Browse

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.

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.

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.

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.

Building Access investigates twentieth-century strategies for designing the world with disability in mind. Illustrated with a wealth of rare archival materials, this book brings together scientific, social, and political histories in what is not only the pioneering critical account of Universal Design but also a deep engagement with the politics of knowing, making, and belonging in twentieth-century United States.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The practice of urban preservation has become increasingly controversial in modern cities. In some places, historic monuments dismantled decades ago are rebuilt in exactly the same fashion, whereas centuries-old urban dwellings are demolished and replaced by new structures with historic appearances. In other places, heritage status becomes the equivalent of tax benefits, which encourages the renovation of historic houses but leads to the displacement of longtime residents. Based on extensive fieldwork and archival data, this book explores how the joint force of policy discourse and political institution shapes the policy process and creates distinct patterns of urban preservation in Beijing, Paris, and Chicago. It argues that the policy concept of urban preservation has become a strategic device for political and social actors to frame their propositions and promote their favored course of action. At the same time, the fragmented urban power structure serves as a filter that constrains the implementation of the preservation initiatives. In particular, the book developed a typology of political fragmentation (i.e., functional, intergovernmental, and territorial) to compare how different types of political fragmentation have shaped the policy process of urban preservation in predictable ways. By wedding political science theory and method to the study of urban preservation, this book is one of the first efforts to reveal the political underpinnings of the topic. The cross-national comparative approach is not only critical to test the theoretical framework presented, but also depicts a richer picture of the modes of spatial and social governance in the urban world.

This book frames a contextual appreciation of Henri Lefebvre’s idea that space is a social product. The book explicitly confronts both the philosophical and the empirical foundations of Lefebvre’s oeuvre, especially his direct involvement in the fields of urban development, planning, and architecture. Countering the prevailing view, which reduces Lefebvre’s theory of space to a projection of his philosophical positions, the book argues that Lefebvre’s work grew out of his concrete, empirical engagement with everyday practices of dwelling in postwar France and his exchanges with architects and planners. The book focuses on the interaction between architecture, urbanism, sociology, and philosophy that occurred in France in the 1960s and 1970s, which was marked by a shift in the processes of urbanization at all scales, from the neighborhood to the global level. Lefebvre’s thinking was central to this encounter, which informed both his theory of space and the concept of urbanization becoming global. The book offers a deeper and clearer understanding of Lefebvre’s thought and its implications for the present day. At a time when cities are increasingly important to our political, spatial, and architectural world, this reassessment proposes a new empirical, and practical, interpretation of Lefebvre’s ideas on urbanism.

Historic Capital shows how Washington, D.C.’s historic buildings and neighborhoods have been a site of contestation between local interests and the expansion of the federal government’s footprint. It ultimately makes the case that historic preservation has had as great an impact on the physical fabric of U.S. cities as any other private or public sector initiative in the twentieth century.

Between the well-documented development of colonial Bombay and sprawling contemporary Mumbai, a profound shift in the city’s fabric occurred: the emergence of the first suburbs and their distinctive pattern of apartment living. This book considers this phenomenon and its significance for South Asian urban life. It explores the organization of the middle-class neighborhood which became ubiquitous in the mid-twentieth-century city and which has spread throughout the subcontinent. This book examines how the challenge of converting lands from agrarian to urban use created new relations between the state, landholders, and other residents of the city. At the level of dwellings, apartment living in self-contained flats represented a novel form of urban residence, one that expressed a compromise between the caste and class identities of suburban residents who are upper caste but belong to the lower-middle or middle class. Living in such a built environment, under the often conflicting imperatives of maintaining the exclusivity of caste and subcaste while assembling residential groupings large enough to be economically viable, led suburban residents to combine caste with class, type of work, and residence to forge new metacaste practices of community identity.

This book examines the intertwined politics surrounding art and modernization in Morocco from 1912 to the present by considering the structure of the museum not only as a modern institution but also as a national monument to modernity, asking what happens when museum monuments start to crumble. In an analysis of museum history, exhibition policy, the lack of national museum space for modern art, and postmodern exhibit spaces in Morocco, this book focuses on the role that art plays in the social fabric of a modernizing Morocco. It argues that the decay of colonial and national institutions of culture has invited the rethinking of the museum and generated countermuseums to stage new narratives of art, memory, and modernity. Through these spaces she explores a range of questions: How is modernity imagined locally? How are claims to modernity articulated? How is Moroccan modernity challenged globally? In this first cultural history of modern Moroccan art and its museums, the book goes beyond the investigation of national institutions to treat the history and evolution of multiple museums—from official state and corporate exhibition spaces to informal, popular, street-level art, and performance spaces—as cultural architectures that both enshrine the past and look to the future.

Impossible Heights examines a distinct American cultural consciousness that came into focus during the interwar years, with the excitement about airplanes and skyscrapers, as well as their anticipated roles in the creation of an ideal “world of tomorrow.” The book explores how this “aesthetics of ascension” contributed to a broader transformation of the architect as a master builder, whose idealistic perspective from above ushered in a modernist impulse to ameliorate the spatial and social problems of an allegedly chaotic world. Recasting the architect as a heroic aviator or an ascending figure, the book suggests that the aesthetics of ascension intersected with popular “superman” discourses of the interwar period. The book focuses on the work of three eminent figures in American design and architecture: Hugh Ferriss’s The Metropolis of Tomorrow, the drawings and writings of Buckminster Fuller, and Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Historians have studied the cultural influences of the airplane and skyscraper. Yet, Impossible Heights is the first comprehensive study of the superhero mentality that emerged from the cultural valorization of heights, enabled by airplanes and skyscrapers.

In February 1956 the president of IBM, Thomas Watson Jr., hired the industrial designer and architect Eliot Noyes, charging him with reinventing IBM’s corporate image, from stationery and curtains to products such as typewriters and computers and to laboratory and administration buildings. What followed—a story told in full here—remade IBM in a way that would also transform the relationships between design, computer science, and corporate culture. IBM’s program assembled a cast of leading figures in American design: Noyes, Charles Eames, Paul Rand, George Nelson, and Edgar Kaufmann Jr. This book offers a detailed account of the key role these designers played in shaping both the computer and the multinational corporation. The book describes a surprising inverse effect: the influence of computer and corporation on the theory and practice of design. Here the book shows how, in the period stretching from the “invention” of the computer during World War II to the appearance of the personal computer in the mid-1970s, disciplines once well outside the realm of architectural design—information and management theory, cybernetics, ergonomics, computer science—became integral aspects of design.

It was the era of the Raj, and yet this book reveals the unexpected role of native communities in the transformation of the urban fabric of British Bombay from 1854 to 1918. The book demonstrates how British Bombay was, surprisingly, a collaboration of the colonial government and the Indian and European mercantile and industrial elite who shaped the city to serve their combined interests. The book shows how the European and Indian engineers, architects, and artists worked with each other to design a city—its infrastructure, architecture, public sculpture—that was literally constructed by Indian laborers and craftsmen. Beyond the built environment, Indian philanthropists entered into partnerships with the colonial regime to found and finance institutions for the general public. Too often thought to be the product of the singular vision of a founding colonial regime, British Bombay is revealed by this text as an expression of native traditions meshing in complex ways with European ideas of urban planning and progress. The result, it argues, was the creation of a new shared landscape for Bombay's citizens that ensured that neither the colonial government nor the native elite could entirely control the city's future.

This book adds a new dimension to our understanding of the development of the deep inequalities that have existed (and continue to exist) in the U.S. housing market by looking closely at some material dimensions of everyday life that are so ordinary, so common, and so ubiquitous that they’ve largely escaped analysis. If we already know a great deal about the ways in which institutional structures connected to the economics of housing operated, we have known far less about the dispersed and complex sets of practices that created, reinforced, and established the forms of cultural knowledge that ultimately supported a housing market designed primarily for whites to the exclusion of others. This book studies the politics of representation and the formation of cultural knowledge about ordinary houses and single-family domesticity in the postwar period. Houses, and the media representations of housing in the postwar period helped to create a specific dimension of racialized knowledge, one that connected white identities to rights related to property ownership and to a specifically classed lifestyle. National publications, television programs, professional literature, domestic artifacts, and even the design of houses and their interiors all contributed to a rhetorical field that shaped the organization of knowledge about the social construction of race and the spatial dimensions of inequality in the postwar era, as it continues to do today.