Results by title
53 books match the query 'Dwellings' and 2 start with m
Making Home in Havana
Pietropaolo, Vincenzo
Rutgers University Press, 2002
Havana is a city that rarely fails to captivate. But much of the unique beauty and culture of this historic city is rapidly disappearing. As Cuban society finds itself at a crossroads, Havana is more than ever a city on the edge, for although frozen in time as a consequence of Fidel Castro’s revolution, it has certainly not been well preserved. Time, climate, and neglect have eroded a rare architectural legacy, making the need to document this heritage even more pressing than ever before.
Making Home in Havana is an elegant book of photographs and testimonies, recording, questioning, and evoking the meaning of place — in particular, the meaning of home. The combination of fine photography and the words of residents of former palaces, humble apartments, and other dwellings offer us an irresistible portrait of Havana that might otherwise be lost forever.Vincenzo Pietropaolo and Cecelia Lawless have made numerous visits to Havana in order to fully understand and convey the essence of what home means to the inhabitants of the dwellings of the El Vedado and Centro Habana neighborhoods. Together, they—and we—explore how a building becomes a home through its human history as well as its architectural features. With some renovation already underway in colonial Havana, they concentrate on largely unexplored and unrecognized sections that continue to fall into ruin. The intimacy of their connection with the buildings and people offers us a rare combination of documentary realism and high art. Buildings and people speak their histories to us in classic humanistic style. Residents of Havana tell their stories of lifelong efforts to turn decay into beauty, while the photographer’s evocative pictures enable us to feel exactly what they are talking about — a creation of time and space called home.
Maya Palaces and Elite Residences
An Interdisciplinary ApproachEdited by Jessica Joyce Christie
University of Texas Press, 2003
Maya "palaces" have intrigued students of this ancient Mesoamerican culture since the early twentieth century, when scholars first applied the term "palace" to multi-room, gallery-like buildings set on low platforms in the centers of Maya cities. Who lived in these palaces? What types of ceremonial and residential activities took place there? How do the physical forms and spatial arrangement of the buildings embody Maya concepts of social organization and cosmology?
This book brings together state-of-the-art data and analysis regarding the occupants, ritual and residential uses, and social and cosmological meanings of Maya palaces and elite residences. A multidisciplinary team of senior researchers reports on sites in Belize (Blue Creek), Western Honduras (Copan), the Peten (Tikal, Dos Pilas, Aguateca), and the Yucatan (Uxmal, Chichen-Itza, Dzibilchaltun, Yaxuna). Archaeologist contributors discuss the form of palace buildings and associated artifacts, their location within the city, and how some palaces related to landscape features. Their approach is complemented by art historical analyses of architectural sculpture, epigraphy, and ethnography. Jessica Joyce Christie concludes the volume by identifying patterns and commonalties that apply not only to the cited examples, but also to Maya architecture in general.