Buffalo Architecture

Buffalo's rich architectural and planning heritage has attracted the attention of several prominent historians, whose work here is accompanied by over 250 illustrations and photographs. For its size, the city of Buffalo, New York, possesses a remarkable number and variety of architectural masterpieces from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Adler and Sullivan's Prudential building, H. H. Richardson's massive Buffalo State Hospital, Richard Upjohn's Sr. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral, five prairie houses by Frank Lloyd Wright, and building by Daniel Burnham, Albert Kahn, and the firms of McKim, Mead, and White, and Lockwood, Green and Company, among others. These structures by prominent "outsiders" served to spur the efforts of local architects, builders, and craftsmen, and all of them built within the context of the city-wide park and parkway system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. In addition, the city and its environs exhibit representative works by more recent architects, among them Eero and Eliel Saarinen, Walther Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Paul Rudloph, Minoru Yamasaki, and the firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. Buffalo's rich architectural and planning heritage has attracted the attention of several prominent historians, capable of the challenge of evaluating its significance. Reyner Banham is one of the world's leading authorities on the theory and practice of architecture, and he has written extensively on design in the industrial age (and Buffalo's innovative manufacturing plants and grain elevators are important exemplars of such design). Charles Beveridge, whose essay covers the park and parkway system, is editor of the Olmsted papers at The American University. And Henry Russell Hitchcock is the dean of American architectural historians, and the organizer of a 1940 exhibition on Buffalo's built environment. Their essays are followed by seven sections that delineate the city's neighborhoods, each provided with a map, neighborhood history, and a full complement of photographs with descriptive building captions. An eighth section, "Lost Buffalo," describes demolished buildings, chief among them Wright's great Larkin administration building, while the remaining sections venture out of town, exploring Erie and Niagara Counties, other parts of Western New York, and southern Ontario.

This stunning hardcover book pays tribute to Buffalo's architectural heritage. Striking full-color photographs by Andy Olenick and an engaging text by Richard O. Reisem make this a keepsake for admirers of outstanding buildings and landscapes. Represented in this attractive coffee-table book are dozens of prominent commercial public buildings, churches, educational institutions, clubs and private residences. Included are dramatic interior and exterior photographs that capture the buildings' architectural splendor.

A timely and important search for architecture's missing women For a century and a half, women have been proving their passion and talent for building and, in recent decades, their enrollment in architecture schools has soared. Yet the number of women working as architects remains stubbornly low, and the higher one looks in the profession, the scarcer women become. Law and medicine, two equally demanding and traditionally male professions, have been much more successful in retaining and integrating women. So why do women still struggle to keep a toehold in architecture? Where Are the Women Architects? tells the story of women's stagnating numbers in a profession that remains a male citadel, and explores how a new generation of activists is fighting back, grabbing headlines, and building coalitions that promise to bring about change. Despina Stratigakos's provocative examination of the past, current, and potential future roles of women in the profession begins with the backstory, revealing how the field has dodged the question of women's absence since the nineteenth century. It then turns to the status of women in architecture today, and the serious, entrenched hurdles they face. But the story isn't without hope, and the book documents the rise of new advocates who are challenging the profession's boys' club, from its male-dominated elite prizes to the erasure of women architects from Wikipedia. These advocates include Stratigakos herself and here she also tells the story of her involvement in the controversial creation of Architect Barbie. Accessible, frank, and lively, Where Are the Women Architects? will be a revelation for readers far beyond the world of architecture.

Architecture Post Mortem surveys architecture’s encounter with death, decline, and ruination following late capitalism. As the world moves closer to an economic abyss that many perceive to be the death of capital, contraction and crisis are no longer mere phases of normal market fluctuations, but rather the irruption of the unconscious of ideology itself. Post mortem is that historical moment wherein architecture’s symbolic contract with capital is put on stage, naked to all. Architecture is not irrelevant to fiscal and political contagion as is commonly believed; it is the victim and penetrating analytical agent of the current crisis. As the very apparatus for modernity’s guilt and unfulfilled drives-modernity’s debt-architecture is that ideological element that functions as a master signifier of its own destruction, ordering all other signifiers and modes of signification beneath it. It is under these conditions that architecture theory has retreated to an 'Alamo' of history, a final desert outpost where history has been asked to transcend itself. For architecture’s hoped-for utopia always involves an apocalypse. This timely collection of essays reformulates architecture’s relation to modernity via the operational death-drive: architecture is but a passage between life and death. This collection includes essays by Kazi K. Ashraf, David Bertolini, Simone Brott, Peggy Deamer, Didem Ekici, Paul Emmons, Donald Kunze, Todd McGowan, Gevork Hartoonian, Nadir Lahiji, Erika Naginski, and Dennis Maher.

Buffalo at the Crossroads is a diverse set of cutting-edge essays. Twelve authors highlight the outsized importance of Buffalo, New York, within the story of American urbanism. Across the collection, they consider the history of Buffalo's built environment in light of contemporary developments and in relationship to the evolving interplay between nature, industry, and architecture. The essays examine Buffalo's architectural heritage in rich context: the Second Industrial Revolution; the City Beautiful movement; world's fairs; grain, railroad, and shipping industries; urban renewal and so-called white flight; and the larger networks of labor and production that set the city's economic fate. The contributors pay attention to currents that connect contemporary architectural work in Buffalo to the legacies established by its esteemed architectural founders: Richardson, Olmsted, Adler, Sullivan, Bethune, Wright, Saarinen, and others. Buffalo at the Crossroads is a compelling introduction to Buffalo's architecture and developed landscape that will frame discussion about the city for years to come. Contributors: Marta Cieslak, University of Arkansas - Little Rock; Francis R. Kowsky; Erkin Özay, University at Buffalo; Jack Quinan, University at Buffalo; A. Joan Saab, University of Rochester; Annie Schentag, KTA Preservation Specialists; Hadas Steiner, University at Buffalo; Julia Tulke, University of Rochester; Stewart Weaver, University of Rochester; Mary N. Woods, Cornell University; Claire Zimmerman, University of Michigan