A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
While the term villa is generic today, its meaning extended across the entirety of ancient Roman life: villas supplied food, oil, and wine to towns and cities and produced raw materials for craft industries and building construction. Villas were also venues for pleasure, relaxation, and the cultivation of friendships and the mind. Many were known for their spectacular sites, architecture, decoration, and furnishings. They came to be ubiquitous throughout ancient Rome's European and Mediterranean rural hegemony.
This volume compiles a wealth of newly translated Latin and ancient Greek sources—treatises, letters, poems, histories, biographies, and other works of literary art—to vividly convey the architectural, economic, social, political, and cultural significance of ancient Roman villas, from their Greek antecedents through the early Christian period. Thematic chapters reveal ancient Roman attitudes on villa architecture, agricultural operations, and the practices of buying, building, and decorating villas as well as entertaining and pursuing leisure there. References to family, gender relations, and the lives of enslaved persons aim to situate, if only indirectly, a broad range of experiences within villas. Supplemented by generous commentaries, copious annotation, a comprehensive bibliography, and a glossary, this definitive sourcebook equips scholars and students alike for further research and makes for fascinating reading.
In this collection of essays, ten experts in turn-of-the-century popular and material culture examine how the struggle between modernity and tradition was reflected in various facets of the household aesthetic. Their findings touch on sub-themes of gender, generation, and class to provide a fascinating commentary on what middle-class Americans were prepared to discard in the name of modernity and what they stubbornly retained for the sake of ideology. Through an examination of material culture and prescriptive literature from this period, the essayists also demonstrate how changes in artistic expression affected the psychological, social, and cultural lives of everyday Americans.
This book joins a growing list of titles dedicated to analyzing and interpreting the cultural dimensions of past domestic life. Its essays shed new light on house history by tracking the transformation of a significant element of home life - its expressions of art.
Francesco Borromini is one of the great geniuses of Baroque architecture, perhaps the greatest in inventiveness and in use of spatial effects. Here is the first book in English to survey the whole work of the master. The author, former Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, is known internationally for his many works on French and Italian architecture and painting.
In this lucid and fully illustrated account, Anthony Blunt charts Borromini’s career and analyzes and assesses his art. Mr. Blunt tells of Borromini’s training, relating his style to that of Bernini, under whom he worked, and to the architecture from which he learned, for example Michelangelo’s. Borromini’s patrons allowed him freedom to evolve his own ideas, and his originality and imagination in inventing new architectural forms become apparent as the author studies individual commissions. His imagination was apparently limitless, but his inventions evolved in terms of rigidly controlled geometry. It is this combination of revolutionary inventiveness and intellectual control that gives Borromini’s work particular appeal in the twentieth century.
As Simpson shows in fascinating detail, rockface concrete blocks, pressed metal imitations of stone, linoleum “marble” and “parquet,” and embossed wall coverings made available to the masses a host of ornamental effects that only the wealthy could previously have afforded. But, she notes, wherever these new materials appeared, a heated debate over the appropriateness of imitation followed. Were these materials merely tasteless shams? Or were they economical, durable alternatives that democratically extended the possibilities of ornamentation?
Simpson devotes chapters to each of the various ornamental materials, considering its precursors, invention, production, and distribution. In her final chapter, she traces the history of the aesthetic debate over imitation and analyzes the social meaning of the materials. Far from being “bad taste,” she concludes, these new ornamental forms reflected modernism, democracy, and progress—some of the most deeply held values of the period.
The Author: Pamela H. Simpson is Ernest Williams II Professor of Art History at Washington and Lee University. The author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogs, she is co-author (with Royster Lyle) of The Architecture of Historic Lexington. She was president, for the 1997–99 term, of the Vernacular Architecture Forum.
Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula juts into Lake Superior, pointing from the western Upper Peninsula toward Canada. Native peoples mined copper there for at least five thousand years, but the industrial heyday of the “Copper Country” began in the late nineteenth century, as immigrants from Cornwall, Italy, Finland, and elsewhere came to work in mines largely run from faraway cities such as New York and Boston. In those cities, suburbs had developed to allow wealthier classes to escape the dirt and grime of the industrial center. In the Copper Country, however, the suburbs sprang up nearly adjacent to mines, mills, and coal docks.
