MIT Press

Through nine essays Gerhard Richter explores the relation between two worlds: the world in which an artwork is created, that is, a world that over time perishes or decays beyond interpretive understanding, and the new world that the artwork opens up. The multiple relations...

In 1976, Sol LeWitt made a large group of pencil drawings on the internal walls of the Vecchia Torre, a medieval tower in the Umbrian town of Spoleto, Italy. These fragile drawings, made on walls that are susceptible to degradation, have rarely been seen...

Rare & Collectible Includes free CD -  Rhythm Science: Excerpts and Allegories from the Sub Rosa Archives Paul D. Miller, known as DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, is a New York-based conceptual artist, composer, and writer known for mixing electronic music, multimedia, and literature...

The daguerreotype, invented in France, came to America in 1839. By 1851, this early photographic method had been improved by American daguerreotypists to such a degree that it was often referred to as “the American process.” The daguerreotype - now perhaps mostly associated with...

In Nothing Less than Literal, Mark Linder shows how minimalist art of the 1960s was infiltrated by architecture, resulting in a reconfiguration of the disciplines of both art and architecture. Linder traces the exchange of concepts and techniques between architecture and art through a...

Rare & Collectible For decades Louise Lawler (b. 1947) has been taking photographs of art in situ, from small poignant black-and-white images of art in people's homes to large format glossy colour pictures of art in museums and in auction houses. In addition she...

Solar System & Rest Rooms collects both Mel Bochner's writings on art and his writings as art, offering more than fifty pieces reviews, art criticism, theoretical texts, interviews, catalogue statements, notecards, and his groundbreaking magazine interventions many reproduced in facsimile. Bochner is a leading figure...

An exploration of minimal writing―texts generally shorter than a sentence―as complex, powerful literary and visual works. In the 1960s and 70s, minimal and conceptual artists stripped language down to its most basic components: the word and the letter. Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Carl Andre,...

A new approach to theory development for practice-driven research, proposing that theory is something made in and through design. Tendencies toward “academisation” of traditionally practice-based fields have forced design to articulate itself as an academic discipline, in theoretical terms. In this book, Johan Redström...

Typography is everywhere and yet widely overlooked. When we read type, we fail to see type. In this book, Kate Brideau considers typography not as part of "print media" or "digital media" but as a medium of communication itself, able to transcend the life...

Muriel Cooper (1925–1994) was the pioneering designer who created the iconic MIT Press colophon (or logo) - seven bars that represent the lowercase letters “mitp” as abstracted books on a shelf. She designed a modernist monument, the encyclopaedic volume The Bauhaus (1969), and the graphically...

he story of the experimental zeitgeist in Eastern European art, seen through personal encounters, pioneering dialogues, collaborative projects, and cultural exchanges. Throughout the 1970s, a network of artists emerged to bridge the East-West divide, and the no less rigid divides between the countries of...

The history and controversial roots of the social design movement, explored through the life and work of its leading pioneer, Victor Papanek. In Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World, Alison Clarke explores the social design movement through the life of its leading pioneer, the...

Artwork as opposed to experiment? Engineer versus artist? We often see two different cultural realms separated by impervious walls. But some fifty years ago, the borders between technology and art began to be breached. In this book, W. Patrick McCray shows how in this...

Ancient history, midcentury modernism, Cinemascope, humanism and monumentality, totalitarianism and democracy: transformations in American culture and architecture. In Flintstone Modernism, Jeffrey Lieber investigates transformations in postwar American architecture and culture. He considers sword-and-sandal films of the 1950s and 1960s - including forgotten gems such...

In 1983, the Iranian government banned the personal use of home video technology. In Underground, Blake Atwood recounts how in response to the ban, technology enthusiasts, cinephiles, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens forged an illegal but complex underground system for video distribution. Atwood draws on...

This posthumous volume gathers Annette Michelson's erudite and incisive readings of the revolutionary films of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, giving readers the opportunity to track her sustained investigations into their work. Michelson introduced American audiences to Soviet cinema in the early 1970s, extending...

Contemporary art in the early twenty-first century is often discussed as if the very idea of art that is contemporary is new. Yet all works of art were once contemporary. In What Was Contemporary Art? Richard Meyer reclaims the contemporary from historical amnesia, and gives the...

How Brazilian postwar avant-garde artists updated modernism in a way that was radically at odds with European and North American art historical narratives. Brazilian avant-garde artists of the postwar era worked from a fundamental but productive out-of-jointness. They were modernist but distant from modernism....

PLEASE NOTE: This title has been remainder marked by the publisher - a  marker pen dot or line on one edge. See images for example. The usual history of architecture is a grand narrative of soaring monuments and heroic makers. But it is also...