A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY40 start with N start with N
From global politics to action movies to the daily commute, Gordon shows how the airport has changed our sense of time, distance, and style, and ultimately the way cities are built and business is done. He introduces the people who shaped and were shaped by this place of sudden transition: pilots like Charles Lindbergh, architects like Le Corbusier, and political figures like Fiorello LaGuardia and Adolf Hitler. Naked Airport is a profoundly original history of a long-neglected yet central component of modern life.
“This charming history documents why airports have always been such intriguing places. Gordon wittily deconstructs air terminal architecture. . . . Here is a book with more than enough quirky details to last a long layover.”—People
“[A] splendid cultural history.”—Atlantic Monthly
“Gordon, an architecture and design critic, tells his story well, bringing to life some of the main characters and highlighting some of the important issues concerning urbanism and airports.”—Michael Roth, San Francisco Chronicle
“Gordon provides a truly compelling account of how airports had over the course of three-quarters of a century become the locus of not only modern dreams but postmodern nightmares as well. Don’t leave home without it.”—Terence Riley, director of the Miami Art Museum
An analysis of the ways film and media create topographies of cities, architecture, and metropolitan experiences.
Narrating the City examines how film and related visual media offer insights and commentary on the city as both a constructed object and a lived social experience. It brings together filmmakers, architects, digital artists, designers, and media journalists who critically read, reinterpret, and create narratives of the city. Analyzing a variety of international films and placing them in dialogue with video art, photographic narratives, and emerging digital image-based technologies, the authors explore the expanding range of “mediated” narratives of contemporary architecture and urban culture from both a media and a sociological standpoint.
The authors explore how moving-image narratives can create cinematic topographies, presenting familiar cities and modes of seeing in unfamiliar ways. The authors then turn to the new age of digital image making and consumption, revealing new techniques of representation, mediation, and augmentation of sensorial reality for city dwellers. The book’s emphasis on narrative also offers insights into critical societal issues including cultural identity, diversity, memory, and spatial politics, as they are both informed by and represented in various media.
Nationalism in Architecture of Modern Iran is the first comprehensive book on modern architecture in Iran to be published in English. It addresses the relationship between nationalism and architecture in Iran and discusses the role Western architects played in the development of modern architecture in the country while introducing some of the most significant and recent projects in Iran. It investigates what it means to design a building that bears an Iranian or Islamic-Iranian identity and how to construct a conceptual platform for critically assessing representations of national identity in contemporary architecture. This book will directly help practicing architects and policymakers of the built environment, especially in Iran, as well as give a comprehensive understanding of the modern history of architecture in Iran to art historians and a broader audience. It introduces some of the most significant and recent projects in Iran for the first time.
In a rapidly changing social, economic, and political landscape at the frontiers of an expansionist United States, the log cabin, a northern European house form, proved equally adaptable to the needs of settlers, slaves, and Native peoples. Each found ways to make log cabins their own. Beneath these deceptively simple hewn facades, indigenous principles of correctness guided southeastern Indians’ uses of interior cabin space, creations of raised clay hearths, and maintenance of pits that gave occupants access to the regenerative properties of the Beneath World. The chapters in this volume make important contributions toward a better understanding of houses and households in the Native Southeast by marshalling new data, methods, and theory to address an important but understudied phenomenon.
The first half of the 1990s saw the largest and most costly floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes in the history of the United States. While natural hazards cannot be prevented, their human impacts can be greatly reduced through advance action that mitigates risks and reduces vulnerability.
Natural Hazard Mitigation describes and analyzes the way that hazard mitigation has been carried out in the U.S. under our national disaster law, the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act. It is the first systematic study of the complete intergovernmental system for natural hazard mitigation, including its major elements and the linkages among them.
The book:
- analyzes the effectiveness of the Stafford Act and investigates what is contained in state hazard mitigation plans required by the Act
- studies how federal hazard mitigation funds have been spent
- explores what goes into decision making following a major disaster
- looks at how government mitigation officials rate the effectiveness of the mitigation system
- suggests changes that could help solve the widely recognized problems with current methods of coping with disasters
Damages from natural disasters are reaching catastrophic proportions, making natural hazard mitigation an important national policy issue. The findings and recommendations presented in this volume should help to strengthen natural hazard mitigation policy and practice, thereby serving to reduce drains on the federal treasury that pay for preventable recovery and relief costs, and to spare residents in areas hit by natural disasters undue suffering and expense. It is an informative and eye-opening study for planners, policymakers, students of planning and geography, and professionals working for government agencies that deal with natural hazards.
The Woods Hole Research Center is an international leader in identifying the causes and consequences of environmental change. When the WHRC needed a new administration building, its scientists and staff decided that the building should utilize “state-of-the-shelf” green building techniques and materials. However, the new office had to conform with the laws and building codes of the time, and with materials that were then available—no matter how frustrating these requirements were to the resident scientists and contractors.
The author, George M. Woodwell, founder of the WHRC, was intimately involved in the design and construction of the Gilman Ordway Campus, which was completed in 2003 in collaboration with McDonough + Partners. He details the challenges they faced, some of which are familiar to everyone who tries to “build green”: the vagaries of building codes, the whims of inspectors, the obstreperousness of subcontractors, the search for appropriate materials, and the surprises involved in turning an old house into a modern office building.
Woodwell puts the building in a larger context, not only within the work of the Center and the tradition of Woods Hole, but in the global need to minimize our carbon emissions and overall environmental impact. Building a world that works requires rethinking how we design, reuse, and live in the built environment while preserving the functional integrity of the landscape.
Washburn draws heavily on his experience within the New York City planning system while highlighting forward-thinking developments in cities around the world. He grounds his book in the realities of political and financial challenges that hasten or hinder even the most beautiful designs. By discussing projects like the High Line and the Harlem Children's Zone as well as examples from Seoul to Singapore, he explores the nuances of the urban design process while emphasizing the importance of individuals with the drive to make a difference in their city.
Throughout the book, Washburn shows how a well-designed city can be the most efficient, equitable, safe, and enriching place on earth. The Nature of Urban Design provides a framework for participating in the process of change and will inspire and inform anyone who cares about cities.
An accomplished Scottish poet, writer, artist, and gardener, Finlay infused his garden designs with his distinct aesthetic philosophy and poetic sensibility. John Dixon Hunt situates his analysis of Finlay’s gardens in the context of that broader philosophy and poetic work, drawing on Finlay’s writings about the art and practice of garden design. From the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart to the University of California at San Diego campus, the book documents how Finlay built an oeuvre of international renown—ultimately arguing that Finlay’s innovations are best understood in the context of the long tradition of European gardens.
Nature-Friendly Communities presents an authoritative and readable overview of the successful approaches to protecting biodiversity and natural areas in America's growing communities. Addressing the crucial issues of sprawl, open space, and political realities, Chris Duerksen and Cara Snyder explain the most effective steps that communities can take to protect nature.
The book: documents the broad range of benefits, including economic impacts, resulting from comprehensive biodiversity protection efforts; identifies and disseminates information on replicable best community practices; establishes benchmarks for evaluating community biodiversity protection programs.
Nine comprehensive case studies of communities explain how nature protection programs have been implemented. From Austin and Baltimore to Tucson and Minneapolis, the authors explore how different cities and counties have taken bold steps to successfully protect natural areas. Examining program structure and administration, land acquisition strategies and sources of funding, habitat restoration programs, social impacts, education efforts, and overall results, these case studies lay out perfect examples that other communities can easily follow. Among the case study sites are Sanibel Island, Florida; Austin, Texas; Baltimore County, Maryland; Charlotte Harbor, Florida; and Teton County, Wyoming.
Nature-Friendly Communities offers a useful overview of the increasing number of communities that have established successful nature protection programs and the significant benefits those programs provide. It is an important new work for public officials, community activists, and anyone concerned with understanding or implementing local or regional biodiversity protection efforts.
Stephen C. Jett and Virginia E. Spencer have devoted years of fieldwork to studying the origin, evolution, and construction of Navajo buildings: not only hogans, houses, and summer dwellings, but also numerous other structures related to activities such as food preparation, hunting, sweat-bathing, and funerary observation. In addition, they have defined the geographic distribution of dwelling forms to reveal both utilization of local resources and local differences in degree of acculturation.
Who was responsible for the crimes of the Nazis? Party leaders and members? Rank-and-file soldiers and bureaucrats? Ordinary Germans? This question looms over German disputes about the past like few others. It also looms over the art and architecture of postwar Germany in ways that have been surprisingly neglected. In The Nazi Perpetrator, Paul B. Jaskot fundamentally reevaluates pivotal developments in postwar German art and architecture against the backdrop of contentious contemporary debates over the Nazi past and the difficulty of determining who was or was not a Nazi perpetrator.
Like their fellow Germans, postwar artists and architects grappled with the Nazi past and the problem of defining the Nazi perpetrator—a problem that was thoroughly entangled with contemporary conservative politics and the explosive issue of former Nazis living in postwar Germany. Beginning with the formative connection between Nazi politics and art during the 1930s, The Nazi Perpetrator traces the dilemma of identifying the perpetrator across the entire postwar period. Jaskot examines key works and episodes from West Germany and, after 1989, reunified Germany, showing how the changing perception of the perpetrator deeply impacted art and architecture, even in cases where artworks and buildings seem to have no obvious relation to the Nazi past. The book also reinterprets important periods in the careers of such major figures as Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Daniel Libeskind.
Combining political history with a close analysis of specific works, The Nazi Perpetrator powerfully demonstrates that the ongoing influence of Nazi Germany after 1945 is much more central to understanding a wide range of modern German art and architecture than cultural historians have previously recognized.
To understand this landscape Jasper Rubin not only explores the built environment but also the major forces that have been at work in its redevelopment. While factors such as new transportation technology and economic restructuring have been essential to the process and character of the waterfront’s transformation, the impact of local, grassroots efforts by planners, activists, and boosters have been equally critical.
The first edition of A Negotiated Landscape won the 2012 prize for best book in planning history from the International Planning History Society. Much has changed in the five years since that edition was published. For this second edition, Rubin provides a new concluding chapter that updates the progress of planning on San Francisco’s waterfront and examines debates over the newest visions for its development.
This provocative collection of essays—a series of case studies in cultural ownership by scholars from a range of fields—explores issues of cultural heritage and intellectual property in a variety of contexts, from contests over tangible artifacts as well as more abstract forms of culture such as language and oral traditions to current studies of DNA and genes that combine nature and culture, and even new, nonproprietary models for the sharing of digital technologies. Each chapter sets the debate in its historical and disciplinary context and suggests how the approaches to these issues are changing or should change.
One of the most innovative aspects of the volume is the way each author recognizes the social dimensions of group ownership and demonstrates the need for negotiation and new models. The collection as a whole thus challenges the reader to reevaluate traditional ways of thinking about cultural ownership and to examine the broader social contexts within which negotiation over the ownership of culture is taking place.
In addition to Laetitia La Follette, contributors include David Bollier, Stephen Clingman, Susan DiGiacomo, Oriol Pi-Sunyer, Margaret Speas, Banu Subramaniam, Joe Watkins, and H. Martin Wobst.
Nevada’s Historic Buildings highlights ninety of these buildings, describing them in the context of the state’s history and the character of the people who created and used them. Here are reminders of mining boomtowns, historic ranches, transportation, the divorce and gaming industries, the New Deal, and the innovation of Las Vegas’s post-modern aesthetic. These buildings provide a cross-section of Nevada’s rich historic and cultural heritage and their survival offers everyone the experience of touching the past.
New Bodleian: The Making of the Weston Library tells the story of how the plans for the new Weston Library—as the New Bodleian is now known—were realized, describing in detail the architectural, academic, curatorial, and heritage considerations addressed, as well as the successful collaborations between clients and consultants. Among the updates introduced were enhanced public access, including new entrance spaces; redesigned reading rooms for the study of special collections; new teaching facilities; and state-of-the-art storage space for the library’s many treasures. With over one hundred color illustrations, the book sheds light on the challenges of meeting the needs of an internationally renowned, four-hundred-year-old institution in the twenty-first century.
The Italian architect, historian, and restorer Gustavo Giovannoni (1873–1947) was a key figure in the fields of architecture, urbanism, and conservation during the first half of the twentieth century. A traditionalist largely neglected by the proponents of modernist architecture following World War II, he remains little known internationally. His writings, however, until now unavailable in English, represent a significant step toward the full appreciation of the historic city and are directly relevant today to the protection of urban historic resources worldwide.
This abundantly illustrated critical anthology is a representative sample of Giovannoni’s seminal texts related to the appreciation, understanding, and planning of historic cities. The thirty readings, which appear with their original illustrations, are grouped into six parts organized around key concepts in Giovannoni’s conservation theory—urban building, respect for the setting or context, a thinning out of the urban fabric, conservation and restoration treatments, the grafting of the new upon the old, and reconstruction. Each part is preceded by an introduction, and each reading is prefaced by succinct remarks explaining the rationale for its selection and the principal matters covered. Six plate sections further illustrate the readings’ main concepts and themes.
Over the past three hundred years New England's landscape has been transformed. The forests were cleared; the land was farmed intensively through the mid-nineteenth century and then was allowed to reforest naturally as agriculture shifted west. Today, in many ways the region is more natural than at any time since the American Revolution. This fascinating natural history is essential background for anyone interested in New England's ecology, wildlife, or landscape.
In New England Forests through Time these historical and environmental lessons are told through the world-renowned dioramas in Harvard's Fisher Museum. These remarkable models have introduced New England's landscape to countless visitors and have appeared in many ecology, forestry, and natural history texts. This first book based on the dioramas conveys the phenomenal history of the land, the beauty of the models, and new insights into nature.
Combining Michael Warner’s concepts of publics and counterpublics with theories of space and sociological approaches to architecture, Stefan Maneval explores the concept of New Islamic Urbanism in Saudi Arabia, arguing that this architectural trend, which is characterized by an emphasis on privacy protection through high enclosures, gates, blinds, and tinted windows, constitutes for some an important element of piety. At the same time, it enables different conceptions of privacy, banned social practices, as well as the formation of publics and counterpublics.
Based on rich ethnographic data collected by the author, New Islamic Urbanism challenges normative assumptions on gender segregation in Muslim societies and provides a nuanced account of the meaning of publicness and privacy in Muslim contexts in general. It will be of particular interest to an academic readership in Middle East and Islamic studies, as well as in architecture, urban planning and anthropology.
In New Mobilities: Smart Planning for Emerging Transportation Technologies, transportation expert Todd Litman examines 12 emerging transportation modes and services that are likely to significantly affect our lives: bike- and carsharing, micro-mobilities, ridehailing and micro-transit, public transit innovations, telework, autonomous and electric vehicles, air taxis, mobility prioritization, and logistics management. These innovations allow people to scoot, ride, and fly like never before, but can also impose significant costs on users and communities. Planners need detailed information on their potential benefits and impacts to make informed choices.
Litman critically evaluates these new technologies and services and provides practical guidance for optimizing them. He systematically examines how each New Mobility is likely to affect travel activity (how and how much people travel); consumer costs and affordability; roadway infrastructure design and costs; parking demand; land use development patterns; public safety and health; energy and pollution emissions; and economic opportunity and fairness.
Public policies around New Mobilities can either help create heaven, a well-planned transportation system that uses new technologies intelligently, or hell, a poorly planned transportation system that is overwhelmed by conflicting and costly, unhealthy, and inequitable modes. His expert analysis will help planners, local policymakers, and concerned citizens to make informed choices about the New Mobility revolution.
Kruse and Sugrue here collect ten essays—augmented by their provocative introduction—that challenge our understanding of suburbia. Drawing from original research on suburbs across the country, the contributors recast important political and social issues in the context of suburbanization. Their essays reveal the role suburbs have played in the transformation of American liberalism and conservatism; the contentious politics of race, class, and ethnicity; and debates about the environment, land use, and taxation. The contributors move the history of African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and blue-collar workers from the margins to the mainstream of suburban history.
From this broad perspective, these innovative historians explore the way suburbs affect—and are affected by—central cities, competing suburbs, and entire regions. The results, they show, are far-reaching: the emergence of a suburban America has reshaped national politics, fostered new social movements, and remade the American landscape. The New Suburban History offers nothing less than a new American history—one that claims the nation cannot be fully understood without a history of American suburbs at its very center.
Transit-oriented development (TOD) seeks to maximize access to mass transit and nonmotorized transportation with centrally located rail or bus stations surrounded by relatively high-density commercial and residential development. New Urbanists and smart growth proponents have embraced the concept and interest in TOD is growing, both in the United States and around the world.
New Transit Town brings together leading experts in planning, transportation, and sustainable design—including Scott Bernstein, Peter Calthorpe, Jim Daisa, Sharon Feigon, Ellen Greenberg, David Hoyt, Dennis Leach, and Shelley Poticha—to examine the first generation of TOD projects and derive lessons for the next generation. It offers topic chapters that provide detailed discussion of key issues along with case studies that present an in-depth look at specific projects. Topics examined include:
- the history of projects and the appeal of this form of development
- a taxonomy of TOD projects appropriate for different contexts and scales
- the planning, policy and regulatory framework of "successful" projects
- obstacles to financing and strategies for overcoming those obstacles
- issues surrounding traffic and parking
- the roles of all the actors involved and the resources available to them
- performance measures that can be used to evaluate outcomes
Case Studies include Arlington, Virginia (Roslyn-Ballston corridor); Dallas (Mockingbird Station and Addison Circle); historic transit-oriented neighborhoods in Chicago; Atlanta (Lindbergh Center and BellSouth); San Jose (Ohlone-Chynoweth); and San Diego (Barrio Logan).
New Transit Town explores the key challenges to transit-oriented development, examines the lessons learned from the first generation of projects, and uses a systematic examination and analysis of a broad spectrum of projects to set standards for the next generation. It is a vital new source of information for anyone interested in urban and regional planning and development, including planners, developers, community groups, transit agency staff, and finance professionals.
According to architect Tay Kheng Soon, the time has come to change and build a new world. The feeling has impelled him to write this book, bringing together memoir and writings on identity, landscape and belonging, and on architecture and urbanism. Born in British-ruled Singapore, Soon was deeply engaged in the debates about building a new world that attended the end of colonialism. His focus, but far from his only concern, was Singapore's built environment—and its spiritual one—since the early 1960s. A New World in the Making is a must-read reflection on tropical Asia, on architecture and urbanism, and on looking ahead to the always urgent task of building a new world.
David Halle and Elisabeth Tiso offer a deep analysis of the transforming district in New York’s New Edge, and the result is a new understanding of how we perceive and interpret culture and the city in New York’s gallery district. From individual interviews with gallery owners to the behind-the-scenes politics of preservation initiatives and megaprojects, the book provides an in-depth account of the developments, obstacles, successes, and failures of the area and the factors that have contributed to them.
How can our complex, interdependent utilities support an urbanizing world, subject to carbon constraints and the impacts of climate change? How might these critical networks be made more efficient, less environmentally damaging, and more resilient? Such questions are at the heart of the approaches and initiatives explored in Next Generation Infrastructure. With a better understanding of the possible connections between different services, not only can inadvertent disruptions be reduced, but crosscutting benefits and lower costs will be possible. Next Generation Infrastructure highlights hopeful examples from around the world, ranging from the Mount Poso cogeneration plant in California to urban rainwater harvesting in Seoul, South Korea, to the multi-purpose Marina Barrage project in Singapore. Five bold organizing objectives are proposed that, in the hands of decision-makers and designers, will help bring about a future of multipurpose, low-carbon, resilient infrastructure that is tightly coordinated with natural and social systems.
In their conception and design, the innovative projects highlighted in Next Generation Infrastructure encourage us to envision infrastructure within a larger economic, environmental, and social context, and to share resources across systems, reducing costs and extending benefits. Through this systems approach to lifeline services, we can begin to move toward a more resilient future.
Written by Number 10’s first ever ‘Researcher in Residence,’ with unprecedented access to people and papers, No. 10: The Geography of Power at Downing Street sheds new light on unexplored aspects of Prime Ministers’ lives. Jack Brown tells the story of the intimately entwined relationships between the house and its post-war residents, telling how each occupant’s use and modification of the building reveals their own values and approaches to the office of Prime Minister. The book reveals how and why Prime Ministers have stamped their personalities and philosophies upon Number 10 and how the building has directly affected the ability of some Prime Ministers to perform the role. Both fascinating and extremely revealing, No. 10 offers an intimate account of British political power and the building at its core. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the nature and history of British politics.
No Communication with the Sea is a journey through this urbanizing Great Basin landscape. Here, the land fosters illusions of limitless space and resources, but its space and resources are severely limited; its people live clustered in cities but are often reluctant to embrace urbanity. These tensions led journalist and urban planner Tim Sullivan to explore the developing centers and edges of the Great Basin cities and the ways some are trying to build livable and sustainable urban environments.
In this highly readable book of creative nonfiction, Sullivan employs a variety of methods—including interviews, research, travelogues, and narrative—to survey the harsh landscape for clues to the ways cities can adapt to their geography, topography, ecology, hydrography, history, and culture. No Communication with the Sea embarks on a quest for a livable future for the heart of the interior West. In the process, it both unearths the past and ponders the present and future Great Basin cities.
This book looks at the buildings that have graced the campus of Northern Arizona University from its opening in 1898 to the present. The school began with a single building, Old Main, and it was joined by five other structures prior to World War I. In the following decades the campus remained relatively small, expanding to approximately twenty-five structures by the late 1950s. During the tenure of President J. Lawrence Walkup (1957–1979), the university effectively doubled in size, spreading southward and adding more than forty buildings, including an entire south campus academic center. Since 1979 the campus has witnessed the addition of more than thirty structures, most as infill within the existing campus layout.
Arranged chronologically, this extensively illustrated volume briefly describes the history of every building that has been a part of the university’s physical layout. The authors describe various structural aspects of each building and provide entertaining and informative anecdotes about events and people associated with the structures. By combing the university’s archives, Drickamer and Runge have turned up photographs of each building as it looked shortly after construction and at present, providing a fascinating visual time lapse.
With more than two hundred images of campus buildings, many of them never before published, Northern Arizona University: Buildings as History provides a wonderful pictorial chronicle of the campus that will interest architectural historians as well as all those who have called NAU home.
Published in Cooperation with the Lord & Schryver Conservancy
Lord & Schryver, the first landscape architecture firm founded and operated by women in the Pacific Northwest, designed more than two hundred gardens in Oregon and Washington, including residential, civic, and institutional landscapes. Elizabeth Lord and Edith Schryver met as young women and in 1929 established their highly successful firm in Salem; their work is acknowledged as one of the milestones in the history of garden design in the Northwest and beyond. Theirs is the only Oregon firm recognized in Pioneers of Landscape Architecture, compiled by the National Park Service. The Cultural Landscape Foundation describes them as “consummate professionals in the broadest sense, as they worked to raise the profile of landscape architects by involving an audience beyond their clients. Their work represented a transition from a formal symmetrical style of garden design to one which responded in a distinctive way to the unique features of Northwest climate, soil, topography, and plant material.”
Gaiety Hollow, their purpose-built Salem home, garden, and studio, is now owned by the Lord & Schryver Conservancy and is open to the public. The conservancy has lovingly restored the gardens at Gaiety Hollow according to Lord & Schryver’s original plans. They have also restored and now maintain the gardens at Deepwood, a former residence that is now a public park.
Students of landscape architecture, garden design, Pacific Northwest history, ornamental horticulture, and general readers who are interested in the contributions of women to once male-dominated professions will find inspiration in these pages.
Learn more about Elizabeth Lord and Edith Schryver at www.lordschryver.org
“These notes are about the process of design: the process of inventing things which display new physical order, organization, form, in response to function.” This book, opening with these words, presents an entirely new theory of the process of design.
In the first part of the book, Christopher Alexander discusses the process by which a form is adapted to the context of human needs and demands that has called it into being. He shows that such an adaptive process will be successful only if it proceeds piecemeal instead of all at once. It is for this reason that forms from traditional un-self-conscious cultures, molded not by designers but by the slow pattern of changes within tradition, are so beautifully organized and adapted. When the designer, in our own self-conscious culture, is called on to create a form that is adapted to its context he is unsuccessful, because the preconceived categories out of which he builds his picture of the problem do not correspond to the inherent components of the problem, and therefore lead only to the arbitrariness, willfulness, and lack of understanding which plague the design of modern buildings and modern cities.
In the second part, Mr. Alexander presents a method by which the designer may bring his full creative imagination into play, and yet avoid the traps of irrelevant preconception. He shows that, whenever a problem is stated, it is possible to ignore existing concepts and to create new concepts, out of the structure of the problem itself, which do correspond correctly to what he calls the subsystems of the adaptive process. By treating each of these subsystems as a separate subproblem, the designer can translate the new concepts into form. The form, because of the process, will be well-adapted to its context, non-arbitrary, and correct.
The mathematics underlying this method, based mainly on set theory, is fully developed in a long appendix. Another appendix demonstrates the application of the method to the design of an Indian village.
A critical look at the competing motivations behind one of modern architecture’s most widely known and misunderstood movements
Although “mid-century modern” has evolved into a highly popular and ubiquitous architectural style, this term obscures the varied perspectives and approaches of its original practitioners. In Nothing Permanent, Todd Cronan displaces generalizations with a nuanced intellectual history of architectural innovation in California between 1920 and 1970, uncovering the conflicting intentions that would go on to reshape the future of American domestic life.
Focusing on four primary figures—R. M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, and Charles and Ray Eames—Nothing Permanent demonstrates how this prolific era of modern architecture in California, rather than constituting a homogenous movement, was propelled by disparate approaches and aims. Exemplified by the twin pillars of Schindler and Neutra and their respective ideological factions, these two groups of architects represent opposing poles of architectural intentionality, embodying divergent views about the dynamic between interior and exterior, the idea of permanence, and the extent to which architects could exercise control over the inhabitants of their structures.
Looking past California modernism’s surface-level idealization in present-day style guides, home decor publications, films, and television shows, Nothing Permanent details the intellectual, aesthetic, and practical debates that lie at the roots of this complex architectural moment. Extracting this period from its diffusion into visual culture, Cronan argues that mid-century architecture in California raised questions about the meaning of architecture and design that remain urgent today.
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