Annabel Jane Wharton
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816693382
- eISBN:
- 9781452950853
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816693382.001.0001
- Subject:
- Architecture, Architectural History
Buildings are not benign; rather, they commonly manipulate and abuse their human users. Architectural Agents makes the case that buildings act in the world independently of their makers, patrons, ...
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Buildings are not benign; rather, they commonly manipulate and abuse their human users. Architectural Agents makes the case that buildings act in the world independently of their makers, patrons, owners, or occupants. And often they act badly. Treating buildings as bodies, Annabel Jane Wharton writes biographies of symptomatic structures in order to diagnose their pathologies. The violence of some sites is rooted in historical trauma; the unhealthy spatial behaviors of other spaces stem from political and economic ruthlessness. The places examined range from the Cloisters Museum in New York City and the Palestine Archaeological Museum (renamed the Rockefeller Museum) in Jerusalem to the grand Hostal de los Reyes Católicos in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and Las Vegas casino resorts. Recognizing that a study of pathological spaces would not be complete without an investigation of digital structures, Wharton integrates into her argument an original consideration of the powerful architectures of video games and immersive worlds. Her work mounts a persuasive critique of popular phenomenological treatments of architecture. Architectural Agents advances an alternative theorization of buildings’ agency—one rooted in buildings’ essential materiality and historical formation—as the basis for this significant intervention in current debates over the boundaries separating humans, animals, and machines.Less
Buildings are not benign; rather, they commonly manipulate and abuse their human users. Architectural Agents makes the case that buildings act in the world independently of their makers, patrons, owners, or occupants. And often they act badly. Treating buildings as bodies, Annabel Jane Wharton writes biographies of symptomatic structures in order to diagnose their pathologies. The violence of some sites is rooted in historical trauma; the unhealthy spatial behaviors of other spaces stem from political and economic ruthlessness. The places examined range from the Cloisters Museum in New York City and the Palestine Archaeological Museum (renamed the Rockefeller Museum) in Jerusalem to the grand Hostal de los Reyes Católicos in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and Las Vegas casino resorts. Recognizing that a study of pathological spaces would not be complete without an investigation of digital structures, Wharton integrates into her argument an original consideration of the powerful architectures of video games and immersive worlds. Her work mounts a persuasive critique of popular phenomenological treatments of architecture. Architectural Agents advances an alternative theorization of buildings’ agency—one rooted in buildings’ essential materiality and historical formation—as the basis for this significant intervention in current debates over the boundaries separating humans, animals, and machines.
Andrzej Piotrowski
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816673049
- eISBN:
- 9781452945835
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816673049.001.0001
- Subject:
- Architecture, Architectural Theory and Criticism
This book maps and conceptually explores material practices of the past, showing how physical artifacts and visual environments manifest culturally rooted modes of thought and participate in the most ...
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This book maps and conceptually explores material practices of the past, showing how physical artifacts and visual environments manifest culturally rooted modes of thought and participate in the most nuanced processes of negotiations and ideological exchanges. According to the text, material structures enable people to think in new ways—distill emerging or alter existing worldviews—before words can stabilize them as conventional narratives. Combining design thinking with academic methods of inquiry, the book traces ancient to modern architectural histories and—through critical readings of select buildings—examines the role of nonverbal exchanges in the development of an accumulated Western identity. Operating from the assertion that buildings are the most permanent record of unself-conscious beliefs and attitudes, it discusses Byzantium and the West after iconoclasm, the conquest and colonization of Mesoamerica, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Eastern Europe, the rise of the culture of consumerism in Victorian England, and High Modernism as its consequence. By moving beyond the assumption that historical structures reflect transcendental values and deterministic laws of physics or economy or have been shaped by self-conscious individuals, the book challenges the traditional knowledge of what architecture is and can be.Less
This book maps and conceptually explores material practices of the past, showing how physical artifacts and visual environments manifest culturally rooted modes of thought and participate in the most nuanced processes of negotiations and ideological exchanges. According to the text, material structures enable people to think in new ways—distill emerging or alter existing worldviews—before words can stabilize them as conventional narratives. Combining design thinking with academic methods of inquiry, the book traces ancient to modern architectural histories and—through critical readings of select buildings—examines the role of nonverbal exchanges in the development of an accumulated Western identity. Operating from the assertion that buildings are the most permanent record of unself-conscious beliefs and attitudes, it discusses Byzantium and the West after iconoclasm, the conquest and colonization of Mesoamerica, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Eastern Europe, the rise of the culture of consumerism in Victorian England, and High Modernism as its consequence. By moving beyond the assumption that historical structures reflect transcendental values and deterministic laws of physics or economy or have been shaped by self-conscious individuals, the book challenges the traditional knowledge of what architecture is and can be.
Kathleen James-Chakraborty
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816673964
- eISBN:
- 9781452946047
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816673964.001.0001
- Subject:
- Architecture, Architectural History
This book aims to give equal attention to Western and non-Western structures and built landscapes. From Tenochtitlan’s Great Pyramid in Mexico City and the Duomo in Florence to Levittown’s suburban ...
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This book aims to give equal attention to Western and non-Western structures and built landscapes. From Tenochtitlan’s Great Pyramid in Mexico City and the Duomo in Florence to Levittown’s suburban tract housing and the Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing, its coverage includes the world’s most celebrated structures and spaces along with many examples of more humble vernacular buildings. The book presents key moments and innovations in architectural modernity around the globe. Integrating architectural and social history, this book pays particular attention to the motivations of client and architect in the design and construction of environments both sacred and secular: palaces and places of worship as well as such characteristically modern structures as the skyscraper, the department store, and the cinema. It also focuses on the role of patrons and addresses to an unparalleled degree the impact of women in commissioning, creating, and inhabiting the built environment, with Gertrude Jekyll, Lina Bo Bardi, and ZahaHadid taking their place beside Brunelleschi, Sinan, and Le Corbusier.Less
This book aims to give equal attention to Western and non-Western structures and built landscapes. From Tenochtitlan’s Great Pyramid in Mexico City and the Duomo in Florence to Levittown’s suburban tract housing and the Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing, its coverage includes the world’s most celebrated structures and spaces along with many examples of more humble vernacular buildings. The book presents key moments and innovations in architectural modernity around the globe. Integrating architectural and social history, this book pays particular attention to the motivations of client and architect in the design and construction of environments both sacred and secular: palaces and places of worship as well as such characteristically modern structures as the skyscraper, the department store, and the cinema. It also focuses on the role of patrons and addresses to an unparalleled degree the impact of women in commissioning, creating, and inhabiting the built environment, with Gertrude Jekyll, Lina Bo Bardi, and ZahaHadid taking their place beside Brunelleschi, Sinan, and Le Corbusier.
Jorge Otero-Pailos
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816666034
- eISBN:
- 9781452948386
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816666034.001.0001
- Subject:
- Architecture, Architectural History
Architecture’s Historical Turn traces the hidden history of architectural phenomenology, a movement that reflected a key turning point in the early phases of postmodernism and a legitimating source ...
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Architecture’s Historical Turn traces the hidden history of architectural phenomenology, a movement that reflected a key turning point in the early phases of postmodernism and a legitimating source for those architects who first dared to confront history as an intellectual problem and not merely as a stylistic question. This book shows how architectural phenomenology radically transformed how architects engaged, theorized, and produced history. The book discusses the contributions of leading members, including Jean Labatut, Charles Moore, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Kenneth Frampton. For architects maturing after World War II, the book contends, architectural history was a problem rather than a given. Paradoxically, their awareness of modernism’s historicity led some of them to search for an ahistorical experiential constant that might underpin all architectural expression. They drew from phenomenology, exploring the work of Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Ricoeur, which they translated for architectural audiences. Initially, the concept that experience could be a timeless architectural language provided a unifying intellectual basis for the stylistic pluralism that characterized postmodernism. It helped give theory—especially the theory of architectural history—a new importance over practice. However, as this text makes clear, architectural phenomenologists could not accept the idea of theory as an end in itself. In the mid-1980s they were caught in the contradictory and untenable position of having to formulate their own demotion of theory.Less
Architecture’s Historical Turn traces the hidden history of architectural phenomenology, a movement that reflected a key turning point in the early phases of postmodernism and a legitimating source for those architects who first dared to confront history as an intellectual problem and not merely as a stylistic question. This book shows how architectural phenomenology radically transformed how architects engaged, theorized, and produced history. The book discusses the contributions of leading members, including Jean Labatut, Charles Moore, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Kenneth Frampton. For architects maturing after World War II, the book contends, architectural history was a problem rather than a given. Paradoxically, their awareness of modernism’s historicity led some of them to search for an ahistorical experiential constant that might underpin all architectural expression. They drew from phenomenology, exploring the work of Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Ricoeur, which they translated for architectural audiences. Initially, the concept that experience could be a timeless architectural language provided a unifying intellectual basis for the stylistic pluralism that characterized postmodernism. It helped give theory—especially the theory of architectural history—a new importance over practice. However, as this text makes clear, architectural phenomenologists could not accept the idea of theory as an end in itself. In the mid-1980s they were caught in the contradictory and untenable position of having to formulate their own demotion of theory.
