World Cinema: A Short History by David Robinson (review)

344 Books architecture and the social sciences and, despite the fact that few solutions are offered by the authors, many interesting directions for research are proposed. The reader is offered, for instance, Parsonian structural formalism (just the tip of the iceberg crammed into one paper), a summary of multidimensional formal languages, an overview of the design of computer languages and a jolly commercial by and for F. Harary. Nicholas Negroponte avoids theoretical design altogether by dealing with content rather than design process. His paper is interesting enough for all that and goes beyond buildings that adjust their internal environment by controlling lighting, temperature, etc., to suggestions that the built environment reshape itself -buildings should take themselves down when obsolete. The Royal College of Art design research group maintains stronger links with current reality and describes its research program into design practice. Neville and Crowe see the digital computer as a partner capable of dialogue with designers and of seeking to enhance their capabilities by switching modes every so often through clarification, exploration, evaluation and altering of goals. Switching from one to the other adds interest to design work and, alternately, encourages linear and lateral thinking. Although the authors do not say so, the great value of their approach is that the computer really does not have to understand everything but must know a natural language well enough to be diplomatic, not just in the sense of politeness but in the ability to recognize when the talker is getting somewhere, so as not to interrupt, and how to do just that when the talker gets stuck. The paper by Stiny and Gips entitled Formalization of Analysis and Design in the Arts is4milar to that in Leonardo 8,213 (1975) and commented upon in 8,326 and 358 (1975). They have added some material on design and heuristic search, but their approach is still rather heavily syntactic and tends to ignore visual phenomena as human experiences. Few artist-readers will find more than half the book directly relevant, but as an opportunity for divergent thinking, it may still be a worthwhile purchase. Indigenous African Architecture. Renk Gardi. Trans. from German by Sigrid MacRae. Van Nostrand Reinhold, London, 1975. 249 pp., illus. f 17.25. Reviewed by Momodou Ceesay* Gardi is well known as a free-lance writer, photographer, and author of many books on other cultures of the world. This book is an impressive well-produced collection of highquality photographs; a pictorial guide to the richness of the vernacular architecture of some of the peoples of West Africa. It has a format that the author himself professes to be neither scholarly nor historiographic. Rather, it is written as an incorporation of information and personal anecdotes relating to his visit to the areas of study, notably the Tuaregs and Peulh of the Sahel Region, an area situated south of the Sahara Desert. Included also are the lake dwellers' village of Ganuie, South Dahomey and the Kirdi peoples living amongst the granite ruins of the Mandara Mountains of Northern Cameroon. One is stimulated, for example, by the impressivepicturesofthe Mosqueat Djenne, Mali. The many successive shots of the same subject matter offer a careful analysis of a historic monument. Gardi does portray in his rather sensitive treatment of the indigenous craftsmana maturation of technique in presenting a foreign culture, making the book largely devoid of conclusions based on the standards of the author's own civilization . In fact, he adds a poetic note to the pictorial essay on African architecture by expressing throughout the book a romantic preference for the simpler, less technological life of the peasant of rural Africa. The word architecture here denotes an idea well beyond mere structural concerns; it refers more to a way of living adapted to the environment that is not an alienating experience, as that suffered by city dwellers in today's modern society. At the core of the book *364 Rindge Ave., Cambridge, MA 02140, U.S.A. is the notion that, notwithstanding the rapid erosion of the indigenous architecture by the onslaught of Western civilization , a simple yet beautiful way of life of the African peasant must remain unchanged. The book, full of marvelous pictures, can...