New Books in Architecture

We know quite a bit about the physical signatures of urban “modernity” foisted upon Paris by Baron Haussmann in the late nineteenth century — the broad boulevards, networked infrastructures, connected apartment houses, and assorted monuments — but little scholarship has seized on its precursors in the half-century prior. In Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), Sun-Young Park turns to another modernity, recovering a daunting array of Romantic and especially post-Napoleonic interventions — less spectacular but arguably more complex — on mobile Parisian bodies and the everyday spaces that host them. Park considers military gymnasia, schools, barracks, leisure gardens, and other spaces purpose-built to inculcate vigor in both individuated physical bodies and, their proponents hoped amid specters of national decline, in the French body politic. Each of these spaces, Park shows, a “threshold” between fully private and fully public realms, helped install — albeit imperfectly — its own “ideal” of the sanitized and gendered human subject. Ideals of the Body is a detailed, visually rich, theoretically motivated study in urban and architectural history, one that just might realign how we periodize and make sense of urban modernity writ large.Peter Ekman is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2016, and is at work on two book projects on the cultural and historical geography of urban America across the long twentieth century. He can be reached at psrekman@berkeley.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

A new book explores how and why New York City became a showcase for the art and architectural styles of ancient Greece and Rome. Classical New York: Discovering Greece and Rome in Gotham (Empire States Editions, 2018), co-edited by Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis and Matthew McGowan (Fordham University Press, 2018), examines the Greco-Roman influence on buildings, monuments and public spaces from Rockefeller Center to the Gould Memorial Library at Bronx Community College.Walking around New York, Macaulay-Lewis says she “was struck by how many classical-looking buildings there were.” Indeed, references to the myths, gods, motifs and structures of the ancient world are seemingly everywhere: in courthouses, museums and libraries, in arches and columns, in Latin inscriptions and sculptures. But these classical references aren’t just about aesthetics or engineering. They also symbolize the aspirations of a city that saw itself as a capital of learning, culture, and civic life, on par with the finest institutions of the ancient world.This interview is part of an occasional series on the history of New York City sponsored by the Gotham Center at CUNY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

It rose against the Texas sun in all its architectural audacity: a domed stadium big enough to cover a baseball field. When it opened in 1965, the Houston Astrodome defied engineering precedent and forever changed professional sports. Today, its legacy today is complicated, and its future remains uncertain.Robert Trumpbour and Kenneth Womack tell the story of this groundbreaking building in The Eighth Wonder of the World The Life of Houston's Iconic Astrodome (University of Nebraska Press, 2016). The book won the Seymour Medal from the Society for American Baseball Research in 2017.Trumpbour is professor of communications at Penn State University. He is also the author of The New Cathedrals: Politics and Media in the History of Stadium Construction (Syracuse Univ. Press, 2006). Womack is a dean and professor of English at Monmouth University, and the author of several books, including Long and Winding Roads: The Evolving Artistry of the Beatles (Bloomsbury, 2007). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

