-09 |
| Genre | : Architecture |
| ISBN | : 1781689814 |
Whatever happened to the last utopian dreams of the city? In the late 1960s the world was faced with impending disaster: the height of the Cold War, the end of oil and the decline of great cities throughout the world. Out of this crisis came a new generation that hoped to build a better future, influenced by visions of geodesic domes, walking cities and a meaningful connection with nature. In this brilliant work of cultural history, architect Douglas Murphy traces the lost archeology of the present day through the works of thinkers and designers such as Buckminster Fuller, the ecological pioneer Stewart Brand, the Archigram architects who envisioned the Plug-In City in the ’60s, as well as co-operatives in Vienna, communes in the Californian desert and protesters on the streets of Paris. In this mind-bending account of the last avant-garde, we see not just the source of our current problems but also some powerful alternative futures.
| Author | : Sean Creaven |
| Publisher | : Taylor & Francis |
| Total Pages | : 194 |
| Release | : 2023-12-15 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 1003818188 |
Contagion Capitalism situates the COVID-19 pandemic within the systems of global political economy and their attendant cultural modes and theorizes that these systems act as facilitators and drivers of global pandemic risk. Contagion Capitalism therefore critiques the institutionalized corporate-capitalist control of the economy, the state, and science, and the grave consequences this has on global public health policy, the ecological crisis of sustainability, and zoonotic pandemic events such as COVID-19. In doing so, this book addresses the failings of what may be termed as “state science” or “establishment science” in managing the pandemic, as personified especially by those elements of the scientific elite placed in the service of the neoliberal state. This book also explores the limitations of corporate pharmacological technoscience in safeguarding public health, arguing that “Big Pharma” offers only partial remedies for problems of human illness and well-being, poses its own dangers to public health, and obfuscates the social bases of public ill-health and of pandemic risk. Contagion Capitalism further argues that COVID-19 will not be the last or even the most dangerous such epidemiological event. This is because the social production and global dissemination of zoonotic diseases is integral to contemporary capitalism, by virtue of its instrumental mode of science, its central dynamic of production for the sake of accumulation, and the consumer mode this sustains as its own condition of existence. These are the drivers of what may be termed as zoonotic accelerationism. Contagion Capitalism will appeal to scholars in the humanities and social sciences with interests in neoliberal ideology and global political economy, and their impact upon social, political and cultural life.
| Author | : Peter L. Berger |
| Publisher | : Prometheus Books |
| Total Pages | : 254 |
| Release | : 2011-06-07 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 1616143908 |
Peter L. Berger is arguably the best-known American sociologist living today. Since the 1960s he has been publishing books on many facets of the American social scene, and several are now considered classics. So it may be hard to believe Professor Berger’s description of himself as an "accidental sociologist." But that in fact accurately describes how he stumbled into sociology. In this witty, intellectually stimulating memoir, Berger explains not only how he became a social scientist, but the many adventures that this calling has led to. Rather than writing an autobiography, he focuses on the main intellectual issues that motivated his work and the various people and situations he encountered in the course of his career. Full of memorable vignettes and colorful characters depicted in a lively narrative often laced with humor, Berger’s memoir conveys the excitement that a study of social life can bring. The first part of the book describes Berger’s initiation into sociology through the New School for Social Research, "a European enclave in the midst of Greenwich Village bohemia." Berger was first a student at the New School and later a young professor amidst a clique of like-minded individuals. There he published The Social Construction of Reality (with colleague Thomas Luckmann), one of his most successful books, followed by The Sacred Canopy on the sociology of religion, also still widely cited. The book covers Berger’s experience as a "globe-trekking sociologist" including trips to Mexico, where he studied approaches to Third World poverty; to East Asia, where he discovered the potential of capitalism to improve social conditions; and to South Africa, where he chaired an international study group on the future of post-Apartheid society. Berger then tells about his role as the director of a research center at Boston University. For over two decades he and his colleagues have been tackling such important issues as globalization, the secularization of Europe, and the ongoing dialectic between relativism and fundamentalism in contemporary culture. What comes across throughout is Berger’s boundless curiosity with the many ways in which people interact in society. This book offers longtime Berger readers as well as newcomers to sociology proof that the sociologist’s attempt to explain the world is anything but boring.
| Author | : Paul Rudolph |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 78 |
| Release | : 2010 |
| Genre | : City planning |
| ISBN | : 9780942324617 |
Exhibition held: October 1 - November 14, 2010, The Arthur A. Houghton, Jr. Gallery, The Cooper Union; curated by Ed Rawlings and Jim Walrod.
| Author | : Nick Cook |
| Publisher | : Voice from the Clouds |
| Total Pages | : 335 |
| Release | : 2021-12-17 |
| Genre | : Fiction |
| ISBN | : |
The time has come for humanity’s last stand against the threat from the stars that unless it is stopped, will wipe out all life on Earth. The final instalment of the Earth Song series heralds the arrival of the Kimprak asteroid ship in our solar system and where the stage will be set for an epic confrontation. Whilst Lauren and the team work to bring Tempest’s systems rapidly online, Eden is throwing all its resources into preparing starship for battle. Production is also working flat out to replace as many of the X-craft as possible after so many were lost at the battle with the Kimprak over Antarctica. With everything now on the line, they must also attempt to create a true alliance with a former enemy if our world to have any chance of defending itself from the alien threat. When the Kimprak mothership is detected passing through the Oort Cloud it soon becomes apparent that the final battle in the orbit of Jupiter will be far worse than anything they could have ever imagined. Lauren will also face the ultimate decision, but will she have the strength to go through what will be asked of her as commander before the end? Earth Roar is the sequel to Earth Scream, and is part of the Multiverse Chronicles, an epic series of interlinked stories that follow humanity’s struggle to survive across parallel universes.
| Author | : Larry Niven |
| Publisher | : Del Rey |
| Total Pages | : 351 |
| Release | : 1985-09-12 |
| Genre | : Fiction |
| ISBN | : 0345333926 |
Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novel Four travelers come to the ringworld. . . Louis Wu: human and old; bored with having lived too fully for far too many years. Seeking a challenge, and all too capable of handling it. Nessus: a trembling coward, a puppeteer with a built-in survival pattern of nonviolence. Except that this particular puppeteer is insane. Teela Brown: human; a wide-eyed youngster with no allegiances, no experience, no abilities. And all the luck in the world. Speaker-To-Animals: kzin; large, orange-furred, and carnivorous. And one of the most savage life-forms known in the galaxy. Why did these disparate individuals come together? How could they possibly function together? And where, in the name of anything sane, were they headed?
