BiblioVault - Books about Architecture

I Speak of the City

Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In this dazzling multidisciplinary tour of Mexico City, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo focuses on the period 1880 to 1940, the decisive decades that shaped the city into what it is today.

Through a kaleidoscope of expository forms, I Speak of the City connects the realms of literature, architecture, music, popular language, art, and public health to investigate the city in a variety of contexts: as a living history textbook, as an expression of the state, as a modernist capital, as a laboratory, and as language. Tenorio’s formal imagination allows the reader to revel in the free-flowing richness of his narratives, opening startling new vistas onto the urban experience.

From art to city planning, from epidemiology to poetry, this book challenges the conventional wisdom about both Mexico City and the turn-of-the-century world to which it belonged. And by engaging directly with the rise of modernism and the cultural experiences of such personalities as Hart Crane, Mina Loy, and Diego Rivera, I Speak of the City will find an enthusiastic audience across the disciplines.

[more]

Idea City

How to Make Boston More Livable, Equitable, and Resilient

Edited by David Gamble, Foreword by Renée Loth

University of Massachusetts Press, 2023

Racial strife, increased social and economic discrimination, amplified political friction, and growing uncertainty around the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change have laid bare many inequalities within the city of Boston. How will these disruptions and inequities influence the city’s future, especially as Boston celebrates its quadricentennial in 2030?

This collection of original essays addresses the many challenges Boston contends with in the twenty-first century and considers ways to improve the city for everyone. Presenting a range of perspectives written by area experts—academics, reflective practitioners, and policymakers—these essays tackle issues of resiliency, mobility, affordable housing, health outcomes, social equity, economic equality, zoning, regionalism, and more. Reflecting the diversity of the city and the challenges and opportunities Boston currently faces, Idea City will help readers think differently about their own areas of expertise and draw conclusions from urban regeneration work in other fields.

[more]

The Idea of Spatial Form

Frank, Joseph

Rutgers University Press, 1991

The Idea of Spatial Form contains the classic essay that introduced the concept of "spatial form" into literary discussion in 1945, and has since been accepted as one of the foundations for a theory of modern literature. It is here reprinted along with two later reconsiderations, one of which answers its major critics, while the second places the theory in relation to Russian Formalism and French Structuralism. Originally conceived to clarify the formal experiments of avant-garde literature, the idea of spatial form, when placed in this wider context, also contributes importantly to the foundations of a general poetics of the literary text. Also included are related discussions of André Malraux, Heinrich Wölfflin, Herbert Read, and E. H. Gombrich.

New material has been added to the essays in the form of footnotes and postscripts to two of them. These either illustrate the continuing relevance of the questions raised, or offer Frank's more recent opinions on the topic.

[more]

If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight

A Guide to Effective Transportation Advocacy

Carter Lavin

Island Press, 2025

Your transit and street safety dreams are within your reach. While challenging our dangerous car-centric systems can feel daunting, you can win, and this book is here to help. In If You Want to Win, You’ve Got to Fight, transportation activist and advocacy consultant Carter Lavin provides a roadmap for transforming passion into political power.

Whether your dream is to make your community safer and more sustainable by getting protected bike lanes, improving bus service, or expanding high-speed rail, this book provides step-by-step guidance on organizing for change. Through advice from dozens of advocates across the United States and Lavin’s own experience with over 100 campaigns, readers will learn transportation-specific strategies to win. Critically, the book teaches readers how to deftly navigate their political, cultural, and historical contexts to adapt their advocacy efforts and make allies -- from local businesses to transit agency staff to key decision makers. Action points at the end of each chapter and a toolbox of campaign tactics at the end of the book enable readers to move seamlessly from brainstorming into concrete action.

Whether you are just starting out or have engaged in transportation advocacy for a while, the tools and insights in this book will help you develop, plan, and execute the transportation-related campaign of your choosing. Professionals in the transportation space will also discover how to be an effective advocate while working within the system.

Accessible and inspirational, If You Want to Win, You’ve Got to Fight will be a game-changer for people who want our communities to prioritize people over cars.

Your transportation dreams are all possible. Are you ready to fight for them?

[more]

An Illini Place

Building the University of Illinois Campus

Incoronata Inserra

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Why does the University of Illinois campus at Urbana-Champaign look as it does today? Drawing on a wealth of research and featuring more than one hundred color photographs, An Illini Place provides an engrossing and beautiful answer to that question. Lex Tate and John Franch trace the story of the university's evolution through its buildings. Oral histories, official reports, dedication programs, and developmental plans both practical and quixotic inform the story. The authors also provide special chapters on campus icons and on the buildings, arenas and other spaces made possible by donors and friends of the university. Adding to the experience is a web companion that includes profiles of the planners, architects, and presidents instrumental in the campus's growth, plus an illustrated inventory of current and former campus plans and buildings.