With the passage of the Secure Fence Act in 2006, the U.S. Congress authorized funding for what has become the largest domestic construction project in twenty-first century America. The result? Approximately 700 miles of fencing, barricades, and walls comprised of newly built and repurposed materials, strategically placed along the 1,954-mile international border between the United Mexican States and the United States of America. At an initial cost of $3.4 billion, the most current estimates predict that the expense of maintaining the existing wall will exceed $49 billion by 2032. Envisioned solely as a piece of security infrastructure—with minimal input from architects and designers—the existing barrier has also levied a heavy toll on the lives of individuals, communities, municipalities, and the surrounding environment. In Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (UC Press, 2017), Professor Ronald Rael proposes a series of architectural designs that advocate for the transformation of the existing 700-mile-wall into a piece of civic infrastructure that makes positive contributions to the social, cultural, and ecological landscapes of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. As both a muse and act of political protest, Rael’s designs challenge us to question the efficacy of the current barrier, while simultaneously stoking our imagination concerning its future. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, the development of multi-ethnic/racial cities, and the evolution of Latina/o identity and politics. His research centers on the relationship between Latina/o politics and the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA throughout the 20th century. You may follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Pamela Woolner, senior lecturer in education at Newcastle University, joins us in this episode to discuss her edited volume, School Design Together (Routledge, 2014). Pam is an expert in understanding and developing learning environments, particularly the use of participatory research methods to engage and empower users to share their experiences and knowledge. My conversation with Pam begins with her background in psychology and how her early research studying the use of visuals in math then led her to her research on school environments. In the interview, Pam reflects on the genesis of the book: a 2011 conference to bring together a diverse collective of architects, designers, educators, and researchers at the conclusion of the UK’s Building Schools for the Future programme. For those unfamiliar with learning environments research, a common question is, “Which comes first, the innovative space or innovative teaching?” To answer this question, Pam discusses the complexity of school change, and describes using a cyclical approach that engages a range of participants, at different levels of participation, and at different times in the process. Throughout our conversation, Pam shares her insight about the ways the physical environment is linked to change in schools. Julie Kallio is a graduate student in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her research interests include educational change, innovation and improvement networks, physical spaces of schools, and participatory design. You can find more about her work on her website, follow her on twitter, or email her at jmkallio@wisc.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Laura Neitzel’s The Life We Longed for: Danchi Housing and the Middle Class Dream in Postwar Japan (MerwinAsia, 2016) is a chronicle of the large, government-sponsored housing projects called danchi that were built during Japan’s high-growth years, roughly 1955 until the first oil shock in the early 1970s. Though only a minority of Japanese lived in the danchi, they took on an outsized place in the public imagination of and aspirations for the ideal new “bright life” of postwar Japan. The danchi, built by the Japan Housing Corporation (JHC) to accommodate the rush of families relocating to the cities during this transformational period, were the symbol of a new “democratic” middle-class life freed from the “feudal” past, a great social and architectural experiment, and the source of enormous social cathexis. Drawing on a wide range of sources from government white papers to popular women’s magazines, and paying close attention to the danchi as an everyday revolution of the everyday, to both the positive and negative views of the danchi, and to their relationship to contemporaneous social imaginaries of democratic-capitalist affluence around the world, Neitzel paints a clear and concise portrait of the danchi as aspiration, but also paradoxically as a kind of nostalgia a longed-for life that never really was. The book provides a clear and sensitive look at danchi as modern design and design for modernity, as a fantasy of middle-class life and a middle-class fantasy, warts and all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Beginning in the mid-1800s, Paris experienced an unprecedented growth in the development of parks, squares, and gardens. This greenspace was part of Napoleon III’s plan for a new, modern Paris and a France restored to glory on the international stage.  Adolphe Alphand, as director of the newly established park service, brought his own democratic and egalitarian vision to urban planning.  In Planning the Greenspaces of Nineteenth-Century Paris (Louisiana State University Press, 2015), Dr. Richard S. Hopkins examines the urban landscape of Paris from the Second Empire through the Third Republic as an expression of France’s revolutionary past in which disparate groups—from planners, reformers, and engineers to neighborhood residents and park visitors—came together to create, define, and negotiate this new public space. Richard S. Hopkins is an Assistant Professor of History at Widener University. He teaches courses in European, urban, environmental, and gender history. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of modern France, urban space, and the relationship between the individual and state authority. He is co-editor of the book Practiced Citizenship: Women, Gender, and the State in Modern France, University of Nebraska Press (forthcoming January, 2019). 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

Seoul, as any listener who has visited will recognize, can be a pretty overwhelming place. This is well recognized by Ross King, Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, who notes that cities like this “are experienced as disaggregated places, always already fragmented, bits, moments, feelings, memories” (p. 131). But in his richly illustrated and luxuriously produced book Seoul: Memory, Reinvention and the Korean Wave (University of Hawaii Press, 2018), Professor King does an expert job of ‘reading’ (p. 15) this megalopolis with deftness and elegance, interpreting the multiplicity of faces which it presents to visitor and local alike. Drawing not only on observations of architecture and urban form, his own areas of expertise, King also offers insights from historiography, literature, film, religion, television and popular culture as they relate to the city. Bringing these into dialogue, he builds up a sophisticated picture of the myriad influences and symbolisms at play in Seoul’s urban landscape, and shows how they are layered, juxtaposed and entangled. Reading Seoul, we thus come to apprehend the city in its Korean, its Asian, and its global contexts. Equally importantly, we also learn how to see it as a crucible of overlapping and contending histories, and of successive developmental modernist projects, most recently those tied the ‘Korean Wave’. Anyone interested in Asian modernization at large, urban planning, and more generally in how national and urban transformations fit into wider social and cultural contexts will find a great deal to engage with here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Toufoul Abou-Hodeib‘s A Taste for Home: The Modern Middle Class in Ottoman Beirut (Stanford University Press, 2017) is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the urban history of Beirut precisely because it exceeds the disciplinary boundaries of urban history: A Taste for Home tells the story of late Ottoman Beirut through the middle class and their sense of self. Abou-Hodeib uses domesticity as a category of analysis to look at how the middle class functioned and what it aspired to be in the midst of the late Ottoman period. However, the book also succeeds wildly because it treats a local context within the global setting, taking seriously the intersecting themes of global capitalism and consumer culture, themes of domesticity and taste. Over the course of the book, leisure and urban development are also shown to be key elements in the development of the middle class, defining the city for generations to come. A Taste for Home will be critical for conversations for many years to come on class, the economy, the city, and the home in the study of the Middle East and the Ottoman Empire. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture