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This introductory book, specifically for architects, focuses on the work of critic Homi K. Bhabha, who's work has been used as a means to analyse architectural practices in previously colonised contexts. This title reveals how his work contributes to architectural theory and the study of contemporary architectures in general, not only in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
Deals with cultural studies
Latin American cities have always been characterized by a strong tension between what is vaguely described as their formal and informal dimensions. However, the terms formal and informal refer not only to the physical aspect of cities but also to their entire socio-political fabric. Informal cities and settlements exceed the structures of order, control and homogeneity that one expects to find in a formal city; therefore the contributors to this volume - from such disciplines as architecture, urban planning, anthropology, urban design, cultural and urban studies and sociology - focus on alternative methods of analysis in order to study the phenomenon of urban informality. This book provides a thorough review of the work that is currently being carried out by scholars, practitioners and governmental institutions, in and outside Latin America, on the question of informal cities.
Latin America has been an important place for architecture for many decades. Recently, architecture on the continent has continued to evolve, and an extremely creative scene has developed. Within this context, the book considers outstanding projects that have prompted discussion and provided fresh impetus all across Latin America.
Latin America has been an important place for architecture for many decades. Masters like Barragán, Dieste, Lina Bo Bardi, and Niemeyer pointed the way for architectural design all over the world, and they continue to do so today. Their approach to colors, materials, and walls had a deep and lasting influence on architectural modernism. Since then, however – and especially in the last fifteen years – architecture on the continent has continued to evolve, and a lively and extremely creative architecture scene has developed. The work of Latin American architects and city planners is often guided by social issues, for example, the approach to informal settlements on the outskirts of big ci...
This collection of essays presents an innovative and provocative set of concepts to understand the spaces of the Americas through local lenses. The disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter; however, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge in these fields originates in another continent and is external to the lived experience in such regions. The book introduces seven new concepts that have not been sufficiently addressed, and would make a significant contribution to the field: namely, gridded spaces; spaces of agriculture; space as image; watered spaces; spaces as labor; racialized spaces; and gendered spaces. This book, thus, introduces a broader conceptual framework to foster the analysis of the spatial histories of the Americas.
To study the built environment of the Americas is to wrestle with an inherent contradiction. While the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge and the vernacular used to describe these disciplines comes from another, very different, continent. With this book, Fernando Luiz Lara discusses several theories of space—drawing on cartography, geography, anthropology, and mostly architecture—and proposes counterweights to five centuries of Eurocentrism. The first part of Spatial Theories for the Americas offers a critique of Eurocentrism in the discipline of arch...
After Nicaragua achieved independence from Spain in 1821, it suffered a series of conflicts culminating in the two-year National War. When that war ended in 1857, Nicaragua was in ruins. The Everyday Nation-State explores what followed: the intersection of nation-state formation and everyday life in nineteenth-century Nicaragua. Rather than focus on the invented traditions of anthems, marches, and memorials that convey and reproduce an established sense of national identity and belonging, this work analyzes how such feelings emerged in the struggles of local communities over political authority, identity, and legitimacy. Based on extensive research of court cases, land registries, census mat...
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Striking, inexplicable stories circulate among the people of Nuevo León in northern Mexico. Stories of conversos (converted Jews) who fled the Inquisition in Spain and became fabulously wealthy in Mexico. Stories of women and children buried in walls and under houses. Stories of an entire, secret city hidden under modern-day Monterrey. All these stories have no place or corroboration in the official histories of Nuevo León. In this pioneering ethnography, Marie Theresa Hernández explores how the folktales of Nuevo León encode aspects of Nuevolenese identity that have been lost, repressed, or fetishized in "legitimate" histories of the region. She focuses particularly on stories regarding three groups: the Sephardic Jews said to be the "original" settlers of the region, the "disappeared" indigenous population, and the supposed "barbaric" society that persists in modern Nuevo León. Hernández's explorations into these stories uncover the region's complicated history, as well as the problematic and often fascinating relationship between history and folklore, between officially accepted "facts" and "fictions" that many Nuevoleneses believe as truth.