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178 books match the query 'Buildings' and 8 start with r

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Reconstruction Fiction

Housing and Realist Literature in Postwar Britain

Paula Derdiger

The Ohio State University Press, 2020

Reconstruction Fiction: Housing and Realist Literature in Postwar Britain by Paula Derdiger assesses the impact of World War II and the welfare state on literary fiction by focusing on one of the defining issues of the postwar period: housing. Through compelling close readings and lively historical and cultural analysis, Derdiger argues that literary realism was a necessary, generative response to the war and welfare state since they impacted the built environment and landscape. Wartime decimation of buildings and streets called for reconstruction, and reconstruction called not just for bricks and mortar, architectural drawings, town plans, preservation schemes, and new policies but also for fiction that invited particular ways of inhabiting an environment that had been irrevocably changed. Derdiger argues that fiction, like actual buildings, creates a sheltered space for the mediation between individual subjects and the social and geographical environments that they encounter. Realist fiction, specifically, insists that such mediation is possible and that it is socially valuable. Covering writers spanning various social positions and aesthetic tendencies—including Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Patrick Hamilton, Doris Lessing, Colin MacInnes, and Elizabeth Taylor—Derdiger shows how these authors responded to the war with realistic technique, investing in external conditions just as much as or more than their characters’ i nterior lives. In doing so, their reconstruction fiction helped to shape postwar life.

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Reframing Berlin

Architecture, Memory-Making and Film Locations

Christopher S. Wilson and Gul Kacmaz Erk

Intellect Books, 2024

A study of the ways Berlin has been depicted in cinema and the ways its architectural transformations inform our understanding of the city and its memories.

Concerned with the connection between the built environment and the passage of time, Reframing Berlin uses film locations in the city to reveal the influence that urban transformation has on memory-making. Covering the city’s history since the beginning of cinema, the book proposes the term urban strategy to understand the range of consequential actions taken by politicians, developers, and other powerful figures to shape the nature and future of buildings, streets, and districts. Organizing these strategies from demolition to memorialization, the authors study the ways these actions forget or recall aspects of place. Using cinematic representations of Berlin as an audiovisual archive, the study details how the city has adjusted to its traumatic twentieth-century history through architectural transformations. Two dissimilar case studies frame each strategy, indicating that an approach that works for one building may not be sufficient for another.

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Rendered in Bits and Stone

Studies in (In)Tangible Digital Heritage

Edited by Maciej Stasiowski

Intellect Books, 2026

A critical exploration of how digital technologies are reshaping global heritage conservation, storytelling, and the politics of preservation.

As digital technologies increasingly shape how we preserve, interpret, and experience the past, the field of digital heritage has undergone rapid and transformative growth. This book offers a timely and critical exploration of how tools such as 3D modelling, augmented reality, and mobile applications are redefining the landscape of heritage conservation and storytelling.

Bringing together contributions from international scholars across disciplines, including architectural conservation, archaeology, urban studies, tourism, photography, museology, and game studies, this volume engages with the complex politics, practices, and potentials of digital heritage. The chapters are organized around three thematic strands: the digital politics of conservation, technology as a medium for narrative and interpretation, and the creation of virtual reconstructions of the past.

By critically examining the limitations of traditional preservation methods and the innovative opportunities offered by digital tools, this collection not only reflects the current state of the field but also contributes to its future directions. Featuring culturally and geographically diverse case studies and blending theoretical insight with practical application, the book is essential reading for students, researchers, and professionals in heritage studies, conservation, architecture, archaeology, and cultural tourism.

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Resplendent Synagogue

Architecture and Worship in an Eighteenth-Century Polish Community

Thomas C. Hubka

Brandeis University Press, 2022

This unique exploration of a lost religious and cultural artifact breathes new life into a forgotten but fascinating aspect of eighteenth-century Polish Jewry.

Thomas C. Hubka, an architectural historian, immersed himself in medieval and early modern Jewish history, religion, and culture to prepare for this remarkable study of the eighteenth-century Polish synagogue in the town of Gwozdziec, now in present-day Ukraine. Because the Gwozdziec Synagogue, like so many others, was destroyed by the Nazis, this book revives a spiritual community lost to history. Hubka selected the Gwozdziec Synagogue because of the completeness of its photographic and historical records. Graced with nearly two hundred historical photographs, architectural drawings, maps, diagrams, and color illustrations, Resplendent Synagogue vividly recreates the spiritual heart of a once-vibrant Jewish population. Hubka demonstrates that while the architectural exterior of the synagogue was largely the product of non-Jewish, regional influences, the interior design and elaborate wall-paintings signified a distinctly Jewish art form. The collaboration of Jewish and Gentile builders, craftsmen, and artists in the creation of this magnificent wooden structure attests to an eighteenth-century period of relative prosperity and communal well-being for the Jews of Gwozdziec. Part of a tradition that was later abandoned by Eastern European Jewish communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this truly resplendent synagogue exemplified a high point in Jewish architectural art and religious painting.

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Rijksmuseum

The Building, the Collection and the Outdoor Gallery

Edited by Cees W. de Jong and Patrick Spijkerman

Amsterdam University Press, 2015

Few art collections in the world can rival that of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Built in 1885, the iconic museum holds more than a million works, with a particular focus on Dutch masters—its collection of works by Van Gogh, Vermeer, and Rembrandt are unparalleled.

The museum recently reopened after a ten-year renovation that cost more than $400 million, and the result is stunning: never before has the Rijksmuseum’s collection been displayed so well. This book offers a lavishly illustrated chronicle of both the collection and the building that houses it. Though nothing can replace an actual trip to the Rijksmuseum—as the more than two million annual visitors can attest—this book comes as close as possible, taking art lovers on a virtual tour of the greatest masterworks of Western art in a building that is brilliantly designed to show them at their best.

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River Crossings

Contemporary Art Comes Home

Jason Rosenfeld

The Artist Book Foundation, 2015

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.

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