Post Western Histories Of Architecture

This book seeks to provide an alternative post-Western perspective to the history of contemporary architecture. It puts forward detailed critical analyses of various areas of the world, including Europe, Latin America, Africa, China, Australia, India and Japan, where particular movements of architecture have developed as active ‘political acts’. The authors focus on a broad spectrum of countries, architectures and architects that have developed a design approach closely linked to the building context. The concept of context is broad and includes various economic, social, cultural, political and natural aspects. In all cases, the architects selected in this book have chosen to view context as an opportunity. However, each architect has considered certain specific aspects of context: some have been very attentive to the social context, others to material aspects or typological issues, and still others to aspects related to political visions or economic factors. The analysis critically highlights interesting, creative and respectful design approaches towards local conditions, such as sustainability in Nordic Europe, climate-conscious design in Africa, and the ‘bottom-up’ sensitivity of India. The book’s main aim is to retrace, through both theoretical arguments and case studies, the debate that focuses on politics and the environment. Thanks to its valuable examples, this book strives to make a conscious contribution to establishing a bulwark against the current ‘flattening-out’ processes that architecture is experiencing. This book will be of relevance to researchers, teachers and students interested in the history of architecture, architecture and planning, and postcolonial studies.

This authoritative, comprehensive and highly illustrated survey provides a fresh perspective which will be invaluable to students and anyone interested in the history of architecture."--BOOK JACKET.

History of buildings, groups of buildings, the styles in which they were built, and the architects responsible for them from Stonehenge to the present.

1960, following as it did the last CIAM meeting, signalled a turning point for the Modern Movement. From then on, architecture was influenced by seminal texts by Aldo Rossi and Robert Venturi, and gave rise to the first revisionary movement following Modernism. Bringing together leading experts in the field, this book provides a comprehensive, critical overview of the developments in architecture from 1960 to 2010. It consists of two parts: the first section providing a presentation of major movements in architecture after 1960, and the second, a geographic survey that covers a wide range of territories around the world. This book not only reflects the different perspectives of its various authors, but also charts a middle course between the 'aesthetic' histories that examine architecture solely in terms of its formal aspects, and the more 'ideological' histories that subject it to a critique that often skirts the discussion of its formal aspects.

What is Architectural History? considers the questions and problems posed by architectural historians since the rise of the discipline in the late nineteenth century. How do historians of architecture organise past time and relate it to the present? How does historical evidence translate into historical narrative? Should architectural history be useful for practicing architects? If so, how? Leach treats the disciplinarity of architectural history as an open question, moving between three key approaches to historical knowledge of architecture: within art history, as an historical specialisation and, most prominently, within architecture. He suggests that the confusions around this question have been productive, ensuring a rich variety of approaches to the project of exploring architecture historically. Read alongside introductory surveys of western and global architectural history, this book will open up questions of perspective, frame, and intent for students of architecture, art history, and history. Graduate students and established architectural historians will find much in this book to fuel discussions over the current state of the field in which they work.

Preface p. 6 1 Mesopotamia and Egypt p. 9 Mesopotamia p. 9 Egypt p. 13 2 The Classical Foundation: Greek, Hellenistic, Roman p. 19 The Bronze Age Heritage p. 19 The Hellenistic Background p. 41 The Rise of Rome p. 57 3 Early Christian and Byzantine p. 89 4 Carolingian and Romanesque p. 107 5 The Gothic Experiment p. 149 France p. 150 England p. 168 Germany and Central Europe, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal p. 185 Town Planning p. 207 6 Renaissance Harmony p. 211 The Birth of the Renaissance p. 211 High Renaissance p. 223 The Renaissance Outside Italy p. 251 Town Planning p. 279 7 Baroque Expansion p. 283 Italy p. 283 Baroque Outside Italy p. 314 Town Planning p. 362 8 Eighteenth-Century Classicism p. 369 The Impact of Rome p. 369 The Rise of Neo-Classicism in France p. 391 The Classical Tradition Elsewhere in Europe p. 410 The Rise of Classicism in the USA p. 424 Town Planning p. 434 9 The Nineteenth Century p. 439 France p. 439 Britain p. 459 Germany, Austria and Italy p. 477 Scandinavia, Russia and Greece p. 497 Belgium and Holland p. 509 USA p. 512 Town Planning p. 530 10 Art Nouveau p. 537 Belgium and France p. 537 Scotland and England p. 543 Germany, Austria and Italy p. 546 Spain p. 556 11 The Twentieth Century p. 565 USA Up to 1939 p. 565 Europe Up to 1939 p. 582 Modernism After 1945 p. 648 Post-Modernism p. 660 Town Planning p. 668 Architecture for the Millennium p. 670 Glossary p. 685 Further Reading p. 688 Acknowledgements p. 693 Index p. 694.

This survey of Western civilization has now been updated to take readers back to prehistory, with material on ancient Egypt and Greece as well as Rome, and through the more recent years of Post-modernism and urbanism, the New Right ideology of the 80s and the rising environmental concerns of the 90s. Taking history as a starting point, the author moves away from style as the dominating theme and looks at architecture as an expression of social and economic conditions.