New Books in Architecture

Nicole Rudolph‘s At Home in Postwar France: Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort (Berghahn Books, 2015) contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the three decades after 1945 known as the Trente glorieuses. Rudolph’s emphasis is on French designs and experiences of dwelling, and the interior spaces of French homes in particular. The book argues that housing was essential to the modernizing project that French society engaged in during these years, a vital site of reconstruction in the wake of the Second World War, and a key locus of nation-building and democratization. In this period, the French state actively pursued policies that sought to guarantee its citizens the right to safe, hygienic, and comfortable homes that would nurture individual happiness while helping to strengthen families as the building blocks of a thriving society. From the creation of a Ministry of Reconstruction and Urbanism in 1945, to the housing crisis of 1953, to the yearly Salon des arts menagers promoting new household methods and technologies, to the oil crisis of the early 1970s, At Home in Postwar France examines the class, gender, and design ideals and tensions of a France in the throes of major transformations on multiple fronts. Pursuing the diffusion, mediation, and reception of the new housing forms that developed in the period, the book considers the contributions of state officials, architects and designers, and proponents of domestic economy and organization in France. It also examines the reactions of the residents and social commentators who felt and evaluated the impact of these forms. At Home in Postwar France explores a range of hopes and dreams for modern French living spaces, thinking through a variety of new approaches to housing on a mass scale. Taking on the complicated relationship between home and citizenship in postwar France, the book offers readers new perspective on how French women and men dwelt and thought about dwelling during this critical period in the nations history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Peter L. Laurence is an associate professor of urban design, history and theory at Clemson University School of Architecture. His book Becoming Jane Jacobs (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) is an intellectual biography of the architecture critic and neo-functionist Jane Jacobs and how she came to write the 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Beginning with Jacobs’s arrival in New York City in 1934 with only a high school diploma and writing aspirations Laurence follows her career to the pages of Architectural Forum under the editorial direction of Douglas Haskell. At the magazine she honed her critical skills and was exposed to the latest in urban design and renewal working with leading architects and planners. Laurence argues that there are persistent myths about Jacobs, including her status as a housewife and an amateur urban activist who surprisingly wrote a classic, or a genius. Rather, Jacobs transformed herself into a sophisticated critic influenced by the ideas of a wide circle of intellectuals and wrote a great deal before and after her most well known work. Death and Life of Great American Cities synthesized many previous ideas and proposed a new way to think about cities that considered the social networks and perspective of the person on the street rather than top-down planning that disregarded the human element for efficiency and form. Her vision for the city was of a living system with flexibility, creativity, and diversity offering a sense of connection by mixing the old and the new. Laurence offers not only the evolution of Jacobs’s ideas but also the ways mid-century intellectuals conceived of the cities we now live in. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

In her excellent new book The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East (UNC Press, 2015), Kishwar Rizvi, Associate Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, interrogates the interaction of history, memory, and architecture by exploring arguably the most important sacred space in Islam: the mosque. By combining the study of religion, history, and architecture in the most compelling of ways, Rizvi highlights the material and political significance of the mosque as a transnational symbol. While focused on the contexts of Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, the theoretical insights of this richly textured book extend much beyond the contemporary Middle East. In our conversation, we talked about the concept of the transnational mosque, the historicist desires and assumptions that often undergird projects of mosque construction in Muslim societies, the transnational mosque, religious identity and international politics, and ways in which mobile networks of architects and corporations reorient our understanding of what we mean by the Middle East. This stunningly well-written book is also aesthetically pleasing, populated with wonderful visuals and images. It will also make an excellent reading for both undergraduate and graduate courses on sacred space, the modern Middle East, Islam and architecture, and religion, mobility, and globalization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Prague, according to Derek Sayer, is the place “in which modernist dreams have time and again unraveled.” In this sweeping history of surrealism centered on Prague as both a physical location and the “magic capital” in the imagination of leading surrealists such as Andre Breton and Paul Aluard, Sayer takes the reader on a thematic journey from the beginning of the 20th century to the immediate post-war era. In this interview, Sayer talks about why surrealism – and, more importantly, why Prague – is central to understanding the 20th century and modernism. Through works of literature and works of architecture, Sayer demonstrates how Czech modernists pluralized visions of what modernist art should be. These Czech artists and architects were largely ignored in post-World War II exhibitions and histories of surrealism and modernism. With this book, Derek Sayer returns them to their proper place in the narrative. Prague, Capital of Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton University Press, 2013) received the 2014 George L. Mosse Prize from the American Historical Association. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding major work of extraordinary scholarly distinction, creativity, and originality in the intellectual and cultural history of Europe since the Renaissance. The book also received an honorable mention for the 2014 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, awarded to the “most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline in the humanities or social sciences,” by The Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Jonathan M. Reynolds‘s new book looks carefully at how photographers, architects, and others wrestled with a postwar identity crisis as they explored and struggled with new meanings of tradition, home, and culture in modern Japan. Building on the work of Walter Benjamin, Allegories of Time and Space: Japanese Identity in Photography and Architecture (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) takes readers into a range of media in which writers and artists engaged with these questions. From photographs of rural inhabitants of the Snow Country of northern Japan to photobooks on Japanese architecture to special structures built to serve young female nomads in Tokyo, the objects of Reynolds’s study all served their makers as spaces for working through problems of identity, Japaneseness, and their transformations. It’s a fascinating study that beautifully integrates images as an integral part of the text, and it is well worth reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

