Extreme poverty, which intensified in India during colonial rule, peaked in the 1920s—after decades of imperialist exploitation, famine, and disease—a time when architects, engineers, and city authorities proposed a new type of housing for India’s urban poor and industrial workers. As Farhan Karim argues, economic scarcity became a central inspiration for architectural modernism in the subcontinent. As India moved from colonial rule to independence, the Indian government, business entities, international NGOs, and intergovernmental agencies took major initiatives to modernize housing conditions and the domestic environment of the state’s low-income population. Of Greater Dignity than Riches traces multiple international origins of austerity as an essential ingredient of postcolonial development. By prescribing model villages, communities, and ideal houses for the working class, this project of austerity eventually reduced poverty into a stylized architectural representation. In this rich and original study, Karim explains the postwar and postcolonial history of low-cost housing as an intertwined process of global transferences of knowledge, Cold War cultural politics, postcolonial nationalism, and the politics of economic development.

Beginning in the 1950s, an explosion in rural-urban migration dramatically increased the population of cities throughout Peru, leading to an acute housing shortage and the proliferation of self-built shelters clustered in barriadas, or squatter settlements. Improvised Cities examines the history of aided self-help housing, or technical assistance to self-builders, which took on a variety of forms in Peru from 1954 to 1986. While the postwar period saw a number of trial projects in aided self-help housing throughout the developing world, Peru was the site of significant experiments in this field and pioneering in its efforts to enact a large-scale policy of land tenure regularization in improvised, unauthorized cities. Gyger focuses on three interrelated themes: the circumstances that made Peru a fertile site for innovation in low-cost housing under a succession of very different political regimes; the influences on, and movements within, architectural culture that prompted architects to consider self-help housing as an alternative mode of practice; and the context in which international development agencies came to embrace these projects as part of their larger goals during the Cold War and beyond.

If there is a feature of the Central European Neolithic period that deserves increased attention of researchers and all those with interest in prehistory, it is circular architecture of the dimensions of many tens of metres, from which only negative imprints of the ditches and imprints of posts in the form of postholes or narrow trenches are preserved to this day. The reason is that it offers quite a different insight into the skills and interpersonal relationships of ancient societies that lived in Europe in the first half of the fifth millennium BC. The authors of the book ask whether these structures, most often termed rondels, can be regarded as ‘architecture of power’ – the first clear evidence of thought-out power strategies of some individuals or their groups. Using anthropological terms – were they skilful and exceptional entrepreneurs with an ad hoc status (such as Big Men) living in egalitarian/segmented communities, or rather powerful Chiefs living in rank and hereditary based societies/chiefdoms?In the introduction, the book points out the difficulties that necessarily arise when cultural (social) anthropology and archaeology join forces in an attempt to generalise information about kinship and socio-political relationships, in an effort to project them into the world of archaic societies that are only known from material culture in the archaeological record. After summing up various hypotheses, the authors use selected sites, results and often only recently processed terrain research projects to summarise more information about the settlements and burials in order to present the important period in which an attempt at accumulation of power took place, perhaps not the first but definitely not the last in European prehistory.Besides other methods used in archaeology to evaluate the archaeological record, the book devotes an important chapter to the radiocarbon dating method, which may – with a critical assessment of the outcomes of dating of carefully selected samples – bring fundamental information not only about dating itself but also about the limits of archaeological sources.Welcome to the world of rondel builders, from whom we are separated by nearly 280 generations of people!

Bright, vibrant, intriguing, and unique, chromatic homes are speckled across the world's landscape. These historic houses and buildings are saturated with colors -- often highlighting decorative woodwork and architecture -- to enhance, revive, and regenerate various neighborhoods and communities.John I. "Hans" Gilderbloom explores and celebrates the appeal of these captivating houses in Chromatic Homes: The Joy of Color in Historic Places. Highlighted in gorgeous detail are the relevance of the homes' styles and colors as well as their history -- many believed to have been around for decades in American cities such as Louisville, Cincinnati, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Miami, and around for centuries in far-flung places such as Havana, Cuba, Venice, Italy, and Moscow, Russia. Gilderbloom reveals how renewing and updating historic homes has the ability to transform and galvanize a community, and these houses serve as creative havens for artists, writers, and musicians: author Alice Walker wrote The Color Purple in one of the most famous chromatic homes in San Francisco, and Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in a spectacular "painted lady" in Hartford, Connecticut.Filled with 182 engaging and eye-catching photos of homes all across the nation and the world, Chromatic Homes perfectly illustrates how the simple act of painting an ornate structure in bright or bold colors can inspire, empower, sustain and enlighten an entire community.

Modern hygienic urbanism originated in the airy boulevards, public parks, and sewer system that transformed the Parisian cityscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet these well-known developments in public health built on a previous moment of anxiety about the hygiene of modern city dwellers. Amid fears of national decline that accompanied the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, efforts to modernize Paris between 1800 and 1850 focused not on grand and comprehensive structural reforms, but rather on improving the bodily and mental fitness of the individual citizen. These forgotten efforts to renew and reform the physical and moral health of the urban subject found expression in the built environment of the city—in the gymnasiums, swimming pools, and green spaces of private and public institutions, from the pedagogical to the recreational. Sun-Young Park reveals how these anxieties about health and social order, which manifested in emerging ideals of the body, created a uniquely spatial and urban experience of modernity in the postrevolutionary capital, one profoundly impacted by hygiene, mobility, productivity, leisure, spectacle, and technology.

The cathedral city of Hereford is one of the best-kept historical secrets of the Welsh Marches. Although its Anglo-Saxon development is well known from a series of classic excavations in the 1960s and ’70s, what is less widely known is that the city boasts an astonishingly well-preserved medieval plan and contains some of the earliest houses still in everyday use anywhere in England. Three leading authorities on the buildings of the English Midlands have joined forces, combining detailed archaeological surveys, primary historical research and topographical analysis, to examine 24 of the most important buildings, from the great hall of the Bishop’s Palace of c. 1190, to the first surviving brick town-house of c.1690. Fully illustrated with photographs, historic maps and explanatory diagrams, the case-studies include canonical and mercantile hall-houses of the Middle Ages, and mansions, commercial premises and simple suburban dwellings of the early modern period. Owners and builders are identified from documentary sources wherever possible, from the Bishop of Hereford and the medieval cathedral canons, through civic office-holding merchant dynasties to minor tradesmen otherwise known only for their brushes with the law.

Intertwining is an international, interdisciplinary journal dedicated to understanding the experience and making of architecture. It includes the voices of science alongside those of the arts - as both ways of knowing are critical to the multidimensional nature of our inquiry."We want to move beyond thinking of architecture as an object. Architecture is not separate from us - it is not something to be judged merely by its formal properties, its satisfaction of programmatic concerns or its performance in terms of technical parameters. We are not dismissing the importance of these factors but wish to enrich them, to understand and articulate how architecture can capture and express unseen layers of meaning and purpose. We want to think of architecture as a verb, a mover, a shaper, an active agent in human flourishing. In order to appreciate the potential power of architecture we want to explore the experience of architecture, and the intimately related experience of making architecture. Turning our attention to experience requires that we listen to and consider knowledge from a full array of disciplines. Experience is multi-dimensional, multi-directional, irreducible. Experience always supercedes, flows over any boundary that attempts to circumscribe it."Contributors: Alessandro Gattara, Sarah Robinson, Davide Ruzzon, Juhani Pallasmaa, Barbara Lamprecht, Kevin Kelley Rooney, Olafur Eliasson, Harry Francis Mallgrave, Colin Ellard, Susan Magsamen, Raymond Richard Neutra, Sarah Robinson, Elnaz Ghazi.

Public spaces have long been the object of countless studies. Yet, most of these have focused almost exclusively on the metropolitan setting, while neglecting the nature and function of public spaces in rural areas. This volume addresses precisely this gap, drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s theories in order to propose an alternative vision of public spaces – one which is centered on the local rhythms of rural areas and on their peculiar complexities. Rural public spaces can present all features of a Lefebvrian abstract space, in a way that is akin to that of cities. However, at the same time, their specific ‘otherness’ allows them to offer communal and organic responses to the pressure of global challenges, in a way that is largely precluded to cities.

Reducing Boundaries offers a new perspective on an often under researched topic: what is the upper and middle classes perception of their own security? While human sciences have mainly focused on poor and low-middle classes evicted from urban space, Reducing Boundaries explores the strategies that the most privileged classes enact in order to preserved their own (real or perceived) security. In the context of an interdisciplinary framework of analysis and through a series of case studies (from Porto Alegre, to Brussels, to Venice), class-specific security measures and policies are considered both in themselves, and in terms of their impact of the urban fabric of cities and on the lives of the different social groups involved. This book crowns a four-year international project funded by the European Research Agency.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, drastic social and political changes, technological innovations, and exposure to non-Western cultures affected Germany's built environment in profound ways. The economic challenges of Germany's colonial project forced architects designing for the colonies to abandon a centuries-long, highly ornamental architectural style in favor of structural technologies and building materials that catered to the local contexts of its remote colonies, such as prefabricated systems. As German architects gathered information about the regions under their influence in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific—during expeditions, at international exhibitions, and from colonial entrepreneurs and officials—they published their findings in books and articles and organized lectures and exhibits that stimulated progressive architectural thinking and shaped the emerging modern language of architecture within Germany itself.  Offering in-depth interpretations across the fields of architectural history and postcolonial studies, Itohan Osayimwese considers the effects of colonialism, travel, and globalization on the development of modern architecture in Germany from the 1850s until the 1930s. Since architectural developments in nineteenth-century Germany are typically understood as crucial to the evolution of architecture worldwide in the twentieth century, this book globalizes the history of modern architecture at its founding moment.

In 1995, in Chicago, Mary Jacob curated “Culture in action”, an experience of participatory Public Art which left a mark on the contemporary artistic research and criticism. Over the last twenty years, this “new genre of public art” (Lacy 1995) has developed. In these “dialogical” and “connective” aesthetics (Kester 1999, Gablik 1992), public artists have involved citizens in creative performances that aim to modify citizens’ perceptions of the places where they live, to create new relations within and toward the territory, and to transform (often temporarily) the physical spaces. The book moves from the first outcomes of a two-year interdisciplinary research programme on the Italian contemporary Public Art, funded by the Sardinia Region (Italy). Moving beyond the traditional ladders of formal citizen participation to territory governance, the research investigates how public artists have involved citizens in creative performances that aim to modify citizens’ perceptions of the places where they live, to create new relations within and toward the territory, and to transform (often temporarily) the physical spaces. A book particularly useful to international students who have strong interests in the ongoing debates on political participation and communication from a multidisciplinary perspective, Performative Citizenship is the product of extensive teaching experience in the field of political participation and communication, and stems from continuous comparisons between students of sociology, cultural and media studies, political sciences, arts, architecture, and urban planning.

Peter Eisenman (Yale School of Architecture, New Haven, Eisenman Architects, New York, USA) discusses with architects and philosophers: Jörg H. Gleiter (Germany), Kim Förster (Switzerland), Preston Scott Cohen (USA), Emmanuel Petit (USA), Mario Carpo (USA), Sarah M. Whiting (USA), Manuel Orazi (Italy), John McMorrough (USA), Gabriele Mastrigli (Italy), Panayotis Pangalos (Greece), Cynthia Davidson (USA), Ingeborg M. Rocker (USA), Alejandro Zaera-Polo (USA), Djordje Stojanović (Serbia), Greg Lynn (USA) performing on the stage for two days in Belgrade.

Rise of the Modern Hospital is a focused examination of hospital design in the United States from the 1870s through the 1940s. This understudied period witnessed profound changes in hospitals as they shifted from last charitable resorts for the sick poor to premier locations of cutting-edge medical treatment for all classes, and from low-rise decentralized facilities to high-rise centralized structures. Jeanne Kisacky reveals the changing role of the hospital within the city, the competing claims of doctors and architects for expertise in hospital design, and the influence of new medical theories and practices on established traditions. She traces the dilemma designers faced between creating an environment that could function as a therapy in and of itself and an environment that was essentially a tool for the facilitation of increasingly technologically assisted medical procedures. Heavily illustrated with floor plans, drawings, and photographs, this book considers the hospital building as both a cultural artifact, revelatory of external medical and social change, and a cultural determinant, actively shaping what could and did take place within hospitals.

"A shed is the shortest line between need and shelter," writes Howard Mansfield. Drawing on material from his recent book Dwelling in Possibility, Mansfield explores the different types of sheds found around New England and beyond: covered bridges, barns, worksheds, "worship sheds" (meeting houses), extended farmhouses, bob houses for ice fishing. In lyrical style and supported by photographs by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey, Mansfield shows the connection between the design of these structures and their roles in our lives. "Sheds are like our lives - not the grandest building or the most graceful. Sheds are ordinary - and in that they are exalted."Anyone who has ever traveled the back roads of America will enjoy this beautifully photographed exploration of simple, useful structures.

Castles and the Anglo-Norman World draws together a series of 20 papers by 26 French and English specialists in the field of Anglo-Norman studies. It includes summaries of current knowledge and new research into important Norman castles in England and Normandy, drawing on information from recent excavations. Sections consider the evolution of Anglo-Norman castles, the architecture and archaeology of Norman monuments, Romanesque architecture and artefacts, the Bayeux Tapestry and the presentation of historic sites to the public. These studies are presented together with a consideration of the 12th century cross-Channel Norman Empire, which provides a broader context. This work is the result of a conference held at Norwich Castle in 2012, which was part of a collaboration between professionals in the fields of archaeology, architecture, museums and heritage, under the banner of the Norman Connections Project.

For over 35 years the author has travelled and researched extensively in the UK. His first publications were concise guides to historic Orkney and Shetland, and Northumberland and Tyne & Wear, covering places of interest from prehistory to the twentieth century. In the last 20 years he has focussed on the Anglo-Saxon period producing gazetteers of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian sites as indicate above, as well as “The Combined Anglo-Saxon Chronicles: A Ready-Reference Abridged Chronology” a single narrative in chronological order of the information provided in the extant manuscripts identifying in the process the source manuscripts. His books are for those readers who wish to learn more about Anglo-Saxon church architecture and Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian stone sculpture. Intended for the student and non-specialist alike, as well as those who already have some knowledge of the subjects covered, it bridges the divide between an academic approach and that of the interested general public. The aim is to provide an informed introduction to the subjects so that the reader will be able to confidently recognise Anglo-Saxon church architectural features and Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian stone sculpture. The contents, including illustrations and photographs, all meticulously checked on site, are drawn from the author’s extensive research and travels over many years. All the sites mentioned have been personally visited and assessed by the author.