[more]

Images of the Canton Factories 1760–1822

Reading History in Art

Paul A. Van Dyke and Maria Kar-wing Mok

Hong Kong University Press, 2015

Hundreds of Chinese export paintings of Canton trading houses and shopping streets are in museums and private collections throughout the world, and scholars of art and history have often questioned the reliability of these historical paintings. In this illustrated volume, Paul Van Dyke and Maria Mok examine these Chinese export paintings by matching the changes in the images with new historical data collected from various archives. Many factory paintings are reliable historical records in their own right and can be dated to a single year. Dating images with such precision was not possible in the past owing to insufficient information on the scenes. The new findings in this volume provide unprecedented opportunities to re-date many art works and prove that images of the Canton factories painted on canvas by Chinese artists are far more trustworthy than what scholars have believed in the past.

[more]

Imaginary Cities

A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between

Darran Anderson

University of Chicago Press, 2017

For as long as humans have gathered in cities, those cities have had their shining—or shadowy—counterparts. Imaginary cities, potential cities, future cities, perfect cities. It is as if the city itself, its inescapable gritty reality and elbow-to-elbow nature, demands we call into being some alternative, yearned-for better place.

This book is about those cities. It’s neither a history of grand plans nor a literary exploration of the utopian impulse, but rather something different, hybrid, idiosyncratic. It’s a magpie’s book, full of characters and incidents and ideas drawn from cities real and imagined around the globe and throughout history. Thomas More’s allegorical island shares space with Soviet mega-planning; Marco Polo links up with James Joyce’s meticulously imagined Dublin; the medieval land of Cockaigne meets the hopeful future of Star Trek. With Darran Anderson as our guide, we find common themes and recurring dreams, tied to the seemingly ineluctable problems of our actual cities, of poverty and exclusion and waste and destruction. And that’s where Imaginary Cities becomes more than a mere—if ecstatically entertaining—intellectual exercise: for, as Anderson says, “If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined.” Every architect, philosopher, artist, writer, planner, or citizen who dreams up an imaginary city offers lessons for our real ones; harnessing those flights of hopeful fancy can help us improve the streets where we live.

Though it shares DNA with books as disparate as Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities, there’s no other book quite like Imaginary Cities. After reading it, you’ll walk the streets of your city—real or imagined—with fresh eyes.

[more]

Imagine Lagos

Mapping History, Place, and Politics in a Nineteenth-Century African City

Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi

Ohio University Press, 2024

Written from a digital humanities perspective, this book combines historical sources, maps, and a walking cartography to create new perspectives on the nineteenth-century history of Lagos, West Africa’s most populous city. What traces do people leave in the places where they live, and even where they die? This book addresses the spatial history of nineteenth-century Lagos, rebuilding its past as a series of encounters: between men and women, between past and present, between enslaved and free, between living and dead, and finally between land and lagoon. In Imagine Lagos, Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi argues that the invention, destruction, and reinvention of spatial markers in Lagos—the streets, markets, roads, squares, palaces, and lagoons where these encounters occurred—was crucial to negotiations over identity, power, and freedom. Research for this book combines oral and archival sources from three countries with the experience of three summers of walking the streets of Lagos. Contrary to historical interpretations that render the physical city as a blank, featureless space in desperate need of constant repair, this book offers a variety of visual and textual narratives to push readers to imagine the old city. Throughout Imagine Lagos, historical maps join other texts—including colonial correspondence and reports, missionary letters, oríkì (Yoruba praise poetry), and newspaper articles—to create a complex collage of urban life in Lagos. Streets emerge as sites of historical memories, and Adelusi-Adeluyi’s maps of the mid-nineteenth-century city reveal and catalog layers of change. A focus on the city as a whole—as both a physical and social landscape—brings us closer than ever to understanding the lives of Lagosians between 1845 and 1872. In old Lagos, the streets keep their histories. The story maps and full-resolution maps for this book are available at https://newmapsoldlagos.com.

[more]

Imaging the City

Art, Creative Practices and Media Speculations

Edited by Steve Hawley, Edward Clift, and Kevin O'Brien

Intellect Books, 2016

Imaging the City brings together the work of designers, artists, dancers, and media specialists who cross the borders of design and artistic practices to investigate how we perceive the city; how we imagine it; how we experience it; and how we might better design it. Breaking disciplinary boundaries, editors Steve Hawley, Edward Clift, and Kevin O’Brien provocatively open up the field of urban analysis and thought to the perspectives of creative professionals from non-urban disciplines. With a cast of contributors from across the globe, Imaging the City offers international insight for engaging with—and forecasting the future for—our cities.

[more]

Imagining the Penitentiary

Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England

John Bender

University of Chicago Press, 1987

This brilliant and insightful contribution to cultural studies investigates the role of literature—particularly the novel—and visual arts in the development of institutions. Arguing the attitudes expressed in narrative literature and art between 1719 and 1779 helped bring about the change from traditional prisons to penitentiaries, John Bender offers studies of Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, The Beggar's Opera, Hogarth's Progresses, Jonathan Wild, and Amelia as well as illustrations from prison literature, art, and architecture in support of his thesis.

[more]

Imagining the Turkish House

Collective Visions of Home

By Carel Bertram

University of Texas Press, 2008

"Houses can become poetic expressions of longing for a lost past, voices of a lived present, and dreams of an ideal future." Carel Bertram discovered this truth when she went to Turkey in the 1990s and began asking people about their memories of "the Turkish house." The fondness and nostalgia with which people recalled the distinctive wooden houses that were once ubiquitous throughout the Ottoman Empire made her realize that "the Turkish house" carries rich symbolic meaning. In this delightfully readable book, Bertram considers representations of the Turkish house in literature, art, and architecture to understand why the idea of the house has become such a potent signifier of Turkish identity.

Bertram's exploration of the Turkish house shows how this feature of Ottoman culture took on symbolic meaning in the Turkish imagination as Turkey became more Westernized and secular in the early decades of the twentieth century. She shows how artists, writers, and architects all drew on the memory of the Turkish house as a space where changing notions of spirituality, modernity, and identity—as well as the social roles of women and the family—could be approached, contested, revised, or embraced during this period of tumultuous change.

[more]

Imperium and Cosmos

Augustus and the Northern Campus Martius

Paul Rehak; Edited by John G. Younger

University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

Caesar Augustus promoted a modest image of himself as the first among equals (princeps), a characterization that was as popular with the ancient Romans as it is with many scholars today. Paul Rehak argues against this impression of humility and suggests that, like the monarchs of the Hellenistic age, Augustus sought immortality—an eternal glory gained through deliberate planning for his niche in history while flexing his existing power. Imperium and Cosmos focuses on Augustus’s Mausoleum and Ustrinum (site of his cremation), the Horologium-Solarium (a colossal sundial), and the Ara Pacis (Altar to Augustan Peace), all of which transformed the northern Campus Martius into a tribute to his major achievements in life and a vast memorial for his deification after death.

Rehak closely examines the artistic imagery on these monuments, providing numerous illustrations, tables, and charts. In an analysis firmly contextualized by a thorough discussion of the earlier models and motifs that inspired these Augustan monuments, Rehak shows how the princeps used these on such an unprecedented scale as to truly elevate himself above the common citizen.

[more]

Improbable Libraries

A Visual Journey to the World's Most Unusual Libraries

Alex Johnson

University of Chicago Press, 2015

How do you use your local library? Does it arrive at your door on the back of an elephant? Can it float down the river to you? Or does it occupy a phone booth by the side of the road?

Public libraries are a cornerstone of modern civilization, yet like the books in them, libraries face an uncertain future in an increasingly digital world. Undaunted, librarians around the globe are thinking up astonishing ways of reaching those in reading need, whether by bike in Chicago, boat in Laos, or donkey in Colombia. Improbable Libraries showcases a wide range of unforgettable, never-before-seen images and interviews with librarians who are overcoming geographic, economic, and political difficulties to bring the written word to an eager audience. Alex Johnson charts the changing face of library architecture, as temporary pop-ups rub shoulders with monumental brick-and-mortar structures, and many libraries expand their mission to function as true community centers. To take just one example: the open-air Garden Library in Tel Aviv, located in a park near the city’s main bus station, supports asylum seekers and migrant workers with a stock of 3,500 volumes in sixteen different languages.

Beautifully illustrated with two hundred and fifty color photographs, Improbable Libraries offers a breathtaking tour of the places that bring us together and provide education, entertainment, culture, and so much more. From the rise of the egalitarian Little Free Library movement to the growth in luxury hotel libraries, the communal book revolution means you’ll never be far from the perfect next read.

[more]

In Julia's Kitchen

Practical and Convivial Kitchen Design Inspired by Julia Child

Pamela Heyne and Jim Scherer

University Press of New England, 2016

“Most architects I know don’t know anything about cooking, and their designs are not practical for cooks!” Julia Child wrote to architect Pamela Heyne. Indeed, our contemporary kitchens are showplaces with islands, hidden appliances, and cold stone surfaces. They resemble laboratories more than the heart of the home, and they are neither cook friendly nor family friendly. American culinary icon Julia Child embraced the significance of the family meal and was devoted to sharing delicious food with friends and family at the comfortable dining table in her kitchen, a place where conversation was as important as cuisine. Pamela Heyne and Julia’s long-time food photographer Jim Scherer collaborate to share Julia’s kitchen design and lifestyle concepts in this book, which examines the kitchens in her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home; at la Pitchoune, the Childs’ French vacation retreat; and in her television studio. The authors reveal which materials, layouts, and equipment Julia preferred and why, providing practical advice interspersed with Julia’s inimitable, wry humor. They bring Julia’s wisdom into the contemporary kitchen, exploring current trends, including modern green sensibilities, and varied styles of kitchens, featuring architectural designs by Heyne, Jacques Pepin’s kitchen, a renovation Julia Child consulted on for PBS’s This Old House, several celebrity home kitchens, and more.

[more]

In the Land of the Patriarchs

Design and Contestation in West Bank Settlements

Noam Shoked

University of Texas Press, 2023

2024 On The Brinck Book Award and Lecture Series, University of New Mexico
2024 PROSE Award, Architecture–Urban Planning, Association of American Publishers

An on-the-ground account of the design and evolution of West Bank settlements, showing how one of the world’s most contested landscapes was produced by unexpected conflicts and collaborations among widely divergent actors.

Since capturing the West Bank in 1967, Israel has overseen the construction of scores of settlements across the territory’s rocky hilltops. The settlements are part of a fierce political conflict. But they are not just hotly contested political ventures. They are also something more everyday: residential architectural projects.

In the Land of the Patriarchs is an on-the-ground account of the design and evolution of West Bank settlements. Noam Shoked shows how settlements have been shaped not only by the decisions of military generals, high-profile politicians, and prominent architects but also by a wide range of actors, including real estate developers, environmental consultants, amateur archeologists, and Israelis who feel unserved by the country’s housing system. The patterns of design and construction they have inspired reflect competing worldviews and aesthetic visions, as well as everyday practices not typically associated with the politics of the Israeli occupation. Revealing the pragmatic choices and contingent circumstances that drive what appears to be a deliberately ideological landscape, Shoked demonstrates how unpredictable the transformation of political passion into brick and mortar can be.

[more]

In The Scheme Of Things

Alternative Thinking on the Practice of Architecture

Thomas R. Fisher Fisher

University of Minnesota Press, 2006

One of the field’s most innovative thinkers reconsiders the purpose and practice of architecture. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, architecture is in a state of crisis. Numbed by an ugly and shoddily constructed built environment and outraged by the cost of high-profile design projects, the public has become disinterested in and contemptuous of architecture as both a profession and an art. At the same time, some of our most creative designers have isolated themselves from the tastes and needs of mainstream society, reflecting a similar malaise found in design and architecture schools around the country. In this troubling climate, Thomas R. Fisher—who challenged architects as editorial director of Progressive Architecture, becoming recognized as one of the field’s most original thinkers—contends that the purpose and prospects of architectural practice must be reconsidered and reenergized. In the Scheme of Things looks at architecture’s need to respond creatively and meaningfully to the extraordinary changes affecting the profession now, changes that include the global economy, the advent of computer-aided design, and the growing disconnection between design schools, architectural practice, and the public.

In each of the twelve essays that comprise this timely volume, Fisher addresses issues of vital concern to architects and students, offering hard-hitting criticism and proposing innovative and practical ideas for reform at the level of both the individual practitioner and the profession as a whole. Through his thoughtful and nuanced consideration of architecture’s ideological foundations and its relationship to ecology, politics, and technology, as well as his subtle understanding of the architect’s interior life, Fisher challenges the demoralized design community to recapture its historical role as steward and visionary of the public realm.

Thomas R. Fisher is dean of the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota and coeditor of Architectural Research Quarterly. His essays have appeared in Design Quarterly, Architectural Record, and other leading journals.

[more]

Inclusive Transportation

A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities

Veronica O. Davis

Island Press, 2023

Transportation planners, engineers, and policymakers in the US face the monumental task of righting the wrongs of their predecessors while charting the course for the next generation. This task requires empathy while pushing against forces in the industry that are resistant to change. How do you change a system that was never designed to be equitable? How do you change a system that continues to divide communities and cede to the automobile?

In Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities, transportation expert Veronica O. Davis shines a light on the inequitable and often destructive practice of transportation planning and engineering. She calls for new thinking and more diverse leadership to create transportation networks that connect people to jobs, education, opportunities, and to each other.

Inclusive Transportation is a vision for change and a new era of transportation planning. Davis explains why centering people in transportation decisions requires a great shift in how transportation planners and engineers are trained, how they communicate, the kind of data they collect, and how they work as professional teams. She examines what “equity” means for a transportation project, which is central to changing how we approach and solve problems to create something safer, better, and more useful for all people.

Davis aims to disrupt the status quo of the transportation industry. She urges transportation professionals to reflect on past injustices and elevate current practice to do the hard work that results in more than an idea and a catchphrase.

Inclusive Transportation is a call to action and a practical approach to reconnecting and shaping communities based on principles of justice and equity.

[more]

The Incredible Scream Machine

A History of the Roller Coaster

Robert Cartmell

University of Wisconsin Press, 1987

In 1984 America celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the first successful roller coaster device: La Marcus A. Thompson’s switchback railway, erected at Coney Island. Robert Cartmell examines every phase of roller coaster history, from the use of the roller coaster by Albert Einstein to demonstrate his theory of physics, to John Allen’s use of psychology in designing one.

[more]

Independent for Life

Homes and Neighborhoods for an Aging America

Edited by Henry Cisneros, Margaret Dyer-Chamberlain, and Jane Hickie

University of Texas Press, 2012

Do you want to age independently in your own home and neighborhood? Staying home, aging in place, is most people's preference, but most American housing and communities are not adapted to the needs of older people. And with the fastest population growth among people over 65, finding solutions for successful aging is important not only for individual families, but for our whole society. In Independent for Life, former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros and a team of experts on aging, architecture, construction, health, finance, and politics assess the current state of housing and present new possibilities that realistically address the interrelated issues of housing, communities, services, and financial concerns.

Independent for Life covers a wide range of smart solutions, including remodeling current housing and building new homes for accessibility and safety, retrofitting existing neighborhoods to connect needed services and amenities, and planning new communities that work well for people of all ages. Case studies show how the proposals can be implemented. The authors offer action plans for working with policy makers at local, state, and national levels to address the larger issues of aging in place, including family financial security, real estate markets, and the limitations of public support. Lists of essential resources, including a detailed "to do" list of aging in place priorities and an individual home assessment, complete the volume.

[more]

Inquiry into the Picturesque

Sidney K. Robinson

University of Chicago Press, 1991

The aesthetic mode of the picturesque has undergone so many transformations since its initial discussion in eighteenth-century England that it is hard to say just what it is. In these probing essays, Sidney K. Robinson re-examines the picturesque in its late eighteenth-century phase.

[more]

Inside an Ancient Assyrian Palace

Looking at Austen Henry Layard's Reconstruction

Ada Cohen and Steven E. Kangas

University Press of New England, 2016

One of the best-known images of the ancient Near East is an intriguing nineteenth-century color lithograph reconstructing the throne room of an Assyrian palace. Executed shortly after the archaeological rediscovery of Assyria, a land theretofore known only from the Bible, it was published by the most famous among early excavators of Assyrian ruins, Austen Henry Layard. Over time and despite criticisms, the picture has shaped the understanding and reception of ancient Mesopotamian architecture and architectural decoration. Inside an Ancient Assyrian Palace studies this influential image in depth, both at the time of its creation in London in the eventful year 1848 and in terms of its afterlife. A hidden inscription reveals unsuspected contributions by the renowned architect-designer Owen Jones and his colleague the architect-Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi. Also unexpected is the involvement of an enigmatic German artist who later emigrated to America and whose previous career in Europe had been lost to scholarship. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of art history and the ancient Near East. It will also be of relevance to museum visitors and others interested in the ancient world in general, in the art of the nineteenth century, and in design and historical reconstruction.

[more]

Integrated Landscaping

Following Nature’s Lead

Lauren Chase-Rowell

University of New Hampshire Press, 2012

Most landscape manuals describe a linear sequence of processes: design, plant selection, installation, and ongoing maintenance. Integrated Landscaping is different. It uses natural ecosystems as models, taking a nonlinear, holistic approach that addresses these processes simultaneously. Integrated Landscaping treats each site as a system of plant and animal communities, considering their interrelationships with each other and their environment.

Integrated Landscaping: Following Nature's Lead is a valuable resource for anyone concerned with helping to shape the landscape we all share. When we see ourselves as part of the whole, we can see that what we do in places where we live, work, and play has a ripple effect far beyond the space each of us calls home.

[more]

Interlacing Words and Things

Bridging the Nature–Culture Opposition in Gardens and Landscape

Stephen Bann

Harvard University Press, 2012

Interlacing Words and Things: Bridging the Nature–Culture Opposition in Gardens and Landscape examines the various ways in which the natural world has been transformed through the creative use of language. The nine contributors do not assume that there is an opposition between nature and culture, but rather emphasize that forms of language are embedded in our understanding and appreciation of the natural environment. Their illustrated essays consider the relationship between language and the natural world, as it has been mediated in different cultures and at different periods by broad notions such as landscape and the garden. Complementing the richness of the examples covered in the volume is the message that writing must still be integrally involved in the creative remaking of the natural world.

[more]

Interpreting Environments

Tradition, Deconstruction, Hermeneutics

By Robert Mugerauer

University of Texas Press, 1995

In this pioneering book, Robert Mugerauer seeks to make deconstruction and hermeneutics accessible to people in the environmental disciplines, including architecture, planning, urban studies, environmental studies, and cultural geography.

Mugerauer demonstrates each methodology through a case study. The first study uses the traditional approach to recover the meaning of Jung's and Wittgenstein's houses by analyzing their historical, intentional contexts. The second case study utilizes deconstruction to explore Egyptian, French neoclassical, and postmodern attempts to use pyramids to constitute a sense of lasting presence. And the third case study employs hermeneutics to reveal how the American understanding of the natural landscape has evolved from religious to secular to ecological since the nineteenth century.

[more]

Interpreting Kigali, Rwanda

Architectural Inquiries and Prospects for a Developing African City

Korydon H. Smith

University of Arkansas Press, 2018

Rwanda, less than a generation removed from the 1994 Genocide, is experiencing a period of economic ascent and population growth. Its capital city, Kigali, is expected to triple in size within a generation, and positioned to become a premiere hub of commerce in central and eastern Africa. Amidst this optimism, however, is limited land and material resources. Food security is in tension with environmental concerns, and government aspirations are often in friction with daily, individual struggles for subsistence.

Interpreting Kigali, Rwanda explores the pressing challenges and opportunities to be found in planning, designing, and constructing a healthy, equitable, and sustainable city. Asking “what is an authentic-yet-modern, prosperous-yet-feasible African city, Rwandan city?” Smith, Berlanda, and colleagues conducted research on Rwandan activities of daily living and how these routines are connected to space-making practices and the Kinyarwanda terms that describe them.

Through a culturally informed view of urban and rural lifestyles and spaces, Interpreting Kigali, Rwanda presents principles and proposals for neighborhood development in the challenging context of Kigali’s informal settlements. With one billion people living in informal settlements worldwide, a number expected to double by 2030, the lessons learned in Rwanda provide a complex, fascinating, and urgent study for scholars and practitioners across disciplines and around the world.

[more]

Interpreting Urban Spaces in Italian Cultures

Andrea Scapolo

Amsterdam University Press, 2023

Made up of both material and symbolic elements, the urban space is always dynamic and transitional; it brings together or separates the past and the present, the public and the private, the center and the periphery. The present volume focuses on the interaction between the social processes and spatial forms that shape the identity of Italian cities. Using both canonical and less well-known texts along with cultural artifacts, the essays in the volume deprovincialize the Italian city, interpreting the material and symbolic practices that have made it into a unique entity whose enduring influence extends far outside Italy.

[more]

Into the Nest

Futures of Affordable Housing

Edited by the University of Cincinnati School of Architecture and Interior Design

University of Cincinnati Press, 2019

Access to affordable housing is one of the most pressing issues facing cities worldwide, as populations grow and real estate prices rise. But the question of what we mean by the term “affordable housing” is far from clear. Designers shy away from the concept, intimidated by the possibility of cheap materials or fast-paced designs, even as potential homeowners are drawn to the promise of elegance and beauty within a tight budget. Into the Nest brings together seventeen architecture students at the University of Cincinnati/DAAP to collaborate with NEWST, a not-for-profit developer that wanted to address the problem of affordable housing in the neighborhood of Northside Cincinnati. Together, they matched up demographic research combined with multiple design iterations to help move toward a definition of affordable housing that works for everyone and points a way toward future design and development.

[more]

An Introduction to Coastal Zone Management

Second Edition

Timothy Beatley, David J. Brower, and Anna K. Schwab

Island Press, 2002

An Introduction to Coastal Zone Management, Second Edition offers a comprehensive overview of coastal planning and management issues for students and professionals in the field. Since publication of the first edition in 1994, population growth and increasing development pressures on our coasts have made the need for forward-looking, creative, and sustainable visions for the future even greater. This completely updated and revised edition includes:

significantly updated data and statistics including discussions of population and growth trends, federal and state coastal expenditures, disaster assistance expenditures, and damage levels from hurricanes and coastal storms
updated legislative and programmatic material, including the Stafford Act and mitigation assistance programs, and changes in the Coastal Zone Management Act
expanded coverage of physical and biological attributes and conditions of the coastal zone
expanded and updated discussions of innovative local coastal management
new chapters on creative coastal design and development and lessons from coastal programs in other countries

An Introduction to Coastal Zone Management, Second Edition is the only available book that addresses the serious coastal trends and pressures in the U.S., assesses the current policy and planning framework, and puts forth a compelling vision for future management and sustainable coastal planning. It is an important resource for undergraduate and graduate students of coastal planning as well as for local and state officials, residents of coastal communities, environmental advocates, developers, and others concerned with coastal issues.

