Architecture

Today, R. M. Schindler’s Kings Road House is celebrated as an icon of early modern architecture, but this wasn’t the case when it was finished in 1922. Though Schindler and his wife Pauline recognized its genius early on, its radical appearance was—and remains—incomprehensible to many. Lavishly illustrated with forty-five new photographs, this book is an incisive examination of the house, placing it in the context of the architect’s career and clarifying its influence on modern architecture and its practitioners. Little-known aspects of Schindler’s life, his relationship with his mentors, and the development of his unique theories about space enrich the narrative.

Robert Sweeney focuses on the construction of the house and the people who lived, worked, and performed there, demonstrating the building’s significance in the social history of Southern California. He includes new research on Schindler’s educational and personal background in Vienna and a discussion of the critical influence of Pauline Schindler in formulating the social underpinnings of the house. Judith Sheine’s essay places the house in the context of Schindler’s career, in which it established the basis of the spatial development of his work. She also examines the influence of the house on the work of numerous architects from Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry.

This is the first in-depth study of how the architectural profession emerged in early American history. Mary Woods dispels the prevailing notion that the profession developed under the leadership of men formally schooled in architecture as an art during the late nineteenth century. Instead, she cites several instances in the early 1800s of craftsmen-builders who shifted their identity to that of professional architects. While struggling to survive as designers and supervisors of construction projects, these men organized professional societies and worked for architectural education, appropriate compensation, and accreditation.

In such leading architectural practitioners as B. Henry Latrobe, Alexander J. Davis, H. H. Richardson, Louis Sullivan, and Stanford White, Woods sees collaborators, partners, merchandisers, educators, and lobbyists rather than inspired creators. She documents their contributions as well as those, far less familiar, of women architects and people of color in the profession's early days.

Woods's extensive research yields a remarkable range of archival materials: correspondence among carpenters; 200-year-old lawsuits; architect-client spats; the organization of craft guilds, apprenticeships, university programs, and correspondence schools; and the structure of architectural practices, labor unions, and the building industry. In presenting a more accurate composite of the architectural profession's history, Woods lays a foundation for reclaiming the profession's past and recasting its future. Her study will appeal not only to architects, but also to historians, sociologists, and readers with an interest in architecture's place in America today.

Magali Larson's comprehensive study explores how architecture "happens" and what has become of the profession in the postmodern era. Drawing from extensive interviews with pivotal architects—from Philip Johnson, who was among the first to introduce European modernism to America, to Peter Eisenman, identified with a new "deconstructionist" style—she analyzes the complex tensions that exist between economic interest, professional status, and architectural product. She investigates the symbolic awards and recognition accorded by prestigious journals and panels, exposing the inner workings of a profession in a precarious social position. Larson captures the struggles around status, place, and power as architects seek to redefine their very purpose in contemporary America.

 

The author's novel approach in synthesizing sociological research and theory proposes nothing less than a new cultural history of architecture. This is a ground-breaking contribution to the study of culture and the sociology of knowledge, as well as to architectural and urban history.

 

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1993 with a paperback edition in 1995.

Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer (1851-1934) is highly regarded among architectural historians for her 1888 biography of the nineteenth-century architect Henry Hobson Richardson. Less well known are her writings on architecture, decorative art, gardening, and landscape design, works that provide a rare view of cities and rural environments in turn-of-the-century America. Now David Gebhard brings Van Rensselaer's significant writings together in one volume, including a chapter from the 1925 edition of Art Out-of-Doors: Hints on Good Taste in Gardening. An established critic in environmental and literary circles, Van Rensselaer wrote for the general public in such journals as the Century Magazine and for a specialized audience of landscape architects in Garden and Forest. She was a long-time contributor to The American Architect and Building News, the first architectural journal in the United States. She is an engaging and accessible writer, and her articles on Frederick Law Olmsted and the Boston Public Library won great praise. Although the only woman in a field that was male-dominated at the time, Van Rensselaer was, curiously enough, opposed to women's suffrage. David Gebhard provides an excellent introduction to this unusual woman and to her place in American architectural criticism. Van Rensselaer's writings are still of interest today, not only for her broad environmental approach, but also for her ability to relate abstract concepts to examples of harmonious design.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.
Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer (1851-1934) is highly regarded among architectural historians for her 1888 biography of the nineteenth-century architect Henry Hobson Richardson. Less well known are her writings on architecture, decorative art, gardening,

The story recounted here--that of efforts in recent years to plan for Greater London--is both unique and important. It concerns a world metropolis that, faced with an urgent need to rebuild its war-damaged central areas while still at war, prepared a notable set of special plans. And it describes subsequent vigorous efforts to carry these plans into effect.

