In Liquid Landscape, Michele Currie Navakas analyzes the history of Florida's incorporation alongside the development of new ideas of personhood, possession, and political identity within American letters, from early American novels, travel accounts, and geography textbooks, to settlers' guides, maps, natural histories, and land surveys.

Open urban spaces are an ideal stage for public events. An important prerequisite for their design in an increasingly heterogeneous multicultural cityscape is the relationship between design, use, and social function.The book documents both temporary as well as permanent installations of various kinds – from the open-air courtyard of a museum to the design of a river bank promenade, through to a city park.

For most of the twentieth century, maps were indispensable. They were how governments understood, managed, and defended their territory, and during the two world wars they were produced by the hundreds of millions. Cartographers and journalists predicted the dawning of a “map-minded age,” where increasingly state-of-the-art maps would become everyday tools. By the century’s end, however, there had been decisive shift in mapping practices, as the dominant methods of land surveying and print publication were increasingly displaced by electronic navigation systems. In After the Map, William Rankin argues that although this shift did not render traditional maps obsolete, it did radically change our experience of geographic knowledge, from the God’s-eye view of the map to the embedded subjectivity of GPS. Likewise, older concerns with geographic truth and objectivity have been upstaged by a new emphasis on simplicity, reliability, and convenience. After the Map shows how this change in geographic perspective is ultimately a transformation of the nature of territory, both social and political.

This book explores the nature of Britain-based artists’ engagement with the transformations of their environment since the early days of the Industrial Revolution. At a time of pressing ecological concerns, the international group of contributors provide a series of case studies that reconsider the nature–culture divide and aim at identifying the contours of a national narrative that stretches from enclosed lands to rising seas. By adopting a longer historical view, this book hopes to enrich current debates concerning art’s engagement with recording and questioning the impact of human activity on the environment. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, environmental humanities, and British studies.

Interior design can be considered a discipline that ranks among the worlds of art, design, and architecture and provides the cognitive tools to operate innovatively within the spaces of the contemporary city that require regeneration. Emerging trends in design combine disciplines such as new aesthetic in the world of art, design in all its ramifications, interior design as a response to more than functional needs, and as the demand for qualitative and symbolic values to be added to contemporary environments. Cultural, Theoretical, and Innovative Approaches to Contemporary Interior Design is an essential reference source that approaches contemporary project development through a cultural and theoretical lens and aims to demonstrate that designing spaces, interiors, and the urban habitat are activities that have independent cultural foundations. Featuring research on topics such as contemporary space, mass housing, and flexible design, this book is ideally designed for interior designers, architects, academics, researchers, industry professionals, and students.

While it is responsible for today’s abundance of flat screens—on televisions, computers, and mobile devices—most of us have only heard of it in the ubiquitous acronym, LCD, with little thought as to exactly what it is: liquid crystal. In this book, Esther Leslie enlightens us, offering an accessible and fascinating look at—not a substance, not a technology—but a wholly different phase of matter. As she explains, liquid crystal is a curious material phase that organizes a substance’s molecules in a crystalline form yet allows them to move fluidly like water. Observed since the nineteenth century, this phase has been a deep curiosity to science and, in more recent times, the key to a new era of media technology. In between that time, as Leslie shows, it has figured in cultural forms from Romantic landscape painting to snow globes, from mountaineering to eco-disasters, and from touchscreen devices to DNA. Expertly written but accessible, Liquid Crystals recounts the unheralded but hugely significant emergence of this unique form of matter.

In this volume, the problems of pattern formation in physics, chemistry and other related fields in complex and nonlinear dissipative systems are studied. Main subjects discussed are formation mechanisms, properties, statistics, characterization and dynamics of periodic and nonperiodic patterns in the electrohydrodynamics in liquid crystals, Rayleigh-Benard convection, crystallization, viscous fingering and Belouzov-Zhabotinsky chemical reaction. Recent developments in topological and defect-mediated chaos, chaos in systems with large degrees of freedom and turbulence-turbulence transitions are also discussed.

Jonathan Nossiter, acclaimed filmmaker and former sommelier, had his first taste of wine at the age of three in Paris, from his father's fingertip. For him, wine is "memory in its most liquid and dynamic form," as essential an expression of culture as cinema, books, baseball, painting, even sex. With great wit and passion, he celebrates wine and its enthusiasts—and defends both from those who tell us what to drink and how to think about it. In Liquid Memory, the American expatriate investigates the infinite mysteries of terroir, the historical sense of place that makes wine a living, thrilling expression of cultural identity that can stretch back centuries. The book is a deliriously joyful master class in locating the soul of a wine, and in learning to trust your own palate and desires. Nossiter, who has already created an uproar in the world of wine with his film Mondovino, arms us against the tyranny of snobs, critics, and charlatans who would prevent us from taking part in what should be a gloriously democratic bacchanalia. From the sacred wine shops and three-star restaurants of Paris to the biodynamic vineyards of Burgundy, from the hipster bistros of New York to film locations in Rio de Janeiro and Athens, this singular journey invites us to consider how power, misused, can sometimes mask an absence of taste—and how our own personal taste can combat power in any sphere. A controversial bestseller in Europe, Liquid Memory is sure to rile the establishment, enlighten the thirsty, and reveal the inner life of the world's most mysterious, contradictory, and jubilatory drink.

This book offers a didactic and a self-contained treatment of the physics of liquid and flowing matter with a statistical mechanics approach. Experimental and theoretical methods that were developed to study fluids are now frequently applied to a number of more complex systems generically referred to as soft matter. As for simple liquids, also for complex fluids it is important to understand how their macroscopic behavior is determined by the interactions between the component units. Moreover, in recent years new and relevant insights have emerged from the study of anomalous phases and metastable states of matter. In addition to the traditional topics concerning fluids in normal conditions, the authors of this book discuss recent developments in the field of disordered systems in condensed and soft matter. In particular they emphasize computer simulation techniques that are used in the study of soft matter and the theories and study of slow glassy dynamics. For these reasons the book includes a specific chapter about metastability, supercooled liquids and glass transition. The book is written for graduate students and active researchers in the field.