[more]

The Invention of the Colonial Americas

Data, Architecture, and the Archive of the Indies, 1781–1844

Byron Ellsworth Hamann

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2022

The story of Seville’s Archive of the Indies reveals how current views of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are based on radical historical revisionism in Spain in the late 1700s.

The Invention of the Colonial Americas is an architectural history and media-archaeological study of changing theories and practices of government archives in Enlightenment Spain. It centers on an archive created in Seville for storing Spain’s pre-1760 documents about the New World. To fill this new archive, older archives elsewhere in Spain—spaces in which records about American history were stored together with records about European history—were dismembered. The Archive of the Indies thus constructed a scholarly apparatus that made it easier to imagine the history of the Americas as independent from the history of Europe, and vice versa.

In this meticulously researched book, Byron Ellsworth Hamann explores how building layouts, systems of storage, and the arrangement of documents were designed to foster the creation of new knowledge. He draws on a rich collection of eighteenth-century architectural plans, descriptions, models, document catalogs, and surviving buildings to present a literal, materially precise account of archives as assemblages of spaces, humans, and data—assemblages that were understood circa 1800 as capable of actively generating scholarly innovation.

[more]

The Iowa Catalog

Historic American Buildings Survey

Wesley I. Shank

University of Iowa Press, 1979

Preservation enthusiasts, architectural historians, and anyone caught up in chronicles of life in early Iowa will find much to treasure in Wesley Shank's catalog of the state's historical buildings. Heavily illustrated and clearly indexed, it offers a concise essay on development of the building arts from the first log cabins through the Prairie School structures of Frank Lloyd Wright and his followers. Well over 100 private and public buildings are indexed by city and structure. Emeritus professor Wesley Shank of Iowa State University's Department of Architecture highlights design and construction features, historical associations, and details of ownership, using measured drawings, photographs, and written documentation from the Historic American Buildings Survey.

[more]

Iowa's Historic Architects

A Biographical Dictionary

Wesley I. Shank

University of Iowa Press, 1998

Who were Iowa's historic architects? In this extensively researched dictionary, Wesley Shank answers that question by providing biographies of more than two hundred architects who practiced in Iowa before 1950 and who maintained an office in the state for at least part of their careers.

Among the prominent Iowa architects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a remarkable few who had little training in architecture; their natural talents and their capacity for hard work made up for their lack of experience. Beginning in 1927, however, an Iowa architect had to meet state requirements of experience and training in order to practice. Shank includes an introduction to the history of the profession in Iowa: the development of professional education and training, the founding of professional societies and their roles, the different personalities and talents of the architects, the demography of architectural offices in the state, and the relative importance of Iowa architects both statewide and nationally.

For each architect Shank has gathered as much personal and professional information as possible: dates and places of birth and death; parents, spouses, and children; education and professional training; personality and competency; when and where they practiced, with whom, and when their partnerships began and ended; what roles they played in their communities and their profession; and the representative buildings they designed.

As a reflection of both national and state history, Iowa's Historic Architects will be valuable to professionals in the fields of architecture, American history, and historic preservation as well as to general readers.

[more]

Iron and Steel

A Driving Guide to the Birmingham Area Industrial Heritage

James R. Bennett and Karen R. Utz

University of Alabama Press, 2010

This guidebook of historic iron-production sites is designed to give the reader a factual and illuminating look at the people and events that shaped Birmingham into one of America’s leading steel centers. Iron & Steel is heavily illustrated with both color and historical black-and-white photographs. It can be used while visiting parks or read as a coherent volume before or after a visit.

The book contains chapters devoted to the larger preserved sites open to the public, such as Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark and Tannehill Ironworks Historical State Park. It also highlights lesser-known, yet still accessible, sites such as Blocton Coke Ovens Park. The work provides easy-to-follow maps for every site as well as driving directions to the more remote locations, giving visitors easy access to all the notable iron and steel sites in Jefferson, Shelby, Tuscaloosa, and Bibb counties. Each chapter also includes a variety of historical information, with accompanying photographs, in order to present the reader with a detailed and comprehensive account of the Birmingham Iron and Steel District.

Featured sites include: Tannehill Ironworks Historical State Park; Shelby Ironworks Park; Billy Gould Coke Ovens Park; Brierfield Ironworks Historical State Park; Oxmoor Furnace Site; Irondale Furnace Park; Helena Rolling Mill Site; Red Mountain Park, Iron Ore Mines; Lewisburg Coke Ovens Park; Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark; Ruffner Mountain Nature Center; Blocton Coke Ovens Park; and Vulcan Park and Museum.

