The Creole architecture of New Orleans is one of the city’s most-recognized features, but studies of it largely have focused on architectural typology. In Building Antebellum New Orleans, Tara A. ...Dudley examines the architectural activities and influence of gens de couleur libres—free people of color—in a city where the mixed-race descendants of whites and other free Blacks could own property.Between 1820 and 1850 New Orleans became an urban metropolis and industrialized shipping center with a growing population. Amidst dramatic economic and cultural change in the mid-antebellum period, the gens de couleur libres thrived as property owners, developers, building artisans, and patrons. Dudley writes an intimate microhistory of two prominent families of Black developers, the Dollioles and Souliés, to explore how gens de couleur libres used ownership, engagement, and entrepreneurship to construct individual and group identity and stability. With deep archival research, Dudley re-creates in fine detail the material culture, business and social history, and politics of the built environment for free people of color and adds new, revelatory information to the canon on New Orleans architecture.
In the three decades following World War II, the French government engaged in one of the twentieth century's greatest social and architectural experiments: transforming a mostly rural country into a ...modernized urban nation. Through the state-sanctioned construction of mass housing and development of towns on the outskirts of existing cities, a new world materialized where sixty years ago little more than cabbage and cottages existed.
Known as thebanlieue, the suburban landscapes that make up much of contemporary France are near-opposites of the historic cities they surround. Although these postwar environments of towers, slabs, and megastructures are often seen as a single utopian blueprint gone awry, Kenny Cupers demonstrates that their construction was instead driven by the intense aspirations and anxieties of a broad range of people. Narrating the complex interactions between architects, planners, policy makers, inhabitants, and social scientists, he shows how postwar dwelling was caught between the purview of the welfare state and the rise of mass consumerism.
The Social Projectunearths three decades of architectural and social experiments centered on the dwelling environment as it became an object of modernization, an everyday site of citizen participation, and a domain of social scientific expertise. Beyond state intervention, it was this new regime of knowledge production that made postwar modernism mainstream. The first comprehensive history of these wide-ranging urban projects, this book reveals how housing in postwar France shaped both contemporary urbanity and modern architecture.
This book reinterprets the Muslim architecture and urban planning of South India, looking beyond the Deccan to the regions of Tamil Nadu and Kerala - the historic coasts of Coromandel and Malabar. ...For the first time a detailed survey of the Muslim monuments of the historic ports and towns demonstrates a rich and diverse architectural tradition entirely independent from the better known architecture of North India and the Deccan sultanates. The book, extensively illustrated with photographs and architectural drawings, widens the horizons of our understanding of Muslim India and will no doubt pave new paths for future studies in the field.
This book explores the relationship between the city of Rome and the Aurelian Wall during the six centuries following its construction in the 270s AD, a period when the city changed and contracted ...almost beyond recognition, as it evolved from imperial capital into the spiritual center of Western Christendom. The Wall became the single most prominent feature in the urban landscape, a dominating presence which came bodily to incarnate the political, legal, administrative, and religious boundaries of urbs Roma, even as it reshaped both the physical contours of the city as a whole and the mental geographies of 'Rome' that prevailed at home and throughout the known world. With the passage of time, the circuit took on a life of its own as the embodiment of Rome's past greatness, a cultural and architectural legacy that dwarfed the quotidian realities of the post-imperial city as much as it shaped them.
Building Apartheid Coetzer, Nicholas
2013, 20160422, 2016-04-22, 2013-06-28
eBook
Through a specific architectural lens, this book exposes the role the British Empire played in the development of apartheid. Through reference to previously unexamined archival material, the book ...uncovers a myriad of mechanisms through which Empire laid the foundations onto which the edifice of apartheid was built. It unearths the significant role British architects and British architectural ideas played in facilitating white dominance and racial segregation in pre-apartheid Cape Town. To achieve this, the book follows the progenitor of the Garden City Movement, Ebenezer Howard, in its tripartite structure of Country/Town/Suburb, acknowledging the Garden City Movement's dominance at the Cape at the time. This tripartite structure also provides a significant match to postcolonial schemas of Self/Other/Same which underpin the three parts to the book. Much is owed to Edward Said's discourse-analytical approach in Orientalism - and the work of Homi Bhabha - in the definition and interpretation of archival material. This material ranges across written and visual representations in journals and newspapers, through exhibitions and events, to legislative acts, as well as the physicality of the various architectural objects studied. The book concludes by drawing attention to the ideological potency of architecture which tends to be veiled more so through its ubiquitous presence and in doing so, it presents not only a story peculiar to Imperial Cape Town, but one inherent to architecture more broadly. The concluding chapter also provides a timely mirror for the machinations currently at play in establishing a 'post-apartheid' architecture and urbanity in the 'new' South Africa.
Mamluk Palaces and Houses in Cairo studies the types of extant residential buildings in Cairo from the Mamluk era (1250-1517 C.E.) and the factors affecting their design, architectural and decorative ...elements, and building materials. القصور والبيوت المملوكية في القاهرة يدرس أنواع المباني السكنية الموجودة في القاهرة من العصر المملوكي (1250-1517 م) والعوامل المؤثرة في تصميمها، وعناصرها المعمارية والزخرفية، ومواد بناءها، إضافة لتقديم دراسة أثرية ومعمارية وتاريخية ووثائقية لكل القصور والبيوت الباقية.
Urban Modernity in the Contemporary Gulf offers a timely and engaging discussion on architectural production in the modernization era in the Arabian Peninsula. Focusing on the 20th century as a ...starting point, the book explores the display of transnational architectural practices resulting in different notions of locality, cosmopolitanism, and modernity. Contextually, with an eye on the present, the book reflects on the initiatives that recently re-engaged with the once ville moderne which, meanwhile, lost its pivotal function and meaning. A city within a bigger city, the urban fabric produced during the modernization era has the potential to narrate the social growth, East–West dynamics, and citizens’ memories of the recent past. Reading obsolescence as an opportunity, the book looks into this topic from a cross-country perspective. It maps, reads and analyses the notion of modern heritage in relation to the contemporary city and looks beyond physical transformations to embrace cultural practices and strategies of urban re-appropriation. It interrogates the value of modern architecture in the non-West, examining how academic research is expanding the debate on Gulf urbanism, and describes how practices of reuse could foster rethinking neglected areas, also addressing land consumption in the GCC. Presenting a diverse and geographically inclusive authorship, which combines established and up-and-coming researchers in the field, this is an important reference for academics and upper-level students interested in heritage studies, post-colonial urbanism, and architecture in the non-West.