Kategoria BISAC: Architecture >> History - General

American ruins have become increasingly prominent, whether in discussions of urban blight and home foreclosures, in commemorations of 9/11, or in postapocalyptic movies. In this highly original book, Nick Yablon argues that the association between American cities and ruins dates back to a much earlier period in the nation s history. Recovering numerous scenes of urban desolation from failed banks, abandoned towns, and dilapidated tenements to the crumbling skyscrapers and bridges envisioned in science fiction and cartoons "Untimely Ruins "challenges the myth that ruins were absent or...

Franco-German cultural exchange reached its height at the 1937 Paris World s Fair, where the Third Reich worked to promote an illusion of friendship between the two countries. Through the prism of this decisive event, "Grand Illusion" examines the overlooked relationships among Nazi elites and French intellectuals. Their interaction, Karen Fiss argues, profoundly influenced cultural production and normalized aspects of fascist ideology in 1930s France, laying the groundwork for the country s eventual collaboration with its German occupiers.

Tracing related developments across fine arts,...

The planners cannot go out today from a tabula rasa situation anymore. Environmental and sustainability issues have already formed the public idea that a 'greenbelt' of our cities is necessary, a kind of fortification leading to intensive development in towns inside a clearly delimited area within the surrounding nature. Since building on the periphery is limited, and the existing built substance has a certain cultural, architectural or at least environmental value, upgrading of existing buildings gains more and more ground from the design of new buildings. Masonry has been already...

This book argues that modernity first arrived in late nineteenth-century Shanghai via a new spatial configuration. This city's colonial capitalist development ruptured the traditional configuration of self-contained households, towns, and natural landscapes in a continuous spread, producing a new set of fragmented as well as fluid spaces. In this process, Chinese sojourners actively appropriated new concepts and technology rather than passively responding to Western influences. Liang maps the spatial and material existence of these transient people and reconstructs a cultural geography...

In the past few decades, thousands of new memorials to executed witches, victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of Communism have dotted the American landscape. Equally ubiquitous, though until now less the subject of serious inquiry, are temporary memorials: spontaneous offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death. In Memorial Mania, Erika Doss argues that these memorials underscore our obsession with issues of memory and history, and the urgent desire to...