A Reading List from SCI-Arc's Librarian Stefanie Crump
SCI-Arc's Librarian Stefanie Crump has curated a cross-disciplinary selection of recently published books and essays acquired by the Kappe Library. The readings featured in this list delve deeply into theoretical and historical investigations of modernity within art, design, and architecture, as contextualized through Blackness, structures of institutional power, global cultural shifts, Afrofuturism, queerness, and much more.
More detailed descriptions of each title can be found below.
Selections:
- Among Others: Blackness at MoMA by Darby English & Charlotte Barat
- Assembling the Architect: The History and Theory of Professional Practice by George Barnett Johnson, Bloomsbury Visual Arts
- Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era by Justus Nieland, University of Minnesota Press
- Queer Times, Black Futures by Kara Keeling
- Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions edited by Tristan Garcia & Vincent Normand, Sternberg Press
- Graphic Assembly: Montage, Media, and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s by Craig Buckley, University of Minnesota Press
Designing Cultures of Care edited by Laurene Vaughan, Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Aesthetics Equals Politics: New Discourses Across Art, Architecture, and Philosophy edited by Mark Foster Gage, The MIT Press
- Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present by Cheng, Davis & Wilson, University of Princeton Press
The Kappe Library also carries architecture and design-related Ebooks. They are available to current SCI-Arc students, faculty and staff, through the Kappe Library home page. Be sure to access EzProxy first. Use your MySCI-Arc name and password.
Among others: blackness at MoMA
by Darby English & Charlotte Barat
This expansive collection of essays on nearly 200 works in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art is the first substantial exploration of MoMA's uneven historical relationship with black artists, black audiences and the broader subject of racial blackness. By addressing these subjects through the consideration of works produced either by black artists or in response to race-related subjects, Among Others confronts two kinds of truth: one plainly factual and informative, the other moral. It is equal parts historical investigation and truth-telling about the Museum's role in the history of the cultural politics of race. More info.
Queer times, Black Futures
by Kara Keeling
A profound intellectual engagement with Afrofuturism and the philosophical questions of space and time. Queer Times, Black Futures considers the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation as they have persisted in and through racial capitalism. Kara Keeling explores how the speculative fictions of cinema, music, and literature that center black existence provide scenarios wherein we might imagine alternative worlds, queer and otherwise. In doing so, Keeling offers a sustained meditation on contemporary investments in futurity, speculation, and technology, paying particular attention to their significance to queer and black freedom. More info.
Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present
by Cheng, Davis & Wilson, University of Princeton Press
Although race—a concept of human difference that establishes hierarchies of power and domination—has played a critical role in the development of modern architectural discourse and practice since the Enlightenment, its influence on the discipline remains largely underexplored. This volume offers a welcome and long-awaited intervention for the field by shining a spotlight on constructions of race and their impact on architecture and theory in Europe and North America and across various global contexts since the eighteenth century. Challenging us to write race back into architectural history, contributors confront how racial thinking has intimately shaped some of the key concepts of modern architecture and culture over time, including freedom, revolution, character, national and indigenous style, progress, hybridity, climate, representation, and radicalism. More info.
Designing Cultures of Care
edited by Laurene Vaughan, Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Designing Cultures of Care brings together an international selection of design researchers who, through a variety of design approaches, are exploring the ways in which design intersects with cultures of care. Unique in its focus and disciplinary diversity, this edited collection develops an expanded discourse on the role and contribution of design to our broader social, cultural and material challenges. Based around a unifying critique of the proposition of care as a theoretical framework for undertaking design research in real world contexts, each chapter presents a case study of design research in action. This book aims to provide readers - both academics and practitioners - with insights into the possibilities and challenges of designing cultures of care. More info.
Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions
edited by Tristan Garcia & Vincent Normand, Sternberg Press
Proposing a history of exhibitions sourced from a wide corpus reaching beyond the framework of art institutions. This volume gathers and expands upon the results of the research project "Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions," held at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, and proposes a history of exhibitions sourced from a wide corpus reaching beyond the framework of art institutions. It undertakes a transdisciplinary history at the nexus of art history, science studies, and philosophy, exploring the role the exhibition played in the construction of the conceptual categories of modernity, and outlines a historiographical model that conceptualizes the exhibition as both an aesthetic and an epistemic site. More info.
Happiness by design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era
by Justus Nieland, University of Minnesota Press
A cultural history of modern lifestyle viewed through film and multimedia experiments of midcentury designers Charles and Ray Eames. For the designers Charles and Ray Eames, happiness was both a technical and ideological problem central to the future of liberal democracy. Being happy demanded new things but also a vanguard life in media that the Eameses modeled as they brought film into their design practice. Midcentury modernism is often considered institutionalized, but Happiness by Design casts Eames-era designers as innovative media artists, technophilic humanists, change managers, and neglected film theorists. More info.