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Buildings are not benign; rather, they commonly manipulate and abuse their human users. Architectural Agents makes the case that buildings act in the world independently of their makers, patrons, owners, or occupants. And often they act badly. Treating buildings as bodies, Annabel Jane Wharton writes biographies of symptomatic structures in order to diagnose their pathologies. The violence of some sites is rooted in historical trauma; the unhealthy spatial behaviors of other spaces stem from political and economic ruthlessness. The places examined range from the Cloisters Museum in New York City and the Palestine Archaeological Museum (renamed the Rockefeller Museum) in Jerusalem to the grand Hostal de los Reyes Católicos in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and Las Vegas casino resorts. Recognizing that a study of pathological spaces would not be complete without an investigation of digital structures, Wharton integrates into her argument an original consideration of the powerful architectures of video games and immersive worlds. Her work mounts a persuasive critique of popular phenomenological treatments of architecture. Architectural Agents advances an alternative theorization of buildings’ agency—one rooted in buildings’ essential materiality and historical formation—as the basis for this significant intervention in current debates over the boundaries separating humans, animals, and machines.

This book aims to give equal attention to Western and non-Western structures and built landscapes. From Tenochtitlan’s Great Pyramid in Mexico City and the Duomo in Florence to Levittown’s suburban tract housing and the Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing, its coverage includes the world’s most celebrated structures and spaces along with many examples of more humble vernacular buildings. The book presents key moments and innovations in architectural modernity around the globe. Integrating architectural and social history, this book pays particular attention to the motivations of client and architect in the design and construction of environments both sacred and secular: palaces and places of worship as well as such characteristically modern structures as the skyscraper, the department store, and the cinema. It also focuses on the role of patrons and addresses to an unparalleled degree the impact of women in commissioning, creating, and inhabiting the built environment, with Gertrude Jekyll, Lina Bo Bardi, and ZahaHadid taking their place beside Brunelleschi, Sinan, and Le Corbusier.

Architecture’s Historical Turn traces the hidden history of architectural phenomenology, a movement that reflected a key turning point in the early phases of postmodernism and a legitimating source for those architects who first dared to confront history as an intellectual problem and not merely as a stylistic question. This book shows how architectural phenomenology radically transformed how architects engaged, theorized, and produced history. The book discusses the contributions of leading members, including Jean Labatut, Charles Moore, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Kenneth Frampton. For architects maturing after World War II, the book contends, architectural history was a problem rather than a given. Paradoxically, their awareness of modernism’s historicity led some of them to search for an ahistorical experiential constant that might underpin all architectural expression. They drew from phenomenology, exploring the work of Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Ricoeur, which they translated for architectural audiences. Initially, the concept that experience could be a timeless architectural language provided a unifying intellectual basis for the stylistic pluralism that characterized postmodernism. It helped give theory—especially the theory of architectural history—a new importance over practice. However, as this text makes clear, architectural phenomenologists could not accept the idea of theory as an end in itself. In the mid-1980s they were caught in the contradictory and untenable position of having to formulate their own demotion of theory.

Building Access investigates twentieth-century strategies for designing the world with disability in mind. Illustrated with a wealth of rare archival materials, this book brings together scientific, social, and political histories in what is not only the pioneering critical account of Universal Design but also a deep engagement with the politics of knowing, making, and belonging in twentieth-century United States.

Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009) was one of the most influential landscape architects of the 20th-century. Though he is most widely known for the FDR Memorial in Washington DC and the Sea Ranch in California, his creative process – derived in the 1960s from experiments in choreographic scoring – represents an overlooked antecedent to today’s approach to landscape and urban design, which emphasizes infrastructural networks, ecological processes, multidisciplinary collaboration, as well as public participation. Emerging from exhaustive study of his vast archive of drawings and documents (housed at the University of Pennsylvania’s Architectural Archives), the book critically interprets Halprin’s participatory design process and argues for the applicability of aspects of that process in city-shaping today. As an urban pioneer, Halprin’s most noteworthy frontier became the nation’s densely settled metropolitan areas during a time of urban “crisis” and “renewal.” Paralleling and responding to a broader public demand for social and political participation in the 1960s, he formulated this creative process, which he called “The RSVP Cycles,” to stimulate a participatory environmental experience. He did not work alone, however. His success depended on collaboration, and particularly the artistic symbiosis that existed between him and his wife, the avant-garde dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin.

The end of apartheid and the transition to parliamentary democracy brought to the surface a host of tensions that were long suppressed under white minority rule. Yet as the ‘new nation’ struggled to establish a firm footing, the lingering ghosts of the past continued to haunt the present. The primary aim of this book is to explore how collective memory works, that is, how the historical past is made to matter in the ‘new South Africa’. A central concern is the question of representation, that is, how the historical past is made to appear in the present. How is the history of white minority rule represented, and thereby mediated, after the end of apartheid and the transition to parliamentary democracy? Addressing this question requires a critical examination of how the practice of commemoration inscribes collective memory in places, objects, and words, and conversely, how the stories attached to these mnemonic devices selectively recount the past in ways that sometimes sanitize, distort, embellish, compress, and even fabricate history in the service of ‘nation-building’. It begins with the premise that such seemingly disconnected are all vehicles for the storage and dissemination of collective memory. Far from operating as passive receptacles or neutral storehouses for holding onto the remembered past, these mnemonic devices are active agents in shaping the construction of a tenuous collective identity and shared meaning in the everyday lives of the South African citizenry.

How does architecture make its appearance in civil society? This book pursues this challenging question by exploring architecture, planning, and law as cultural forces. Analyzing the complex entanglements between these disciplines in the Cuban Republic, the book reveals how architects joined with other professionals and intellectuals in efforts to establish a stable civil society, from the promulgation of a new Cuban Constitution in 1940 up until the Cuban Revolution. By arguing that constitutionalism was elaborated through architectural principles and practices as well as legal ones, the book offers a new view of architectural modernism as a political and social instrument. It contends that constitutionalism produced a decisive confluence of law and architecture, a means for planning the future of Cuba. The importance of architecture in this process is laid bare by this book’s thorough scrutiny of a variety of textual, graphical, and physical artifacts. It examines constitutional articles, exhibitions, interviews, master plans, monuments, and other primary materials as acts of design. Read from the perspective of architectural history, this book demonstrates how the modernist concepts that developed as an international discourse before the Second World War evolved through interactions with other disciplines into a civil urbanism in Cuba. And read from the perspective of Cuban history, the book explains how not only material products such as buildings and monuments but also the immaterial methods of architecture as a cultural practice produced ideas that had consequential effects on the political circumstances of the nation.

The practice of urban preservation has become increasingly controversial in modern cities. In some places, historic monuments dismantled decades ago are rebuilt in exactly the same fashion, whereas centuries-old urban dwellings are demolished and replaced by new structures with historic appearances. In other places, heritage status becomes the equivalent of tax benefits, which encourages the renovation of historic houses but leads to the displacement of longtime residents. Based on extensive fieldwork and archival data, this book explores how the joint force of policy discourse and political institution shapes the policy process and creates distinct patterns of urban preservation in Beijing, Paris, and Chicago. It argues that the policy concept of urban preservation has become a strategic device for political and social actors to frame their propositions and promote their favored course of action. At the same time, the fragmented urban power structure serves as a filter that constrains the implementation of the preservation initiatives. In particular, the book developed a typology of political fragmentation (i.e., functional, intergovernmental, and territorial) to compare how different types of political fragmentation have shaped the policy process of urban preservation in predictable ways. By wedding political science theory and method to the study of urban preservation, this book is one of the first efforts to reveal the political underpinnings of the topic. The cross-national comparative approach is not only critical to test the theoretical framework presented, but also depicts a richer picture of the modes of spatial and social governance in the urban world.

Historic Capital shows how Washington, D.C.’s historic buildings and neighborhoods have been a site of contestation between local interests and the expansion of the federal government’s footprint. It ultimately makes the case that historic preservation has had as great an impact on the physical fabric of U.S. cities as any other private or public sector initiative in the twentieth century.

Between the well-documented development of colonial Bombay and sprawling contemporary Mumbai, a profound shift in the city’s fabric occurred: the emergence of the first suburbs and their distinctive pattern of apartment living. This book considers this phenomenon and its significance for South Asian urban life. It explores the organization of the middle-class neighborhood which became ubiquitous in the mid-twentieth-century city and which has spread throughout the subcontinent. This book examines how the challenge of converting lands from agrarian to urban use created new relations between the state, landholders, and other residents of the city. At the level of dwellings, apartment living in self-contained flats represented a novel form of urban residence, one that expressed a compromise between the caste and class identities of suburban residents who are upper caste but belong to the lower-middle or middle class. Living in such a built environment, under the often conflicting imperatives of maintaining the exclusivity of caste and subcaste while assembling residential groupings large enough to be economically viable, led suburban residents to combine caste with class, type of work, and residence to forge new metacaste practices of community identity.

