Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press , 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 364 pages, illustrated throughout in color. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Photographer Camilo Jose Vergara has been chronicling the neighborhood for forty-three years, and Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto is an unprecedented record of urban change. Vergara began his documentation of Harlem in the tradition of such masters as Helen Levitt and Aaron Siskind, and he later turned his focus on the neighborhood's urban fabric, both the buildings that compose it and the life and culture embedded in them. By repeatedly returning to the same locations over the course of decades, Vergara is able to show us a community that is constantly changing--some areas declining, as longtime businesses give way to empty storefronts, graffiti, and garbage, while other areas gentrify, with corporate chain stores coming in to compete with the mom-and-pops. He also captures the ever-present street life of this densely populated neighborhood, from stoop gatherings to graffiti murals memorializing dead rappers to impersonators honoring Michael Jackson in front of the Apollo, as well as the growth of tourism and racial integration. Woven throughout the images is Vergara's own account of his project and his experience of living and working in Harlem. Taken together, his unforgettable words and images tell the story of how Harlem and its residents navigated the segregation, dereliction and slow recovery of the closing years of the twentieth century and the boom and racial integration of the twenty-first century. A deeply personal investigation, Harlem will take its place with the best portrayals of urban life.
Hardcover. Ostfildern GR, Hatje Cantz, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 288 pages 231 illustrations 60 in color with 274 plans and drawings. Biography. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Josef Paul Kleihues (1933-2004) was one of the most prolific architects of postwar Germany, famous both as the Director of the International Building Exhibition Berlin in 1987 and for his design for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He was also known for his sensitive interventions into older buildings, an instance of which is the former Hamburger Bahnhof--now the Museum fur Gegenwart--in Berlin, where Kleihues intermixed glass walls and light installations by the American Minimalist Dan Flavin with the building's original nineteenth-century Neoclassical design. (His reconstruction was widely deemed to rival or even surpass Gae Aulenti's overhaul of the interior of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.) This first volume of a three-part monograph presents projects up to 1980, including the highly acclaimed Berlin Sanitation Department and the Neukolln Hospital. Even in these early works, Kleihues' practical, problem-solving approach is already evident, indicating his readiness to reflect on the traditional approaches of Modern architecture and his capacity to expand them in interesting ways. This very generously illustrated volume was designed by Kleihues himself, just before his death in 2004.
Hardcover. New York , Rizzoli, Revised Ed., 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 256 pages, roughly 420 color and 110 b&w plates. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap.
