New Books in Architecture

Folklore scholar Joseph Sciorra is the Director for Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in Queens College which is part of the City University of New York.  He’s also a Brooklyn-born and -raised Italian American and in this episode of the New Books in Folklore podcast, he talks about his latest book, Built with Faith: Italian American Imagination and Catholic Material Culture in New York City (University of Tennessee Press, 2015) which “offers a place-centric, ethnographic study of the religious material culture of New York City’s Italian American Catholics” (xiv). A transdisciplinary work, albeit firmly grounded in folklore scholarship and based on ethnographic research conducted over 35 years, this book is a comprehensive study of the myriad ways in which a people express their personal religious faith in tangible, dynamic, and often public forms.  The resulting yard shrines, sidewalk altars, elaborate presepi (Nativity scenes), and other manifestations – which also include extravagant Christmas light adornments of domestic exteriors, The Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto in Rosebank, Staten Island, and a series of Brooklyn religious processions – usually receive no kind of official sanction. In fact, they are more likely to provoke disdain than approbation in most quarters.  Nonetheless, they allow residents to both meaningfully relate to and actively construct the city in a way that is unique to “New York” and also speak to a vernacular Italian-American ethos that sets great store by the concept of lavoro ben fatto, or “work done well”. In Built with Faith, Sciorra gives prominence to the voices of the creators of this landscape of devotional material culture, voices which he has captured over decades in formal interviews as well as less formal ‘phone conversations, and casual street-side chats. He also takes pains to present the history of the sorts of displays that are his subject. In addition, the volume includes numerous photographs of the sites in question, often taken by the author himself. As noted by another New Books in Folkore interviewee, Luisa Del Giudice, in her review for the Journal of American Folkore: “Sciorra has vividly demonstrated why the study and practice of such material culture is important and how individual human creativity informed by a spiritual and cultural core becomes an act of both personal and community identity. These art forms may not have much social capital, but Sciorra does. As Director of Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute of New York, editor (Italian American Review), blogger (“Joey Skee,” for i-Italy), noted scholar and cultural activist, Sciorra, through Built with Faith, will make a high impact beyond the disciplines of vernacular culture; art and architecture; migration and ethnic, urban, religious studies; and beyond New York City. This is definitely a carefully crafted work—that is, un lavoro ben fatto.” Cindy R. Lobel, writing for the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s Buildings and Landscapes journal, is similarly effusive: “Built with Faith makes a fine contribution to the literature on landscape, material culture, immigration, ethnic studies, and urban studies. It offers important information on the kinds of approaches Italian American New Yorkers have taken toward shaping the built environment of New York through their religious and cultural practices. Sciorra documents and offers wonderful thick descriptions of Italian American mat... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

In Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), geographer Caitlin DeSilvey offers a set of alternatives to those who would assign a misplaced solidity to historic buildings and landscapes in order then to “preserve” or “conserve” them. DeSilvey reimagines processes of material decay, which always intermingle natural and cultural landscapes, as more animate, eventful, productive, and worthy of affirmation than prevailing practice would have it. Her narrative wends through Montana, Vermont, Germany’s Ruhr Valley, and numerous English sites, each of them rendered at close range, in lithe, sometimes experimental prose. Through these encounters, and with a remarkably light touch, she thinks in a key recognizable alongside, but never subservient to, many strands of recent geographic thought on the force or vitality of nonhuman matter. Curated Decay is an ethical intervention, too, posing difficult questions about vulnerability, rights, care, repair, maintenance, and how we might better respond to environments as they weather and fragment. Just this week, happily, the book was just awarded the Historic Preservation Book Prize by the Center for Historic Preservation at the University of Mary Washington. It will satisfy a wide and curious readership across diverse domains of theory and practice, and because the lines of questioning it opens are not easily closed down, it will stoke debate for some time to come. Peter Ekman teaches in the departments of geography at Sonoma State University and 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