This book examines the intertwined politics surrounding art and modernization in Morocco from 1912 to the present by considering the structure of the museum not only as a modern institution but also as a national monument to modernity, asking what happens when museum monuments start to crumble. In an analysis of museum history, exhibition policy, the lack of national museum space for modern art, and postmodern exhibit spaces in Morocco, this book focuses on the role that art plays in the social fabric of a modernizing Morocco. It argues that the decay of colonial and national institutions of culture has invited the rethinking of the museum and generated countermuseums to stage new narratives of art, memory, and modernity. Through these spaces she explores a range of questions: How is modernity imagined locally? How are claims to modernity articulated? How is Moroccan modernity challenged globally? In this first cultural history of modern Moroccan art and its museums, the book goes beyond the investigation of national institutions to treat the history and evolution of multiple museums—from official state and corporate exhibition spaces to informal, popular, street-level art, and performance spaces—as cultural architectures that both enshrine the past and look to the future.

Impossible Heights examines a distinct American cultural consciousness that came into focus during the interwar years, with the excitement about airplanes and skyscrapers, as well as their anticipated roles in the creation of an ideal “world of tomorrow.” The book explores how this “aesthetics of ascension” contributed to a broader transformation of the architect as a master builder, whose idealistic perspective from above ushered in a modernist impulse to ameliorate the spatial and social problems of an allegedly chaotic world. Recasting the architect as a heroic aviator or an ascending figure, the book suggests that the aesthetics of ascension intersected with popular “superman” discourses of the interwar period. The book focuses on the work of three eminent figures in American design and architecture: Hugh Ferriss’s The Metropolis of Tomorrow, the drawings and writings of Buckminster Fuller, and Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Historians have studied the cultural influences of the airplane and skyscraper. Yet, Impossible Heights is the first comprehensive study of the superhero mentality that emerged from the cultural valorization of heights, enabled by airplanes and skyscrapers.

In February 1956 the president of IBM, Thomas Watson Jr., hired the industrial designer and architect Eliot Noyes, charging him with reinventing IBM’s corporate image, from stationery and curtains to products such as typewriters and computers and to laboratory and administration buildings. What followed—a story told in full here—remade IBM in a way that would also transform the relationships between design, computer science, and corporate culture. IBM’s program assembled a cast of leading figures in American design: Noyes, Charles Eames, Paul Rand, George Nelson, and Edgar Kaufmann Jr. This book offers a detailed account of the key role these designers played in shaping both the computer and the multinational corporation. The book describes a surprising inverse effect: the influence of computer and corporation on the theory and practice of design. Here the book shows how, in the period stretching from the “invention” of the computer during World War II to the appearance of the personal computer in the mid-1970s, disciplines once well outside the realm of architectural design—information and management theory, cybernetics, ergonomics, computer science—became integral aspects of design.

It was the era of the Raj, and yet this book reveals the unexpected role of native communities in the transformation of the urban fabric of British Bombay from 1854 to 1918. The book demonstrates how British Bombay was, surprisingly, a collaboration of the colonial government and the Indian and European mercantile and industrial elite who shaped the city to serve their combined interests. The book shows how the European and Indian engineers, architects, and artists worked with each other to design a city—its infrastructure, architecture, public sculpture—that was literally constructed by Indian laborers and craftsmen. Beyond the built environment, Indian philanthropists entered into partnerships with the colonial regime to found and finance institutions for the general public. Too often thought to be the product of the singular vision of a founding colonial regime, British Bombay is revealed by this text as an expression of native traditions meshing in complex ways with European ideas of urban planning and progress. The result, it argues, was the creation of a new shared landscape for Bombay's citizens that ensured that neither the colonial government nor the native elite could entirely control the city's future.

This book adds a new dimension to our understanding of the development of the deep inequalities that have existed (and continue to exist) in the U.S. housing market by looking closely at some material dimensions of everyday life that are so ordinary, so common, and so ubiquitous that they’ve largely escaped analysis. If we already know a great deal about the ways in which institutional structures connected to the economics of housing operated, we have known far less about the dispersed and complex sets of practices that created, reinforced, and established the forms of cultural knowledge that ultimately supported a housing market designed primarily for whites to the exclusion of others. This book studies the politics of representation and the formation of cultural knowledge about ordinary houses and single-family domesticity in the postwar period. Houses, and the media representations of housing in the postwar period helped to create a specific dimension of racialized knowledge, one that connected white identities to rights related to property ownership and to a specifically classed lifestyle. National publications, television programs, professional literature, domestic artifacts, and even the design of houses and their interiors all contributed to a rhetorical field that shaped the organization of knowledge about the social construction of race and the spatial dimensions of inequality in the postwar era, as it continues to do today.

Since they were first established in the 1880s, children’s summer camps have touched the lives of millions of people. Why were summer camps created? What concerns and ideals motivated their founders? Whom did they serve? How did they change over time? What factors influenced their design? To answer these and many other questions, this book looks at the most visible and evocative aspect of camp life: its landscape and architecture. It argues that summer camps delivered much more than a simple encounter with the natural world. Instead, it suggests, camps provided a man-made version of wilderness, shaped by middle-class anxieties about gender roles, class tensions, race relations, and modernity and its impact on the lives of children. Following a fascinating history of summer camps and a wide-ranging overview of the factors that led to their creation, the book examines the intersections of the natural landscape with human-built forms and social activities. In particular, it addresses changing attitudes toward such subjects as children’s health, sanitation, play, relationships between the sexes, Native American culture, and evolving ideas about childhood.

During the nineteenth century, the Keweenaw Peninsula of Northern Michigan was the site of America’s first mineral land rush as companies hastened to profit from the region’s vast copper deposits. In order to lure workers to such a remote location—and work long hours in dangerous conditions—companies offered not just competitive wages but also helped provide the very infrastructure of town life in the form of affordable housing, schools, health-care facilities, and churches. This book investigates how the architecture of a company town revealed the paternal relationship that existed between company managers and workers—a relationship that both parties turned to their own advantage. The story of Joseph and Antonia Putrich, immigrants from Croatia, punctuates and illustrates the realities of life in a booming company town. While company managers provided housing as a way to develop and control a stable workforce, workers often rejected this domestic ideal and used homes as an economic resource, taking in boarders to help generate further income. Focusing on how the exchange between company managers and a largely immigrant workforce took the form of negotiation rather than a top-down system, this book examines surviving buildings and uses Copper Country’s built environment to map this remarkable connection between a company and its workers at the height of Michigan’s largest land rush.

Pedestrian Modern shows that stores and shopping centers were integral to the shaping of modernism in the middle decades of the 20th century. Rather than framing store work as some parallel or lesser realm of architectural work tied only to consumption or suburbanization, as is the typical view, this book shows that store and shopping center design work were described as uniquely fitting for the emerging tenets of modernist architecture. The typical view of the rise of shopping centers is also limited to the work of Victor Gruen and while he was a key figure, his work was part of a larger experimentation with the planning and design of increasing large commercial ventures. Pedestrian Modern refocuses the historiography of modern architecture and asks for a more ecumenical view of the American landscape and Modernism that should be of great interest to architectural and urban historians as well as scholars and students of American studies, American history, cultural history.

Photographic Architecture and the Spread of German Modernism is a “picture anthropology” of modern architecture, showing how photography shaped its development, its reception, and its history in the 20^th c. At first, architects used photography to promote their practices, even as they doubted its value and efficacy as a means of representation. Unlike other representations, photographs were both too real, and not real enough. Furthermore, the photographic image acted on its subject like an alchemical agent. Photography altered the material that it represented, at the same time shepherding architecture from elite social representation in the nineteenth century to potential mass communicator in the twentieth. In architectural markets, technological development and public self-presentation were at least equally important, and both were affected by photography and the mass distribution of cultural information. The collateral effects of market competition in architecture in the age of printed advertising, however, produced resistance in the architectural profession, as it insisted on the inadequacy of the new medium to adequately represent built things. The book focuses on two interconnected subjects subsumed in the term, “photographic architecture”: on the one hand, architectural photography and its circulation; on the other, the impact of photography on architectural design. In this particular strain of modern architecture, the visible appearance of buildings and the modalities of photographic images overlapped in consequential ways. This book analyzes the formation and impact of such ideas and the discourses that accompanied them.

From property deeds to shipping containers to wearable shelters to virtual spaces: what does it mean to draw a spatial boundary? To be at home? In a world in which notions of place are constantly changing, this book looks at new constructions of staying in place—in contemporary site-specific art, digital media, portable architecture, and various other imaginable shelters and sites. The book suggests that while “place” may no longer be a sustainable category, being in place and belonging at home are nonetheless possible. By emphasizing reusability rather than fixed constructions, art and architecture together propose various systems of replacing home in which sites can be revisited, material structures can be renewed, and dwellers can come back into contact over time. Bringing together a range of objects and events, the book considers the structural replacements of home as evident in artistic analogies of the prehistoric hut, modular homes, transformable garments, and digitally networked sites. In charting these intersections between contemporary art and architecture, the book introduces a new framework for reconceptualizing spatial situation; at the same time, it presents a new way to experience being and belonging within our globally expanded environments.