Extinct by Barbara Penner

Extinct by Barbara Penner

A collection of 85 extinct objects, now superseded, unfashionable or simply forgotten.

"A truly fascinating and consistently unexpected account of a forgotten landscape of lost futuresThis richly original work chronicles the designed world of the undead and, at the same time, challenges today's easy consensus of progress and modernization. Entertaining, jolting, and scholarly, it is a superb counterblast to our own age of relentless upgrades and product improvements." -- Tristram Hunt, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London "Objects have come and gone from our lives throughout history, mostly because something new has been designed to fulfill their functions more efficiently, appealingly, economically, or sustainably. Never before has this happened with such speed or on the same scale as in the digital age. Extinct is both a thoughtful and incisive analysis of the phenomenon and an engaging tribute to some of the intriguing or eccentric objects we have lost in design's equivalent of natural selection." -- Alice Rawsthorn, author of "Design as an Attitude" "This is a wonderfully curious book about how the ghosts of extinct inventions live on, not just in our minds but in the world around us. It is strangely addictive to discover how the epitaphs of these technologies form the blueprints of our future." -- Mark Miodownik, author of "Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-made World" "Extinct is an intoxicating exploration of a host of objects, systems, and protocols that are no longer in use or never made it. They are design ghosts, actively haunting the present and conjuring up alternative nested futures. Each short story becomes epic. This brilliant book is a survey of the future rather than of the past." -- Beatriz Colomina, Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture, Princeton University, and author of "Are We Human?: Notes on an Archaeology of Design"

Barbara Penner (Anthology Editor)
Barbara Penner is Professor in Architectural Humanities at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her books include Bathroom (Reaktion, 2013) and she is a contributing editor of Places Journal.

Adrian Forty (Anthology Editor)
Adrian Forty is Professor Emeritus of Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is the author of many books including Concrete and Culture: A Material History (Reaktion, 2012).

Olivia Horsfall Turner (Anthology Editor)
Olivia Horsfall Turner is Senior Curator of Designs at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Miranda Critchley (Anthology Editor)
Miranda Critchley is completing her PhD on railways and colonial narratives of progress at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781789144529
ISBN 10	1789144523
Title	Extinct
Author	Barbara Penner
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Reaktion Books
Year published	2021-10-11
Number of pages	400
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable