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Starting with the question concerning the discursive formation of architectural history, the chapters compiled in this book attempt to re-read the historiography of early modern architecture from the point of view of the theoretical work produced since the post-war era. Central to the objectives of the argument are the ways in which, firstly, architectural history differs from the traditions of art history, and, secondly, that the historical narrative works its autonomy through theoretical representation, the discursive flow of which is interrupted by the historian’s urge to support arguments with references to buildings, texts, drawings, and historical events. The historians discussed in this volume are those regularly addressed by most critics revisiting modern architectural history. Individual chapters are dedicated to N. Pevsner, H. R. Hitchcock, and S. Giedion, an economy of selection that is formative for a critical understanding of the canon established by these historians. Themes such as periodization, autonomy, and time are discussed, and the coda of the final chapter expands on the scope of “critical historiography” popularised by Kenneth Frampton and Manfredo Tafuri.

The life and thought of one of the founders of twentieth-century American design

Visualizing Fascism argues that fascism was not merely a domestic menace in a few European nations, but arose as a genuinely global phenomenon in the early twentieth century. Contributors use visual materials to explore fascism's populist appeal in settings around the world, including China, Japan, South Africa, Slovakia, and Spain. This visual strategy allows readers to see the transnational rise of the right as it fed off the agitated energies of modernity and mobilized shared political and aesthetic tropes. This volume also considers the postwar aftermath as antifascist art forms were depoliticized and repurposed in the West. More commonly, analyses of fascism focus on Italy and Germany alone and on institutions like fascist parties, but that approach truncates our understanding of the way fascism was indebted to colonialism and internationalism with all their attendant grievances and aspirations. Using photography, graphic arts, architecture, monuments, and film—rather than written documents alone—produces a portable concept of fascism, useful for grappling with the upsurge of the global right a century ago—and today. Contributors. Nadya Bair, Paul D. Barclay, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Maggie Clinton, Geoff Eley, Lutz Koepnick, Ethan Mark, Bertrand Metton, Lorena Rizzo, Julia Adeney Thomas, Claire Zimmerman

A novel interpretation of architecture, ugliness, and the social consequences of aesthetic judgment When buildings are deemed ugly, what are the consequences? In Ugliness and Judgment, Timothy Hyde considers the role of aesthetic judgment—and its concern for ugliness—in architectural debates and their resulting social effects across three centuries of British architectural history. From eighteenth-century ideas about Stonehenge to Prince Charles’s opinions about the National Gallery, Hyde uncovers a new story of aesthetic judgment, where arguments about architectural ugliness do not pertain solely to buildings or assessments of style, but intrude into other spheres of civil society. Hyde explores how accidental and willful conditions of ugliness—including the gothic revival Houses of Parliament, the brutalist concrete of the South Bank, and the historicist novelty of Number One Poultry—have been debated in parliamentary committees, courtrooms, and public inquiries. He recounts how architects such as Christopher Wren, John Soane, James Stirling, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe have been summoned by tribunals of aesthetic judgment. With his novel scrutiny of lawsuits for libel, changing paradigms of nuisance law, and conventions of monarchical privilege, he shows how aesthetic judgments have become entangled in wider assessments of art, science, religion, political economy, and the state. Moving beyond superficialities of taste in order to see how architectural improprieties enable architecture to participate in social transformations, Ugliness and Judgment sheds new light on the role of aesthetic measurement in our world.

Modernity tends to be considered a mostly Western, chronologically recent concept. Looking at locations in Brazil, Java, India, Georgia, and Yugoslavia, among others, Across Space and Time provides architectural and cultural evidence that modernity has had an impact across the globe and for much longer than previously conceived. This volume moves through space and time to illustrate the way global modernity has been negotiated through architecture, urban planning, design pedagogies, preservation, and art history in diverse locations around the world. Bringing together emerging and established architecture and art history scholars, each chapter focuses on a particular site where modernity was defined, challenged, or reinterpreted. The contributors examine how architectures, landscapes, and design thinking influence and are influenced by conflicts between cultural, economic, technological, and political forces. By invoking well-researched histories to ground their work in a post-colonial critique, they closely examine many prevailing myths of modernity. Notable topics include emerging architectural history in the Indian subcontinent and the connection between climate change and architecture. Ultimately, Across Space and Time contributes to the ongoing critique of architecture and its history, both as a discipline and within the academy. The authors insist that architecture is more than a style. It is a powerful expression of representational power that reveals how a society negotiates its progress.

