Vernacular Materials

This volume presents editions of two fascinating anonymous and untitled manuscripts of magic produced in Elizabethan England: the Antiphoner Notebook and the Boxgrove Manual. Frank Klaassen uses these texts, which he argues are representative of the overwhelming majority of magical practitioners, to explain how magic changed during this period and why these developments were crucial to the formation of modern magic.

The book provides new perspectives from leading researchers accentuating and examining the central role of the built environment in conceiving and implementing multifaceted solutions for the complex challenges of our understanding of planetary resources and circularity, revealing critical potentials for architecture and design to contribute in more informed and long-term ways to the urgent transition of our society. The book offers a compilation of peer-reviewed papers that uniquely connects knowledge broadly across practice and academia; from the newest technologies and methods such as the role of digital modelling, analysis, and fabrication in circular design, i.e. material passports, cyber-physical augmentation, and LCA to the potentials of growing and harvesting biomass materials, engaging waste streams in material production and more, all in context of economic, social, and ecological potentials and consequences.

John Adams' The Gospel According to the Other Mary, first performed in 2012 in Los Angeles, is something of an expansion on the composer's El Niño, a Passion story adorned with a variety of contemporary themes and musical materials. Like the earlier work, it features a libretto by longtime Adams collaborator Peter Sellars, and it may be sung on-stage as an oratorio or presented as an opera. Mary Magdalene is indeed a central figure in the work, but actually it is more than the trick perspective the title might imply; as with El Niño Sellars incorporates such devices as set pieces featuring poetry by other writers (this time poet Louise Erdrich plays the central role).

This volume covers chapters of International Sustainable Buildings Symposium