Sarah Fayen Scarlett contrasts two types of neighborhoods that transformed Michigan’s mining frontier between 1875 and 1920: paternalistic company towns built for the workers and elite suburbs created by the region’s network of business leaders. Richly illustrated with drawings, maps, and photographs, Company Suburbs details the development of these understudied cultural landscapes that arose when elites began to build housing that was architecturally distinct from that of the multiethnic workers within the old company towns. They followed national trends and created social hierarchies in the process, but also, uniquely, incorporated pre-existing mining features and adapted company housing practices. This idiosyncratic form of suburbanization belies the assumption that suburbs and industry were independent developments.
Built environments evince interrelationships among landscapes, people, and power. Scarlett’s work offers new perspectives on emerging national attitudes linking domestic architecture with class and gender identity. Company Suburbs complements scholarship on both industrial communities and early suburban growth, increasing our understanding of the ways hierarchies associated with industrial capitalism have been built into the shared environments of urban areas as well as seemingly peripheral American towns.
This small book, the last work of a world-renowned scholar, has established itself as a classic. It provides a superb overview of the vast historical process by which Christianity was Hellenized and Hellenic civilization became Christianized.
Werner Jaeger shows that without the large postclassical expansion of Greek culture the rise of a Christian world religion would have been impossible. He explains why the Hellenization of Christianity was necessary in apostolic and postapostalic times; points out similarities between Greek philosophy and Christian belief; discuss such key figures as Clement, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa; and touches on the controversies that led to the ultimate complex synthesis of Greek and Christian thought.
A well-illustrated, holistic overview of how American domestic spaces have changed over four hundred years, Experiencing American Houses encourages readers to think creatively about houses in terms of their function as opposed to their appearance. This captivating volume helps the reader step into the lived experience of the evolving American house: understanding, for example, why a nineteenth-century dining room might include a bed or why the kitchen as we know it did not evolve until the turn of the twentieth century. By carrying her study from the colonial period to the present, Elizabeth Collins Cromley makes the domestic spaces of the past feel like vital precursors to today’s experience.
Beginning with cooking spaces, Cromley examines how multi-use areas consolidated into dedicated rooms for cooking, from fires on an earthen floor to sleek modern spaces with twenty first-century appliances. Next, the author looks at ways social class, income, and local custom framed which kinds of spaces became suitable for socializing and entertaining, and what they should be called: sitting room, drawing room, hall, living room, family room, or parlor. Distinct from cooking spaces, Cromley discusses eating spaces, which morphed from multi-use areas to separate dining rooms and back again. The author covers spaces for sleeping, health, and privacy, as well as circulation—the ways that we move through a house—analyzing the functions of such little-studied features as hallways, back doors, and staircases. Finally, Cromley takes on the evolution of storage, which began mainly because of the need to store and preserve food. Clothing closets grew from oddly shaped afterthoughts to generous walk-ins, while increases in material wealth led to the need for storage outbuildings.
This accessible volume, informed by up-to-date scholarship in vernacular architecture and disciplines far beyond it, provides students and readers necessary context to understand the development of the historic and contemporary houses they encounter.
The people who lived in Middle Virginia in the eighteenth century are almost unknown to history because so little has been written about them. After Glassie selected the area – roughly Goochland and Louisa counties – for study, he selected a representative part of the countryside, recorded all the older houses there, developed a transformational grammar of traditional house designs, and examined the area’s architectural stability and change.
Comparing the houses with written accounts of the period, he found that the houses became more formal and lee related to their environment at the same time as the areas established political, economic, and religious institutions were disintegrating. It is as though the builders of the houses were deliberately trying to impose order on the surrounding chaotic world. Previous orthodox historical interpretations of the period have failed to note this. Glassie has provided new insights into the intellectual and social currents of the period, and at that time has rescued a heretofore little-known people from historiographical oblivion. Combining a fresh, perceptive approach with a broad interdisciplinary body of knowledge, ha has made an invaluable breakthrough in showing the way to understand the people of history who have left their material things as their only legacy.
A nation's buildings are a record of the character and aspirations of its people. In a rich blend of social and architectural history, Abbott Lowell Cummings reconstructs, through text and pictures, the framed houses of Massachusetts Bay that reflect the straightforward honesty of our earliest northern settlers and their profound love of craftsmanship.
A substantial number of the nation's seventeenth-century houses have been preserved in Massachusetts, and Cummings provides illustrations for a majority of them. He describes the dwellings in detail, and includes architectural drawings that were especially commissioned for this book. He demonstrates that the builders were far more sophisticated than previously imagined and that, while maintaining their English timber-building traditions, they were astonishingly adaptable to their new environment.
Beyond the houses themselves, Cummings discusses evolutions in pioneer life. The most simple kinds of changes in architecture, Cummings shows, indicated singular changes in family living. Such additions as kitchens and parlors, or the moving of the master bedroom to a second floor, suggest shifts in the private and social lives of families.
The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay is a splendid story of innovations— of restless, migratory people and their architectural and social responses to the heavily forested New World. It is the first chapter in the long saga of America's preoccupation with technology as it affected the early American home.
The division of human society by race, class, and gender has been addressed by scholars in many of the social sciences. Now historical archaeologists are demonstrating how material culture can be used to examine the processes that have erected boundaries between people.
Drawing on case studies from around the world, the essays in this volume highlight diverse moments in the rise of capitalist civilization both in Western Europe and its colonies. In the first section, the contributors address the dynamics of the racial system that emerged from European colonialism. They show how archaeological remains shed light on the institution of slavery in the American Southeast, on the treatment of Native Americans by Mormon settlers, and on the color line in colonial southern Africa. The next group of articles considers how gender was negotiated in nineteenth-century New York City, in colonial Ecuador, and on Jamaican coffee plantations. A final section focuses on the issue of class division by examining the built environment of eighteenth-century Catalonia and material remains and housing from early industrial Massachusetts.
These essays constitute an archaeology of capitalism and clearly demonstrate the importance of history in shaping cultural consciousness. Arguing that material culture is itself an active agent in the negotiation of social difference, they reveal the ways in which historical archaeologists can contribute to both the definition and dismantling of the lines that divide.
The Editors: James A. Delle is an assistant professor of anthropology at Franklin and Marshall College and the author of An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica's Blue Mountains.
Stephen A. Mrozowski is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts–Boston, director of the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research, and co-author of Living on the Boott: Historical Archaeology of the Boott Cotton Mills, Lowell, Massachusetts.
Robert Paynter is a professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, author of Models of Spatial Inequality, and co-editor of The Archaeology of Inequality.
The Contributors: Marjorie R. Abel, Mark Bograd, James A. Delle, Terrence W. Epperson, William B. Fawcett, Ross W. Jamieson, David L. Larsen, Walter Robert Lewelling, Patricia Hart Mangan, Stephen A. Mrozowski, Michael S. Nassaney, Thomas C. Patterson, Robert Paynter, Warren Perry, Paul A. Shackel, Theresa A. Singleton, Diana diZerega Wall.
The design of housing has commanded the attention of the greatest architects of the twentieth century. In this stunning volume, Roger Sherwood presents thirty-two notable examples of multi-family housing from many countries and four continents, selected for their importance as prototypes. Designed by such masters as Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Alvar Aalto, they range from single-house clusters to row-houses, terrace houses, party-wall and large-courtyard housing, to urban high-rise towers and slabs.
The thirty-two buildings or housing complexes are illustrated with photographs, site plans, floor plans, elevations, and marvelous axonometric drawings. In each case Mr. Sherwood gives background information on the project, mention, factors the architect had to take into consideration (social, environmental, financial), points out creative solutions to particular problems, and comments on special features of the design. Laymen as well as professionals will find his presentations enlightening.
In the Introduction, Mr. Sherwood sets forth the basic principles of organization that apply to housing. He analyzes first the limited number of ways in which individual apartments or living units can be laid out (each type or plan lending itself to variations and permutations) and then the ways in which different units can be vertically and horizontally organized within a single building. Drawings and plans of more than eighty housing complexes in twenty countries accompany his analysis.
Mr. Sherwood offers his book in the belief that there is no excuse for shoddy architecture; that no branch of architecture is more important than the design of human habitations; and that much is to be learned from the study of significant buildings of the recent past.
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.
“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.
The Renaissance man avant la lettre.