 

The London record is singularly impressive, unmatched by metropolitan planning efforts elsewhere. It has implications for metropolitan areas in other countries that are seeking solutions to comparable problems--problems reflecting unanticipated growth, technological and functional change, governmental chaos, and the reformulation of social requirements.

 

Foley presents the first comprehensive factual analysis--British or otherwise--of the London planning experience. He offeres and original, sophisticated discussion of the social doctrine incorporated in the plans, and explains its emphasis on the principle of "containing" metropolitan London. He examines the context within which this doctrine emerged, investigates the suitability of this doctrine in the light of subsequent developments, and discusses possibilities for a fresh look at the main planning policies for Greater London. His approach gives the book depth without turning it into a specialized academic treatise. It speaks directly to thoughtful city-dwellers who are concerned to control rather than to be controlled by their environment.

 

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.

Published on the occasion of the expo's 75th anniversary, Into the Void Pacific is the first architectural history of the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair. While fairs of the 1930's turned to the future as a foil to the Great Depression, the Golden Gate International Exposition conjured up geographical conceits to explore the nature of the city's place in what organizers called "Pacific Civilization." Andrew Shanken adopts D.H. Lawrence’s suggestive description of California as a way of thinking about the architecture of the Golden Gate International Exposition, using the phrase “void Pacific” to suggest the isolation and novelty of California and its habit of looking West rather than back over its shoulder to the institutions of the East Coast and Europe. The fair proposed this vision of the Pacific as an antidote to the troubled Atlantic world, then descending into chaos for the second time in a generation. Architects took up the theme and projected the regionalist sensibilities of Northern California onto Asian and Latin American architecture. Their eclectic, referential buildings drew widely on the cultural traditions of ancient Cambodia, China, and Mexico, as well as the International Style, Art Deco, and the Bay Region Tradition. The book explores how buildings supported the cultural and political work of the fair and fashioned a second, parallel world in a moment of economic depression and international turmoil. Yet it is also a tale of architectural compromise, contingency, and symbolism gone awry. With chapters organized around the creation of Treasure Island and the key areas and pavilions of the fair, this study takes a cut through the work of William Wurster, Bernard Maybeck, Timothy Pflueger, and Arthur Brown, Jr., among others. Shanken also looks closely at buildings as buildings, analyzing them in light of local circumstances, regionalist sensibilities, and national and international movements at that crucial moment when modernism and the Beaux-Arts intersected dynamically.

Spanning four continents and six countries, this book introduces “new art landscapes” that fuse architecture, the reuse of found structures, environmentalism, and artistic experimentation. Through words and pictures, readers explore six institutions—Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, USA; Raketenstation Hombroich, near Neuss, Germany; Benesse Art Site in Naoshima, Japan; Inhotim, near Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Jardín Botánico, Culiacán, Mexico; and Grand Traiano Art Complex, Grottaferrata, Italy—dedicated to the experience of culture and nature. Integrating vegetation and non-linear sequences of spaces, the sites offer multiple experiences enticing the visitor to circulate between and within buildings.

Iwan Baan, one of today’s most influential architectural photographers, thoughtfully documents each project. In addition to his stunning images, the sites are depicted with architects’ plans and sketches, historical photographs, and maquettes and sketches by key installation artists. Raymund Ryan’s insightful essay discusses important historical precedents and considers the defining characteristics of “new art landscapes” through descriptions of each of the projects. Brian O’Doherty offers an artist’s critical perspective, while Marc Treib situates the projects in the history of landscape design Architects under consideration include such established masters as Tadao Ando and Álvaro Siza Vieira as well as emerging practices such as Tatiana Bilbao and Johnston Marklee.

This absorbing biography, often conveyed through Peter Selz’s own words, traces the journey of a Jewish-German immigrant from Hitler’s Munich to the United States and on to an important career as a pioneer historian of modern art. Paul J. Karlstrom illuminates key historical and cultural events of the twentieth-century as he describes Selz’s extraordinary career—from Chicago’s Institute of Design (New Bauhaus), to New York’s Museum of Modern Art during the transformative 1960s, and as founding director of the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley. Karlstrom sheds light on the controversial viewpoints that at times isolated Selz from his colleagues but nonetheless affirmed his conviction that significant art was always an expression of deep human experience. The book also links Selz’s long life story—featuring close relationships with such major art figures as Mark Rothko, Dore Ashton, Willem de Kooning, Sam Francis, and Christo—with his personal commitment to political engagement.

In this provocative revisionist work, Evonne Levy brings fresh theoretical perspectives to the study of the "propagandistic" art and architecture of the Jesuit order as exemplified by its late Baroque Roman church interiors. The first extensive analysis of the aims, mechanisms, and effects of Jesuit art and architecture, this original and sophisticated study also evaluates how the term "propaganda" functions in art history, distinguishes it from rhetoric, and proposes a precise use of the term for the visual arts for the first time.

Levy begins by looking at Nazi architecture as a gateway to the emotional and ethical issues raised by the term "propaganda." Jesuit art once stirred similar passions, as she shows in a discussion of the controversial nineteenth-century rubric the "Jesuit Style." She then considers three central aspects of Jesuit art as essential components of propaganda: authorship, message, and diffusion. Levy tests her theoretical formulations against a broad range of documents and works of art, including the Chapel of St. Ignatius and other major works in Rome by Andrea Pozzo as well as chapels in Central Europe and Poland. Innovative in bringing a broad range of social and critical theory to bear on Baroque art and architecture in Europe and beyond, Levy’s work highlights the subject-forming capacity of early modern Catholic art and architecture while establishing "propaganda" as a productive term for art history.

Munich, notorious in recent history as the capital of the Nazi movement, is the site of Gavriel Rosenfeld's stimulating inquiry into the German collective memory of the Third Reich. Rosenfeld shows, with the aid of a wealth of photographs, how the city's urban form developed after 1945 in direct reflection of its inhabitants' evolving memory of the Second World War and the Nazi dictatorship.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the German people's struggle to come to terms with the legacy of Nazism has dramatically shaped nearly all dimensions of their political, social, and cultural life. The area of urban development and the built environment, little explored until now, offers visible evidence of the struggle. By examining the ways in which the people of Munich reconstructed the ruins of their historic buildings, created new works of architecture, dealt with surviving Nazi buildings, and erected new monuments to commemorate the horrors of the recent past, Rosenfeld identifies a spectrum of competing memories of the Nazi experience.

Munich’s postwar development was the subject of constant controversy, pitting representatives of contending aesthetic and mnemonic positions against one another in the heated battle to shape the city’s urban form. Examining the debates between traditionalists, modernists, postmodernists, and critical preservationists, Rosenfeld shows that the memory of Nazism in Munich has never been "repressed" but has rather been defined by constant dissension and evolution. On balance, however, he concludes that Munich came to embody in its urban form a conservative view of the past that was inclined to diminish local responsibility for the Third Reich.

Do survival instincts have anything to do with our architectural choices—our liking for a certain room, a special stairway, a plaza in a particular city? In this engaging study Grant Hildebrand discusses ways in which architectural forms emulate some archetypal settings that humans have found appealing—and useful to survival—from ancient times to the present.

Speculating that nature has "designed" us to prefer certain conditions and experiences, Hildebrand is interested in how the characteristics of our most satisfying built environments mesh with Darwinian selection. In examining the appeal of such survival-based characteristics he cites architectural examples spanning five continents and five millennia. Among those included are the Palace of Minos, the Alhambra, Wells cathedral, the Shinto shrine at Ise, the Piazza San Marco, Brunelleschi's Pazzi Chapel, Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, a Seattle condominium, and recent houses by Eric Owen Moss and Arne Bystrom.

