Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
348
result(s) for
"Architecture and society United States."
Sort by:
Rethinking the American City
Whether struggling in the wake of postindustrial decay or reinventing themselves with new technologies and populations, cities have once again moved to the center of intellectual and political concern.Rethinking the American Citybrings together leading scholars from a range of disciplines to examine an array of topics that illuminate the past, present, and future of cities.Rethinking the American Cityoffers a lively and fascinating survey of contemporary thinking about cities in a transnational context. Utilizing an innovative format, each chapter opens with an iconic image and includes a brief and provocative essay on a single topic followed by an extended dialogue among all the essayists. Topics range from energy use, design, and digital media to transportation systems and housing to public art, urban ruins, and futurist visions. By engaging with key contemporary concerns-public and private space, sustainability, ethnic and racial divisions, and technology-this volume illuminates how global society has imagined American urban life.Contributors:Klaus Benesch, Dolores Hayden, David M. Lubin, Malcolm McCullough, Jeffrey L. Meikle, David E. Nye, Miles Orvell, Andrew Ross, Mabel O. Wilson, Albena Yaneva.
eBook
Solar Adobe
How a centuries-old architectural tradition reemerged as
a potential solution to the political and environmental crises of
the 1970s Against the backdrop of a global energy crisis,
a widespread movement embracing the use of raw earth materials for
building construction emerged in the 1970s. Solar Adobe
examines this new wave of architectural experimentation taking
place in the United States, detailing how an ancient tradition
became a point of convergence for issues of environmentalism,
architecture, technology, and Indigenous resistance.
Utilized for centuries by the Pueblo people of the American
Southwest and by Spanish colonialists, adobe construction found
renewed interest as various groups contended with the troubled
legacies of modern architecture and an increasingly urgent need for
sustainable design practices. In this period of critical
experimentation, design networks that included architects,
historians, counterculture communities, government weapons labs,
and Indigenous activists all looked to adobe as a means to address
pressing environmental and political issues.
Albert Narath charts the unique capacities of adobe construction
across a wide range of contexts, consistently troubling simple
distinctions between traditional and modern technologies, high
design and vernacular architecture. Drawing insightful parallels
between architecture, environmentalism, and movements for
Indigenous sovereignty, Solar Adobe stresses the
importance of considering the history of the built environment in
conjunction with architecture's larger impact on the natural
world.
eBook
Impossible Heights
The advent of the airplane and skyscraper in 1920s and '30s America offered the population an entirely new way to look at the world: from above. The captivating image of an airplane flying over the rising metropolis led many Americans to believe a new civilization had dawned. InImpossible Heights, Adnan Morshed examines the aesthetics that emerged from this valorization of heights and their impact on the built environment.
The lofty vantage point from the sky ushered in a modernist impulse to cleanse crowded twentieth-century cities in anticipation of an ideal world of tomorrow. Inspired by great new heights, American architects became central to this endeavor and were regarded as heroic aviators. Combining close readings of a broad range of archival sources, Morshed offers new interpretations of works such as Hugh Ferriss's Metropolis drawings, Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion houses, and Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Transformed by the populist imagination into \"master builders,\" these designers helped produce a new form of visuality: the aesthetics of ascension.
By demonstrating how aerial movement and height intersect with popular \"superman\" discourses of the time, Morshed reveals the relationship between architecture, art, science, and interwar pop culture. Featuring a marvelous array of never before published illustrations, this richly textured study of utopian imaginings illustrates America's propulsion into a new cultural consciousness.
eBook
Pedestrian Modern
Too close to the wiles and calculations of consumption, stores and shopping centers are generally relegated to secondary, pedestrian status in the history of architecture. And yet, throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, stores and shopping centers were an important locus of modernist architectural thought and practice. Under the mantle of modernism, the merchandising problems and possibilities of main streets, cities, and suburbs became legitimate-if also conflicted-responsibilities of the architectural profession. In Pedestrian Modern, David Smiley reveals how the design for places of consumption informed emerging modernist tenets. The architect was viewed as a coordinator and a site planner-modernist tropes particularly well suited to merchandising. Smiley follows this development from the twenties and thirties, when glass and transparency were equated with modernist rationality; to the forties, when cities and congestion presented considerable hurdles for shopping district design and, at the same time, when modern concerns about the pedestrian deeply affected city and neighborhood planning; to the early fifties, when both urban shopping districts and suburban shopping centers became large-scale modernist undertakings. Although interpreting the tools and principles of modernism, designs for shopping never quite shed the specter of consumption. Tracing the history of architecture's relationship with retail environments during a time of significant transformation in urban centers and in open suburban landscapes, Smiley expands and qualifies the making of American modernism.
eBook
Houses without names : architectural nomenclature and the classification of America's common houses
\"Hubka argues that even \"vernacular architecture\" scholars tend to embrace a model for understanding home forms that relies on iconic architects and theories about how ideas proceed downward from aesthetic ideals to home construction, even though this model fails to adequately characterize the vast majority actual homes that people live in, particularly in recent times after the widespread growth of suburban America. This controversial book proposes new ways to categorize houses\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
194X
In a major study of American architecture during World War II, Andrew M. Shanken focuses on the culture of anticipation that arose in this period, as out-of-work architects turned their energies from the built to the unbuilt, redefining themselves as planners and creating original designs to excite the public about postwar architecture. Shanken recasts the wartime era as a crucible for the intermingling of modernist architecture.
eBook