Evolving Transcendentalism In Literature And Architecture

Evolving Transcendentalism in Literature and Architecture: Frank Furness, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright demonstrates how American architects read literature and transformed abstract philosophy and literary form into physical substance. Furness, Sullivan, and Wright were inspired by such Transcendentalists as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, and attempted to embody the concepts of nature, American identity, and Universalism in their architecture. Notably, this book is the first attempt to concentrate on analyzing these architects’ works from the perspective of Transcendentalism. This is also the first time that reproductions of Wright’s copy of Leaves of Grass and several tape records of Wright’s Sunday morning talks, both held in the Frank Lloyd Wright Archive, have been published. Importantly, these Transcendentalist architects’ philosophy has been influential in the development of contemporary environmental architects all over the world, including Paolo Soleri (an Italian-American) and Glenn Murcutt (an Australian), both of whom are discussed in the final chapter of this book.

The Midwest has produced a robust literary heritage. Its authors have won half of the nation's Nobel Prizes for Literature plus a significant number of Pulitzer Prizes. This volume explores the rich racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the region. It also contains entries on 35 pivotal Midwestern literary works, literary genres, literary, cultural, historical, and social movements, state and city literatures, literary journals and magazines, as well as entries on science fiction, film, comic strips, graphic novels, and environmental writing. Prepared by a team of scholars, this second volume of the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature is a comprehensive resource that demonstrates the Midwest's continuing cultural vitality and the stature and distinctiveness of its literature.

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 Skyscraper provides 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 Skyscraper reclaims 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.

Examining architecture’s foundational role in the repression of democracy Reinhold Martin and Claire Zimmerman bring together essays from an array of scholars exploring the troubled relationship between architecture and antidemocratic politics. Comprising detailed case studies throughout the world spanning from the early nineteenth century to the present, Architecture against Democracy analyzes crucial occasions when the built environment has been harnessed as an instrument of authoritarian power. Alongside chapters focusing on paradigmatic episodes from twentieth-century German and Italian fascism, the contributors examine historic and contemporary events and subjects that are organized thematically, including the founding of the Smithsonian Institution, Ellis Island infrastructure, the aftermath of the Paris Commune, Cold War West Germany and Iraq, Frank Lloyd Wright’s domestic architecture, and Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Through the range and depth of these accounts, Architecture against Democracy presents a selective overview of antidemocratic processes as they unfold in the built environment throughout Western modernity, offering an architectural history of the recent “nationalist international.” As new forms of nationalism and authoritarian rule proliferate across the globe, this timely collection offers fresh understandings of the role of architecture in the opposition to democracy. Contributors: Esra Akcan, Cornell U; Can Bilsel, U of San Diego; José H. Bortoluci, Getulio Vargas Foundation; Charles L. Davis II, U of Texas at Austin; Laura diZerega; Eve Duffy, Duke U; María González Pendás, Cornell U; Paul B. Jaskot, Duke U; Ana María León, Harvard U; Ruth W. Lo, Hamilton College; Peter Minosh, Northeastern U; Itohan Osayimwese, Brown U; Kishwar Rizvi, Yale U; Naomi Vaughan; Nader Vossoughian, New York Institute of Technology and Columbia U; Mabel O. Wilson, Columbia U.

A sweeping assessment of the entire career of Frank Furness that features more than one hundred illustrations, George E. Thomas's book argues that modern American architecture, in design and genealogy, is rooted in the industrial culture of Philadelphia and the office of Frank Furness.

This book offers a multidisciplinary environmental approach to ethics in response to the contemporary challenge of climate change caused by globalized economics and consumption. This book synthesizes the incredible complexity of the problem and the necessity of action in response, highlighting the unambiguous problem facing humanity in the 21st century, but arguing that it is essential to develop an ethics housed in ambiguity in response. Environmental Ethics and Uncertainty is divided into theoretical and applied chapters, with the theoretical sections engaging in dialogue with scholars from a variety of disciplines, while the applied chapters offer insight from 20th century activists who demonstrate and/or illuminate the theory, including Martin Luther King, Rachel Carson, and Frank Lloyd Wright. This book is written for scholars and students in the interdisciplinary field of environmental studies and the environmental humanities, and will appeal to courses in religion, philosophy, ethics, politics, and social theory.

This project brings the ideological philosophy of Social Transcendentalism more or less systematically into the open for the first time, and does so from a variety of genre perspectives - essays, dialogues, aphorisms and maxims - with a view to examining and propounding the ideology in question from as many different philosophical angles as possible. As suggested by the title, the end is transcendental, but the means are socialistic (which is not the same as socialism, since transcendentalism remains the fulcrum and therefore determines the form of what is less than transcendent), and therefore aimed at taking the masses of a specific type of society to an entirely new ideological destination by dint of the fact that the impetus for this stems not from below (as in socialism) but from above, in relation to a kind of messianic resolve affiliated with all things transcendental.