Architecture And Retrenchment

Scholars in architectural and urban history have, over the last decade, been trying to come to terms with architecture's 'neoliberal turn' and its various impacts - from municipal policy to the artistic imagination. However most scholarship has focussed on generalizations, with very little work to date focussing on specific cases. Architecture and Retrenchment brings one such case to the fore – investigating the relation between architecture and the Swedish Model of the welfare state. It tracks the response of architecture to the gradual retrenchment and ultimate dismantling of the Swedish welfare state – which was, in its heyday, world-famous for its integration of architecture and the built environment into the welfare system. Ultimately, neoliberal economics prevailed, yet this book reveals how new architectural strategies and techniques were developed in order to protect the agency of architecture in the newly reorganised society of the 1980s and 1990s. Through eight in-depth case-studies, the book situates the often abstract, generalised discourse of neoliberalism and privatisation in specific architectural sites, and provides an original interpretation of how architecture, space, aesthetics, and politics converged at the end of the twentieth century.

Collects the best of Kamin's writings for the Chicago Tribune from the past decade.

Non-Plan explores ways of involving people in the design of their environments - a goal which transgresses political categories of 'right' and 'left'. Attempts to circumvent planning bureaucracy and architectural inertia have ranged from free-market enterprise zones, to self-build housing, and from squatting to sophisticated technologies of prefabrication. Yet all have shared in a desire to let people shape the built environment they want to live and work in. How can buildings better reflect the needs of their inhabitants? How can cities better facilitate the work and recreation of their many populaces? Modernism had promised a functionalist approach to resolving the architectural needs of the twentieth-century, yet the design of cities and buildings often appears to confound the needs of those who use them - their design and layout being highly regulated by restrictive legislation, planning controls and bureaucracy. Non-Plan considers the theoretical and conceptual frameworks within which architecture and urbanism have sought to challenge entrenched boundaries of control, focusing on the architectural history of the post-war period to the present day. This provocative book will be of interest to architects, planners and students of architecture, design, town-planning and architectural history. Its contributors include architects, critics and historians, including many whose work helped shape the Non-Plan debate during the period. List of contributors: Cedric Price, Benjamin Franks, Elizabeth Lebas, Eleonore Kofman, Ben Highmore, Yona Friedman, Paul Barker, Clara Greed, Barry Curtis, Colin Ward, Ian Horton, John Beck, Chinedu Umenyilora and Malcolm Miles.

Why did the colonial Americans give over a significant part of their homes to a grand staircase? Why did the Victorians drape their buildings ornate decoration? And why did American buildings grow so tall in the last decades of the 19th century. This book explores the history of American architecture from prehistoric times to the present, explaining why characteristic architectural forms arose at particular times and in particular places.

Prefabricated and Modular Architecture demystifies age-old perceptions surrounding prefabrication and modularization of buildings, offering a fresh approach to design and procurement. Experienced architect, William Hogan-O'Neill, provides a unique insight into why architectural design, manufacturing and assembly processes must coexist in parallel. In order for the architectural profession to have a meaningful existence in the future, it must examine the new opportunities that are emerging through automation and artificial intelligence from within the factory environment, as opposed to the construction site. In addition, the book explores the following topics; core elements defining prefabrication; perceptions and influences; precision, exactness and tolerances; standardization and economies of scale; panelized versus modular buildings as a design solution and, finally, common features, technical considerations and certification.

"A pioneering account of mid-Atlantic folk architecture and of the nineteenth-century transformation of traditional agriculture. . . . A major study of American vernacular architecture."--Dell Upton, University of California, Berkeley "Bernard L. Herman has provided us with a model study in the interdisciplinary interpretation of a common landscape."--Robert Blair St. George, Journal of American Folklore "An impressive study that adds an important dimension to our understanding of the built environment."--Clifford E. Clark Jr., American Historical Review "A wide range of reader expectations will be met by this book. Herman provides a focused community study as well as an interpretation of vernacular architecture in the Mid-Atlantic region."--John Michael Vlach, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians "Scholars will be impressed by Herman's ability to marshal different kinds of evidence to buttress his contention that architecture reveals not just how people materially ordered their lives but helped 'to create and maintain order, to project images of self and community, and to control meaning in social discourse.'"--Choice The Author: Bernard L. Herman teaches at the University of Delaware, where is a professor of art history and senior research fellow at the Center for Historic Architecture and Design. Among his many publications are Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic: Looking at Buildings and Landscapes (co-author with Gabrielle M. Lanier) and Historical Architectural and the Study of American Culture (co-editor with Lu Ann De Cunzo).

One of Japan's leading architects examines notions of Japan-ness as exemplified by key events in Japanese architectural history from the seventh to the twentieth century; essays on buildings and their cultural context. Japanese architect Arata Isozaki sees buildings not as dead objects but as events that encompass the social and historical context—not to be defined forever by their "everlasting materiality" but as texts to be interpreted and reread continually. In Japan-ness in Architecture, he identifies what is essentially Japanese in architecture from the seventh to the twentieth century. In the opening essay, Isozaki analyzes the struggles of modern Japanese architects, including himself, to create something uniquely Japanese out of modernity. He then circles back in history to find what he calls Japan-ness in the seventh-century Ise shrine, reconstruction of the twelfth-century Todai-ji Temple, and the seventeenth-century Katsura Imperial Villa. He finds the periodic ritual relocation of Ise's precincts a counter to the West's concept of architectural permanence, and the repetition of the ritual an alternative to modernity's anxious quest for origins. He traces the "constructive power" of the Todai-ji Temple to the vision of the director of its reconstruction, the monk Chogen, whose imaginative power he sees as corresponding to the revolutionary turmoil of the times. The Katsura Imperial Villa, with its chimerical spaces, achieved its own Japan-ness as it reinvented the traditional shoin style. And yet, writes Isozaki, what others consider to be the Japanese aesthetic is often the opposite of that essential Japan-ness born in moments of historic self-definition; the purified stylization—what Isozaki calls "Japanesquization"—lacks the energy of cultural transformation and reflects an island retrenchment in response to the pressure of other cultures. Combining historical survey, critical analysis, theoretical reflection, and autobiographical account, these essays, written over a period of twenty years, demonstrate Isozaki's standing as one of the world's leading architects and preeminent architectural thinkers.