[more]

Isaiah Rogers

Architectural Practice in Antebellum America

James F. O'Gorman

University of Massachusetts Press, 2015

When Isaiah Rogers died in 1869, the Cincinnati Daily Times noted that “in his profession he was, perhaps, better known than any other person in the country.” Yet until now there has been no study that fully examines his remarkable, influential, and instructive career. Based largely on Rogers's own diary, this book tells his story and adds much to our understanding of architectural practice in the United States before the Civil War.

In 1944 the distinguished historian Talbot Hamlin wrote of New York's Merchant Exchange (1836–42) that the building had “been so grandly conceived, so simply and directly planned, and so beautifully detailed . . . [that] the whole was welded inextricably into one powerful organic conception that shows Rogers as a great architect in the fullest sense of the word.” Rogers's Tremont House in Boston has been called the world's first modern hotel; it spawned many progeny, from his first Astor House in New York to his Burnet House in Cincinnati and beyond.

Rogers designed buildings from Maine to Georgia and from Boston to Chicago to New Orleans, supervising their construction while traveling widely to procure materials and workmen for the job. He finished his career as Architect of the Treasury Department during the Civil War. In this richly illustrated volume, James F. O'Gorman offers a deft portrait of an energetic practitioner at a key time in architectural history, the period before the founding of the American Institute of Architects in 1857.

[more]

Islamic Architecture on the Move

Motion and Modernity

Edited by Christiane Gruber

Intellect Books, 2016

Even a casual observer can spy traces of Islamic architecture and design on buildings all over the world, a reminder that artistic traditions and visual culture have never been limited to their region or country of origin, but rather are highly diffusible.
This book brings together scholars from architectural studies, design, art history, and other fields to challenge and expand concepts of Islamic architecture. Ranging from eighteenth-century Ottoman tents to manifestations of Islamic motifs in 1960s Hawaii, this richly illustrated volume raises key questions about Islamic architecture, and, more broadly, about how we can rethink our understanding of material, artistic, and cultural mobility in the modern world.

[more]

Israel as a Modern Architectural Experimental Lab, 1948-1978

Edited by Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler and Anat Geva

Intellect Books, 2019

This collection discusses the innovative and experimental architecture of Israel during its first three decades following the nation’s establishment in 1948. Written by leading researchers, the volume highlights new perspectives on the topic, discussing the inception, modernization, and habitation of historic and lesser-researched areas alike in its interrogation. Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler and Anat Geva show how Israeli nation building, in its cultural, political, and historical contexts, constituted an exceptional experiment in modern architecture. Examples include modern experiments in mass housing design; public architecture such as exhibition spaces, youth villages, and synagogues; a necessary consideration of climate in modern architectural experiments; and the exportation of Israeli modern architecture to other countries.

[more]

Istanbul

Living with Difference in a Global City

Fisher-Onar, Nora

Rutgers University Press, 2018

Istanbul explores how to live with difference through the prism of an age-old, cutting-edge city whose people have long confronted the challenge of sharing space with the Other. Located at the intersection of trade networks connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa, Istanbul is western and eastern, northern and southern, religious and secular. Heir of ancient empires, Istanbul is the premier city of a proud nation-state even as it has become a global city of multinational corporations, NGOs, and capital flows.

Rather than exploring Istanbul as one place at one time, the contributors to this volume focus on the city’s experience of migration and globalization over the last two centuries. Asking what Istanbul teaches us about living with people whose hopes jostle with one’s own, contributors explore the rise, collapse, and fragile rebirth of cosmopolitan conviviality in a once and future world city. The result is a cogent, interdisciplinary exchange about an urban space that is microcosmic of dilemmas of diversity across time and space.

[more]

It's All Done Gone

Arkansas Photographs from the Farm Security Administration Collection, 1935-1943

Patsy Watkins

University of Arkansas Press, 2018

In 1935 a fledging government agency embarked on a project to photograph Americans hit hardest by the Great Depression. Over the next eight years, the photographers of the Farm Security Administration captured nearly a quarter-million images of tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the South, migrant workers in California, and laborers in northern industries and urban slums.

Of the roughly one thousand FSA photographs taken in Arkansas, approximately two hundred have been selected for inclusion in this volume. Portraying workers picking cotton for five cents an hour, families evicted from homes for their connection with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, and the effects of flood and drought that cruelly exacerbated the impact of economic disaster, these remarkable black-and-white images from Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, and other acclaimed photographers illustrate the extreme hardships that so many Arkansans endured throughout this era.

These powerful photographs continue to resonate, providing a glimpse of life in Arkansas that will captivate readers as they connect to a shared past.

[more]