Vitruvius (Marcus V. Pollio), Roman architect and engineer, studied Greek philosophy and science and gained experience in the course of professional work. He was one of those appointed to be overseers of imperial artillery or military engines, and was architect of at least one unit of buildings for Augustus in the reconstruction of Rome. Late in life and in ill health he completed, sometime before 27 BC, De Architectura which, after its rediscovery in the fifteenth century, was influential enough to be studied by architects from the early Renaissance to recent times.
In On Architecture Vitruvius adds to the tradition of Greek theory and practice the results of his own experience. The contents of this treatise in ten books are as follows. Book 1: Requirements for an architect; town planning; design, cities, aspects; temples. 2: Materials and their treatment. Greek systems. 3: Styles. Forms of Greek temples. Ionic. 4: Styles. Corinthian, Ionic, Doric; Tuscan; altars. 5: Other public buildings (fora, basilicae, theaters, colonnades, baths, harbors). 6: Sites and planning, especially of houses. 7: Construction of pavements, roads, mosaic floors, vaults. Decoration (stucco, wall painting, colors). 8: Hydraulic engineering; water supply; aqueducts. 9: Astronomy. Greek and Roman discoveries; signs of the zodiac, planets, moon phases, constellations, astrology, gnomon, sundials. 10: Machines for war and other purposes.
The Renaissance man avant la lettre.
Vitruvius (Marcus V. Pollio), Roman architect and engineer, studied Greek philosophy and science and gained experience in the course of professional work. He was one of those appointed to be overseers of imperial artillery or military engines, and was architect of at least one unit of buildings for Augustus in the reconstruction of Rome. Late in life and in ill health he completed, sometime before 27 BC, De Architectura which, after its rediscovery in the fifteenth century, was influential enough to be studied by architects from the early Renaissance to recent times.
In On Architecture Vitruvius adds to the tradition of Greek theory and practice the results of his own experience. The contents of this treatise in ten books are as follows. Book 1: Requirements for an architect; town planning; design, cities, aspects; temples. 2: Materials and their treatment. Greek systems. 3: Styles. Forms of Greek temples. Ionic. 4: Styles. Corinthian, Ionic, Doric; Tuscan; altars. 5: Other public buildings (fora, basilicae, theaters, colonnades, baths, harbors). 6: Sites and planning, especially of houses. 7: Construction of pavements, roads, mosaic floors, vaults. Decoration (stucco, wall painting, colors). 8: Hydraulic engineering; water supply; aqueducts. 9: Astronomy. Greek and Roman discoveries; signs of the zodiac, planets, moon phases, constellations, astrology, gnomon, sundials. 10: Machines for war and other purposes.
The Pantheon in Rome is one of the grand architectural statements of all ages. This richly illustrated book isolates the reasons for its extraordinary impact on Western architecture, discussing the Pantheon as a building in its time but also as a building for all time.
Mr. MacDonald traces the history of the structure since its completion and examines its progeny--domed rotundas with temple-fronted porches built from the second century to the twentieth--relating them to the original. He analyzes the Pantheon's design and the details of its technology and construction, and explores the meaning of the building on the basis of ancient texts, formal symbolism, and architectural analogy. He sees the immense unobstructed interior, with its disk of light that marks the sun's passage through the day, as an architectural metaphor for the ecumenical pretensions of the Roman Empire.
Past discussions of the Pantheon have tended to center on design and structure. These are but the starting point for Mr. MacDonald, who goes on to show why it ranks--along with Cheops's pyramid, the Parthenon, Wren's churches, Mansard's palaces-as an architectural archetype.
Paris is the most personal of cities. There is a Paris for the medievalist, and another for the modernist—a Paris for expatriates, philosophers, artists, romantics, and revolutionaries of every stripe. James H. S. McGregor brings these multiple perspectives into focus throughout this concise, unique history of the City of Light.
His panorama begins with an ancient Gallic fortress on the Seine, burned to the ground by its own defenders in a vain effort to starve out Caesar’s legions. After ninth-century raids by the Vikings ended, Parisians expanded the walls of their tiny sanctuary on the Ile de la Cité, turning the river’s right bank into a thriving commercial district and the Rive Gauche into a college town. Gothic spires expressed a taste for architectural novelty, matched only by the palaces and pleasure gardens of successive monarchs whose ingenuity made Paris the epitome of everything French. The fires of Revolution threatened all that had come before, but Baron Haussmann saw opportunity in the wreckage. No planned city in the world is more famous than his.
Paris from the Ground Up allows readers to trace the city’s evolution in its architecture and art—from the Roman arena to the Musée d’Orsay, from the Louvre’s defensive foundations to I. M. Pei’s transparent pyramids. Color maps, along with identifying illustrations, make the city accessible to visitors by foot, Metro, or riverboat.
The Patina of Place offers a multidisciplinary analysis of workers’ housing as an index to social change and cultural identity in New Bedford from 1848 to 1925. Heath discusses both the city’s company-owned mill housing and the subsequent transition to a speculative building market that established the three-decker rental flat as the city’s most common housing form for industrial workers.
Using the concept of “cultural weathering” to explore the cultural imprints left by inhabitants on their built environment, Heath considers whether the three-decker is a generic “type” that could be transferred elsewhere. He concludes that the ethnic, economic, and geographic conditions of a locale serve as filters that reshape the meaning, utility, and character of a building form, thereby making it an integral part of its particular community. Specifically, he shows how the three-decker was lived in, and used by, its original inhabitants and illustrates its transformation by later generations of residents following the collapse of the textile industry in the mid-1920s.
The Patina of Place focuses on the three-decker in New Bedford, but its overarching theme concerns the cultural, economic, and social complexities of place-making and the creation of regional identity. Heath offers a broad investigation of the forces that drive the production and consumption of architecture, at the same time providing an economic and cultural context for the emergence of a particular architectural form.
The Author: Kingston Heath is associate professor in the college of architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His articles have appeared in The Encyclopedia of Architecture and Old-Time New England, among other publications.
The Ionian city of Priene, the most extensively excavated Hellenistic city in western Asia Minor, was in its day a model of town planning. It was sited according to principles corresponding to Aristotle's description in the Politics of the ideal city of 5,000, laid out on a grid of the type developed by the famous Hippodamus of the nearby city of Miletus, and ornamented with buildings designed by Pythius, who was known for his holistic approach to architecture. Priene provides the researcher with an unusually clear and complete picture of life in an ancient Greek city of the late Classical and Hellenistic period.
This study, a collaboration of Greek scholars under the scientific direction of Nikos A. Dontas at the Foundation of the Hellenic World and Professor Wolfram Hoepfner of the University of Berlin, first published in 2000 and now appearing in its Second Edition, presents for the first time a comprehensive look at the architecture of the city, combining material from both the first excavation of 1894 and more recent work at the site. It is lavishly illustrated with specially redrawn architectural plans and reconstructions of the major public buildings and spaces as well as residential and commercial structures.
The accompanying text is aimed at both specialist and non-specialist and explores in detail the function and context of these buildings as well as their place in the development of architecture in Asia Minor and the place of Priene in the history of the region.
These essays demonstrate how various combinations of research strategies, conceptual frameworks, and data can afford a new look at a geographical area and its settlement. The contributors offer views on the evolution of backcountry communities by addressing such topics as migration, kinship, public institutions, transportation and communications networks, land markets and real estate claims, and the role of agricultural development in the emergence of a regional economy. In their discussions of individuals in the backcountry, they also explore the multiracial and multiethnic character of southern frontier society.
Yielding new insights unlikely to emerge under a single disciplinary analysis, The Southern Colonial Backcountry is a unique volume that highlights the need for interdisciplinary approaches to the backcountry while identifying common research problems in the field.
The Editors: David Colin Crass is the archaeological services unit manager at the Historic Preservation Division, Georgia Department of Natural Resources.
Steven D. Smith is the head of the Cultural Resources Consulting Division of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Antrhopology.
Martha A. Zierden is curator of historical archaeology at The Charleston Museum.
Richard D. Brooks is the administrative manager of the Savannah River Archeological Research Program, South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Antrhopology.
The Contributors: Monica L. Beck, Edward Cashin, Charles H. Faulkner, Elizabeth Arnett Fields, Warren R. Hofstra, David C. Hsiung, Kenneth E. Lewis, Donald W. Linebaugh, Turk McCleskey, Robert D. Mitchell, Michael J. Puglisi, Daniel B. Thorp.