The Americans with Disability Act passed in 1990, but it was just one moment in ongoing efforts to craft the meaning and practice of “good design” that put people with disabilities at the center. In their new book, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), Aimi Hamraie takes a “sledgehammer to history” in the spirit of one guerrilla activist group that they track in the archives—among many other people, objects, and historical contexts. Hamraie focuses on work around “access-knowledge”—that is, the forms of expertise that were considered legitimate ways of knowing and responding to disability through design. What has counted as legitimate access-knowledge, Hamraie argues, indicates designers’ goals: Was the aim of design to make productive workers, liberal consumers, or structures that materialized a commitment to spacial belonging? Who were the imagined users and how could new political priorities materialize in worlds already built? Answers to these questions made—and continue to remake—our material world and its frictions.  Hamraie brings their training in feminist epistemology to never-before-accessed archival materials, along with an array of historical images and documents. The result is a persuasive, beautiful, and intrepidly researched book. Building Access torques received wisdom in disability studies, history of science, and architectural design, and models how to attend to research, writing, and publishing as a material practice. Hamraie is Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health & Society, and Director of Vanderbilt’s Critical Design Lab. This interview was a collective effort among Vanderbilt faculty and graduate students in the course New Approaches to STS. For more information about using NBN interviews as part of pedagogical practice, please email Laura Stark or see the essay “Can New Media Save the Book?” in Contexts (2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Lawrence Halprin, one of the central figures in twentieth-century American landscape architecture, is well known to city-watchers for his work on San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square, Seattle’s Freeway Park, downtown Portland’s open-space sequence, the FDR Memorial on the National Mall, and the California planned community of Sea Ranch. Less well known is his distinctive, process-based approach to design—his theoretical commitment, on the one hand, to a dynamic “choreography” of bodies moving through space, and, on the other, the visually arresting notational techniques of “scoring” he devised to represent such movement and carry out his projects in consultation with the public. In City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Alison Bick Hirsch addresses Halprin’s built work and community workshops in equal measure, pointing up important tensions that his participatory “Take Part Process” never quite extinguished: between manipulation and facilitation, universality and difference, conscious choice and emergent chance. Through Lawrence Halprin and his wife, the modern dancer Anna Halprin, Hirsch opens onto a broader history of postwar landscape and urban design, and onto some of the complicated politics in which proponents and critics of Urban Renewal alike found themselves immersed. Hirsch has written a decisive work that joins the intellectual, social, political, and aesthetic histories of urbanism. Geographers, historians, and urbanists of many stripes will learn from her able analysis. Peter Ekman teaches in the departments of geography at Sonoma State University and 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

Singular Spaces: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments (Raw Vision, 2013) is an audacious tome. A comprehensive survey of 45 art environments on the Spanish mainland, it weighs just over eight and a half pounds and contains over 1300 color photographs (with over 4000 more plus site plans on the accompanying CD). Its author, Jo Farb Hernandez, is the Director of SPACES, a non-profit focused on art environments around the world. She first became interested in place-based creative constructions when she was an undergraduate in Wisconsin. In her introduction to Singular Spaces, she recounts how this particular book began: she and her husband were in the process of renovating an old farmhouse they’d purchased in Catalonia. They took a short road-trip to explore the area around their new home and chanced upon “the enormous roadside construction of Josep Pujiula I Vila, at that time one of the largest and most idiosyncratic art environments found worldwide” (16). Shortly thereafter Farb Hernandez began documenting Pujiula’s work while writing another book. In the process she came across more and more such endeavors that demanded her attention. Singular Spaces is devoted to those sites and like them, the book is the product of years of labor and dedication. Singular Spaces features the work of 45 artists, all men. Alongside the photographs and descriptions of the art environments, Farb Hernandez also tells the stories of their creators’ lives, and details the history and development of each project. She also describes the challenges that many of the artists have faced, not least those posed by unhappy neighbors and unsympathetic municipal authorities. In fact, helping the men deal with local adversities has led to Farb Hernandez frequently taking on the role of advocate on behalf of her interlocutors. A recent review in the Journal of American Folklore described Singular Spaces as “incredibly important for those who are interested in architecture, the politics of place and space, folk art and art in general, art and activism, the psychology of creativity, and relationships between tradition and the individual. Jo Farb Hernandez has written more than a survey of eccentric art spaces. She has opened a door to each artist and space so that they may be explored, analyzed, and, in some cases, loved by any who enjoy such contextual art forms.” Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

