[This text] covers the concepts and principles of biology from the structure and function of the cell to the organization of the biosphere. It draws upon the entire world of living things to bring out an evolutionary theme that is introduced from the start. The concept of evolution is necessary to understanding the unity and diversity of life and serves as a background for the study of ecological principles. Four chapters are devoted to reviewing the ecological principles that explain how the natural world works. Frequent references are made as to how humans impact the environment. Ecological problems are considered.

Product Description: Architects have long operated based on the assumption that a building is 'complete' once construction has finished. Striving to create a perfect building, they wish for it to stay in its original state indefinitely, viewing any subsequent alterations as unintended effects or the results of degeneration...read more

Product Description: Shakespeare studies have been dominated by theoretical approaches derived from extra-literary disciplines: Marxist, Feminist, Cultural and Queer. This work examines Shakespeare's comedies through a nineteenth-century lens, arguing that the plays reveal Shakespeare's personal prejudices...read more

Product Description: “Some photographers take their pictures; others make them. Neither notion seems right in describing Stanford Lipsey’s work, however, for the spirit behind these pictures is one of natural discovery, something that comes before process...read more

Product Description: A highly developed study of the relationships between rhetoric and public culture.One of the most widely used ideas in scholarship of the humanities and social sciences is that of homology: a formal pattern structuring different kinds of texts, ideas, and experiences...read more

Product Description: Book by Bhuvan Chandel

In the eighty years since Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache on a copy of the Mona Lisa, the dissolving of cultural forms has intensified to the point that there is no longer an absolute, a “proper” form, anywhere. This generalized breakdown is evident in social and moral codes, in gender distinctions and personal relationships, in politics and economics, in literature, music, dance, painting, and architecture, in our concepts of reality itself. Is there any sense to be made of this seeming chaos? And if so, can any single theory adequately account for all aspects of the phenomenon? Physicists and mathematicians have informed us that reality is irreducibly complex and plural, unable to be exhausted by any one system of description. Following their lead, Mary Settegast has explored several different ways of looking at the reality of dissolving forms, seeing it as the result of global consumer capitalism; environmental deterioration; the end of a cycle of time; the beginning of a new cycle; a shift in the evolution of human consciousness; and finally, seeing the dissolution of form as a cause for celebration. Each of these six perspectives is theoretically “correct” in its ability to explain the breakdown, and each can be supported by the work of twentieth-century artists. Readers are asked to forego the impulse to choose which view they believe to be true and encouraged instead to practice the simultaneous holding of multiple perspectives: “Like the Cubist painters of the early twentieth century, who were among the first to recognize the error in a single point of view, we will be trying in these pages to portray our subject from all sides in hopes of capturing it whole.”

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Product Description: Provocative Form in Plato, Kant, Nietzsche (and Others) seeks (1) to liberate form from its primary affiliation with intellect and with its putative structural function; and (2) to relocate it as the correlate of imagination and desire...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

According to N. J. Habraken, intimate and unceasing interaction between people and the forms they inhabit uniquely defines built environment. The Structure of the Ordinary, the culmination of decades of environmental observation and design research, is a recognition and analysis of everyday environment as the wellspring of urban design and formal architecture. The authors central argument is that built environment is universally organized by the Orders of Form, Place, and Understanding. These three fundamental, interwoven principles correspond roughly to physical, biological, and social domains. Historically, "ordinary" environment was the background against which architects built the "extraordinary." Drawing upon extensive examples from archaeological and contemporary sites worldwide, the author illustrates profound recent shifts in the structure of everyday environment. One effect of these transformations, Habraken argues, has been the loss of implicit common understanding that previously enabled architects to formally enhance and innovate while still maintaining environmental coherence. Consequently, architects must now undertake a study of the ordinary as the fertile common ground in which form- and place-making are rooted. In focusing on built environment as an autonomous entity distinct from the societies and natural environments that jointly create it, this book lays the foundation for a new dialogue on methodology and pedagogy, in support of a more informed approach to professional intervention. (view table of contents)

Product Description: The second volume in the "Design in the 20th Century" series, this book explains and then challenges the notion that a form in architecture and product design is derived solely from practical functions. The text sets the role of function in a historical perspective, quoting extensively from the writings of theorists and designers...read more