What is the fate of culture and urban regeneration in the era of austerity? In Urban Constellations: Spaces of Cultural Regeneration in Post-industrial Britain (Ashgate, 2015), Zoe Thompson applies critical cultural theory to help understand this question. The book is based on four case studies, of The Lowry in Salford, The Deep in Hull, The Sage Gateshead and The Public in West Bromwich. These four case studies are read through a variety of methods, including walking and visual methods, along with two key theorists, Jean Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin. Baudrillard and Benjamin are juxtaposed as important thinkers of culture, the symbolic and the urban, in an attempt to show the ambivalences of cultural buildings used for urban regeneration. The buildings are narrated as ‘dreamhouses’ within the symbolic, as well as the political, economy of post-industrial urban spaces. The book shows how all the case studies offer elements of hope and redemption for their locations, whether as sites for individual’s memory, in the case of The Sage, or as collective notions of art and culture, in the example of The Lowry. However the book also shows the risks associated with these spaces, as premature ruins, in the case of the now closed The Public, or sites reminding us of nature’s revenge in the form of climate change, as The Deep does. The book will be of interest to a large range of scholars across cultural and urban studies, through to architecture and critical theory, and it has important lessons for contemporary urban policy too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Most of us have been to strip malls–lines of shops fronted by acres of parking–and most of us have been to closed malls–massive buildings full of shops and surrounded by acres of parking. Fewer of us have been to open malls: small parks ringed by shops with parking carefully tucked out of sight. That’s because open malls–once numerous–have largely disappeared, having been replaced by strip malls, closed malls and, more recently, big-box stores. As David Smiley points out in his wonderfully researched and beautifully illustrated book Pedestrian Modern: Shopping and American Architecture, 1925-1956 (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), the open mall was a response to a number of macro-historical, mid-twentieth century forces: the explosion of car culture, the decline of urban centers, the rise of suburbs, and, of course, mass consumerism. But he also shows that the open mall wasn’t just an banal machine for selling; it was a canvas upon which Modernist architects could create a uniquely American kind of Modernist architecture. The strip mall, the closed mall, and the big-box store may be artless, but the mid-century open mall certainly was not. It had style, as the many wonderful images in David’s book show. Interestingly, the open mall is making a comeback. I visited one outside Hartford, Connecticut. Alas, it has none of the Modernist elements that made the original open malls so interesting. To me, it looked like a closed mall turned inside out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

The intersection of empirical research and critical theory is the basis for Anastasia Karandinou‘s new book No Matter: Theories and Practices of the Ephemeral in Architecture (Ashgate, 2013). The book takes as its starting point the growth of interest in ephemeral aspects of architecture, for example sound or time, which has arisen during the era of social and digital media. The two developments are interconnected across the book’s attempt to disrupt the traditional binary hierarchies dominant in architectural theory. Drawing on Derrida, Benjamin and Deluze, alongside a range of architects and architectural theorists, No Matter raises questions about the dominance of the visual over the non-visual; the formal over the material; and the physical over the digital. The range of empirical case studies used to illustrate the instability of the theoretical divisions ranges from audio projects in Edinburgh, Scotland to performative mapping in Shanghai, China. As a result of both its theoretical basis and its use of case study material, No Matter will interest anyone who wants to know more about the intersection of the built environment around us and the digital world that we use to live our lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Gregory Heller is the author of Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Heller is Senior Advisor at Econsult Solutions, Inc. in Philadelphia. Bacon’s vision and leadership on urban renewal helped to create the physical landscape of what Philadelphia is today. He was central to many of the public and private projects that recreated this modern city. But, as the book title suggests, Bacon’s legacy is more than just as a planner. Heller dubs Heller ‘the planner as policy entrepreneur’. In doing so, Heller’s biography of Bacon can be read as an extended case-study in the policy process and urban politics. Bacon’s deep belief in public participation resulted in a vision for planning that was profoundly democratic and a great departure from many of his contemporaries who were often dismissive or indifferent of public input. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

In their new book Diagramming the Big Idea (Routledge, 2012), Jeffrey Balmer and Michael Swisher offer some new insights into the eternal problem of how creativity works. As you will hear in our interview, they are beginning design instructors and colleagues at University of North Carolina in Charlotte where they teach architecture students how to communicate their ideas and concepts through diagramming. The material for this book developed out of their teaching and a realization that students and professionals needed more resources to nurture their design thinking skills and methods. Of interest to both architects and anyone who wants to know more about the design process, this book explains how and why diagrams work, provides examples of successful diagramming strategies, and offers step-by-step instructions on how to make your own diagrams in two and three dimensions. The interview offers many insights into this fascinating and understudied topic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture