Results by title

A critical examination of the rational turn in postwar West German architecture

Postwar West German architecture experienced a “rational turn” characterized by a dramatic push toward ideals of optimization, economy, and accuracy based in calculation. Analyzing how architects reckoned with the political and cultural legacy of fascism and were driven by the desire to quantify and manage unpredictability in the human environment, Rationality Without Reason shows how they translated their design and production methods into numbers through protodigital technology and computational processes.

Daniela Fabricius examines architectural practices within the wider context of the shifting intellectual and cultural landscape as rationalism devolved between the student movements of 1968 and the reign of postmodernism in the 1980s. Showing how rationalism’s limitations and contradictions became increasingly apparent, she demonstrates how the intensity of these approaches ultimately led to a form of rationalism devoid of reason. Fabricius explores how the development of increasingly autonomous systems and formalist methods strayed from important economic, social, and ethical concerns and impeded the potential for developing more liberatory forms of architecture.

Using case studies involving the Ulm School for Design and the research-based work of Frei Otto and Oswald Mathias Ungers, Rationality Without Reason traces how debates around scientific thinking evolved throughout the Cold War era and offers a critical look at the utopian promises associated with supposedly rational systems of knowledge. Through an interdisciplinary approach steeped in archival research, Fabricius highlights how the logic of quantification is bound to be unsustainable without serious ethical considerations.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

Larry Bennett explores the complexities of nostalgia with considerations of the historic preservation of brutalist architecture, specifically Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago; the memoirs and recollections of early and mid-twentieth-century Brooklyn and Detroit; and the turntable’s rebirth as a musical instrument alongside the vinyl LP’s resurgence as a prized way of consuming music. Bennett tracks modernity as expressed through ideas, artistic products, and widespread social practices. His consideration of nostalgia focuses on our inclination to rediscover value in people, places, and social habits diminished by the passage of time.

Provocative and multidisciplinary, Reclaiming Modernity delves into the paradox of how we feel nostalgia for ideas and times that emerged from an impulse to shun nostalgia.

Evaluates for the first time one of the foundational works in architecture criticism

Immediately on its publication in 1972, Learning from Las Vegas, by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, was hailed as a transformative work in the history and theory of architecture, liberating those in architecture who were trying to find a way out of the straitjacket of architectural orthodoxies. Resonating far beyond the professional and institutional boundaries of the field, the book contributed to a thorough rethinking of modernism and was subsequently taken up as an early manifestation and progenitor of postmodernism.

Honorable Mention, New Deal Book Award

Exploring how the New Deal shaped history through politically driven commemoration

During the Great Depression, Americans employed historic preservation as a tool to address the political, economic, and social upheavals of the era. Inspired by the Roosevelt administration’s unprecedented support of federal arts projects, US politicians, architects, laborers, artisans, and local boosters skillfully used New Deal funds to restore, mythologize, and politicize the “historic shrines” in their communities. Restoring America illustrates how and why Americans turned to historic preservation as a strategy for managing both political realities and ambitions.

Stephanie Gray presents four thoroughly researched and diverse case studies: a colonial theater in the Deep South, a Puritan minister’s home in New England, aviator Charles Lindbergh's modest farmhouse and parklands of the Upper Midwest, and a multi-layered Spanish-German-Mexican arts village in the Central South. Collectively, these examples show how the restoration of old places emerged as a popular form of cultural production, an instrument of economic reconstruction, and a striking expression of political theater during the Depression. Moreover, these New Deal preservation projects make evident that any exercise in physically preserving the past is both conservative and progressive, reactive and proactive.

Restoring America contends that the federally funded and locally driven preservation initiatives of the 1930s and 1940s can help inform contemporary public history debates over the politics of commemoration and imagine possibilities for future preservation practice.
 

Honorable Mention, ALAA-Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association of Latin American Art
Finalist, 2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, College Art Association

How Mexican artists and intellectuals created a new identity for modern Mexico City through its ties to Aztec Tenochtitlan.

After archaeologists rediscovered a corner of the Templo Mayor in 1914, artists, intellectuals, and government officials attempted to revive Tenochtitlan as an instrument for reassessing Mexican national identity in the wake of the Revolution of 1910. What followed was a conceptual excavation of the original Mexica capital in relation to the transforming urban landscape of modern Mexico City.

Revolutionary-era scholars took a renewed interest in sixteenth century maps as they recognized an intersection between Tenochtitlan and the foundation of a Spanish colonial settlement directly over it. Meanwhile, Mexico City developed with modern roads and expanded civic areas as agents of nationalism promoted concepts like indigenismo, the embrace of Indigenous cultural expressions. The promotion of artworks and new architectural projects such as Diego Rivera’s Anahuacalli Museum helped to make real the notion of a modern Tenochtitlan. Employing archival materials, newspaper reports, and art criticism from 1914 to 1964, Resurrecting Tenochtitlan connects art history with urban studies to reveal the construction of a complex physical and cultural layout for Mexico’s modern capital.

A London-based architect offers a self-reflexive account of a communal building they designed in rural Britain.

Rethinking the Pavilion comprehensively investigates one unique project by Walters & Cohen Architects, the Vajrasana Buddhist Retreat Centre in rural Suffolk, completed in 2018. The book describes how shared experience defines a new way of working towards an architecture that rediscovers and enriches its communal purpose. In addition to setting out a theoretical framework that examines the architectural history and theory of pavilions, the book provides a complex discussion of the details and meanings of the design research process itself.

A critical reassessment of nineteenth‑century American architecture that uncovers how race, settler colonialism, and contested national identities shaped the built environment and its historiography.

Rewriting American Architecture offers a revisionist riposte to the canonical story of nineteenth-century American architecture. Drawing on new archival research and revisionist historiography, the essays in this volume reveal how American architecture was shaped not by inevitable progress toward a unified national culture but by the turbulent realities of race, labor, settler colonialism, and territorial expansion. Rather than treating architecture as an apolitical aesthetic expression, the contributors expose it as an active arena in which the meanings of nationhood were constructed, contested, and often violently enforced. From Indigenous spatial practices and Black institutional building to transnational exchanges and the racial politics embedded in professionalization, this collection reframes the built environment as central to the competing cultural, political, and geographic claims that defined the United States during this period.

In a unique and groundbreaking 2015 presentation of important contemporary art rarely seen in the traditional environs of the Hudson River Valley, the Thomas Cole National Historic Site and Olana, Frederic Edwin Church's Persian-inspired mansion, showcased the work of contemporary American artists such as Chuck Close, Cindy Sherman, Maya Lin, Martin Puryear, and Gregory Crewdson, some of the 30 artists featured in the exhibition. Stephen Hannock, celebrated Luminist painter and one of the exhibition's co-curators, stated that "this is a terrific opportunity to open up contemporary art, as well as these historic properties, to audiences who will see firsthand these shared artistic concerns."

The works of art selected for the exhibition were shown at the two venues to encourage visitors to experience both of the distinguished properties and the grandeur of their surroundings, and to present a complete overview and understanding of these contemporary works in a location where many art historians believe American art was born. The accompanying publication, River Crossings: Contemporary Art Comes Home, provides readers with a lavish record of this extraordinary and innovative exhibition, and offers unique and highly informative perspectives on the continuity of the American artistic tradition in two of the nation's most historic sites.

In addition to an impressive plate section of more than 60 works with brief artist biographies and descriptive narratives for the individual works, this comprehensive presentation features noteworthy, exceptional contributions. Stephen Hannock's preface details the development of this remarkable exhibition, while co-curator Jason Rosenfeld reveals in his essay the exhibition's importance relative to historical perception as he considers Cole's and Church's support of conemporary art in their time. Cultural historian Maurice Berger considers the realities of race and gender from the nineteenth-century Hudson River Valley to the present, and Marvin Heiferman, curator and writer, examines photography in the exhibition and its connections to Church's work and his use of the medium. Award-winning architectural and landscape photographer Peter Aaron generously provided the stunning installation, exterior, and landscape photographs, a gorgeous complement to this outstanding catalogue.

During Mexico's first century of independence, European and American explorers rediscovered its pre-Hispanic past. Finding the jungle-covered ruins of lost cities and artifacts inscribed with unintelligible hieroglyphs—and having no idea of the age, authorship, or purpose of these antiquities—amateur archaeologists, artists, photographers, and religious writers set about claiming Mexico's pre-Hispanic patrimony as a rightful part of the United States' cultural heritage.

In this insightful work, Tripp Evans explores why nineteenth-century Americans felt entitled to appropriate Mexico's cultural heritage as the United States' own. He focuses in particular on five well-known figures—American writer and amateur archaeologist John Lloyd Stephens, British architect Frederick Catherwood, Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the French émigré photographers Désiré Charnay and Augustus Le Plongeon. Setting these figures in historical and cultural context, Evans uncovers their varying motives, including the Manifest Destiny-inspired desire to create a national museum of American antiquities in New York City, the attempt to identify the ancient Maya as part of the Lost Tribes of Israel (and so substantiate the Book of Mormon), and the hope of proving that ancient Mesoamerica was the cradle of North American and even Northern European civilization. Fascinating stories in themselves, these accounts of the first explorers also add an important new chapter to the early history of Mesoamerican archaeology.