Architecture

A 2022 ALA Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title A visual and global chronicle of the triumphs, challenges, and impact of over 100 women in architecture, from early practitioners to contemporary leaders. Marion Mahony Griffin passed the architectural licensure exam in 1898 and created exquisite drawings that buoyed the reputation of Frank Lloyd Wright. Her story is one of the many told in The Women Who Changed Architecture, which sets the record straight on the transformative impact women have made on architecture. With in-depth profiles and stunning images, this is the most comprehensive look at women in architecture around the world, from the nineteenth century to today. Discover contemporary leaders, like MacArthur Fellow Jeanne Gang, spearheading sustainable design initiatives, reimagining cities as equitable spaces, and directing architecture schools. An essential read for architecture students, architects, and anyone interested in how buildings are created and the history behind them.

Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture considers the lasting contribution made by Central European designers and architects to twentieth-century architecture. Featuring original writing from leading academics in the field, this edited collection examines how oppositional stances in debates concerning consumption and modernism’s social agendas in Europe prefigured the adoption or rejection of émigrés such as Joseph Binder, Josef Frank and Felix Augenfeld by American culture. The contributors to this cutting-edge volume argue that émigrés and refugees from fascist Europe drew on the particular experiences of their home countries, and networks of émigré and exiled designers in the United States, developing a humanist, progressive and socially inclusive design culture which continues to influence design practice today.

Renzo Piano has created some of the most emblematic buildings of our age, including the New York Times Building in New York City, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Shard in London, and the Parco della Musica in Rome. Here, Renzo Piano himself--whose many international awards include the prestigious Pritzker Prize--presents in his own words the works on which he has built his reputation over a span of fifty years. Over one hundred works are featured, accompanied by over one thousand images of Piano's work around the world including new photographs, drawings, and sketches, both intimate and authoritative, all with commentaries by the architect that combine personal anecdote and technical description with original insights. No other architecture book will appeal to such a broad range of professionals and general readers alike. This is an unmatched introduction to the work of one of the world's most influential and inspiring architects.

"Although Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) famously disliked cities, he had a genuine affinity for San Francisco. Paul V. Turner's unprecendented book looks at the architect's complex and evolving relationship with the city, surveying the full body of Wright's work in the Bay Area-- roughly thirty projects, a third of which were built. Spanning from 1900 to 1959, they include houses, a gift shop, a civic center, a skyscraper, a church, and industrial building, a mortuary, a brigde across the San Francisco Bay, and even a dog house. The unbuilt structures are among Wright's most innovative, and the diverse reason for their failure counter long-held stereotypes about the architect and his client relationships. Wright's Bay Area projects are published together here for the first time, along with previously unpublished correspondence between Wright and his clients, as well as his Bay Area associate Aaron Green. Stories from San Francisco newspapers portray the media's changing positions on Wright -- from his early personal scandals to his later roles as eccentric provocateur and celebrated creative genius."

How climate influenced the design strategies of modernist architects Modern Architecture and Climate explores how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and shows how regional approaches to climate adaptability were essential to the development of modern architecture. Focusing on the period surrounding World War II--before fossil-fuel powered air-conditioning became widely available--Daniel Barber brings to light a vibrant and dynamic architectural discussion involving design, materials, and shading systems as means of interior climate control. He looks at projects by well-known architects such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Lúcio Costa, Mies van der Rohe, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the work of climate-focused architects such as MMM Roberto, Olgyay and Olgyay, and Cliff May. Drawing on the editorial projects of James Marston Fitch, Elizabeth Gordon, and others, he demonstrates how images and diagrams produced by architects helped conceptualize climate knowledge, alongside the work of meteorologists, physicists, engineers, and social scientists. Barber describes how this novel type of environmental media catalyzed new ways of thinking about climate and architectural design. Extensively illustrated with archival material, Modern Architecture and Climate provides global perspectives on modern architecture and its evolving relationship with a changing climate, showcasing designs from Latin America, Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Africa. This timely and important book reconciles the cultural dynamism of architecture with the material realities of ever-increasing carbon emissions from the mechanical cooling systems of buildings, and offers a historical foundation for today's zero-carbon design.

How did writers and artists view the intersection of architecture and race in the modernist era? Winner of the MSA First Book Prize of the Modernist Studies Association With the development of the first skyscrapers in the 1880s, urban built environments could expand vertically as well as horizontally. Tall buildings emerged in growing cities to house and manage the large and racially diverse populations of migrants and immigrants flocking to their centers following Reconstruction. Beginning with Chicago's early 10-story towers and concluding with the 1931 erection of the 102-story Empire State Building, Adrienne Brown's The Black Skyscraperprovides a detailed account of how scale and proximity shape our understanding of race. Over the next half-century, as city skylines grew, American writers imagined the new urban backdrop as an obstacle to racial differentiation. Examining works produced by writers, painters, architects, and laborers who grappled with the early skyscraper's outsized and disorienting dimensions, Brown explores this architecture's effects on how race was seen, read, and sensed at the turn of the twentieth century. In lesser-known works of apocalyptic science fiction, light romance, and Jazz Age melodrama, as well as in more canonical works by W. E. B. Du Bois, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aaron Douglas, and Nella Larsen, the skyscraper mediates the process of seeing and being seen as a racialized subject. From its distancing apex--reducing bodies to specks--to the shadowy mega-blocks it formed at street level, the skyscraper called attention, Brown argues, to the malleable nature of perception. A highly interdisciplinary work, The Black Skyscraperreclaims the influence of race on modern architectural design as well as the less-well-understood effects these designs had on the experience and perception of race.

How socialist architects, planners, and contractors worked collectively to urbanize and develop the Global South during the Soviet era In the course of the Cold War, architects, planners, and construction companies from socialist Eastern Europe engaged in a vibrant collaboration with those in West Africa and the Middle East in order to bring modernization to the developing world. Architecture in Global Socialism shows how their collaboration reshaped five cities in the Global South: Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait City. Łukasz Stanek describes how local authorities and professionals in these cities drew on Soviet prefabrication systems, Hungarian and Polish planning methods, Yugoslav and Bulgarian construction materials, Romanian and East German standard designs, and manual laborers from across Eastern Europe. He explores how the socialist development path was adapted to tropical conditions in Ghana in the 1960s, and how Eastern European architectural traditions were given new life in 1970s Nigeria. He looks at how the differences between socialist foreign trade and the emerging global construction market were exploited in the Middle East in the closing decades of the Cold War. Stanek demonstrates how these and other practices of global cooperation by socialist countries--what he calls socialist worldmaking--left their enduring mark on urban landscapes in the postcolonial world. Featuring an extensive collection of previously unpublished images, Architecture in Global Socialism draws on original archival research on four continents and a wealth of in-depth interviews. This incisive book presents a new understanding of global urbanization and its architecture through the lens of socialist internationalism, challenging long-held notions about modernization and development in the Global South.