This title explores the intricate relationship between architecture and printed media in the fast-changing nineteenth century. Publication history is a rapidly expanding scholarly field which has ...profoundly influenced architectural history in recent years. Yet, while groundbreaking work has been done on architecture and printing in the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the twentieth century, the nineteenth century has received little attention. This is the omission that 'The Printed and the Built' seeks to address, thus filling a significant gap in the understanding of architecture's cultural history.
Congo Style presents a postcolonial approach to discussing the visual culture of two now-notorious regimes: King Leopold II’s Congo Colony and the state sites of Mobutu Sese Seko’s totalitarian ...Zaïre. Readers are brought into the living remains of sites once made up of ambitious modernist architecture and art in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. From the total artworks of Art Nouveau to the aggrandizing sites of post-independence Kinshasa, Congo Style investigates the experiential qualities of man-made environments intended to entertain, delight, seduce, and impress. In her study of visual culture, Ruth Sacks sets out to reinstate the compelling wonder of nationalist architecture from Kinshasa’s post-independence era, such as the Tower of the Exchange (1974), Gécamines Tower (1977), and the artworks and exhibitions that accompanied them. While exploring post-independence nation-building, this book examines how the underlying ideology of Belgian Art Nouveau, a celebrated movement in Belgium, led to the dominating early colonial settler buildings of the ABC Hotels (circa 1908–13). Congo Style combines Sacks’s practice as a visual artist and her academic scholarship to provide an original study of early colonial and independence-era modernist sites in their African context.
This book offers new ways of investigating relationships between learning and the spaces in which it takes place. It suggests that we need to understand more about the distinctiveness of teaching and ...learning in post-compulsory education, and what it is that matters about the design of its spaces. Starting from contemporary educational and architectural theories, it suggests alternative conceptual frameworks and methods that can help map the social and spatial practices of education in universities and colleges; so as to enhance the architecture of post-compulsory education.
Jos Boys has a background in architectural practice, research and journalism and is currently Senior Research Fellow of Learning Spaces at the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning through Design (CETLD). She has taught at various institutions, including the Architectural Association, London Metropolitan University and the University of Brighton; and has also been an academic developer for the art and design disciplines. Jos’ practice is predominantly community-based and she is particularly interested in exploring the relationships between space and its occupation, not just theoretically but also publically and practically.
Introduction 1. Why Re-think Learning Spaces? Part 1: Reviewing our Frames 2. Learning Spaces from an Architectural Perspective 3. Learning Spaces from an Educationalist Perspective 4. Learning Spaces from an Estates Planning Perspective Part 2: Mapping the Terrain 5. Getting Beneath the Surface: Re-thinking Relationships Between Learning and Space 6. On the Ground: Searching for the Student Experience 7. Shaping Learning: (Re)designing the Institution Part 3: Shifting the Boundaries 8. Learning as a Transitional Space 9. Hybrid Spaces and the Impact of New Technologies 10. Creative Learning Spaces: Towards the Porous University?
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.
Mediated Messages presents a collection of original writing exploring the role played by the media in the development of postmodern architecture in the 1970s and 80s. The book’s twelve chapters and ...case-studies examine a range of contemporary periodicals and exhibitions to explore their role in the postmodern. This focus on mediation as a key feature of architectural post-modernism, and the recognition that post-modernism grew out of developments in the media, opens up the possibility of an important new account of post-modernism distinct from existing narratives. Accompanied by a contextualizing introduction, the essays are arranged across four thematic sections (covering: images; international postmodernisms; high and low culture; and postmodern architects as theorists) and present a range of case-studies with a genuinely international scope. Altogether, this work makes a substantial contribution to the historical account of architectural postmodernism, and will be of great interest to researchers in postmodernism as well as those examining the role of the media in architectural history.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the authors of Poland’s 3 May 1791 Constitution became the heirs to a defunct state whose territory had been partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. ...At this moment of intensive national postmortem, Ignacy Potocki, an eminent statesman and co-author of the Constitution, composed an architectural treatise. One of the best-preserved examples of early modern Polish architectural thought, published and translated here for the first time, the Remarks on Architecture announces itself as a project of national introspection, with architecture playing a direct role in the betterment of the nation. In it, Potocki addresses his remarks to the contemporary Polish nobility and conveys the lessons of a Vitruvian canon that shaped Continental classical architectural theory and practice throughout the early modern period. He argues that architecture is a vessel for cultural values and that it plays an important part in the formation and critique of broader national traditions. In her introduction, Carolyn Guile further explores Polish Enlightenment architectural writing as an example of cultural exchange, inheritance, and transformation. This is a work that broadens our understanding of European architectural history during the early modern period.
Buffalo at the Crossroads is a diverse set of cutting-edge essays. Twelve authors highlight the outsized importance of Buffalo, New York, within the story of American urbanism. Across the collection, ...they consider the history of Buffalo's built environment in light of contemporary developments and in relationship to the evolving interplay between nature, industry, and architecture. The essays examine Buffalo's architectural heritage in rich context: the Second Industrial Revolution; the City Beautiful movement; world's fairs; grain, railroad, and shipping industries; urban renewal and so-called white flight; and the larger networks of labor and production that set the city's economic fate. The contributors pay attention to currents that connect contemporary architectural work in Buffalo to the legacies established by its esteemed architectural founders: Richardson, Olmsted, Adler, Sullivan, Bethune, Wright, Saarinen, and others. Buffalo at the Crossroads is a compelling introduction to Buffalo's architecture and developed landscape that will frame discussion about the city for years to come. Contributors: Marta Cieslak, University of Arkansas - Little Rock; Francis R. Kowsky; Erkin Özay, University at Buffalo; Jack Quinan, University at Buffalo; A. Joan Saab, University of Rochester; Annie Schentag, KTA Preservation Specialists; Hadas Steiner, University at Buffalo; Julia Tulke, University of Rochester; Stewart Weaver, University of Rochester; Mary N. Woods, Cornell University; Claire Zimmerman, University of Michigan
"Open Heritage" is a response to the urgent need for a more open definition of cultural heritage, of the parties involved in protecting and maintaining it, and of the relevant planning processes in ...order to ensure the sustainable reuse of cultural heritage in times of climate change, social inequality and social plurality.
Bringing together fourteen original essays, this collection opens up new perspectives on the architectural history of the nineteenth century by examining the buildings of the period through the lens ...of ‘experience’. With a focus on the experience of the ordinary building user – rather than simply on the intentions of the designer – the book shows that new and important insights can be brought to our understanding of Victorian architecture. The chapters present a range of ideas and new research – some examining individual building case studies (from grand hotels and clubhouses in New York to the parliament buildings of Westminster), and others exploring conceptual questions about the nature of architectural experience, whether sensory or otherwise. Yet they share the premise that the idea of the ‘experience of architecture’ took on a new and particular significance with the rise of industrial modernity, and they examine what contemporary people – both architects and non-architects – understood by this idea. The insights in this volume extend beyond the study of Victorian architecture. Together they suggest how ‘experience’ might be used as a framework to produce a more convincingly historical account of the artefacts of architectural history
From the avant-garde design of the Islamic Cultural Center in New York City to the simplicity of the Dar al-Islam Mosque in Abiquiu, New Mexico, the American mosque takes many forms of visual and ...architectural expression. The absence of a single, authoritative model and the plurality of design nuances reflect the heterogeneity of the American Muslim community itself, which embodies a whole spectrum of ethnic origins, traditions, and religious practices. In this book, Akel Ismail Kahera explores the history and theory of Muslim religious aesthetics in the United States since 1950. Using a notion of deconstruction based on the concepts of jamal (beauty), subject, and object found in the writings of Ibn Arabi (d. 1240), he interprets the forms and meanings of several American mosques from across the country. His analysis contributes to three debates within the formulation of a Muslim aesthetics in North America—first, over the meaning, purpose, and function of visual religious expression; second, over the spatial and visual affinities between American and non-American mosques, including the Prophet’s mosque at Madinah, Arabia; and third, over the relevance of culture, place, and identity to the making of contemporary religious expression in North America.
