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ARCHITECTURE & PLANNING
Race and Modern Architecture
A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present Edited by Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis and Mabel O. Wilson Sheds new light on the construction and impact of race on architecture across the world since the eighteenth century.
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Although race – a concept of human difference that establishes hierarchies of power and domination – has played a critical role in the development of modern architectural discourse and practice since the Enlightenment, its influence on the discipline remains largely underexplored. This volume offers a welcome and long-awaited intervention for the field by shining a spotlight on constructions of race and their impact on architecture and theory in Europe and North America and across various global contexts since the eighteenth century. Challenging us to write race back into architectural history, contributors confront how racial thinking has intimately shaped some of the key concepts of modern architecture and culture over time, including freedom, revolution, character, national and indigenous style, progress, hybridity, climate, representation, and radicalism. By analysing how architecture has intersected with histories of slavery, colonialism, and inequality – from eighteenth-century neoclassical governmental buildings to present-day housing projects for immigrants – Race and Modern Architecture challenges, complicates, and revises the standard association of modern architecture with a universal project of emancipation and progress.
“In looking at the history of architecture as a history of racialised cultures, seemingly everywhere, this volume makes a major contribution to the literature.” —CHOICE “Race and Modern Architecture challenges the suppression of race in canonical histories of modern architecture, revealing the discipline’s foundation on hierarchies of racial difference, its absorption of racial thought, and the racial origins of modernism’s narrative of universalism and progress. These incisive essays resonate beyond architectural history and reflect on the inextricable intertwining of race
and modernism.” —Patricia Morton, University of California
CULTURE POLITICS & THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT | UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS Paperback • 9780822966593 • December 2020 • £34.50 424 pages
Redemptive Reconstruction Across Cold War Borders By Andrew Demshuk
Compares how three prewar German cities shared decades of post-war development under three competing post-Nazi regimes. A wide-ranging architectural history of German and post-German cities and an insightful comparison of postwar urban reconstruction across the Iron Curtain. This book looks at Frankfurt in capitalist West Germany, Leipzig in communist East Germany, and Wroclaw (formerly Breslau) in communist Poland. It explores how these cities reimagined their pasts through architectural narratives using redemptive reconstruction.
RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES | UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS Hardback • 9780822946977 • August 2021 • £49.00 500 pages
Writing Architectural History
Evidence and Narrative in Architectural History
Examines contributions of new approaches to research transcending traditional boundaries of art history departments and architecture schools. Over the past two decades, scholarship in architectural history has transformed, moving away from design studio pedagogy and postmodern historicism to draw instead from trends in critical theory focusing on gender, race, the environment, and more recently global history. With examples from medieval European coin trials and eighteenth-century Haitian revolutionary buildings to Weimar German construction firms and present-day African refugee camps, this book considers the impact of these shifting institutional landscapes and disciplinary positionings for architectural history.
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS Hardback • 9780822946847 • December 2021 • £53.00 352 pages
From Earth
Earth Architecture in Iceland By Hjörleifur Stefansson
A detailed, beautifully photographed exploration of historic and contemporary Icelandic turf houses. The first inhabitants of Iceland built their homes from the material that was closest at hand: the earth itself. In the early 20th century, more than half the Icelandic population were still living in turf houses, and a few dozen such buildings remain standing today. This book explores the Icelandic turf house as a remarkable phenomenon in world architectural history, and is one of Iceland’s most important contributions to global culture.
