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Architecture of Thought

Andrzej Piotrowski

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 ... More

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

The City as Campus: Urbanism and Higher Education in Chicago

Sharon Haar

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 ... More

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

The City, Revisited: Urban Theory from Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York

Dennis R. Judd and Dick Simpson (eds)

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 ... More

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 Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City

Eric Avila

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 ... More

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

From Mobility to Accessibility: Transforming Urban Transportation and Land-Use Planning

Jonathan Levine, Joe Grengs, and Louis A. Merlin

This book flips the tables on the standard models for evaluating regional transportation performance. It argues for an “accessibility shift” whereby transportation planning, and the transportation ... More

This book flips the tables on the standard models for evaluating regional transportation performance. It argues for an “accessibility shift” whereby transportation planning, and the transportation dimensions of land-use planning, would be based on people's ability to reach destinations, rather than on their ability to travel fast. Existing models for planning and evaluating transportation, which have taken vehicle speeds as the most important measure, would make sense if movement were the purpose of transportation. But it is the ability to reach destinations, not movement per se, that people seek from their transportation systems. While the concept of accessibility has been around for the better part of a century, the book shows that the accessibility shift is compelled by the fundamental purpose of transportation. It argues that the shift would be transformative to the practice of both transportation and land-use planning but is impeded by many conceptual obstacles regarding the nature of accessibility and its potential for guiding development of the built environment. By redefining success in transportation, the book provides city planners, decision makers, and scholars a path to reforming the practice of transportation and land-use planning in modern cities and metropolitan areas.Less

Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory

Lukasz Stanek

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 ... More

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.Less

Messy Urbanism: Understanding the "Other" Cities of Asia

Manish Chalana (ed.)

Seemingly messy and chaotic, the landscapes and urban life of cities in Asia possess an order and hierarchy which often challenge understanding and appreciation. With a cross-disciplinary group of ... More

Seemingly messy and chaotic, the landscapes and urban life of cities in Asia possess an order and hierarchy which often challenge understanding and appreciation. With a cross-disciplinary group of authors, Messy Urbanism: Understanding the “Other” Cities of Asia examines a range of cases in Asia to explore the social and institutional politics of urban formality and the contexts in which this “messiness” emerges or is constructed. The book brings a distinct perspective to the broader patterns of informal urban orders and processes as well as their interplay with formalized systems and mechanisms. It also raises questions about the production of cities, cityscapes, and citizenship. Messy Urbanism will appeal to professionals, students, and scholars in the fields of urban studies, architecture, landscape architecture, planning and policy, as well as Asian studies.Less

On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought

Daniel Purdy

The eighteenth century struggled to define architecture as either an art or a science—the image of the architect as a grand figure who synthesizes all other disciplines within a single master plan ... More

The eighteenth century struggled to define architecture as either an art or a science—the image of the architect as a grand figure who synthesizes all other disciplines within a single master plan emerged from this discourse. The architect, as philosophers liked to think of him, was obligated by the design and construction process to mediate between the abstract and the actual. This book traces this notion back to its wellspring. It surveys the volatile state of architectural theory in the Enlightenment, brought on by the newly emerged scientific critiques of Renaissance cosmology, then shows how German writers redeployed Renaissance terminology so that “harmony,” “unity,” “synthesis,” “foundation,” and “orderliness” became states of consciousness, rather than terms used to describe the built world. The book's new interpretation of German theory reveals how metaphors constitute interior life as an architectural space to be designed, constructed, renovated, or demolished. It elucidates the close affinity between Hegel's Romantic aesthetic of space and Daniel Libeskind's deconstruction of monumental architecture in Berlin's Jewish Museum. The book details how classical architecture shaped Benjamin's modernist interpretations of urban life, particularly his elaboration on Freud's archaeology of the unconscious. Benjamin's essays on dreams and architecture turn the individualist sensibility of the Enlightenment into a collective and mythic identification between humans and buildings.Less

The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment

Jesse LeCavalier

The Rule of Logistics examines how Walmart, the largest company on the planet, depends its success on its vast networks of buildings and the logistical systems that connect them. For Walmart, ... More

The Rule of Logistics examines how Walmart, the largest company on the planet, depends its success on its vast networks of buildings and the logistical systems that connect them. For Walmart, logistics dictates the design of the retailer's buildings, governs their deployment, and conditions the workers who operate them. By tracking Walmart's spatial operations, this book shows how the company's logistical obsessions have implications at all scales: from undermining the stability of architecture while investing it with political capacity; to challenging the inalienable features of locations by focusing on the aspects that connect rather than distinguish them; to blurring the threshold between man and machine in order create new possibilites for inhabitation. By doing so, the book identifies opportunities based on the features of logistics itself and argues that these concepts—including prototypes, loose forms, fungible locations, ambiguous borders, and recombinant territories—can help us think differently as we confront some of the contemporary challenges facing architecture and the city.Less

Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between

Sharon Irish

Often controversial and sometimes even shocking to audiences, the work of California-based artist Suzanne Lacy has challenged viewers and participants with personal accounts of traumatic events, ... More

