You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Shortlisted for the 2014 SAHGB Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion. Certainly, ancient structures have long been treated with care and reverence in many societies, including classical Rome and Greece. But only in modern Europe and America, in the last two centuries, has this care been elaborated and energised into a forceful, dynamic ideology: a 'Conservation Movement', infused with a sense of historical destiny and loss, that paradoxically shared many of the characteristics of Enlightenment modernity. Miles Glendinning's new book authoritatively presents, for the first time, the entire history of architectural conservation, and traces its dramatic fluctuations in ideas and popularity, ending by questioning whether its recent international ascendancy can last indefinitely.
This major work provides the first comprehensive history of one of modernism's most defining and controversial architectural legacies: the 20th-century drive to provide 'homes for the people'. Vast programmes of mass housing – high-rise, low-rise, state-funded, and built in the modernist style – became a truly global phenomenon, leaving a legacy which has suffered waves of disillusionment in the West but which is now seeing a dramatic, 21st-century renaissance in the booming, crowded cities of East Asia. Providing a global approach to the history of Modernist mass-housing production, this authoritative study combines architectural history with the broader social, political, cultural aspe...
At last - here is a single volume authoritative history of Scottish architecture. This compact yet comprehensive account combines factual description of the vast and fertile range of visual forms and key architects in each period with a wide-ranging analysis of their social, ideological and historical context. As Scotland has often been closely involved with new trends in western architecture, this book highlights the interaction of Scottish developments with broader European and international movements. From the beginnings of the Renaissance in the 15th century right up to the 1990s ,this much-needed survey covers the entire post-medieval story in one volume.
After World War II, the most urgent reconstruction problem in these islands was in the field of public housing, and the opportunity presented itself to create innovative buildings and to finally abolish slums. Everyone, including the slum-dwellers, united behind the plan to build new dwellings as quickly as possible. In this book Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius tell the story of a great adventure of building and explain the architectural and political ideas that lay behind it.
As the debate about Scottish independence rages on, this book takes a timely look at how Scotland's politics have been expressed in its buildings, exploring how the architecture of Scotland - in particular the constantly-changing ideal of the 'castle' - has been of great consequence to the ongoing narrative of Scottish national identity. Scotch Baronial provides a politically-framed examination of Scotland's kaleidoscopic 'castle architecture', tracing how it was used to serve successive political agendas both prior to and during the three 'unionist centuries' from the early 17th century to the 20th century. The book encompasses many of the country's most important historic buildings - from the palaces left behind by the 'lost' monarchy, to revivalist castles and the proud town halls of the Victorian age - examining their architectural styles and tracing their wildly fluctuating political and national connotations. It ends by bringing the story into the 21st century, exploring how contemporary 'neo-modernist' architecture in today's Scotland, as exemplified in the Holyrood parliament, relates to concepts of national identity in architecture over the previous centuries.
From Chicago to Toronto to Shanghai, cities around the world have sprouted “iconic” buildings by celebrity architects like Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind that compete for attention both on the skyline and in the media. But in recent years, criticism of these extreme “gestural” structures, known for their often-exaggerated forms, has been growing. Miles Glendinning’s impassioned polemic, Architecture’s Evil Empire, looks at how today’s trademark architectural individualism stretches beyond the well-known works and ultimately extends to the entire built environment. Glendinning examines how the global empire of the current modernism emerged—particularly in relation to the exc...
This is a concise, up-to-date survey that provides for the visitor or resident an overview of Scotland's finest buildings and its long line of architectural geniuses.
Focusing on the experience of one of Scotland's foremost house-builders during the 19th and 20th centuries, this book features essays by several leading architectural, social and economic historians including copious illustrations, statistical information and documentary evidence. A summary guide to the Mactaggart & Mickel architectural archive, which forms part of the RCAHMS collection, is also included.
Clone City brings architecture, for the first time, into the mainstream of debates about Scottish cultural identity. It analyses polemically the ways in which contemporary market-led globalisation has fragmented and debased the Scottish urban environment. It examines the pointers to possible solutions provided by history, and especially by the lessons of the 20th-century Modern Movement. Building on these examples, it sketches out ways in which a more socially organic and place-specific architecture can be reconciled with modernity's pressure of freedom and individuality and it shows how that process can actively help in the building of a Scottish identity under home rule.* Integrates architecture and the built environment into mainstreamScottish cultural identity debates; introduces architectural issues to the wider Scottish public* The first book to set out a critical, polemical position on Scottish architecture* Sets contemporary Scottish architecture and city planning issues in a comprehensive historical context* Examines the relevance of the ideas of Patrick Geddes to the contemporary Scottish city
The early post-war decades witnessed a national reconstruction drive of unprecedented vigour - a revolution in architecture and building, whose uncompromising modern monuments still dominate Scottish towns and cities. This book, drawing on a series of national symposia and exhibitions staged by DOCOMOMO (Documentation and Conservation of the Modern Movement) and other key organizations, presents an introductory reassessment of a quarter-century of vigorous, but until recently misunderstood transformation of Scotland's built environment.