New Books in Architecture

The book today is Cultural Landscapes of South Asia : Studies in Heritage Conservation, and Management (Routledge, 2017) edited by Kapila D. Silva and Amita Sinha. It's the Winner of the Environmental Design Research Association's 2018 Achievement Award. South Asian architecture and landscapes are not as well known in the western design schools. This book adds to our body of knowledge about “how to” design spaces with culturally sensitivity for projects in South Asia but also what we can learn from them. It's about how their multi-faceted cultural appreciation of the land that derives from their religion, food, and way of living with ecologies affects their designs and placemaking. It’s a fascinating book to view western cultures in a new light and also our current struggles with sea level rise and ecological challenges. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Chris Reed and Nina-Marie Lister's book  Projective Ecologies (Harvard Graduate School of Design 2014) is about how landscape architecture can move forward in the design field beyond garden landscapes to delve into the serious issues of climate change and land use master planing affecting our global landscapes today. Projective ecologies is a “how to get started” guide to understanding what we can control, what we can’t control, and to embrace all of the creative chaos to produce good and meaning peacemaking for humans and nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

In Making Space for the Dead: Catacombs, Cemeteries, and the Reimagining of Paris, 1780-1830 (Cornell University Press, 2019), Dr. Erin-Marie Legacey, Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech University, explores the transformation of burial practices in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Public health concerns under the Old Regime prompted reforms in how the French buried their dead, with millions of bones carted away from church graveyards to the deserted mining tunnels underneath the city. After the Revolution, the Catacombs, as well as newly established cemeteries such as Père Lachaise, became more than simply places for the disposal of the deceased. Amidst the turmoil and upheaval wrought by the Revolution, these burial sites became public spaces for Parisians to, as Dr. Legacey writes, “assert and assess their radical break with the past, to reconsider a new set of moeurs in the wake of that break, to reconnect with their fellow Parisians, both alive and dead, and to reimagine their past and its relationship to the present.”Beth Mauldin is an Associate Professor of French at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Her research interests include French cultural studies, film, and the social and cultural history of Paris. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