Sharon Haar
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816665648
- eISBN:
- 9781452946528
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816665648.001.0001
- Subject:
- Architecture, Architectural Theory and Criticism
We are witnessing an explosion of universities and campuses nationwide, and urban schools play an important role in shaping the cities outside their walls. This book uses Chicago as a case study to ...
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We are witnessing an explosion of universities and campuses nationwide, and urban schools play an important role in shaping the cities outside their walls. This book uses Chicago as a case study to examine how universities interact with their urban contexts, demonstrating how higher education became integrated with ideas of urban growth as schools evolved alongside the city. The book shows the strain of this integration, detailing historical accounts of battles over space as campus designers faced the challenge of weaving the social, spatial, and architectural conditions of the urban milieu into new forms to meet the changing needs of academia. Through a close analysis of the history of higher education in Chicago, the book explores how the university’s missions of service, teaching, and research have metamorphosed over time, particularly in response to the unique opportunities—and restraints—the city provides.Less
We are witnessing an explosion of universities and campuses nationwide, and urban schools play an important role in shaping the cities outside their walls. This book uses Chicago as a case study to examine how universities interact with their urban contexts, demonstrating how higher education became integrated with ideas of urban growth as schools evolved alongside the city. The book shows the strain of this integration, detailing historical accounts of battles over space as campus designers faced the challenge of weaving the social, spatial, and architectural conditions of the urban milieu into new forms to meet the changing needs of academia. Through a close analysis of the history of higher education in Chicago, the book explores how the university’s missions of service, teaching, and research have metamorphosed over time, particularly in response to the unique opportunities—and restraints—the city provides.
Alison Bick Hirsch
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816679782
- eISBN:
- 9781452948201
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816679782.001.0001
- Subject:
- Architecture, Architectural History
Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009) was one of the most influential landscape architects of the 20th-century. Though he is most widely known for the FDR Memorial in Washington DC and the Sea Ranch in ...
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Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009) was one of the most influential landscape architects of the 20th-century. Though he is most widely known for the FDR Memorial in Washington DC and the Sea Ranch in California, his creative process – derived in the 1960s from experiments in choreographic scoring – represents an overlooked antecedent to today’s approach to landscape and urban design, which emphasizes infrastructural networks, ecological processes, multidisciplinary collaboration, as well as public participation. Emerging from exhaustive study of his vast archive of drawings and documents (housed at the University of Pennsylvania’s Architectural Archives), the book critically interprets Halprin’s participatory design process and argues for the applicability of aspects of that process in city-shaping today. As an urban pioneer, Halprin’s most noteworthy frontier became the nation’s densely settled metropolitan areas during a time of urban “crisis” and “renewal.” Paralleling and responding to a broader public demand for social and political participation in the 1960s, he formulated this creative process, which he called “The RSVP Cycles,” to stimulate a participatory environmental experience. He did not work alone, however. His success depended on collaboration, and particularly the artistic symbiosis that existed between him and his wife, the avant-garde dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin.Less
Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009) was one of the most influential landscape architects of the 20th-century. Though he is most widely known for the FDR Memorial in Washington DC and the Sea Ranch in California, his creative process – derived in the 1960s from experiments in choreographic scoring – represents an overlooked antecedent to today’s approach to landscape and urban design, which emphasizes infrastructural networks, ecological processes, multidisciplinary collaboration, as well as public participation. Emerging from exhaustive study of his vast archive of drawings and documents (housed at the University of Pennsylvania’s Architectural Archives), the book critically interprets Halprin’s participatory design process and argues for the applicability of aspects of that process in city-shaping today. As an urban pioneer, Halprin’s most noteworthy frontier became the nation’s densely settled metropolitan areas during a time of urban “crisis” and “renewal.” Paralleling and responding to a broader public demand for social and political participation in the 1960s, he formulated this creative process, which he called “The RSVP Cycles,” to stimulate a participatory environmental experience. He did not work alone, however. His success depended on collaboration, and particularly the artistic symbiosis that existed between him and his wife, the avant-garde dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin.
Dennis R. Judd and Dick Simpson (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816665754
- eISBN:
- 9781452946559
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816665754.001.0001
- Subject:
- Architecture, Architectural Theory and Criticism
The chapters in this book trace an intellectual history that begins in 1925 with the publication of the influential classic The City, engaging in a spirited debate about whether the major theories of ...
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The chapters in this book trace an intellectual history that begins in 1925 with the publication of the influential classic The City, engaging in a spirited debate about whether the major theories of twentieth-century urban development are relevant for studying the twenty-first-century metropolis.Less
The chapters in this book trace an intellectual history that begins in 1925 with the publication of the influential classic The City, engaging in a spirited debate about whether the major theories of twentieth-century urban development are relevant for studying the twenty-first-century metropolis.
Martin J. Murray
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816682997
- eISBN:
- 9781452948607
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816682997.001.0001
- Subject:
- Architecture, Architectural History
The end of apartheid and the transition to parliamentary democracy brought to the surface a host of tensions that were long suppressed under white minority rule. Yet as the ‘new nation’ struggled to ...
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The end of apartheid and the transition to parliamentary democracy brought to the surface a host of tensions that were long suppressed under white minority rule. Yet as the ‘new nation’ struggled to establish a firm footing, the lingering ghosts of the past continued to haunt the present. The primary aim of this book is to explore how collective memory works, that is, how the historical past is made to matter in the ‘new South Africa’. A central concern is the question of representation, that is, how the historical past is made to appear in the present. How is the history of white minority rule represented, and thereby mediated, after the end of apartheid and the transition to parliamentary democracy? Addressing this question requires a critical examination of how the practice of commemoration inscribes collective memory in places, objects, and words, and conversely, how the stories attached to these mnemonic devices selectively recount the past in ways that sometimes sanitize, distort, embellish, compress, and even fabricate history in the service of ‘nation-building’. It begins with the premise that such seemingly disconnected are all vehicles for the storage and dissemination of collective memory. Far from operating as passive receptacles or neutral storehouses for holding onto the remembered past, these mnemonic devices are active agents in shaping the construction of a tenuous collective identity and shared meaning in the everyday lives of the South African citizenry.Less
The end of apartheid and the transition to parliamentary democracy brought to the surface a host of tensions that were long suppressed under white minority rule. Yet as the ‘new nation’ struggled to establish a firm footing, the lingering ghosts of the past continued to haunt the present. The primary aim of this book is to explore how collective memory works, that is, how the historical past is made to matter in the ‘new South Africa’. A central concern is the question of representation, that is, how the historical past is made to appear in the present. How is the history of white minority rule represented, and thereby mediated, after the end of apartheid and the transition to parliamentary democracy? Addressing this question requires a critical examination of how the practice of commemoration inscribes collective memory in places, objects, and words, and conversely, how the stories attached to these mnemonic devices selectively recount the past in ways that sometimes sanitize, distort, embellish, compress, and even fabricate history in the service of ‘nation-building’. It begins with the premise that such seemingly disconnected are all vehicles for the storage and dissemination of collective memory. Far from operating as passive receptacles or neutral storehouses for holding onto the remembered past, these mnemonic devices are active agents in shaping the construction of a tenuous collective identity and shared meaning in the everyday lives of the South African citizenry.
Timothy Hyde
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816678105
- eISBN:
- 9781452947938
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816678105.001.0001
- Subject:
- Architecture, Architectural History
How does architecture make its appearance in civil society? This book pursues this challenging question by exploring architecture, planning, and law as cultural forces. Analyzing the complex ...
