Results by title
855 books match the query 'Architecture' and 19 start with n
Naked Airport
A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary StructureAlastair Gordon
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Although airports are now best known for interminable waits at check-in counters, liquid restrictions for carry-on luggage, and humiliating shoe-removal rituals at security, they were once the backdrops for jet-setters who strutted, martinis in hand, through curvilinear terminals designed by Eero Saarinen. In the critically acclaimed Naked Airport, Alastair Gordon traces the cultural history of this defining institution from its origins in the muddy fields of flying machines to its frontline position in the struggle against international terrorism.
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
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
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Narrating the City
Mediated Representations of Architecture, Urban Forms and Social LifeEdited by Aysegül Akçay Kavakoglu, Türkan Nihan Haciömeroglu, and Lisa Landrum
Intellect Books, 2020
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.
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Nationalism in Architecture of Modern Iran
Niloofar Kakhi
Gingko, 2023
A historical account of the development of nationalism in Iranian architecture between 1905 and 2015.
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.
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.
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Navajo Architecture
Forms, History, DistributionsStephen C. Jett and Virginia E. Spencer
University of Arizona Press, 1981
Navajo Architecture may well be the most complete study to date of the folk architecture of a tribal society. Enhanced by nearly 200 photographs and drawings, the book explores the whole range of a Native American tradition as it has evolved through the present day—and is already yielding to modernization.
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.
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.
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Negotiating Culture
Heritage, Ownership, and Intellectual PropertyLaetitia La Follette
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013
Rival claims of ownership or control over various aspects of culture are a regular feature of our twenty-first-century world. Such debates are shaping disciplines as diverse as anthropology and archaeology, art history and museum studies, linguistics and genetics.
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.
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.
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Nevada's Historic Buildings
A Cultural LegacyRonald M. James
University of Nevada Press, 2009
In 1991, Nevada’s Commission for Cultural Affairs was formed to oversee the preservation of the state’s historic buildings and the conversion of the best of them for use as cultural centers. This program has rehabilitated dozens of historic structures valued by their communities for the ways they represent the development of the state and its culture.
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.
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.
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New Bodleian
Making the Weston LibraryEdited by the Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2015
In 2010, with a bequest from the Garfield Weston Foundation, the Bodleian Library and the London firm Wilkinson Eyre Architects began to move forward with plans to refurbish the New Bodleian. Having served the community for seventy years, the New Bodleian housed more than three million books and manuscripts and was listed as a site of historic interest. Now, the stately building on Broad Street would preserve its façade while gaining updates to meet modern research needs.
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.
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.
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New Building in Old Cities
Writings by Gustavo Giovannoni on Architectural and Urban ConservationGustavo Giovannoni
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2024
The highly influential writings by an important early advocate for the conservation of historic cities are made available for the first time in English.
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.
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.
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New Islamic Urbanism
The Architecture of Public and Private Space in Jeddah, Saudi ArabiaStefan Maneval
University College London, 2019
New Islamic Urbanism traces the changing relationship between public and private space in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, over the past seventy years, from the dawn of the oil era to the present, paying particular attention to the role architecture plays in defining public and private spaces.
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.
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.
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New York's New Edge
Contemporary Art, the High Line, and Urban Megaprojects on the Far West SideDavid Halle and Elisabeth Tiso
University of Chicago Press, 2014
The story of New York’s west side no longer stars the Sharks and the Jets. Instead it’s a story of urban transformation, cultural shifts, and an expanding contemporary art scene. The Chelsea Gallery District has become New York’s most dominant neighborhood for contemporary art, and the streets of the west side are filled with gallery owners, art collectors, and tourists. Developments like the High Line, historical preservation projects like the Gansevoort Market, the Chelsea galleries, and plans for megaprojects like the Hudson Yards Development have redefined what is now being called the “Far West Side” of Manhattan.
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.
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.
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Newman University Church, Dublin
Architectural Revivalism in the British Isles and the Authority of FormNiamh Bhalla
University College London, 2024
The first-ever account of the historic relationship between the church and early architecture in Dublin.
Newman University Church, Dublin charts the first ever analysis of University Church’s significance within the history of Victorian revivalist architecture. Author Niamh Bhalla explores the relationship between the church’s context as the first Catholic university in Ireland and the ambiguity of its “early Christian” style, providing an effective lens to understand the architectural revivalism of the nineteenth century, particularly basilican and Byzantine revivalist architectures in the British Isles.
Newman University Church, Dublin charts the first ever analysis of University Church’s significance within the history of Victorian revivalist architecture. Author Niamh Bhalla explores the relationship between the church’s context as the first Catholic university in Ireland and the ambiguity of its “early Christian” style, providing an effective lens to understand the architectural revivalism of the nineteenth century, particularly basilican and Byzantine revivalist architectures in the British Isles.
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Nineteenth Century Home Architecture of Iowa City
A Silver Anniversary EditionMargaret N. Keyes
University of Iowa Press, 1993
Newly expanded with over twenty new houses and twenty-five new photographs—plus a map that allows readers to explore Iowa City's historic neighborhoods! This silver anniversary edition of Margaret Keyes' 1967 classic will be required reading for all those fascinated by local history and by the development of architectural styles in the Midwest and for all those devoted to restoring and preserving historic houses.
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No Communication with the Sea
Searching for an Urban Future in the Great BasinTim Sullivan
University of Arizona Press, 2010
Few other places in the United States are as high, dry, sparsely inhabited—and urbanized—as the Great Basin of Utah and Nevada. The great majority of the population of this rapidly growing region lives in the two metropolitan areas at its edges, Salt Lake City and the Wasatch Front, and Reno and the Truckee Meadows. These cities embody the allure and the challenge of the contemporary American West, deemed by some “The New American Heartland.”
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.
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.
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No. 10
The Geography of Power at Downing StreetJack Brown
Haus Publishing, 2019
Fronted by one of the world’s most iconic doors, 10 Downing Street is the home and office of the British Prime Minister and the heart of British politics. Steeped in both political and architectural history, this famed address was originally designed in the late seventeenth century as little more than a place of residence, with no foresight of the political significance the location would come to hold. As its role evolved, 10 Downing Street, now known simply as ‘Number 10,’ has required constant adaptation in order to accommodate the changing requirements of the premiership.
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.
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.
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Nominal Constructions in Modern Greek
Implications for the Architecture of GrammarDimitra Kolliakou
CSLI, 2003
The study of nominals—lingustic expressions whose core constituent is characteristically a noun—is of great interest to both theoretical and computational linguistics. Their internal structure, meaning, and use address intriguing issues of semantics and pragmatics that are intrinsically related to syntactic matters. Dimitra Kolliakou provides a detailed description and formal analysis of a wide range of intricate linguistic phenomena concerning nominal constructions in Modern Greek, while exploring the implications of those phenomena for the architecture of grammar both at a theoretical and computational level. In particular, this book supports the integration of semantic and contextual information in the grammar, formalizing it within the multi-dimensional framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar.
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Non-Construction
An Architectural Gesture in Artistic ResearchRonny Hardliz
Diaphanes, 2021
By defining a concept of architecture based on the tactile experience and not on construction, this book allows us to explore both discursive practice as the study of architectural art and the integration of architectural art as a discourse of spatial practice. In order to take on this new lens, Non-Construction utilizes a cinematographic documentary image strategy that engages with a critical spatial exploration of current entanglements of art and research at the crossroads of art, theory, and architecture. A challenge to visual conventions, this book offers conceptual and aesthetic insights into spiraling and voiding sensual experiences, with implications for the decolonization of the documentary and cinematographic reaching far beyond architecture.
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Non-Design
Architecture, Liberalism, and the MarketAnthony Fontenot
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Anthony Fontenot’s staggeringly ambitious book uncovers the surprisingly libertarian heart of the most influential British and American architectural and urbanist discourses of the postwar period, expressed as a critique of central design and a support of spontaneous order. Non-Design illuminates the unexpected philosophical common ground between enemies of state support, most prominently the economist Friedrich Hayek, and numerous notable postwar architects and urbanists like Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Reyner Banham, and Jane Jacobs. These thinkers espoused a distinctive concept of "non-design,"characterized by a rejection of conscious design and an embrace of various phenomenon that emerge without intention or deliberate human guidance. This diffuse and complex body of theories discarded many of the cultural presuppositions of the time, shunning the traditions of modern design in favor of the wisdom, freedom, and self-organizing capacity of the market. Fontenot reveals the little-known commonalities between the aesthetic deregulation sought by ostensibly liberal thinkers and Hayek’s more controversial conception of state power, detailing what this unexplored affinity means for our conceptions of political liberalism. Non-Design thoroughly recasts conventional views of postwar architecture and urbanism, as well as liberal and libertarian philosophies.
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Northern Arizona University
Buildings as HistoryLee C. Drickamer and Peter J. Runge
University of Arizona Press, 2011
Any university is composed of faculty, students, and staff. But these living components change over time and in varying degrees, while the campus buildings are more permanent, remaining for decades, a century, or longer.
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.
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.
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Nothing Permanent
Modern Architecture in CaliforniaTodd Cronan
University of Minnesota Press, 2023
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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