MITPressLog

1960: The Image of the City

For day 3 of the 50th anniversary series, Reiter's Bookseller Jim Wood reflects on The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch:

"I first encountered it as a young bookseller in 1975, building the stock of a technical bookstore. In 1979, I began architecture school at the University of Maryland. I was inspired by the book to think about buildings in the city. I went back to the book again, this time as a student. I did not become an architect, taking another route. The book and its image has stayed with me as a later graduate student, and has informed my thinking  ever since as an urban resident. I still have the copy I purchased in the 1970's and I just pulled it off a bookshelf in my apartment. I have put aside many books that have been a part of my life, not this one."

Production facts about  The Image of the City from Production Coordinator Kate Elwell:

"The Image of the City has hit 35 printings. A cover PO from 1964 to Farnsworth Press specifies that we would like the covers printed offset rather than letterpress. At the 7th printing in 1971, we did 10,000 copies. The 14th printing  was in 1977."

Our 50 influential journal articles are listed here. The articles are in chronological order and will be freely available through the end of 2012.

1959: Experiencing Architecture by Steen Eiler Rasmussen

For today's 50th anniversary post, Production Coordinator Kate Elwell dug up some Production facts about Steen Eiler Rasmussen's Experiencing Architecture:

"We just reprinted Rasmussen's Experiencing Architecture for the 35th time. Our production folder only goes back to the 14th printing, which was done in 1977. It was for 15,000 copies and we asked to see “a salt for approval.” We printed an additional 15,000 in 1978! It’s fun to track the list of buyers who have worked on reprints and the history of the printing industry. This title printed at Halliday, then Halliday got bought by Arcata, and then somewhere between the 23rd (in 1992) and the 24th (in 1993) printings, Arcata-Halliday must have closed because it went to Vail."

Monday Eye Candy: 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School

Happy Monday! Today's eye candy is from 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday Eye Candy: The Springboard in the Pond

Today's eye candy is a cover that we love--it's from The Springboard in the Pond: An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool by Thomas  A. P. van Leeuwen, which features 110 illustrations (get a closer look by clicking on the image). In The Springboard in the Pond, Thomas van Leeuwen looks at the domestic swimming pool and discovers an icon indispensable to the reading of twentieth-century modernism. We'll be posting more about this book to celebrate the Olympics in the coming weeks. Happy Monday!

Monday Eye Candy: Toward A Minor Architecture

Happy Monday! Today's eye candy comes from Toward A MInor Architecture by Jill Stoner. The book contains 25 b&w illustrations. Click on each image to enlarge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spacanapoli, 2006

 

 

 

 

Twelve Monkeys, directed by Terry Gilliam, 1992

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Berlin Wall, photographer unknown, 1961

Monday Eye Candy: How to Architect

Happy Monday! Today’s eye candy comes from How to Architect by Doug Patt. This illustrated book presents the many elements of architecture in an A-Z guide, complete with lettering, hand drawings, computer-generated images, and photographs to enhance the points. As Patt notes in his preface, being an architect makes him more inclined to describe things with pictures than words.

 

A is for Asymmetry

 

 

 

 

G is for Gravity

 

 

 

 

 

 

M is for Mathematics

 

 

 

 

 

 

Q is for Quirky

 

 

 

 

V is for Vocation

"A most ingenious paradox"

In "The Pirates of Penzance," time plays a trick on Frederic, making him a victim of "a most ingenious paradox" due to his Leap Year birthday. What better way to celebrate Leap Year 2012 than to dive into books that deal with the various paradoxes and definitions of "time"? Here are a few titles to add to your reading list:

 

The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality
by  David Couzens Hoy

A study of the emergence in post-Kantian continental philosophy of a focus on the lived experience of temporality.

 

 

 

 

Time and Identity
Edited by Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke and Harry S. Silverstein

Original essays on the metaphysics of time, identity, and the self, written by distinguished scholars and important rising philosophers.

 

 

 

Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means
Siegfried Zielinski; Translated by Gloria Custance

A quest to find something new by excavating the "deep time" of media's development—not by simply looking at new media's historic forerunners, but by connecting models, machines, technologies, and accidents that have until now remained separated.

 

 

Time and Realism: Metaphysical and Antimetaphysical Perspectives
Yuval Dolev

A new view of the metaphysics of time, arguing that the traditional tensed-tenseless debate within analytic philosophy should be seen as the first stage in a philosophical investigation of time, and that the next stage belongs to phenomenology.

 

 

twin time: or, how death befell me
Veronica Gonzalez

A young woman's fabulist search for her long-lost twin brother overturns all notions of motherhood, magic realism, and miscegenation.

 

 

Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture Sanford Kwinter An exploration of twentienth-century conceptions of time and their relation to artistic form.

Sharing the Love

Happy Valentine's Day! Here are a few books that we love:

 

The author of the classic philosophical treatment of love reflects on the trajectory, over decades, of his thoughts on love and other topics.

 

 

 

 

 

A vision of architecture that transcends concerns of form and function and finds the connections between the architect's wish to design a beautiful world and architecture's imperative to provide a better place for society.