Often controversial and sometimes even shocking to audiences, the work of California-based artist Suzanne Lacy has challenged viewers and participants with personal accounts of traumatic events, settings that require people to assume uncomfortable positions, multisensory productions that evoke emotional as well as intellectual responses, and even flayed lambs and beef kidneys. Lacy has experimented with ways to claim the power of mass media, to use women's consciousness-raising groups as a performance structure, and to connect her projects to lived experiences. The body and large groups of bodies are the locations for her lifelike art, revealing the aesthetics of relationships among people. This book surveys Lacy's art from 1972 to the present, demonstrating the pivotal roles that Lacy has had in public art, feminist theory, and community organizing. Lacy initially used her own body—or animal organs—to visually depict psychological states or social conditions in photographs, collages, and installations. In the late 1970s she turned to organizing large groups of people into art events—including her most famous work, The Crystal Quilt, a 1987 performance broadcast live on PBS and featuring hundreds of women in Minneapolis—and pioneered a new genre of public art. This book investigates the spaces between art and life, self and other, and the body and physical structures in Lacy's multifaceted artistic projects, showing how throughout her influential career Lacy has created art that resists racism, promotes feminism, and explores challenging human relationships.Less

Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment

Henri Lefebvre

Lukasz Stanek (ed.)

The French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre meditates on the relationship between jouissance, space, and architecture. Commissioned as a part of a study on tourist new towns in ... More

The French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre meditates on the relationship between jouissance, space, and architecture. Commissioned as a part of a study on tourist new towns in Spain, the book identifies spaces devoted to pleasure, enjoyment, sensuality, and desire as sites where the possibilities for a society moving beyond Fordism are manifested. In order to study these possibilities, architecture needs to be redefined as a mode of imagination rather than being restricted to a specialized practice or a collection of monuments. Taking the practices of habitation as the starting point of the inquiry, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment is understood as a production of space on all scales, from the domestic interiors, through urban spaces, to landscapes. Extending the focus of the book from “architecture” to “space of jouissance” within a transdicisplinary perspective, Lefebvre opens the discussion towards questions of subversive spaces, rhythmanalysis of the body, and pedagogy of senses. He proposes a Marxist take of architecture different from and alternative to the voice of Manfredo Tafuri, which since then has dominated critical architectural theory and history. Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment not only fundamentally changes our view on French and international architecture culture after 1968 but it gives new impulses for today’s debates about architecture and the urban society.Less

Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field

Swati Chattopadhyay

Cities are more than concrete and steel infrastructure. But modern urban theory does not have the language to describe and debate the vital component of urban life that is lived on the streets of ... More

Cities are more than concrete and steel infrastructure. But modern urban theory does not have the language to describe and debate the vital component of urban life that is lived on the streets of cities and towns. This book presents a nuanced argument for a new vocabulary of the city, proposing a way of analyzing the materiality of the urban that captures the ever-changing element of human experience. Urban life is intrinsically messy and usually refuses to conform to the rigid views laid down in much of urban studies theory. The book looks at urban life in India with a fresh perspective that incorporates the everyday and the unstructured. As the first to apply the theories of subalternity for an understanding of urban history, the book provides an in-depth study of vehicular art, street cricket, political wall writing, and religious festivities that links the visual and spatial attributes of these popular cultural forms with the imagination and practices of the city. She contends that these practices have a direct impact on the configuration and knowledge of public space, and the political potential of the people inhabiting cities.Less

The Urban Apparatus: Mediapolitics and the City

Reinhold Martin

The Urban Apparatus analyzes urbanization and the contemporary city in aesthetic, socioeconomic, and mediapolitical terms. Its main argument is that understanding the city as infrastructure (i.e. ... More

The Urban Apparatus analyzes urbanization and the contemporary city in aesthetic, socioeconomic, and mediapolitical terms. Its main argument is that understanding the city as infrastructure (i.e. hardware in all senses) reveals the category of the urban, and of urbanization, to be a way of imparting functional, aesthetic, and cognitive order to a contradictory, doubly-bound neoliberal regime, rather than an empirical or properly theoretical description of that regime. The “urban” is, in short, an apparatus of power and of knowledge. The book’s detailed theoretical introduction elaborates this thesis. It is followed by ten shorter essays, each of which explores questions related to urban life through specific examples from around the world.Less

Utopia's Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again

Reinhold Martin

Architectural postmodernism had a significant impact on the broader development of postmodern thought. This book offers a critical reconsideration of their relationship. Combining discourse analysis, ... More

Architectural postmodernism had a significant impact on the broader development of postmodern thought. This book offers a critical reconsideration of their relationship. Combining discourse analysis, historical reconstruction, and close readings of buildings, projects, and texts from the 1970s and 1980s, the book argues that retheorizing postmodern architecture gives us new insights into cultural postmodernism and its aftermath. Much of today's discussion has turned to the recovery of modernity, but as the Introduction states, “Simply to historicize postmodernism seems inadequate and, in many ways, premature.” The book connects architecture to current debates on biopolitics, neoliberalism, and corporate globalization as they are haunted by the problem of utopia. Exploring a series of concepts—territory, history, language, image, materiality, subjectivity, and architecture itself—the book shows how they reorganize the cultural imaginary and shape a contemporary biopolitics that ultimately precludes utopian thought.Less