You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Examines the role of architecture in the history of global development and decolonization. In Modernism’s Magic Hat, Ijlal Muzaffar examines how modern architects and planners help resolve one of the central dilemmas of the mid-twentieth-century world order: how to make decolonization plausible without accounting for centuries of capital drain under colonial rule. In the years after World War II, architects and planners found extensive opportunities in new international institutions—such as the World Bank, the UN, and the Ford Foundation—and helped shape new models of global intervention that displaced the burden of change onto the inhabitants. Muzaffar argues that architecture in this...
Portals: Pedagogy, Practice, and Architecture’s Future Imaginary considers the COVID-19 pandemic and the remote pedagogy it occasioned globally in schools of architecture, as a critical threshold to future architectural pedagogy, practice, and spatial imaginaries. Given that the conceit of a “return to normal” is neither desirable nor possible, this book speculates upon possible futures for the discipline of architecture, through the lens of the Thesis and Directed Research projects of the RISD Architecture class of 2020. This book documents an interregnum, a pause, a moment of self-reflection in which architects, imperiled by the COVID-19 pandemic and all of the forms of inequity that...
Governing by Design offers a unique perspective on twentieth-century architectural history. It disputes the primacy placed on individuals in the design and planning process and instead looks to the larger influences of politics, culture, economics, and globalization to uncover the roots of how our built environment evolves. In these chapters, historians offer their analysis on design as a vehicle for power and as a mediator of social currents. Power is defined through a variety of forms: modernization, obsolescence, technology, capital, ergonomics, biopolitics, and others. The chapters explore the diffusion of power through the establishment of norms and networks that frame human conduct, ac...
An in-depth look at the diverging paths of Vietnamese American communities, or “Little Saigons,” in America’s built environment. In the final days before the fall of Saigon in 1975, 125,000 Vietnamese who were evacuated or who made their own way out of the country resettled in the United States. Finding themselves in unfamiliar places yet still connected in exile, these refugees began building their own communities as memorials to a lost homeland. Known both officially and unofficially as Little Saigons, these built landscapes offer space for everyday activities as well as the staging of cultural heritage and political events. Building Little Saigon examines nearly fifty years of city ...
This volume offers a critical and complicated picture of how leisure tourism connected the world after the World War II, transforming coastal lands, traditional societies, and national economies in new ways. The 21 chapters in this book analyze selected case studies of architectures and landscapes around the world, contextualizing them within economic geographies of national development, the geopolitics of the Cold War, the legacies of colonialism, and the international dynamics of decolonization. Postwar leisure tourism evokes a rich array of architectural spaces and altered coastal landscapes, which is explored in this collection through discussions of tourism developments in the Mediterra...
Landed Internationals explores how postwar encounters in housing and planning helped transform the dynamics of international development and challenged American modernity.
Publisher description
As Latin American elites strove to modernize their cities at the turn of the twentieth century, they eagerly adopted the eugenic theory that improvements to the physical environment would lead to improvements in the human race. Based on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of the “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” this strain of eugenics empowered a utopian project that made race, gender, class, and the built environment the critical instruments of modernity and progress. Through a transnational and interdisciplinary lens, Eugenics in the Garden reveals how eugenics, fueled by a fear of social degeneration in France, spread from the realms of medical science to architecture and urban...
The Middle East is well-known for its historic gardens that have developed over more than two millenniums. The role of urban landscape projects in Middle Eastern cities has grown in prominence, with a gradual shift in emphasis from gardens for the private sphere to an increasingly public function. The contemporary landscape projects, either designed as public plazas or public parks, have played a significant role in transferring the modern Middle Eastern cities to a new era and also in transforming to a newly shaped social culture in which the public has a voice. This book considers what ties these projects to their historical context, and what regional and local elements and concepts have been used in their design.
Introduction: a peculiar experiment -- Kinaesthetic knowing: the nineteenth-century biography of another kind of knowledge -- Looking: Wölfflin's comparative vision -- Affecting: Endell's mathematics of living feeling -- Drawing: the Debschitz school and formalism's subject -- Designing: discipline and introspection at the Bauhaus -- Epilogue