This book brings together a series of new and historical case studies to show how different phases of globalization are transforming the built environment. Taking a broad interdisciplinary approach, ...the author draws on sociological, geographical, cultural and postcolonial studies to provide a critical account of the development of three key concepts: global culture, post colonialism, and modernity. Subsequent case studies examine how global economic, political and cultural forces shape the forms of architectural and urban modernity in globalized suburbs and spaces in major cities worldwide.
The first book to combine global and postcolonial theoretical approaches to the built environment and to illustrate these with examples, Spaces of Global Cultures argues for a more historical and interdisciplinary understanding of globalization: one that places material space and the built environment at the centre and calls for new theories to address new conditions.
'This outstanding volume by Anthony King is empirically rich and sends deep theoretical tremors as well; an invaluable read.' - Jan Nederveen Pieterse, author of Globalization or Empire, Routledge 2004
'The book is very interdisciplinary—and inherently geographical ... It is sensitive to political and cultural context and highlights the various hegemonies at play in architecture.' - Environment and Planning A
'King's importance in shaping the way we understand globalization as an unequal and uneven system not only of economic but of material and cultural processes cannot be understated.' 'The empirical material in this book is excellent.' 'This is architectural history at its best.' - Rob Shields, Building Research and Information, 2005
'King provides an accessible and significant contribution to the literature on how transnational and global identities play out within the built environment ... it will be of considerable interest to a range of courses, from architecture and planning history to the sociology and geography of consumption.' - Journal of Consumer Culture
'...an excellent book that maps the multifaceted ways in which the built environment is influenced by transnational processes in general and a good overview of the research of one of its most important students in particular' - International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
Anthony D. King is Bartle Professor of Art History and of Sociology, State University of New York at Binghamton. He has been Visiting Professor in Architecture, University of Califonia Berkeley and, for five years, Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.
Introduction. Part I: Theories 1. Worlds in the City: Wonders of Modern Design to Weapons of Mass Destruction 2. Interrogating Global Culture(s) 3. Cultures and Spaces of Postcolonial Knowledges 4. The Times and Spaces of Modernities 5. Writing Transnational Planning Histories: The Dialectics of Dual Development Part II: Histories 6. Suburb/Ethnoburb/Globurb: The Making of Contemporary Modernities 7. Villafication: The Transformation of Chinese Cities 8. Imagining the World at Home: The Distant Spaces of the Indian City 9. Transnational Delhi Revisited: The Spatial Language of Three Modernities 10. Imperialism, Colonialism and Architects of the Arts and Crafts in Britain Part III: Pasts/Presents/Futures 11. Ways of Seeing: Serendipity, Visuality, Experience
Mudejarismo and Moorish Revival in Europe offers a critical examination of the reception of Ibero-Islamic architecture in medieval Iberia and 19th-century Europe. Taking selected case studies as a ...starting point, the volume challenges prevalent readings of interconnected cultural and artistic phenomena.
Ornament Picon, Antoine
2014, 2013, 2014-05-28, 2014-05-29
eBook, Book
Once condemned by Modernism and compared to a 'crime' by Adolf Loos, ornament has made a spectacular return in contemporary architecture. This is typified by the works of well-known architects such ...as Herzog & de Meuron, Sauerbruch Hutton, Farshid Moussavi Architecture and OMA. There is no doubt that these new ornamental tendencies are inseparable from innovations in computer technology. The proliferation of developments in design software has enabled architects to experiment afresh with texture, colour, pattern and topology. Though inextricably linked with digital tools and culture, Antoine Picon argues that some significant traits in ornament persist from earlier Western architectural traditions. These he defines as the 'subjective' – the human interaction that ornament requires in both its production and its reception – and the political. Contrary to the message conveyed by the founding fathers of modern architecture, traditional ornament was not meant only for pleasure. It conveyed vital information about the designation of buildings as well as about the rank of their owners. As such, it participated in the expression of social values, hierarchies and order. By bringing previous traditions in ornament under scrutiny, Picon makes us question the political issues at stake in today's ornamental revival. What does it tell us about present-day culture? Why are we presently so fearful of meaning in architecture? Could it be that by steering so vehemently away from symbolism, contemporary architecture is evading any explicit contribution to collective values?
An unprecedented survey of the origins and evolution of Chinese architecture, from the last millennia BCE to today
Throughout history, China has maintained one of the world's richest built ...civilizations. The nation's architectural achievements range from its earliest walled cities and the First Emperor's vision of city and empire, to bridges, pagodas, and the twentieth-century constructions of the Socialist state. In this beautifully illustrated book, Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt presents the first fully comprehensive survey of Chinese architecture in any language. With rich political and historical context, Steinhardt covers forty centuries of architecture, from the genesis of Chinese building through to the twenty-first century and the challenges of urban expansion and globalism.
Steinhardt follows the extraordinary breadth of China's architectural legacy-including excavation sites, gardens, guild halls, and relief sculpture-and considers the influence of Chinese architecture on Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and Tibet. Architectural examples from Chinese ethnic populations and various religions are examined, such as monasteries, mosques, observatories, and tombs. Steinhardt also shows that Chinese architecture is united by a standardized system of construction, applicable whether buildings are temples, imperial palaces, or shrines. Every architectural type is based on the models that came before it, and principles established centuries earlier dictate building practices. China's unique system has allowed its built environment to stand as a profound symbol of Chinese culture.
