Modern Mobility Aloft

Modern Mobility Aloft PDF

Author: Amy D. Finstein

Publisher: Temple University Press

Published: 2020-11-23

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1439919186

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In the first half of the twentieth century, urban elevated highways were much more than utilitarian infrastructure, lifting traffic above the streets; they were statements of civic pride, asserting boldly modern visions for a city’s architecture, economy, and transportation network. Yet three of the most ambitious projects, launched in Chicago, New York, and Boston in the spirit of utopian models by architects such as Le Corbusier and Hugh Ferriss, ultimately fell short of their ideals. Modern Mobility Aloft is the first study to focus on pre-Interstate urban elevated highways within American architectural and urban history. Amy Finstein traces the idealistic roots of these superstructures, their contrasting realities once built, their impacts on successive development patterns, and the recent challenges they have posed to contemporary urban designers. Filled with more than 100 historic photographs and illustrations of beaux arts and art deco architecture, Modern Mobility Aloft provides a critical understanding of urban landscapes, transportation, and technological change as cities moved into the modern era.

The Mobility of People and Things in the Early Modern Mediterranean

The Mobility of People and Things in the Early Modern Mediterranean PDF

Author: Elisabeth A. Fraser

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-07-23

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1351042041

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For centuries artists, diplomats, and merchants served as cultural intermediaries in the Mediterranean. Stationed in port cities and other entrepôts of the Mediterranean, these go-betweens forged intercultural connections even as they negotiated and sometimes promoted cultural misunderstandings. They also moved objects of all kinds across time and space. This volume considers how the mobility of art and material culture is intertwined with greater Mediterranean networks from 1580 to 1880. Contributors see the movement of people and objects as transformational, emphasizing the trajectory of objects over single points of origin, multiplicity over unity, and mutability over stasis.

The Complete Rigger's Apprentice: Tools and Techniques for Modern and Traditional Rigging

The Complete Rigger's Apprentice: Tools and Techniques for Modern and Traditional Rigging PDF

Author: Brion Toss

Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional

Published: 1997-08-01

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 0070648409

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Combining and updating the renowned Rigger's Apprentice and Rigger's Locker, meets the changing face of modern materials and technology while remaining true to rigging's best traditional principles and practices. It's much more than a knot book, though the knots a sailor needs are all here. It's a book for sailors who want the satisfaction and hard-cash savings of stepping their own masts, inspecting and maintaining their own rigs, and turning their own tailsplices and wire eyesplices. It is for boatowners who want to replace an entire gang of rigging themselves--measuring, choosing appropriate wire, turning soft eyes, leathering, and serving. It is for bluewater voyagers who want to feel secure in the knowledge that, should a shroud carry away far at sea, they will be able to repair it. The Complete Rigger's Apprentice is also a free-roaming collection of useful ideas and tips on everything from supplementing winches with block and tackle, to rigging snubbers at anchor, to using pantyhose for an emergency fanbelt. In short, it's the definitive book on the art of rigging, written by its most entertaining practitioner.

The Complete Rigger's Apprentice: Tools and Techniques for Modern and Traditional Rigging, Second Edition

The Complete Rigger's Apprentice: Tools and Techniques for Modern and Traditional Rigging, Second Edition PDF

Author: Brion Toss

Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional

Published: 2016-09-09

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 0071849777

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Revised and updated—the only book you need on sailboat rigging and marlinspike arts The Complete Rigger’s Apprentice, Second Edition offers today’s marine professionals a complete, up-to-date resource on today’s rigging best practices and traditions. This expanded edition features new material on multihull rig design, how to make and use soft-shackles, and the latest information on Sta-Lok (mechanical) terminals. In addition to sharing traditional rigging methods, new techniques are taught here, for the first time, including how to work with today’s high-modulus fibers for both running and standing rigging. Continuing its tradition, this book helps you gain satisfaction and hard-cash savings from stepping your own masts, inspecting and maintaining your own rigs, and turning your own tail splices and wire eye splices. Easy-to-understand explanations demonstrate how to make hundreds of pieces of handmade gear, which saves you hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of dollars.

Modern Warfare, Intelligence and Deterrence

Modern Warfare, Intelligence and Deterrence PDF

Author: Benjamin Sutherland

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2012-01-09

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1118240448

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An in-depth look at Western military technology from the experts at The Economist Much has been made of the limitations of Western technology when pitted against today's low-tech insurgencies. Modern Warfare, Intelligence and Deterrence: The Technology That is Transforming Them explores emerging high tech military technologies and places them in the larger context of today's politics, diplomacy, business, and social issues, arguing that, broadly speaking, defense technologies will continue to provide enormous advantages to advanced, Western armed forces. The book is organized into five parts: land and sea, air and space, the computer factor, intelligence and spycraft, and the road ahead (which examines the coming challenges for Western armies, such as new wars against insurgents operating out of civilian areas). Comprised of a selection of the best writing on the subject from The Economist, each section includes an introduction linking the technological developments to civilian matters. Looks at new and emerging military technologies, including the Panzerfaust-3, a German shoulder-fired heat-seeking antitank missile, the MPR-500, an Israeli precision bomb, Russia's Sizzler, an anti-ship missile that can travel 300 kilometers, and many others Explains how military and intelligence technologies are changing the world Edited by Benjamin Sutherland, a writer for The Economist and expert on the social, political, and business implications of new and disruptive technologies A fascinating look at Western military technologies, Modern Warfare, Intelligence and Deterrence is essential reading for business readers and history buffs, alike.

