Architecture / General

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.

This book considers the effects of colonialism, travel, and globalization on the development of modern architecture in Germany from the 1850s until the 1930s. Osayimwese argues that the rise of a new modern language of architecture within Germany during this period was shaped by the country’s colonial and neo-colonial entanglements. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book depicts the evolution of domestic space and the meaning of home during the twentieth century. The chapters initially discuss topics that include modernization, design, housing policy, utopias, and future forms of living that affected domestic life. The book then analyzes the basic functional units within the home, interpreting each unit according to its essential social and cultural characteristics: the corridor (public/private); living room (comfort); kitchen (gender); bathroom (hygiene); and bedroom (intimacy). Overall, the book offers a fascinating glimpse at how the twentieth century changed the functionalities and aesthetics of domestic environments across Eastern Europe, Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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