In this segment of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Elizabeth “Libby” Otto, Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies and Executive Director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Buffalo about her forthcoming work, Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics (MIT Press, 2019). The MIT press release appropriately notes that Otto “liberates Bauhaus history” with this work, drawing the focus from the handful of male artists like Klee and Breuer outward as she considers the other 1200 odd Bauhäusler. Otto discusses spiritism, gender constructions, and the nature of queer before turning her attention to the unavoidable political landscape of the 1930s. Our conversation was wide ranging and as edifying as it was fun. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Nadia Amoroso's last book Representing Landscapes: Analogue (Routledge, 2019) focuses the art of hand drawings and why they are still relevant and important in our digital age. Nadia takes us on a journey through the diverse Landscape Architecture University programs showcasing the best in student work. Simple hand drawings can tell powerful stories if we know “how to “ do them. Each chapter illustrates a different style and type of drawing along with an essay from the leading professors at the major universities. Visual communication is the heart of Landscape Architecture. Her book series captures that spirt.Nadia Amoroso, PhD, is a faculty member at the University of Guelph, Department of Landscape, School of Environmental Design and Rural Development. She was the Lawrence Halprin Fellow at Cornell University and the Garvan Chair Visiting Professor at the University of Arkansas. She holds a PhD from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London, and degrees in Landscape Architecture and Urban Design from the University of Toronto. She specializes in visual communication in landscape architecture, digital design, data visualization and creative mapping. She also operates an illustration studio, under her name, focusing on landscape architectural visual communication. She has written a number of articles and books on topics relating to creative mapping, visual representation, and digital design including, The Exposed City: Mapping the Urban Invisibles, Representing Landscapes: Digital, and more recently Representing Landscapes: Hybrid. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Stefan Al, PhD, is a native of the Netherlands, a low-lying county that would not exist without flood protection, is an architect, urban designer, and infrastructure expert at global design at Kohn Pedersen Fox in New York. He has served as a TED resident, advisor to the United Nations High Level Political Forum on sustainable development and Professor of urban design at the University of Pennsylvania.Adapting Cities to Sea Level Rise: Green and Gray Strategies(Island Press, 2018) is a tool kit for adapting and managing sea level rise and storm events for metropolitan cities and smaller communities. It’s a “how to” guide to create better comprehensive strategies and ideas for implementation. The beautiful and simple diagrams illustrate the difference responses possible for cities and the pros and cons of each. The book makes the argument that collaboration is the key to finding successful solutions for all stakeholders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Vacant lots, so often seen as neighborhood blight, have the potential to be a key element of community revitalization. As manufacturing cities reinvent themselves after decades of lost jobs and population, abundant vacant land resources and interest in green infrastructure are expanding opportunities for community and environmental resilience. Vacant to Vibrant: Creating Successful Green Infrastructure Networks (Island Press, 2019) explains how inexpensive green infrastructure projects can reduce stormwater runoff and pollution, and provide neighborhood amenities, especially in areas with little or no access to existing green space.Sandra Albro offers practical insights through her experience leading the five-year Vacant to Vibrant project, which piloted the creation of green infrastructure networks in Gary, Indiana; Cleveland, Ohio; and Buffalo, New York. Vacant to Vibrant provides a point of comparison among the three cities as they adapt old systems to new, green technology. An overview of the larger economic and social dynamics in play throughout the Rust Belt region establishes context for the promise of green infrastructure. Albro then offers lessons learned from the Vacant to Vibrant project, including planning, design, community engagement, implementation, and maintenance successes and challenges. An appendix shows designs and plans that can be adapted to small vacant lots.Sandra Albro, research associate at Holden Forests & Gardens, investigates how improving soil and plants can boost the ecological and social value of vacant lots in Great Lakes cities. She is project manager for two projects that test low-cost, low-maintenance urban greening projects that manage stormwater and revitalize communities in Gary, IN; Cleveland, OH; and Buffalo, NY. Ms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Today’s guest hails to us from England. Mr. Edward Hutchison’s new book is Drawing for Landscape Architecture: Sketch to Screen to Site (Thames & Hudson, 2019). Can you draw? The answer is yes and we must. As designers, understanding the landscape beings with the basics. Like learning your musical scales, so is drawing to design. It’s the fundamental skill to understand a place’s the culture, space, color, and discovering the genius loci. Mr. Hutchison’s latest book is “how to do it.” He explains his process for understanding how taking the time to understand the site influences his designs and the benefits of it.Edward Hutchison is principal of his own successful landscape design practice in London. He was previously an associate of Foster + Partners. His drawings have been included in major exhibitions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

If there’s one thing that conjures up the – rightly contested – idea of a ‘civilisation’, it is grand palatial or religious buildings, and many such structures are foremost in how China is imagined throughout the world. But as Nancy S. Steinhardt notes in Chinese Architecture: A History (Princeton University Press, 2019), many iconic edifices such Beijing’s Forbidden City or Shanxi’s temples share features in common with the humblest ordinary dwellings which people in what we now call China have inhabited for centuries.Steinhardt here draws on decades of exhaustive reading and tireless fieldwork to tell the story of Chinese building practices, principles and techniques across space and time, from the earliest archaeological traces of construction right up to the present day. Both highly accessible and richly illustrated with hundreds of colour photographs, as well as intricate technical diagrams, this extraordinary treasure trove of a book is much more than an architectural compendium. The countless insights Steinhardt offers into the wider worlds of art and urban planning, and the political, economic and religious contexts in which Chinese buildings have been built for thousands of years, will serve as an engrossing and materially-rooted account of Chinese ‘civilisation’ for anyone with even a fleeting interest in the country.Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Raymond Jungles is the founder of the Miami based Landscape Architecture firm Raymond Jungles Inc. He graduate from the University of Florida with honors in 1981. And, was elected as a Fellow in 2006 in the American Society of Landscape Architects. Raymond’s work has earned 2 national awards and 40 state awards. He has lectured internationally at a diverse number of institutions and universities. In his book The Cultivated Wild: Gardens and Landscapes (The Monacelli Press, 2015), Jungles discusses his design process and its synthesis with local ecologies for our human desires of cultivated landscapes. The story of Jungles’s mentors weaves in and out of his projects. The art and ecology begins in the photography and hand drawings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture