A new addition to the University of Pittsburgh Press award winning Culture Politics & the Built Environment series

To study the built environment of the Americas is to wrestle with an inherent contradiction. While the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge and the vernacular used to describe these disciplines comes from another, very different, continent. With this book, Fernando Luiz Lara discusses several theories of space—drawing on cartography, geography, anthropology, and mostly architecture—and proposes counterweights to five centuries of Eurocentrism. The first part of Spatial Theories for the Americas offers a critique of Eurocentrism in the discipline of architecture, problematizing its theoretical foundation in relation to the inseparability of modernization and colonization. The second part makes explicit the insufficiencies of a hegemonic Western tradition at the core of spatial theories by discussing a long list of authors who have thought about the Americas. To overcome centuries of Eurocentrism, Lara concludes, will require a tremendous effort, but, nonetheless, we have the responsibility of looking at the built environment of the Americas through our own lenses. Spatial Theories for the Americas proposes a fundamental step in that direction.

This new series will enchant seasoned country house visitors and amaze people new to art and architecture as they read about surprising snippets of history that occurred at, or because of, a country house in England, Scotland, or Wales. Three volumes in total, the first covering the letters A through H, each book will contain fascinating content and beautiful illustrations.Curt DiCamillo’s series of three high quality hardback books use the alphabet to frame an astonishing variety of material as a backdrop to endless, beguiling stories. Curt’s series of crisp, zesty entries dive into fascinating moments of British cultural history—from tea to bananas, from Canaletto to Agatha Christie, from porcelain to ghosts. The text is an exhilarating whistle-stop tour—perfectly pitched for pleasurable sampling that will enchant both newcomers and seasoned visitors to country houses.

Winner, 2018 SAH Alice Davis Hitchcock Award Mexico City became one of the centers of architectural modernism in the Americas in the first half of the twentieth century. Invigorated by insights drawn from the first published histories of Mexican colonial architecture, which suggested that Mexico possessed a distinctive architecture and culture, beginning in the 1920s a new generation of architects created profoundly visual modern buildings intended to convey Mexico’s unique cultural character. By midcentury these architects and their students had rewritten the country’s architectural history and transformed the capital into a metropolis where new buildings that evoked pre-conquest, colonial, and International Style architecture coexisted. Through an exploration of schools, a university campus, a government ministry, a workers’ park, and houses for Diego Rivera and Luis Barragán, Kathryn O’Rourke offers a new interpretation of modern architecture in the Mexican capital, showing close links between design, evolving understandings of national architectural history, folk art, and social reform. This book demonstrates why creating a distinctively Mexican architecture captivated architects whose work was formally dissimilar, and how that concern became central to the profession.

Threatened by issues of environmental health, climate change, population growth, and industrial demands, the coastal zone of the Great Lakes reflects an increasingly dysfunctional relationship between the people of the basin and the resources that support them. Perhaps no place is the physical manifestation of this struggle more evident than in the basin’s shallow bays. While many regional and local responses to these issues focus on methods of control, Five Bay Landscapes argues that responses should begin with critical, experiential, and pluralistic understandings of place. Through a series of five narratives, each located on a bay within the Great Lakes, the authors share their practice of curious site explorations. These explorations, both written and visual, consider the nuances and systems of these shorelines along with the lessons these findings might offer for future design and planning interventions. Using the Great Lakes as a context, Five Bay Landscapes illuminates a dynamic and robust landscape system and establishes a series of methods for understanding, analyzing, and intervening within the changing landscape.

Original fine-art prints inspired by the classical architecture of Florence.

This book provides a comprehensive guide with detailed explanations, illustrations and photographs of late-7th century to 11th century Anglo-Saxon Churches and stone sculpture. It is divided into four parts.The first part includes an extensive glossary explaining the terms likely to be encountered, it explains Celtic and Roman Church practices and the Synod of Whitby, how Anglo-Saxon churches were established and their plans, and also provides a summary to the settlements of the Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Hiberno-Norse in England. The second part provides a comprehensive description of the construction and architectural features of extant Anglo-Saxon Churches including their walling, plinths and quoining, archways, doorways, windows and belfry-openings of whatever shape or format or wherever their location. It also explains features such as string-courses, pilaster-strips, pilaster-buttresses, hood-moulding and strip-work. Also included are extant Anglo-Saxon stairways and crypts. Explanations are included on porticus, galleries, the use of rooms in towers, roofs, church seating and other furnishing, balusters and baluster-shafts.The third part provides a comprehensive description of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian Decoration on stonework. It details all the designs and patterns involved including those which also have scenes depicting creatures, beasts, birds, serpents and humans, figures, and scenes from Christianity and Norse Mythology. It explains and provides examples of the stonework on which these designs and patterns appear namely standing crosses, cross-heads, cross-shafts and cross-bases; grave-markers, grave-covers, grave-slabs and grave-memorials and crosses; sarcophagi and shrine chests; wall friezes and wall panels; fonts; and sundials. The fourth part provides an alphabetical list of 183 recommended churches and museums with summarised information on their individual architectural features, and/or stone sculpture. Many of the churches are further expanded in detail in the text in the second and third parts. Also provided is a page and photographic index of all the churches and museums where they are referred to in the text. All the places referred to in the text have been personally visited by the author.

In 1811, architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe spurred American builders into action when he called for them to reject "the corrupt Age of Dioclesian, or the still more absurd and debased taste of Louis the XIV," and to emulate instead the ancient temples of Greece. In response, people in the antebellum trans-Appalachian region embraced the clean lines, intricate details, and stately symmetry of the Grecian style. On newly built public buildings, private homes, and religious structures, references to classical Greek architecture became the preferred ornamentation. Several antebellum cities and towns adopted the moniker of "Athens," styling themselves as centers of culture, education, and sophistication. As the trend grew, American citizens understood the name as a link between the Grecian style and the founding principles of democracy—signaling a change of taste in service to the larger American cultural ideal. In Athens on the Frontier, Patrick Lee Lucas examines the material culture of Grecian-style buildings in antebellum America to help recover nineteenth-century regional identities. As communities worked to define their built landscape and develop a shared Western identity, Lucas's study invites readers to question many of the assumptions Americans have made about divisions and cultural formation in antebellum society.

The Byzantine cathedral of Hagia Sophia has been a source of wonder and fascination since its sixth-century construction. It was the premier monument of the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, and remains one of the most recognisable symbols of modern Istanbul. Often seen as encapsulating Byzantine history and culture, the building has been the subject of much scholarly interest since the Renaissance. However, while almost all previous archaeological work has focussed on the church itself, the surrounding complex of ecclesiastical buildings has been largely neglected. The research project presented here (co-directed by the authors) is the first to focus on the archaeology of the immediate environs of the church in order to understand the complex as a whole. Previously unrecorded material includes parts of the Patriarchal complex, from which the Orthodox Church was governed for almost a millennium, what may be the ‘Great Baptistery’ north of the church, and what are perhaps the first fragments of the fourth-century phase of the cathedral yet identified. The discovery of an unrecognised porch, surviving to its full height within the standing building, changes the known plan of the famous sixth-century church. This new information provides fresh evidence about the appearance and function of the complex, illustrating its similarities to, and dissimilarities from, Episcopal centers elsewhere in the Byzantine world. Combined with other archaeological sources, these discoveries enable us to place the sixth-century cathedral in its urban context and to reconsider what Hagia Sophia can tell us about the wider Byzantine world.

The first inhabitants of Iceland built their homes from the material that was closest at hand: the earth itself. In the early 20th century, more than half the Icelandic population were still living in turf houses, and a few dozen such buildings remain standing today. Icelanders were not the only northern nation, however, who built their homes of turf and rock: in the North Atlantic region, people were living in earth structures as recently as the early 20th century, although no trace of them remains today except in Iceland. The Icelandic turf house is a remarkable phenomenon in world architectural history. It is part of international cultural heritage, and one of Iceland’s most important contributions to global culture.

The features of humankind’s interaction with the natural enrivonment have, over the course of evolution, slowly consolidated specific models of behavior. In the social dimension, these primitive schemes of interaction between the body and the enviroment have generated the blooming of consciousness and gradually also of language. Neuroscience sheds light on the mechanism by which the artifical envionrnment – i. e. architecture – has represented a crucial moment of change in improving human beings’ cognitive capacities. This fact situates the beginning of architecture in an even more distant past. There are certain natural situations which, taken together with humankind’s actions and body, in the phase of homo erectus, which can therefore be considered the very first architecture. In particular, the technology and architecture which humankind has developed over the last two centuries, along with cultural and social transformations, have modified the environment without a sufficient awareness of the fundamental role played by nature in cognitive evolution. Today’s cities, and the entirety of our environmental conditions, are nothing other than the mirror image of this fogetting.

This book intends to explore the atmospheric issue from an independent, architectural perspective. It is composed of two main sections. The first one introduces and analyzes the atmospheric concept inside the lexical scope of the architectural discipline, mapping the whole taxonomy of semantic declinations that are recognized by architecture, in addition to retracing the etymology of the term ‘atmosphere’ and its evolution. The second section studies the topic throughout the sensory-emotional filter of the perceiving subject located in the built environment, gleaning suggestions from neuroscientific knowledge. More recently, architecture and neuroscience have started to interact, both in the combination of their theories and through experiment-based investigations.

In the late nineteenth century, medical educators intent on transforming American physicians into scientifically trained, elite professionals swiftly recognized the value of medical school design for their reform efforts. Between 1893 and 1940, nearly every medical college in the country rebuilt or substantially renovated its facility. In Building Schools, Making Doctors, Katherine Carroll reveals how the new buildings constructed during this fifty-year period did more than passively house a new system of medical training; they actively participated in defining and promoting a reformed pedagogy, modern science, and the new physician. Interdisciplinary and wide ranging, her study moves architecture from the periphery of medical education to the center, revealing a network of medical educators, architects, and philanthropists who believed that the educational environment itself shaped how students learned and the type of physicians they became. Carroll offers the first comprehensive study of the science and pedagogy formulated by new facilities, the influence of donors and architects, the impact of educational centers on the urban landscape and the local community, and the privileging of white men within the medical profession during this formative period for physicians and medical schools.

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.

Over the past two decades, scholarship in architectural history has transformed, moving away from design studio pedagogy and postmodern historicism to draw instead from trends in critical theory focusing on gender, race, the environment, and more recently global history, connecting to revisionist trends in other fields. With examples across space and time—from medieval European coin trials and eighteenth-century Haitian revolutionary buildings to Weimar German construction firms and present-day African refugee camps—Writing Architectural History considers the impact of these shifting institutional landscapes and disciplinary positionings for architectural history. Contributors reveal how new methodological approaches have developed interdisciplinary research beyond the traditional boundaries of art history departments and architecture schools, and explore the challenges and opportunities presented by conventional and unorthodox forms of evidence and narrative, the tools used to write history.