An extensively illustrated, comprehensive exploration of the architecture and development of Old Cambridge from colonial settlement to bustling intersection of town and gown. Old Cambridge is the traditional name of the once-isolated community that grew up around the early settlement of Newtowne, which served briefly as the capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and then became the site of Harvard College. This abundantly illustrated volume from the Cambridge Historical Commission traces the development of the neighborhood as it became a suburban community and bustling intersection of town and gown. Based on the city's comprehensive architectural inventory and drawing extensively on primary sources, Building Old Cambridge considers how the social, economic, and political history of Old Cambridge influenced its architecture and urban development. Old Cambridge was famously home to such figures as the proscribed Tories William Brattle and John Vassall; authors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Dean Howells; publishers Charles C. Little, James Brown, and Henry O. Houghton; developer Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a founder of Bell Telephone; and Charles Eliot, the landscape architect. Throughout its history, Old Cambridge property owners have engaged some of the country's most talented architects, including Peter Harrison, H. H. Richardson, Eleanor Raymond, Carl Koch, and Benjamin Thompson. The authors explore Old Cambridge's architecture and development in the context of its social and economic history; the development of Harvard Square as a commercial center and regional mass transit hub; the creation of parks and open spaces designed by Charles Eliot and the Olmsted Brothers; and the formation of a thriving nineteenth-century community of booksellers, authors, printers, and publishers that made Cambridge a national center of the book industry. Finally, they examine Harvard's relationship with Cambridge and the community's often impassioned response to the expansive policies of successive Harvard administrations.

The history of Fresh Pond Reservation—onetime summer retreat for wealthy Bostonians, center of the nineteenth-century ice industry, and stomping grounds for Harvard students—told through photographs, maps and plans, and stories. Fresh Pond Reservation, at the northwest edge of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been described as a “landscape loved to death.” Certainly it is a landscape that has been changed by its various uses over the years and one to which Cantabridgeans and Bostonians have felt an intense attachment. Henry James returned to it in his sixties, looking for “some echo of the dreams of youth,” feeling keenly “the pleasure of memory”; a Harvard student of the 1850s fondly remembered skating parties and the chance of “flirtation with some fair-ankled beauty of breezy Boston”; modern residents argue fiercely over dogs being allowed to run free at the reservation and whether soccer or nature is a more valuable experience for Cambridge schoolchildren. In Fresh Pond, Jill Sinclair tells the story of the pond and its surrounding land through photographs, drawings, maps, plans, and an engaging narrative of the pond's geological, historical, and political ecology. Fresh Pond has been a Native American hunting and fishing ground; the site of an eighteenth-century hotel offering bowling, food and wine, and impromptu performances by Harvard men; a summer retreat for wealthy Bostonians; a training ground for trench warfare; a location for picnics and festivals for workers and sporting activities for all. The parkland features an Olmsted design, albeit an imperfectly realized one. The pond itself—a natural lake carved out by the retreating Ice Age about 15,000 years ago—was a center of the nineteenth-century ice industry (disparaged by Thoreau, writing about another pond), and still supplies the city of Cambridge with fresh drinking water. Sinclair's celebration of a local landscape also alerts us to broader issues—shifts in public attitudes toward nature (is it brutal wilderness or in need of protection?) and water (precious commodity or limitless flow?)—that resonate as we remake our relationship to the landscape.

Up to World War II and beyond, the British ruled over a vast empire. Modern western attitudes towards the imperial past tend either towards nostalgia for British power or revulsion at what seem to be the abuses of that power. The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire adopts neither of these approaches. It aims to create historical understanding about the British empire on the assumption that such understanding is important for any informed appreciation of the modern world. Through striking illustration and a text written by leading experts, this book examines the experience of colonialism in North America, India, Africa, Australia, and the Caribbean, as well as the impact of the empire on Britain itself. Emphasis is placed on social and cultural history, including slavery, trade, religion, art, and the movement of ideas. How did the British rule their empire? Who benefited economically from the empire? And who lost?

Necipoglu demonstrates the palace's role as a vast stage for the enactment of a ceremonial that emphasized the sultan's absolute power and his aloofness from the outside world. In the absence of the monumentality, axiality, and rational geometric planning principles now usually associated with imperial architecture, the author's deciphering of the palace's iconography is all the more revealing.