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How does architecture make its appearance in civil society? This book pursues this challenging question by exploring architecture, planning, and law as cultural forces. Analyzing the complex entanglements between these disciplines in the Cuban Republic, the book reveals how architects joined with other professionals and intellectuals in efforts to establish a stable civil society, from the promulgation of a new Cuban Constitution in 1940 up until the Cuban Revolution. By arguing that constitutionalism was elaborated through architectural principles and practices as well as legal ones, the book offers a new view of architectural modernism as a political and social instrument. It contends that constitutionalism produced a decisive confluence of law and architecture, a means for planning the future of Cuba. The importance of architecture in this process is laid bare by this book’s thorough scrutiny of a variety of textual, graphical, and physical artifacts. It examines constitutional articles, exhibitions, interviews, master plans, monuments, and other primary materials as acts of design. Read from the perspective of architectural history, this book demonstrates how the modernist concepts that developed as an international discourse before the Second World War evolved through interactions with other disciplines into a civil urbanism in Cuba. And read from the perspective of Cuban history, the book explains how not only material products such as buildings and monuments but also the immaterial methods of architecture as a cultural practice produced ideas that had consequential effects on the political circumstances of the nation.Less
How does architecture make its appearance in civil society? This book pursues this challenging question by exploring architecture, planning, and law as cultural forces. Analyzing the complex entanglements between these disciplines in the Cuban Republic, the book reveals how architects joined with other professionals and intellectuals in efforts to establish a stable civil society, from the promulgation of a new Cuban Constitution in 1940 up until the Cuban Revolution. By arguing that constitutionalism was elaborated through architectural principles and practices as well as legal ones, the book offers a new view of architectural modernism as a political and social instrument. It contends that constitutionalism produced a decisive confluence of law and architecture, a means for planning the future of Cuba. The importance of architecture in this process is laid bare by this book’s thorough scrutiny of a variety of textual, graphical, and physical artifacts. It examines constitutional articles, exhibitions, interviews, master plans, monuments, and other primary materials as acts of design. Read from the perspective of architectural history, this book demonstrates how the modernist concepts that developed as an international discourse before the Second World War evolved through interactions with other disciplines into a civil urbanism in Cuba. And read from the perspective of Cuban history, the book explains how not only material products such as buildings and monuments but also the immaterial methods of architecture as a cultural practice produced ideas that had consequential effects on the political circumstances of the nation.
Eric Avila
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816680726
- eISBN:
- 9781452947860
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816680726.001.0001
- Subject:
- Architecture, Architectural Theory and Criticism
The Folklore of the Freeway provides an alternative history of highway construction in urban America, emphasizing the cultural politics of fighting freeways in the inner city. Using the methods of ...
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The Folklore of the Freeway provides an alternative history of highway construction in urban America, emphasizing the cultural politics of fighting freeways in the inner city. Using the methods of ethnic studies, cultural studies, and urban history, this book offers a revisionist history of the freeway revolt in urban America, that moment when neighborhood activists organized against state highway builders to defend the integrity of their communities. While historical accounts of the freeway revolt emphasize successful forms of grassroots mobilization within predominantly white, middle-class urban communities, the urban neighborhoods that bore the brunt of urban highway construction, lacking political and economic power, devised a creative set of cultural strategies to express opposition towards the routing of freeways through their neighborhoods. These expressions, taking shape through visual and literary cultural forms, iterates the destructive consequences of the Interstate highway program, helping to preserve communal integrity and identity and inventing new relationships between people and the urban built environment. This book thus considers the cultural dimensions of this freeway revolt, emphasizing the role of culture and identity in mediating the relationship between inner city communities and the disruptive process of infrastructural development. Losers, perhaps, in the fight against the freeway, these racially and ethnically diverse communities of working class men and women nonetheless innovated a genre of cultural expression that shapes our understanding of the urban landscape and influences the shifting priorities of urban policy since the 1960s.Less
The Folklore of the Freeway provides an alternative history of highway construction in urban America, emphasizing the cultural politics of fighting freeways in the inner city. Using the methods of ethnic studies, cultural studies, and urban history, this book offers a revisionist history of the freeway revolt in urban America, that moment when neighborhood activists organized against state highway builders to defend the integrity of their communities. While historical accounts of the freeway revolt emphasize successful forms of grassroots mobilization within predominantly white, middle-class urban communities, the urban neighborhoods that bore the brunt of urban highway construction, lacking political and economic power, devised a creative set of cultural strategies to express opposition towards the routing of freeways through their neighborhoods. These expressions, taking shape through visual and literary cultural forms, iterates the destructive consequences of the Interstate highway program, helping to preserve communal integrity and identity and inventing new relationships between people and the urban built environment. This book thus considers the cultural dimensions of this freeway revolt, emphasizing the role of culture and identity in mediating the relationship between inner city communities and the disruptive process of infrastructural development. Losers, perhaps, in the fight against the freeway, these racially and ethnically diverse communities of working class men and women nonetheless innovated a genre of cultural expression that shapes our understanding of the urban landscape and influences the shifting priorities of urban policy since the 1960s.