 

 

 

 

A self-described failed filmmaker falls obsessively in love with her theorist-husband's colleague: a manifesto for a new kind of feminism and the power of first-person narration.

 

 

 

 

 

A vision of architecture that includes sculpture, machines, and technology and encapsulates the history of the human species.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A psychological exploration of how the love of nature can coexist in our psyches with apathy toward environmental destruction.

 

 

 

 

 

An exploration of the sensuous and the passionate, as expressed in operas by Mozart and Beethoven.

“Eighteen Years in the Making”

Ellen Faran, Director of The MIT Press, reflects on last week’s PROSE Awards ceremony.

By coincidence, “eighteen years in the making” described each of the two books featured at the PROSE awards ceremony in Washington, DC last week. The PROSE awards recognize excellence in professional and scholarly publishing and are judged by distinguished industry experts. This year’s engaging ceremony provided, along with the chance to applaud several MIT Press category winners*, many good reminders about the things we value in scholarly publishing.        

Last year’s winner of the top prize, the R.R. Hawkins Award, was Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade by Eltis et al., a comprehensive reference work published by Yale University Press. At this year’s awards ceremony, we saw a new short film about the making of the Atlas. I can’t report on the details of this process, of which I have only a fuzzy grasp, but my lasting impressions from the film are the large collaborative team involved (including funders, scholars, cartographers, and the Press); and that team’s clear vision of the book form as superbly effective in presenting this material (to accompany an openly-available database). These impressions call to mind MIT Press’ Atlas of Science by Katy Börner, another Atlas that featured collaborative effort and vision behind its making.

The 2012 Hawkins award went to The Diffusion Handbook: Applied Solutions for Engineers by Thambynayagam, published by McGraw Hill. My grasp of this highly complex, 2,000-page hardcover book is even fuzzier, but I was struck by its evident usefulness for its technical audience and by the author’s invention of a new visual icon system for organizing the solutions he presents (the book contains a 125-page table of contents using these icons!).

The Diffusion Handbook reminded me of several of our own completely unique works, books whose new concepts required custom editorial solutions and/or breathtakingly detailed production work. These include Shape by George Stiny, Color for the Sciences by Jan Koenderink, Aaaaw to Zzzzzd by John Bevis, and The Book of Michael of Rhodes, volumes 1-3, edited by David McGee, Alan Stahl, and Pamela Long. Likely some of these were eighteen years (or more) in the making, as well.

 

*MIT Press 2011 PROSE Award category winners are  Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes by Louise A. Mozingo (Architecture & Urban Planning); The Fate of Greenland:  Lessons from Abrupt Climate Change by Philip Conkling, Richard Alley, Wallace Broecker and George Denton (Earth Sciences); and When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans by Paula J. Caplan (Psychology).

Honorable Mentions include Helvetica and the New York City Subway System: The True (Maybe) Story by Paul Shaw (Architecture & Urban Planning); Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art by Gwen Allen (Art History & Criticism); Unlocking Energy Innovation: How America Can Build a Low-Cost, Low-Carbon Energy System by Richard K. Lester and David M. Hart (Business, Finance & Management); and Engineering Systems: Meeting Human Needs in a Complex Technological World by Olivier L. de Weck, Daniel Roos and Christopher L. Magee (Engineering & Technology).

 

The Font Fight: Helvetica’s Battle to Gain Control of NYC Subway Signs

 

In celebration of the 107^th anniversary of New York City’s first official subway system, let’s take a look at seven facts about how its iconic signs came about from Paul Shaw’s Helvetica and the New York City Subway System:

1) The first “signs” in the New York City subway system were created by Heins & La Farge, the architects of the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT), when the IRT, the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT), and the Independent (IND) lines merged in 1904. They are the same mosaic tablets seen today in both serif and sans serif roman capitals. Although created in the same architect’s studio, none of the signs have a uniform lettering style.

 2) George Salomon, frustrated by the labyrinth of distinctions among the IRT, BMT, and IND lines, suggested creating five color-coded lines identified by a letter and eleven branch lines a derivative letter/number combination. Only the color-coded route map was adopted by the Transit Authority, and Salomon’s subway map was published in 1958. 

3) Many subway sign systems around the world experienced many issues with consistency of style, except for London. Calligrapher Edward Johnston created the Johnston Railway Sans font for Frank Pick, the publicity manager for London Transport in 1916. In the 1960s, the font Airport, first used in The Oceanic Building (now Terminal 3) at Heathrow Airport.

4) The font Helvetica, created in Switzerland, didn’t catch on so quickly in the United States until Mergenthaler Linotype in Brooklyn aligned its original German Linotype mats with American ones.

5) MIT was one of the earliest three places to incorporate Helvetica into award-winning designs and advertising.

6) Helvetica became the official typeface for the New York City subway system signage in December 1989. Forms of Helvetica Medium were used for the Metro-North, Long Island Railroad, and New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA).

7) Desktop publishing software helped prompt the complete switch from the font Standard to Helvetica. It was the only font available in the equipment and systems listed the 1989 MTA Sign Manual.