Books

Kathryn E. O’Rourke offers a new interpretation of the development of modern architecture in the Mexican capital, showing close links between design, evolving understandings of national architectural history, folk art, and social reform.

The new edition of this long unavailable classic features an extensive analytical introduction by the noted architectural historian Dell Upton. Containing 416 black-and-white photographs, 81 measured drawings and an extensive text, this volume presents a splendid array of the early dwellings, barns, and other outbuildings, churches, arsenals, banks, inns, commercial buildings, tollhouses, mills, and even tombstones of western Pennsylvania.

The first thorough guide to the design and history of “Kentuck,” designed in 1953-1954 by Frank Lloyd Wright, only seven miles from Fallingwater. Donald Hoffmann includes more than fifty photographs, drawings, diagrams, and a descriptive text to illustrate the structural peculiarities of the house based on the equilateral triangle.

Sites Unseen challenges conventions for viewing and interpreting the landscape, using visual theory to move beyond traditional practices of describing and classifying objects to explore notions of audience and context. Treats landscape as a spatial, psychological, and sensory encounter, opening a new dialogue for discussing the landscape outside the boundaries of current art criticism and theory.

Winner of the 2009 Allen Noble Book Award from the Pioneer America Society

Looking mainly at the years following the British victory in the second Boer War, from 1902 to 1930, Foster examines the influence of painting, writing, architecture, and photography on the construction of a shared, romanticized landscape subjectivity that was perceived as inseparable from “being South African”, and thus helped forge the imagined community of white South Africa.

Toker examines Pittsburgh in its historical context, in its regional setting, and from the street level (leading the reader on a personal tour through every neighborhood). Based on his 1986 classic, Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait, but with a completely revised text and lavishly illustrated with all new photos and maps, Pittsburgh: A New Portrait reveals the true colors of a great American city.

The first comprehensive history of architectural practice and the emergence of prefabricated housing in the Eastern Bloc. Through discussions of individual architects and projects, as well as building typologies, professional associations, and institutional organization, Zarecor opens a rare window into the cultural and economic life of Eastern Europe during the early postwar period.

This edited collection offers a unique perspective on twentieth-century architectural history, disputing the primacy placed on individuals in the design and planning process and instead looking to the larger influences of politics, culture, economics, and globalization to uncover the roots of how our built environment evolves.

Second Suburb uncovers the unique story of Levittown, Pennsylvania, and its significance to American social, architectural, environmental, and political history.

Winner of the 2011 Allen Noble Book Award from the Pioneer America Society: Best edited book in North American material culture.

Angelique Bamberg provides the first book-length study of the community of Chatham Village in Pittsburgh. She establishes its historical significance to urban planning and reveals the complex development process, social significance, and breakthrough construction and landscaping techniques that shaped this idyllic community.

Winner of the 2007 Art Libraries Society of North America Worldwide Books Award

Examines Pittsburgh’s built environment as it relates to the city’s unique topography—man’s response to an unruly terrain of hills, hollows, and rivers. Adopting a spectator’s viewpoint, Aurand studies three “terrestrial rooms” and their development over time.

Emily Pugh provides an original comparative analysis of selected works of architecture and urban planning in East and West Berlin during the “Wall era,” to reveal the importance of these structures to the formation of political, cultural, and social identities.

The first comprehensive study of Scheibler, it includes 125 historic and contemporary photographs and drawings, all of Scheibler’s known projects—including many not recorded in any other published source—and a selected bibliography.

Zeynep Kezer offers a critical account of how the built environment mediated Turkey’s transition from a pluralistic (multiethnic and multireligious) empire into a modern, homogenized nation-state following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I.

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 premiere locations of cutting-edge medical treatment for all classes, and from low-rise decentralized facilities to high-rise centralized structures.