Books

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 ...

A Territory in Conflict explores Israeli and Palestinian projects of modernization and development in the Gaza Strip, from the outset of Israel’s military occupation in 1967 to the Oslo Accords of 1993. Rather than reduce the Gaza Strip to an arena of war and violence, Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat resurrects the urban and ...

By transporting waves of newly arrived immigrants along rail lines from both coasts, railway companies played an active role in repopulating the interior of the country. Spaces of Immigration follows the travel routes of immigrants during a foundational period of American infrastructure—from ports of arrival to train cars and ...

William Whewell, the famous master of Trinity College in Cambridge, was a central figure in nineteenth-century British scientific culture and one of the last great polymaths. His influential work ranged from history and philosophy of science, education, architecture, mineralogy, and political economy to mathematics, engineering, natural theology, metaphysics, and moral ...

Longlist, 2025 Architecture Book Awards – Architectural Theory 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 ...

A new edition of this long unavailable classic reproduces photographic prints made from original negatives and features an extensive analytical introduction by the noted architectural historian Dell Upton.Before the 1936 publication of The Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania, the architectual heritage of a region prominent in the history of early ...

The Spectator and the Topographical City examines Pittsburgh’s built environment as it relates to the city’s unique topography. Martin Aurand explores the conditions present in the natural landscape that led to the creation of architectural forms; man’s response to an unruly terrain of hills, hollows, and rivers. ...

Allegheny City, known today as Pittsburgh’s North Side, was the third-largest city in Pennsylvania when it was controversially annexed by the City of Pittsburgh in 1907. Founded in 1787 as a reserve land tract for Revolutionary War veterans in compensation for their service, it quickly evolved into a thriving urban center ...

Frederick G. Scheibler, Jr. (1872–1958) was the rare turn-of-the-century American architect who looked to progressive movements such as Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts for inspiration, rather than conventional styles. His fresh house designs and plans for apartment buildings and multifamily “group cottages” feature dramatic massing, rich detailing, and a wide ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...