New Geographies, 8: Island - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1934510459 ISBN 13: 9781934510452

Publisher: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2017

Synopsis

As a master metaphor, the island has been a fecund source of inspiration across many domains. From More’s Utopia to Darwin’s evolutionary theory to Ungers’s archipelago, insights derived from “island thinking” are commonly extrapolated across diverse scales and fields. The appeal of the island metaphor lies in its capacity to simplify the complex and frame the apparently unbounded. Yet the concept seems to contradict current mainstream thought and practice in geographic and design fields. The globalization motifs of openness and interconnectedness, and ecology’s privilege of environmental processes and flows over forms and boundaries, both challenge the pertinence of the island as a cognitive device for territorial description and intervention.

New Geographies, 8 proposes an epistemological pulse between, on the one hand, the ultimate loss of the exterior implied in planetary upscaling of territorial interpretations (toward an idea of the world as a whole) and, on the other hand, the need to rearrange new boundaries in an environment viewed through the process-oriented lens of ecology. An “atlas” of islands, New Geographies, 8 explores the new limits of islandness and gathers examples to reassert its relevance for design disciplines.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"Everything is connected to everything else" is the un­official slogan of our times. But is it really, and, if so, is it desirable? New Geographies 08 explores the geo philo­sophic notion of boundaries, and, in so doing, proposes new limits for the island master metaphor, bolsters the agency of design in an entangled world, and suggests the basis for a reinvigorated universalism.

Marc Shell and Stefania Staniscia elaborate on "Islandology" and "Islandness." Robin MacKay and MAP Office provide a timeline and an atlas of islands as lab­oratories for empirical and thought experiments. Cary Wolfe and Timothy Morton debate whether the world is more like an archipelago or an iceberg. Nina Samuel and Stefan Helmreich discuss the implications of rendering islands visible or invisible. Anita Berrizbeitia, Stan Allen, and Douglas Spencer ponder form and pro­cess. Formlessfinder, Roland Snooks, and Neyran Turan explore islandness in design. Kees Lokman and Susan Herrington, Alexander Felson, and Milica Topalovic provide examples of islands as cross­scalar tools from gardens to cities to territories. Joyce Hsiang and Bimal Mendis, Roi Salgueiro Barrio, Hashim Sarkis, and Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy speculate on potential new limits of the island metaphor.

Featuring work by: Tania Álvarez Zaldívar, Neeraj Bhatia, Andrea Branzi, Edward Burtynsky, Luis Callejas, Gilles Clement, DOGMA, Olafur Eliasson, Yona Friedman, Walter Herfst, Rem Koolhaas and Madelon Vriesendorp, Gabriel Kozlowski, Israel López Balán, Emma McNally, Jamie Mills, Mary Oliver, Piet Oudolf, Stephen Petegorsky, Bas Princen, Charles Ross, Rudi Sebastian, George Steinmetz, John Stephens, and Keith Tyson.

About the Author:

Daniel Daou is a Doctor of Design candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Pablo Pérez-Ramos is a Doctor of Design candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard Graduate School of Design
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1934510459
• ISBN 13: 9781934510452
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224
• Editor: Daou Daniel, Pérez-Ramos Pablo