With unprecedented breadth united by a continuous chronological narrative,Chinese Architectureoffers the best scholarship available on this remarkable subject for scholars, students, and general readers.
An in-depth history of the Stalinist skyscraper In the early years of the Cold War, the skyline of Moscow was forever transformed by a citywide skyscraper building project. As the steel girders of ...the monumental towers went up, the centuries-old metropolis was reinvented to embody the greatness of Stalinist society. Moscow Monumental explores how the quintessential architectural works of the late Stalin era fundamentally reshaped daily life in the Soviet capital.Drawing on a wealth of original archival research, Katherine Zubovich examines the decisions and actions of Soviet elites—from top leaders to master architects—and describes the experiences of ordinary Muscovites who found their lives uprooted by the ambitious skyscraper project. She shows how the Stalin-era quest for monumentalism was rooted in the Soviet Union's engagement with Western trends in architecture and planning, and how the skyscrapers required the creation of a vast and complex infrastructure. As laborers flooded into the city, authorities evicted and rehoused tens of thousands of city residents living on the plots selected for development. When completed in the mid-1950s, these seven ornate neoclassical buildings served as elite apartment complexes, luxury hotels, and ministry and university headquarters. Moscow Monumental tells a story that is both local and broadly transnational, taking readers from the streets of interwar Moscow and New York to the marble- clad halls of the bombastic postwar structures that continue to define the Russian capital today.
A rare exploration of the racial and class politics of architecture, Little White Houses examines how postwar media representations associated the ordinary single-family house with middle-class ...whites to the exclusion of others, creating a powerful and invidious cultural iconography that continues to resonate today. Drawing from popular and trade magazines, floor plans and architectural drawings, television programs, advertisements, and beyond, Dianne Harris shows how the depiction of houses and their interiors, furnishings, and landscapes shaped and reinforced the ways in which Americans perceived white, middle-class identities and helped support a housing market already defined by racial segregation and deep economic inequalities.After describing the ordinary postwar house and its orderly, prescribed layout, Harris analyzes how cultural iconography associated these houses with middle-class whites and an ideal of white domesticity. She traces how homeowners were urged to buy specific kinds of furniture and other domestic objects and how the appropriate storage and display of these possessions was linked to race and class by designers, tastemakers, and publishers. Harris also investigates lawns, fences, indoor-outdoor spaces, and other aspects of the postwar home and analyzes their contribution to the assumption that the rightful owners of ordinary houses were white.Richly detailed, Little White Houses adds a new dimension to our understanding of race in America and the inequalities that persist in the U.S. housing market.
Architecture is often seen as the art of a thinking mind that arranges, organizes and establishes relationships between the parts and the whole. It is also seen as the art of designing spaces, which ...we experience through movement and use. Conceptual ordering, spatial and social narrative are fundamental to the ways in which buildings are shaped, used and perceived. Examining and exploring the ways in which these three dimensions interact in the design and life of buildings, this intriguing book will be of use to anyone with an interest in the theory of architecture and architecture's relationship to the cultural human environment.
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. Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang Goethe described the architect as their equal, a genius with godlike creativity. For writers from Descartes to Freud, architectural reasoning provided a method for critically examining consciousness. 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.
InOn the Ruins of Babel, Daniel Purdy traces this notion back to its wellspring. He 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. Purdy's distinctly new interpretation of German theory reveals how metaphors constitute interior life as an architectural space to be designed, constructed, renovated, or demolished. He elucidates the close affinity between Hegel's Romantic aesthetic of space and Daniel Libeskind's deconstruction of monumental architecture in Berlin's Jewish Museum.
Through a careful reading of Walter Benjamin's writing on architecture as myth, Purdy 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.
Stories of House and Homeis a social and cultural history of the massive construction campaign that Khrushchev instituted in 1957 to resolve the housing crisis in the Soviet Union and to provide each ...family its own apartment. Decent housing was deemed the key to a healthy, productive home life, which was essential to the realization of socialist collectivism. Drawing on archival materials, as well as memoirs, fiction, and the Soviet press, Christine Varga-Harris shows how the many aspects of this enormous state initiative-from neighborhood planning to interior design-sought to alleviate crowded, undignified living conditions and sculpt residents into ideal Soviet citizens. She also details how individual interests intersected with official objectives for Soviet society during the Thaw, a period characterized by both liberalization and vigilance in everyday life.
Set against the backdrop of the widespread transition from communal to one-family living,Stories of House and Homeexplores the daily experiences and aspirations of Soviet citizens who were granted new apartments and those who continued to inhabit the old housing stock due to the chronic problems that beset the housing program. Varga-Harris analyzes the contradictions apparent in heroic advances and seemingly inexplicable delays in construction, model apartments boasting modern conveniences and decrepit dwellings, happy housewarmings and disappointing moves, and new residents and individuals requesting to exchange old apartments. She also reveals how Soviet citizens identified with the state and with the broader project of building socialism.