Designing the Modern City

Designing the Modern City PDF

Author: Eric Paul Mumford

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2018-01-01

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0300207727

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A comprehensive new survey tracing the global history of urbanism and urban design from the industrial revolution to the present. Written with an international perspective that encourages cross-cultural comparisons, leading architectural and urban historian Eric Mumford presents a comprehensive survey of urbanism and urban design since the industrial revolution. Beginning in the second half of the 19th century, technical, social, and economic developments set cities and the world's population on a course of massive expansion. Mumford recounts how key figures in design responded to these changing circumstances with both practicable proposals and theoretical frameworks, ultimately creating what are now mainstream ideas about how urban environments should be designed, as well as creating the field called "urbanism." He then traces the complex outcomes of approaches that emerged in European, American, and Asian cities. This erudite and insightful book addresses the modernization of the traditional city, including mass transit and sanitary sewer systems, building legislation, and model tenement and regional planning approaches. It also examines the urban design concepts of groups such as CIAM (International Congresses of Modern Architecture) and Team 10, and their adherents and critics, including those of the Congress for the New Urbanism, as well as efforts toward ecological urbanism. Highlighting built as well as unbuilt projects, Mumford offers a sweeping guide to the history of designers' efforts to shape cities.

Italo Calvino's Architecture of Lightness

Italo Calvino's Architecture of Lightness PDF

Author: Letizia Modena

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2011-05-09

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1136730591

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This study recovers Italo Calvino's central place in a lost history of interdisciplinary thought, politics, and literary philosophy in the 1960s. Drawing on his letters, essays, critical reviews, and fiction, as well as a wide range of works--primarily urban planning and design theory and history--circulating among his primary interlocutors, this book takes as its point of departure a sweeping reinterpretation of Invisible Cities. Passages from Calvino's most famous novel routinely appear as aphorisms in calendars, posters, and the popular literature of inspiration and self-help, reducing the novel to vague abstractions and totalizing wisdom about thinking outside the box. The shadow of postmodern studies has had a similarly diminishing effect on this text, rendering up an accomplished but ultimately apolitical novelistic experimentation in endless deconstructive deferrals, the shiny surfaces of play, and the ultimately rigged game of self-referentiality. In contrast, this study draws on an archive of untranslated Italian- and French-language materials on urban planning, architecture, and utopian architecture to argue that Calvino's novel in fact introduces readers to the material history of urban renewal in Italy, France, and the U.S. in the 1960s, as well as the multidisciplinary core of cultural life in that decade: the complex and continuous interplay among novelists and architects, scientists and artists, literary historians and visual studies scholars. His last love poem for the dying city was in fact profoundly engaged, deeply committed to the ethical dimensions of both architecture and lived experience in the spaces of modernity as well as the resistant practices of reading and utopian imagining that his urban studies in turn inspired.

Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body

Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body PDF

Author: Kristina Wilson

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0691213496

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The first investigation of how race and gender shaped the presentation and marketing of Modernist decor in postwar America In the world of interior design, mid-century Modernism has left an indelible mark still seen and felt today in countless open-concept floor plans and spare, geometric furnishings. Yet despite our continued fascination, we rarely consider how this iconic design sensibility was marketed to the diverse audiences of its era. Examining advice manuals, advertisements in Life and Ebony, furniture, art, and more, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body offers a powerful new look at how codes of race, gender, and identity influenced—and were influenced by—Modern design and shaped its presentation to consumers. Taking us to the booming suburban landscape of postwar America, Kristina Wilson demonstrates that the ideals defined by popular Modernist furnishings were far from neutral or race-blind. Advertisers offered this aesthetic to White audiences as a solution for keeping dirt and outsiders at bay, an approach that reinforced middle-class White privilege. By contrast, media arenas such as Ebony magazine presented African American readers with an image of Modernism as a style of comfort, security, and social confidence. Wilson shows how etiquette and home decorating manuals served to control women by associating them with the domestic sphere, and she considers how furniture by George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames, as well as smaller-scale decorative accessories, empowered some users, even while constraining others. A striking counter-narrative to conventional histories of design, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body unveils fresh perspectives on one of the most distinctive movements in American visual culture.