"This new edition ensures that the book will continue to be internationally acknowledged as the standard work on the development of modern architecture." -Walter Gropius
"A remarkable accomplishment. . . one of the most valuable reference books for students and professionals concerned with the reshaping of our environment. " -José Luis Sert
A milestone in modern thought, Space, Time and Architecture has been reissued many times since its first publication in 1941 and translated into half a dozen languages. In this revised edition of Sigfried Giedion’s classic work, major sections have been added and there are 81 new illustrations.
The chapters on leading contemporary architects have been greatly expanded. There is new material on the later development of Frank Lloyd Wright and the more recent buildings of Walter Gropius, particularly his American Embassy in Athens. In his discussion of Le Corbusier, Mr. Giedion provides detailed analyses of the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, Le Corbusier’s only building in the United States, and his Priory of La Tourette near Lyons. There is a section on his relations with his clients and an assessment of his influence on contemporary architecture, including a description of the Le Corbusier Center in Zurich (designed just before his death), which houses his works of art. The chapters on Mies van der Rohe and Alvar Aalto have been brought up to date with examples of their buildings in the sixties. There is an entirely new chapter on the Danish architect Jørn Utzon, whose work, as exemplified in his design for the Sydney Opera House, Mr. Giedion considers representative of post–World War II architectural concepts.
A new essay, “Changing Notions of the City,” traces the evolution of the structure of the city throughout history and examines current attempts to deal with urban growth, as shown in the work of such architects as José Luis Sert, Kenzo Tange, and Fumihiko Maki. Mr. Sert’s Peabody Terrace is discussed as an example of the interlocking of the collective and individual spheres. Finally, the conclusion has been enlarged to include a survey of the limits of the organic in architecture.
Everybody’s got a theory . . . or do they?
Thomas McLaughlin argues that critical theory—raising serious, sustained questions about cultural practice and ideology—is practiced not only by an academic elite but also by savvy viewers of sitcoms and TV news, by Elvis fans and Trekkies, by labor organizers and school teachers, by the average person in the street.
Like academic theorists, who are trained in a tradition of philosophical and political skepticism that challenges all orthodoxies, the vernacular theorists McLaughlin identifies display a lively and healthy alertness to contradiction and propaganda. They are not passive victims of ideology but active questioners of the belief systems that have power over their lives. Their theoretical work arises from the circumstances they confront on the job, in the family, in popular culture. And their questioning of established institutions, McLaughlin contends, is essential and healthy, for it energizes other theorists who clarify the purpose and strategies of institutions and justify the existence of cultural practices.
Street Smarts and Critical Theory leads us through eye-opening explorations of social activism in the Southern Christian anti-pornography movement, fan critiques in the ‘zine scene, New Age narratives of healing and transformation, the methodical manipulations of the advertising profession, and vernacular theory in the whole-language movement. Emphasizing that theory is itself a pervasive cultural practice, McLaughlin calls on academic institutions to recognize and develop the theoretical strategies that students bring into the classroom.
“This book demystifies the idea of theory, taking it out of the hands of a priestly caste and showing it as the democratic endowment of the people.”—Daniel T. O’Hara, Temple University, author of Radical Parody: American Culture and Critical Agency after Foucault and Lionel Trilling: The Work of Liberation.
“McLaughlin takes seriously the critical and theoretical activity of everyday people and does so in a way that will empower these very populations to take seriously their own activities as theorists. . . . A manifesto that is sure to be heard by the younger generation of thinkers in American cultural studies.”—Henry Jenkins, MIT, author of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture
Earthen architecture is one of the oldest forms of construction and is evidenced around the globe. This volume gathers the research and presentations from Terra 2022: 13th World Congress on Earthen Architectural Heritage, which brought together in Santa Fe, New Mexico, 350 conservation professionals and practitioners from fifty-two countries.
Seventy richly illustrated papers, fifty-seven in English and thirteen in Spanish, address a range of conservation issues. Abstracts are provided in both English and Spanish for each paper. Themes covered include advances in research, strategies for archaeological sites, community-based care and decision-making, cultural landscapes, decorated surfaces, education, historic and modern buildings, conservation history, risks and vulnerabilities, and traditional materials and practices. Sections that draw on symposia held at the congress spotlight two recent architectural heritage initiatives: the rehabilitation of an urban settlement by the AlUla Old Town and Oasis Conservation Project in Saudi Arabia, and the conservation and management of eight monumental enclosure complexes at the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks in Ohio.
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