The imagined histories of twenty-five architectural drawings and models, told through reminiscences, stories, conversations, letters, and monologues. Even when an architectural drawing does not show any human figures, we can imagine many different characters just off the page- architects, artists, onlookers, clients, builders, developers, philanthropists-working, observing, admiring, arguing. In Stories from Architecture, Philippa Lewis captures some of these personalities through reminiscences, anecdotes, conversations, letters, and monologues that collectively offer the imagined histories of twenty-five architectural drawings. Some of these untold stories are factual, like Frank Lloyd Wright's correspondence with a Wisconsin librarian regarding her $5,000 dream home, or letters written by the English architect John Nash to his irascible aristocratic client. Others recount a fictional, if credible, scenario by placing these drawings-and with them their characters-into their immediate social context. For instance, the dilemmas facing a Regency couple who are considering a move to a suburban villa; a request from the office of Richard Neutra for an assistant to measure Josef von Sternberg's Rolls-Royce so that the director's beloved vehicle might fit into the garage being designed by his architect; a teenager dreaming of a life away from parental supervision by gazing at a gadget-filled bachelor pad in Playboy magazine; even a policeman recording the ground plans of the house of a murder scene. The drawings, reproduced in color, are all sourced from the Drawing Matter collection in Somerset, UK, and are fascinating objects in themselves; but Lewis shifts our attention beyond the image to other possible histories that linger, invisible, beyond the page, and in the process animates not just a series of archival documents but the writing of architectural history.

Lord Of The Absurd

Politics & Social Sciences

Nogar, Raymond J.

Anthropology

University of Notre Dame Press

This is a remarkable account of a personal journey exploring the evidence for, and far-reaching implications of, human evolution. It is also a powerful inside look at the experience of lecturing on controversial matters at the academic meccas of America. In 1964, Raymond Nogar, a Dominican Scholar Priest and author of the highly regarded book, The Wisdom of Evolution, set out on a ten campus tour that took him to the Universities of Illinois, California, Stanford, North Carolina, Harvard, Michigan and Notre Dame, among others. The Lord of the Absurd is not a collection of Nogar's Lectures, but rather a series of reflections about interaction with audiences, challenging modes of thinking, understanding the risk of unsettling ideas, and the deepening of the author's own convictions in the very presentation of his lectures. He came to realize that the "transforming effect of speaking, in its most creative phases, calls forth much more interpersonal existence, one in which the speaker, the listener and the word are caught up in a drama of human experience which reinterprets the world and gives directions to an existence which otherwise would remain utterly senseless." One sees in Nogar's reflections on his lecture experiences a progressive deepening of his own thought and spirituality. The same evidence for human evolution that has led some to atheism and a view of existence itself as Absurd, the result of nothing more than chance, circumstance and complexity, leads Nogar to a deeper appreciation of the mystery of creation. He acknowledges that the human situation is filled with frivolity and fate, wonders and strangeness and happenings whose apparent meaninglessness pose a dilemma. But, for Nogar, it was exactly in that human situation that Christ presented himself. His life, death and resurrection show him not as the Lord of cosmic order but as Lord of the Absurd. This book can be read with profit by anyone who wishes to probe the truly profound questions of life.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Nogar, Raymond J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Nogar, Raymond J.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Nogar, Raymond J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Lord Of The Absurd

Lord Of The Absurd