Just what characteristics bestow evolutionary benefits? "Refuge and prospect" offer a protective place of concealment close to a foraging and hunting ground. "Enticement" invites the safe exploration of an information-rich setting where worthwhile discoveries await. "Peril" elicits an emotion of pleasurable fear and so tests and increases our competence in the face of danger: thus the attraction of a skyscraper or a house poised over a vertiginous ravine. "Order and complexity" tease our intuitions for sorting complex information into survival-useful categories.

Gracefully written, with excellent illustrations that complement the text, Origins of Architectural Pleasure will open the reader's eyes to new ways of seeing a home, a workplace, a vacation setting, even a particular table in a restaurant. It also suggests important design considerations for buildings with a more pressing mandate for human appeal, such as hospitals, retirement homes, and hospices.

Ask Americans to think of a famous architect and the person they are most likely to name is Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright's work, his reputation, and his long and colorful career have made him an icon of modern American architecture. But despite his status as America's most celebrated architect, his influence throughout an active practice spanning the years 1896 to 1959 is so wide and complex that it has been difficult to grasp fully.

The essays in this book look not at the United States, the context usually associated with Wright, but at countries around the globe. Anthony Alofsin has assembled a superb collection of scholars to examine Wright's importance from Japan to Great Britain, France to Chile, Mexico to Russia, and the Middle East. Interwoven in the essays are stories of champions and critics, rivals and acolytes, books and exhibitions, attitudes toward America and individualism, and the many ways Wright's ideas were brought to the world. Together the essays represent a first look at Wright's impact abroad, some from the perspective of natives of the countries discussed and others from that of informed outsiders. Of special note is Bruno Zevi's firsthand account of traveling with Wright in Italy. Zevi was instrumental in bringing Wright's ideas to Italy and in helping launch the movement for organic architecture. Of unusual interest in light of today's events in Iraq is Mina Marefat's essay on Wright's elaborate designs for a cultural center for the city of Baghdad. The Baghdad projects, which were never realized after the assassination of King Faisal II, were Wright's principal focus in his last decade.

In searching out the little known rather than reexamining the well-established aspects of Frank Lloyd Wright's work, this collection is a rewarding exploration of his vision and influence.

The corporate downtown, with its multitude of social dilemmas and contradictions, is the focus of this well-illustrated volume. How are downtown projects conceived, scripted, produced, packaged, and used, and how has all this changed during the twentieth century? The authors of Urban Design Downtown offer a critical appraisal of the emerging appearance of downtown urban form. They explore both the poetics of design and the politics and economics of development decisions.

Following a historical review of the various phases of downtown transformation, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Tridib Banerjee turn to contemporary American downtowns. They examine the phenomenon of public-space privatization, arguing that corporate open spaces are the consumer-oriented result of policies that have promoted downtown renovation and restructuring but at the same time have neglected the cities' existing poverty-stricken cores.

The book's case studies of individual West Coast downtown projects capture the essence of late twentieth-century urbanism. This analysis of downtown urban America, which offers extensive insight into the design and development process, will interest architects, city planners, developers, and urban designers everywhere.

Tokyo: destroyed by the earthquake of 1923 and again by the firebombing of World War II. Does anything remain of the old city?

The internationally known Japanese architectural historian Jinnai Hidenobu set out on foot to rediscover the city of Tokyo. Armed with old maps, he wandered through back alleys and lanes, trying to experience the city's space as it had been lived by earlier residents. He found that, despite an almost completely new cityscape, present-day inhabitants divide Tokyo's space in much the same way that their ancestors did two hundred years before.

Jinnai's holistic perspective is enhanced by his detailing of how natural, topographical features were incorporated into the layout of the city. A variety of visual documents (maps from the Tokugawa and Meiji periods, building floorplans, woodblock prints, photographs) supplement his observations. While an important work for architects and historians, this unusual book will also attract armchair travelers and anyone interested in the symbolic uses of space.

(A translation of Tokyo no kûkan jinruigaku.)