My students don’t remember Vietnam. That’s hard to believe, for someone born in 1968. But it’s true, nonetheless. High school history courses rarely make it past World War Two. The Cold War and the Berlin Wall are mysteries. And Vietnam, unless someone in their family fought there, is just a country. But most, if not all, of my students have heard of the Vietnam Memorial. They may not know what or who it commemorates. But they’ve seen it on class trips, or in textbooks. And they universally praise its power and simplicity. So, unless you’re my age, it’s hard to imagine the bitterness and divisions which greeted Maya Lin’s memorial. In his new book A Rift in the Earth: Art, Memory and the Fight for a Vietnam War Memorial (Arcade Publishing, 2017), James Reston, Jr. retells this story in a way that brings it alive again. Reston brings a journalist’s eye for character and narrative to the book. Several authors have told this tale, but Reston is by far the best at bringing the story to life. Less interested in putting this memorial into the broader context of memorialization in the 1970s, he instead concentrates on retelling the story and on explaining to a modern audience why it matters. And, when you’ve finished the narrative heart of the book, you suddenly learn why the story seems so personal and important to Reston. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Pastseries, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda,1994. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

For most people the field of architecture is not what they think about when discussing artificial intelligence as we describe it today. Yet, architects are a part of the historic foundations of what we call the Internet and now AI. In her new book, Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT, 2017), Carnegie Mellon associate professor Molly Wright Steenson, considers four of these designers: Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte, to examine how they included elements of interactivity in their projects. In so doing she illuminates how their work influences today’s technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

What do gingerbread houses in Haiti teach us about the construction of identity in the French Caribbean? How do hurricanes and earthquakes reveal the connections between the tangible built environment and intangible notions of identity? Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean (Liverpool University Press, 2017) examines these questions in a rich body of works from Haiti, Guadeloupe and Martinique. The book proposes two key concepts to aid in our understanding of Caribbean writers’ construction of identity in their literary works. The term “architexture” asks readers to be attentive to the building blocks of the text and the inner workings of literary works that reflect on themselves and reach out beyond their own pages to be in conversation with other writers, other texts, other stories. Authenticity underscores the ever-present specter of the colonial past and the possibilities for drawing on multiple influences (or in Herbeck’s terminology, using multiple building materials) to construct a unique and original Caribbean identity. Drawing on a range of writers including Maryse Conde, Daniel Maximin and Yanick Lahens, this book steps back from a narrow view of the finished edifice and takes in the scaffolding and mortar that holds these narratives together. Jason Herbeck is Professor of French at Boise State University. His research focuses primarily on evolving narrative forms in twentieth and twenty-first-century French and French-Caribbean literatures, and how these forms relate to expressions and constructions of identity. In addition to many articles and book chapters devoted to the literatures and histories of Haiti, Martinique and Guadeloupe, he has also published widely on Albert Camus and is, since 2009, President of the North American Section of the Societe des Etudes Camusiennes. Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Resistance in the Francophone World, examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

It’s no secret that we continue to live in the midst of digital revolution that continues to unfold in a rapidly accelerating fashion. Digital connectivity and the Internet of Things make possible not only Smart Homes, but Smart Cities. As with all technological revolutions, the road ahead is equally dotted with possibilities and pitfalls. Liss C. Werner and her colleagues brought together a collection of thinkers and practitioners in the realms of architecture, design, and urban planning to wrestle with questions around ways we might utilize today’s digital design tools to enable more responsive, resilient, and ultimately, inclusive and democratic forms of urban design and governance without tipping the balance over to a technocratic project that might imprison us within its algorithmic logics. All of the contributors to this discussion share the hope that the insights of second-order cybernetics might provide valuable guidance as we attempt to find that particular “sweet-spot” of human/machine interaction. Their insights are gathered together in Cybernetics: State of the Art edited by our guest, Liss C. Werner, and available free online from the Technical University of Berlin. As editor, Werner has skillfully crafted a dialectic arc that allows the productive tensions between digital utopianism and skepticism enabling a provocative investigation of the revolution that is happening whether we like it or not, and might help us find the means to steer its emergence in ways that are most beneficial for all of us and our environment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

In 1898, a new metropolis emerged from the consolidation of New York City with East Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island and the western part of Queens County. In Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mike Wallace describes the first two decades of this city’s expanded history, a period in which it led and embodied the developments that were taking place nationally. As he explains, consolidation was a trend throughout America during this era. Big business was at the forefront of this, as Wall Street provided the financing necessary for numerous industries to form dominant corporate combinations through mergers and takeovers. The enormous wealth controlled by these titans was prominent throughout the city, both in the new skyscrapers rising to dominate the city’s skyline and in the cultural and educational institutions that flourished with infusions of their capital. Similar mergers took place in many sectors and aspects of city life, from entertainment to labor, with even the criminal underworld consolidating in a reflection of the times. Wallace’s book chronicles all of this, as well as the developments in the many communities of a richly diverse city that during these years experienced dramatic growth and changes wrought by a global war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture