You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This volume is a passionate scholarly inquiry focused on some of the most pressing issues confronting contemporary architectural practice, urbanism, and city-making. Presented in the form of conversations with leading architects, urbanists, and internationally renowned architectural historians and urban thinkers, this concise book reviews and critiques the legacy of Modernism and its impact on global urbanisation. Timely, thoughtful and thought-provoking, these conversations, conducted by the editor during the last few years, urge the rejection of some of the most widespread dogmas and often dangerously limiting and misguided intellectual legacies of urban and architectural thinking. The contributors recommend a search instead for more enlightened architectural practices, urban planning, and city-making in the new millennium, when environmental problems have become particularly pressing. In this volume, readers will find not only glimpses into possible urban futures, but a thorough review of what now often appear as the shackles of the not-so-distant Modernist past.
This book offers an in-depth discussion of how postcolonialism entered the Baltic cultural and literary domain and what difficulties it had, and often still has, to face while encountering local and international cultural and literary discourses. Initially viewed as entirely alien to the Baltic (as well as Eastern European) academic milieu, postcolonial studies have recently started to overcome previous academic prejudices and take shape in this part of the world. This study provides timely insights into Lithuanian prose writing and analyzes some of Lithuania’s best postcolonial literary texts. The author examines novels written during the last decade of the Soviet period as well as some more recent writings produced in the post-Soviet era. The book will be useful to cultural historians and literary scholars interested in the past and present of Eastern European and Baltic cultures and societies.
This book is a collection of scholarly studies focused on urban life and urban culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and its capital, Vilnius (Wilno). It covers a wide range of subjects, including the activities of the local craft guilds as well as their houses, the role of religious brotherhoods, and the types and locations of shops and warehouses. The author discusses such aspects of public urban life as inns and pharmacies, music, musicians and musical instruments, and outbreaks of plague, and highlights certain burial customs as well as other elements of urban culture. This posthumous collection contributes significantly to the existing knowledge about forms of urban life in Eastern Europe, the Baltic region, and Lithuania in particular. The book will be useful to architectural and cultural historians as well as all those whose scholarly interests are related to the history and culture of Eastern Europe and the urban legacy of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
This title reflects the transition of Lithuanian literature since the beginning of the 20th century, when Lithuania was still an agrarian and colonized country on the margins of Europe, to its present modern and post-modernist phase.
This book explores the link between well-being, society, and the built environment. The author argues that urban living has deteriorated globally, particularly over the past 200 years, due to industrial architectural and urban designs that harm both human and natural environments. However, existing intellectual tools can counter and reverse this decline by challenging mainstream industrial design. The book revisits a range of approaches that emerged in the last century, offering insights into urban and architectural challenges. These include architectural phenomenology, cognitive architecture, biophilic design, and the reassessment of traditional architectural and urban practices. By reflecting on what urban historian Lewis Mumford called the “uses of the past,” the author suggests that revisiting “alternative modernisms” and other non-mainstream ideas may offer a more balanced approach than relying solely on technological progress.
This book is a scholarly inquiry into several dimensions of culture, exploring the close relationship between architecture and metaphysical ideas as well as religious and philosophical concepts in each period of human history, a relationship which has, however, been largely forgotten or neglected by modernity. Rather than being a specialized account of any particular epoch, it is an intellectual attempt to map out a general picture of how certain ideas have made their way into architectural structures or shaped them in one or another way, from classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the present. The four essays it contains, focusing on light, water, color, and soun...
This volume brings together essays focused on Lithuania’s architectural and urban legacy, as well as recent developments since 1990, when the country said a firm farewell to the era of dependence and the Soviet communist regime. Nevertheless, as the book argues, the legacy of the past still dominates due to an uncritical adoption of Modernist dogmas in architecture and urban design by architects and urban designers during the last two decades of Soviet colonization. It offers a critical overview of urban developments during the last three decades which were marked by the emergence of private capital, the market economy and the growth of the real estate sector. The rapid expansion of the bu...
This volume explores the relationship between sites, architectural symbols and cultural landscapes, and discusses a variety of issues related to the central themes of the book, providing insights into the history, as well as the present development, of cultural landscapes. Contributors to this book—architects, architectural historians and theorists—reconsider the notion of genius loci and its importance in shaping historical landscapes in the eastern part of Europe. Despite being focused on Lithuanian historical and architectural contexts, these essays will be of interest to anyone who approaches architectural and urban legacies as part of general culture. Transcending local realities, and providing insights into the making and destruction of cultural landscapes, the book will be useful to architects and architectural historians, as well as scholars dealing with urban and landscape issues not only in Europe, but also in other parts of the globe.
This book is an in-depth study of the transformations in Central Europe in the years since the fall of Communism. In a comparative analysis of geopolitical, ethical, cultural, and socioeconomic shifts, this essential text investigates the post-communist countries.
International openness is one of the fundamental characteristics of the DiAP Department of Architecture and Design, which sees its members active in 57 bilateral collaboration agreements (without counting the Erasmus agreements) with countries in which today there is a demand for architectural design that looks at Italy as a model, not only for studies of historical architecture, but also for contemporary architecture designed in the existing city and for the new building, including complex landscape and environmental systems.