Category Archives: Reviews
Future Of Pet Care: “My Virtual Veterinarian” – Smartphone Video And Chat Appointments App
My Virtual Veterinarian connects pet parents with veterinarians for video and chat appointments. Through our platform, pet parents can access their primary veterinarian, or find a different veterinarian who is available for virtual veterinary appointments.
Top New Art Books: “Alice Trumbull Mason – Pioneer of American Abstraction”
The first comprehensive publication exploring the life and art of pioneering American abstract artist Alice Trumbull Mason is perfect for audiences eager to discover unsung yet brilliantly talented women artists.
A groundbreaking artist, Alice Trumbull Mason (1904-1971) was one of the earliest painters of the twentieth century to embrace abstract painting in America. Mason’s early paintings have been compared to those of Gorky, Kandinsky, and Miró, and in 1936 she became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) and one of its leaders in the promotion of abstract work by artists such as Josef Albers, Ad Reinhardt, Piet Mondrian, and many others. Mason was a true artist’s artist whose efforts helped lead to the great movements of later twentieth-century art, such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Post-Modernism, and Conceptual Art.
Alice Trumbull Mason features essays that illuminate and contextualize the artist’s multifaceted work and personal life through her paintings, prints, poetry, and letters. The book reveals the full life story of a seminal abstractionist, making a sound argument for adding her to the annals of great twentieth-century artists.
CITIES OF THE FUTURE: “The Link – A Conscious City-Forest For 200,000 People” (Luca Curci Architects)
“The first smart city “conscious oriented”, that will prevent urban sprawl, produce and storage energy, improve air quality, increase urban biodiversity, and create a healthier lifestyle”. Arch. Luca Curci
With its 300 floors THE LINK will reach the maximum height of 1200 meters. The project combines sustainability with population density, and it aims to build up a zero-energy city-building. The city-forest is made of 4 main towers, connected one each other, equipped with green areas on each level, natural light and ventilation. 100% green transport systems. The vertical city allows its residents to get into a healthier lifestyle, in connection with natural elements, re-thinking the traditional concept of community and society.
Architecture firm Luca Curci Architects presents THE LINK, a vertical city for 200,000 people. The project aims to rise above the challenge of population density by successfully combining vertical expansion with economic innovation. A self-sustainable city-forest, that will absorb CO2, produce oxygen for cleaner air and increase urban biodiversity. With interconnected communities’ programs. No suburbs. Less poverty oriented.
Using an urban operating system with an AI (Artificial Intelligence), the vertical city will be able to manage the global city temperature, levels of CO2 and humidity, will control the global lighting system, and will storage extra energy produced by solar panels and other renewable energy resources.
Top Science Infographics: “Neurogenomics”, Brain Function & Development
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Top Design Books: “Studio Gang Architecture” (2020)
The most in-depth exploration of one of the most important, innovative, and creative architecture practices working today.
For the last twenty years Studio Gang, led by Jeanne Gang, has created bold, visionary architecture that engages the urgent social and environmental challenges of our time. This first comprehensive monograph brings together 25 signature projects-from the award-winning Aqua Tower and Writers Theatre to highly-anticipated upcoming buildings for the American Museum of Natural History and O’Hare International Airport-to reveal the resonant concepts and design approach that connect them. With a rich variety of visual materials and short essays by Jeanne Gang, the book elegantly captures the creative sensibility and trajectory of an architecture driven by pressing twenty-first-century questions.
Studio Gang is an international architecture and urban design practice founded and led by Jeanne Gang. A recipient of the National Design Award in Architecture and numerous other honors, the Studio works as a collective to create projects that foster interaction and connection. Their research-based, interdisciplinary approach has produced award-winning buildings across scales and typologies as well as publications and exhibitions that push design’s ability to effect positive change.
Top Literary Catalogs: “Johns Hopkins University Press – Winter 2020”
Art History: “Auguste Rodin – The Father Of Modern Sculpture”
From Christie’s online magazine (May 2020):
Rodin travelled to Italy in 1875, a trip described by the late art historian Kirk Varnedoe as, ‘one of the seminal events in modern art’.
Here, in his mid-thirties, he fell under the spell of the Renaissance master, Michelangelo. His monumental, exaggerated nude figures would have a deep and lasting influence on the artist. ‘My liberation from academicism was via Michelangelo,’ Rodin later recalled. ‘He is the bridge by which I passed from one circle to another.’
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) is renowned for breathing life into clay, creating naturalistic, often vigorously modelled sculptures which convey intense human emotions: love, ecstasy, agony or grief. Breaking the rules of academic convention and classical idealism, Rodin ushered in a new form of highly expressive sculpture that went on to influence generations of artists that followed.
Read full article at Christie’s
INFOGRAPHIC: “Diabetes In The United States” (CDC)
New Books: “The Louvre – The Many Lives Of The World’s Most Famous Museum” (James Gardner)
The fascinating and little-known story of the Louvre, from its inception as a humble fortress to its transformation into the palatial residence of the kings of France and then into the world’s greatest art museum.
Some ten million people from all over the world flock to the Louvre each year to enjoy its incomparable art collection. Yet few of them are aware of the remarkable history of that place and of the buildings themselves―a fascinating story that historian James Gardner elegantly chronicles in the first full-length history of the Louvre in English.
More than 7,000 years ago, men and women camped on a spot called le Louvre for reasons unknown; a clay quarry and a vineyard supported a society there in the first centuries AD. A thousand years later, King Philippe Auguste of France constructed a fortress there in 1191, just outside the walls of a city far smaller than the Paris we know today. Intended to protect the capital against English soldiers stationed in Normandy, the fortress became a royal residence under Charles V two centuries later, and then the monarchy’s principal residence under the great Renaissance king François I in 1546.
It remained so until 1682, when Louis XIV moved his entire court to Versailles. Thereafter the fortunes of the Louvre languished until the tumultuous days of the French Revolution when, during the Reign of Terror in 1793, it first opened its doors to display the nation’s treasures. Ever since―through the Napoleonic era, the Commune, two World Wars, to the present―the Louvre has been a witness to French history, and expanded to become home to a legendary collection, including such masterpieces as the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo, whose often-complicated and mysterious origins form a spectacular narrative that rivals the building’s grand stature.
James Gardner
James Gardner is an American art critic and literary critic based in New York and Buenos Aires. He is the author of six books, including Buenos Aires: The Biography of a City. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, and the British Spectator. He was the art critic at the New York Post and wrote architecture criticism for the New York Observer, before serving as the architecture critic at the New York Sun. He is now a contributing editor at The Magazine Antiques.
