Results by title
855 books match the query 'Architecture' and 13 start with u
Uncommon Vernacular
The Early Houses of Jefferson County, West Virginia, 1735-1835John C. Allen, Jr.
West Virginia University Press, 2011
Allen’s refreshing perspective illuminates the vibrant vernacular architecture of Jefferson County, connecting the housing of this area to the rich history of the Shenandoah Valley. Varying features of house siting, plan types, construction techniques, building materials, outbuildings, and exterior and interior detailing illustrate the blending of German, Scots-Irish, English, and African cultures into a distinct, regional style.
Unlearning the City
Infrastructure in a New Optical FieldSwati Chattopadhyay
University of Minnesota Press, 2012
Cities are more than concrete and steel infrastructure. But modern urban theory does not have the language to describe and debate the vital component of urban life that is lived on the streets of cities and towns. Swati Chattopadhyay has written a nuanced argument for a new vocabulary of the city in Unlearning the City, proposing a way of analyzing the materiality of the urban that captures the ever-changing element of human experience.
Urban life is intrinsically messy and usually refuses to conform to the rigid views laid down in much of urban studies theory. Chattopadhyay looks at urban life in India with a fresh perspective that incorporates the everyday and the unstructured. As the first to apply the theories of subalternity for an understanding of urban history, Chattopadhyay provides an in-depth study of vehicular art, street cricket, political wall writing, and religious festivities that link the visual and spatial attributes of these popular cultural forms with the imagination and practices of urban life. She contends that these practices have a direct impact on the configuration and knowledge of public space, and the political potential of the people inhabiting cities.
Unlearning the City uses the popular culture of Indian cities to question the dominant conception of urban infrastructure and encourage a conceptual realignment in how the city is seen, discussed, and even experienced.
Untimely Ruins
An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919Nick Yablon
University of Chicago Press, 2009
American ruins have become increasingly prominent, whether in discussions of “urban blight” and home foreclosures, in commemorations of 9/11, or in postapocalyptic movies. In this highly original book, Nick Yablon argues that the association between American cities and ruins dates back to a much earlier period in the nation’s history. Recovering numerous scenes of urban desolation—from failed banks, abandoned towns, and dilapidated tenements to the crumbling skyscrapers and bridges envisioned in science fiction and cartoons—Untimely Ruins challenges the myth that ruins were absent or insignificant objects in nineteenth-century America.
The first book to document an American cult of the ruin, Untimely Ruins traces its deviations as well as derivations from European conventions. Unlike classical and Gothic ruins, which decayed gracefully over centuries and inspired philosophical meditations about the fate of civilizations, America’s ruins were often “untimely,” appearing unpredictably and disappearing before they could accrue an aura of age. As modern ruins of steel and iron, they stimulated critical reflections about contemporary cities, and the unfamiliar kinds of experience they enabled. Unearthing evocative sources everywhere from the archives of amateur photographers to the contents of time-capsules, Untimely Ruins exposes crucial debates about the economic, technological, and cultural transformations known as urban modernity. The result is a fascinating cultural history that uncovers fresh perspectives on the American city.
Unworking
The Reinvention of the Modern OfficeJeremy Myserson and Phillip Ross
Reaktion Books, 2022
Over the past one hundred years, the office has been integral to the development of modern society. It has shaped the architecture of our cities, the behavior of our organizations, and the everyday movements of millions of people. In 2020, however, the global pandemic brought our attendance in the office to an abrupt halt and triggered a complete reevaluation of the purpose of the workplace. This book offers a panoramic view of the office and explores what happens next. The authors advance a manifesto for “unworking”—unlearning old habits and rituals established for an outdated office and crafting and creating new ones fit for an age of digital technology, design innovation, and diverse workforces.
Urban Design
Alex Krieger
University of Minnesota Press, 2009
Highlights key issues in contemporary urban design through a discussion of its origins, current state, and future
Fifty years ago a landmark conference at Harvard University established urban design as a distinct architectural and planning practice. Today, with the world’s urban population surpassing three billion people, urban design has become more crucial than ever. Indeed, the concerns that initially brought leading architects and city planners together—including concerns over sprawl, pollution, and aging infrastructure—have only intensified over the past half century.
In Urban Design, Alex Krieger and William S. Saunders have assembled prominent figures in architecture, planning, and landscape design to look back on the evolution of the discipline of urban design; assess the current state of the field; and anticipate the challenges posed by the unprecedented rate of urbanization, particularly in the developing world, and how the profession will need to adapt in order to confront them. The volume opens with excerpts from transcripts of the 1956 Harvard conference followed by essays that contextualize and critique its assumptions and ambitions. Subsequent essays address such topics as the social conscience of urban design and stake out the competing sensibilities in the field, from New Urbanism to avant-garde. As humanity becomes an urban species to a degree that was unimaginable fifty years ago, this comprehensive volume seeks to encourage today’s designers to draw on the energy and messy vitality of cities in shaping tomorrow’s urban environments.Contributors: Jonathan Barnett, Denise Scott Brown, Joan Busquets, Kenneth Greenberg, John Kaliski, Timothy Love, Fumihiko Maki, Richard Marshall, Eric Mumford, Michelle Provoost, Peter G. Rowe, Edward W. Soja, Richard M. Sommer, Michael Sorkin, Emily Talen, Marilyn Jordan Taylor, Wouter Vanstiphout, Charles Waldheim.
Urban Design Governance
Soft Powers and the European ExperienceMatthew Carmona, João Bento, and Tommaso Gabrieli
University College London, 2023
Urban Design Governance takes a deep dive into the governance of urban design around Europe. It examines interventions in the means and processes of designing the built environment as devised by public authorities and other stakeholders across the continent, paying particular attention to the use of soft powers and allied financial mechanisms to influence design quality in the public interest. In doing so, the book traces the scope, use, and effectiveness of the range of informal, non-regulatory urban design governance tools that governments, municipalities, and others have at their disposal.
Urban Design in Western Europe
Regime and Architecture, 900-1900Wolfgang Braunfels
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Urban Informality and the Built Environment
Infrastructure, Exchange and ImageEdited by Nerea Amorós Elorduy, Nikhilesh Sinha, and Colin Marx
University College London, 2024
Urban Informality and the Built Environment demonstrates the value of greater and more diverse forms of engagement of built-environment disciplines with what constitutes urban informality and its politics. This collection lays forth a range of new methodologies to the study of urban informality, by exploring case studies from multiple geographies, including the creative place-making of street artists in Accra, the morphological evolution of urban Tirana, urban agriculture in la Habana, and social reproduction in Greece. Together these case studies offer ways to promote cross-fertilization between disciplines, lenses, geographies, and methodologies. Drawing on recent research by architects, planners, political scientists, geographers, and urban theorists, this book brings a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of informality and the built environment in diverse contexts.
Urban Land Use Planning, Fifth Edition
Philip R. Berke, David R. Godschalk, and Edward J. Kaiser, with Daniel A. Rodriguez
University of Illinois Press, 2006
Divided into three sections, this edition of Urban Land Use Planning deftly balances an authoritative, up-to-date discussion of current practices with a vision of what land use planning should become. It explores the societal context of land use planning and proposes a model for understanding and reconciling the divergent priorities among competing stakeholders; it explains how to build planning support systems to assess future conditions, evaluate policy choices, create visions, and compare scenarios; and it sets forth a methodology for creating plans that will influence future land use change.
Discussions new to the fifth edition include how to incorporate the three Es of sustainable development (economy, environment, and equity) into sustainable communities, methods for including livability objectives and techniques, the integration of transportation and land use, the use of digital media in planning support systems, and collective urban design based on analysis and public participation.
Urban Land Use Planning, Sixth Edition
Philip R. Berke, Todd K. BenDor, Daniel A. Rodriguez, and Yan Song
University of Illinois Press, 2026
Over five decades, successive editions of <i>Urban Land Use Planning</i> have reflected and shaped the planning profession, guiding practitioners as they respond to changing social, economic, and environmental challenges. The sixth edition addresses the complex and pressing equity, sustainability, and resilience issues of today and looks ahead to emerging tools and technologies that will influence the field’s future evolution.
The book is organized into three parts. The first establishes an intellectual foundation by linking the values, theories, and tools that define contemporary land use planning practice. The second equips planners with analytical methods and information systems needed to build a strong factual basis for effective land use planning, incorporating advances in digital data and interactive technologies. The third explains the concepts and sequential tasks involved in preparing and implementing plans.
The first new edition since 2006, <i>Urban Land Use Planning, Sixth Edition</i> updates and revises one of the most enduring and influential works in American planning history.
Urban Planning in the Nordic World
Ellen Braae
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
Urban planning is a keystone in the materialization of the Nordic welfare states. That is not to say that there is one particular city form or planning practice that is synonymous with the emerging welfare city, as welfare per se is far from normative. On the contrary, welfare is a highly ambiguous and contested notion that has changed over the postwar decades, which is also reflected in the development of the welfare city.
However, welfare in urban planning has mainly been associated with ideas of “the good life” and egalitarianism. In a Nordic context, the state has taken the lead in providing the social engineering “hardware” for advancing this universal aim. Social demographic welfare is economically based on full employment, and in this regard housing and caregiving support are key components. Yet education, infrastructure, and leisure facilities are also basic features in the distribution of universal welfare services for citizens’ entire lives. The results, ideally, are green and spacious welfare cities.
This book outlines the origins, development, challenges, and lived realities of the changing welfare city, focusing primarily on Denmark. Strategies have changed over the decades as models of development have shifted and as the needs of society and a warming planet have come into focus. The current welfare city can be described as an urban landscape characterized by, on the one hand, a division of functions and, on the other, mutual competition. The role of the state has been minimized, turning municipalities into the new major agents in attracting taxpayers and providing goods—both by means of urban planning.
Urbanist Desire
Queer and Trans Survival in the CityDavy Knittle
University of Minnesota Press, 2026
How writers and artists have used city planning strategies to push back against harm
Black queer feminist thinker Audre Lorde famously declared that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” This language is normally understood as a metaphor, but as author Davy Knittle argues in this provocative book, queer and trans activists have long used the tools of city planning and urban design to create written and visual art that critiques those in power and offers points of resilience to their own communities.
A close look at the ways queer and trans writers and artists resisted predatory redevelopment in New York City from 1950 to 2020, Urbanist Desire draws on the work of James Schuyler, June Jordan, David Wojnarowicz, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, and Zeyn Joukhadar, exploring how they intervened in major political flashpoints like the War on Poverty, the AIDS-era housing crisis, and gentrification in Brooklyn and Queens. Presenting a new cultural history of New York City, Knittle explains how urban change and the more-than-human life of cities have been foundational concerns for queer and trans cultural production since the 1950s.
Ending with analysis of the 2022 speculative novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, Urbanist Desire looks to the past to imagine a better future for New York City and for all marginalized people. Knittle demonstrates how to move past a recuperative response to harm and toward one that can change the structure of society by documenting how queer and trans activists have engaged the strategies of planning and design to address spatial, social, and economic inequality.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
Utopia’s Ghost
Architecture and Postmodernism, AgainReinhold Martin
University of Minnesota Press, 2010