What is Architectural History? considers the questions and problems posed by architectural historians since the rise of the discipline in the late nineteenth century. How do historians of architecture organise past time and relate it to the present? How does historical evidence translate into historical narrative? Should architectural history be useful for practicing architects? If so, how? Leach treats the disciplinarity of architectural history as an open question, moving between three key approaches to historical knowledge of architecture: within art history, as an historical specialisation and, most prominently, within architecture. He suggests that the confusions around this question have been productive, ensuring a rich variety of approaches to the project of exploring architecture historically. Read alongside introductory surveys of western and global architectural history, this book will open up questions of perspective, frame, and intent for students of architecture, art history, and history. Graduate students and established architectural historians will find much in this book to fuel discussions over the current state of the field in which they work.

Unlike regionalism in architecture, which has been widely discussed in recent years, nationalism in architecture has not been so well explored and understood. However, the most powerful collective representation of a nation is through its architecture and how that architecture engages the global arena by expressing, defining and sometimes negating a sense of nation in order to participate in the international world. Bringing together case studies from Europe, North and South America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia, this book provides a truly global exploration of the relationship between architecture and nationalism, via the themes of regionalism and representation, various national building projects, ethnic and trans-national expression, national identities and histories of nationalist architecture and the philosophies and sociological studies of nationalism. It argues that nationalism needs to be trans-national as a notion to be critically understood and the geographical scope of the proposed volume reflects the continuing relevance of the topic within current architectural scholarship as an overarching notion. The interdisciplinary essays are coherently grouped together in three thematic sections: Revisiting Nationalism, Interpreting Nationalism and Questioning Nationalism. These chapters, offer vignettes of the protean appearances of nationalism across nations, and offer a basis of developing wider knowledge and critically situated understanding of the question, beyond a singular nation's limited bounds.

In this beautifully illustrated volume, fifteen distinguished writers on architecture mark the retirement of Professor David Watkin from the University of Cambridge. Linked by the common theme of classicism, the chapters are divided into three sections. The first is concerned with architectural ideas and includes essays on Renaissance interpretations of Vitruvius, Roman Catholic Chapels in post-Reformation London, and architectural writers John Summerson and Hope Bagenal. The central section deals with aspects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Neo-classicism and includes new work on Marie-Joseph Peyre, Charles Barry and C.R. Cockerell. The final section is devoted to studies of classicism and the Picturesque in the twentieth century.

In this book, prominent architectural historians, who happen to be women, reflect on their practice and the intervention this has made in the discipline. Of particular concern are the ways in which feminine subjectivities have been embodied in the discourses of architectural history. Each of the chapters examines the author’s own position and the disruptive presence of women as both subject and object in the historiography of a specific field of enquiry. The aim is not to replace male lives with female lives, or to write women into the masculinist narratives of architectural history. Instead, this book aims to broaden the discourses of architectural history to explore how the potentially ‘unnatural rule’ of women subverts canonical norms through the empowerment of otherness rather than a process of perceived emasculation. The essays examine the historiographic and socio/cultural implications of the role of women in the narratives and writing of architectural history with particular reference to Western traditions of scholarship on the period 1600–1950. Rather than subscribing to a single position, individual voices critically engage with past and present canonical histories disclosing assumptions, biases, and absences in the architectural historiography of the West. This book is a crucial reflection upon historiographical practice, exploring potential openings that may contribute further transformation of the theory and methods of architectural history. Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license.