Samuel Pepys's Library, as famous in his own lifetime as it is now, was willed by Pepys to Magdalene, the college he had attended in the 1650s. It finally arrived in 1724 to be housed in a handsome new building. A remarkable collection of some 3,000 items, the library includes medieval manuscripts and early printed books by Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde; a naval collection, reflecting Pepys's role as Secretary to the Admiralty; works by Pepys's contemporaries and members of the Royal Society, including Newton's Principia Mathematica; and an unrivalled array of ephemera - letters, playbills and invitations. Alongside the Pepys Library, Magdalene has an impressive historic collection, housed in the beautiful Old Library rooms. Evolving from a series of major benefactions to the college across nearly 500 years, combined with the books routinely acquired for the use of students and scholars in the past, the Old Library contains medieval manuscripts, incunabula, prints and papers, as well as the ancient records of the college. Contents: Preface; Introduction; The Library of Samuel Pepys; The Pepys Building; Pepys the Collector; The Diary; Furnishing a Library; The Old Library: Heart of the College; Building a Collection; The Treasures of the Old Library; Special Collections; Objects in the Collections; The Magdalene College Archives; The Work of the Historic Libraries: - Exhibitions, - Conservation, - Scholars and Readers; List of (Fellow) Librarians.

This spectacular book is the first single volume to tell the story of the library as a distinct building type, all around the world. Throughout the ages, book collections have served to symbolize their owners culture and learning, and the wealthy and powerful have spent lavishly on buildings to house them. In its highest form the library became a total work of art, combining painting, sculpture, furniture and architecture into seamless, dramatic spaces. The finest libraries are repositories not just of books, but of learning, creativity and contemplation; they embody some of the highest achievements of humankind. This book recounts that history in text and images of truly outstanding quality.

Part II of volume I deals with the history of the Near East from about 3000 to 1750 B.C. In Egypt, a long period of political unification and stability enabled the kings of the Old Kingdom to develop and exploit natural resources, to mobilize both the manpower and the technical skill to build the pyramids, and to encourage sculptors in the production of works of superlative quality. After a period of anarchy and civil war at the end of the Sixth Dynasty the local rulers of Thebes established the so-called Middle Kingdom, restoring an age of political calm in which the arts could again flourish. In Western Asia, Babylonia was the main centre and source of civilisation, and her moral, though not always her military, hegemony was recognized and accepted by the surrounding countries of Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Assyria and Elam. The history of the region is traced from the late Uruk and Jamdat Nasr periods up to the rise of Hammurabi, the most significant developments being the invention of writing in the Uruk period, the emergence of the Semites as a political factor under Sargon, and the success of the centralized bureaucracy under the Third Dynasty of Ur.

Part memento mori for architecture, and part invocation to reimagine the design values that lay at the heart of its creative purpose. Buildings, although inanimate, are often assumed to have "life." And the architect, through the act of design, is assumed to be their conceiver and creator. But what of the "death" of buildings? What of the decay, deterioration, and destruction to which they are inevitably subject? And what might such endings mean for architecture's sense of itself? In Buildings Must Die, Stephen Cairns and Jane Jacobs look awry at core architectural concerns. They examine spalling concrete and creeping rust, contemplate ruins old and new, and pick through the rubble of earthquake-shattered churches, imploded housing projects, and demolished Brutalist office buildings. Their investigation of the death of buildings reorders architectural notions of creativity, reshapes architecture's preoccupation with good form, loosens its vanities of durability, and expands its sense of value. It does so not to kill off architecture as we know it, but to rethink its agency and its capacity to make worlds differently. Cairns and Jacobs offer an original contemplation of architecture that draws on theories of waste and value. Their richly illustrated case studies of building "deaths" include the planned and the unintended, the lamented and the celebrated. They take us from Moline to Christchurch, from London to Bangkok, from Tokyo to Paris. And they feature the work of such architects as Eero Saarinen, Carlo Scarpa, Cedric Price, Arata Isozaki, Rem Koolhaas and François Roche. Buildings Must Die is both a memento mori for architecture and a call to to reimagine the design values that lay at the heart of its creative purpose.