The History Of History In American Schools Of Architecture 1865 1975

Revolt and Reform in Architecture’s Academy uniquely addresses the complicated relationship between architectural education and urban renewal in the 1960s, which paved the way for what is today known as public interest design. Through an examination of curricular reforms at Columbia University’s and Yale University’s schools of architecture in the 1960s, this book translates the "urban crisis" through the experiences of two influential groups of architecture students, as well as their contributions to design’s lexicon. The book argues that urban renewal and campus expansion half a century ago recast architectural education at two schools whose host cities, New York and New Haven, were critical sites for political, social, and urban upheaval in America. The urban challenges of that time are the same challenges rapidly growing cities face today—access, equity, housing, and services. As architects, architects in training, and architecture students continue to wrestle with questions surrounding how design may serve a broadly defined public interest, this book is a timely assessment of the forces that have shaped the debate.

Like America itself, the architecture of the United States is an amalgam, an imitation or an importation of foreign forms adapted to the natural or engineered landscape of the New World. So can there be an "American School" of architecture? The most legitimate claim to the title emerged in the 1950s and 1960s at the Gibbs College of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma, where, under the leadership of Bruce Goff, Herb Greene, Mendel Glickman, and others, an authentically American approach to design found its purest expression, teachable in its coherence and logic. Followers of this first truly American school eschewed the forms most in fashion in American architectural education at the time—those such as the French Beaux Arts or German Bauhaus Schools—in favor of the vernacular and the organic. The result was a style distinctly experimental, resourceful, and contextual—challenging not only established architectural norms in form and function but also traditional approaches to instructing and inspiring young architects. Edited by Luca Guido, Stephanie Pilat, and Angela Person, this volume explores the fraught history of this distinctively American movement born on the Oklahoma prairie. Renegades features essays by leading scholars and includes a wide range of images, including rare, never-before-published sketches and models. Together these essays and illustrations map the contours of an American architecture that combines this country’s landscape and technology through experimentation and invention, assembling the diversity of the United States into structures of true beauty. Renegades for the first time fully captures the essence and conveys the importance of the American School of architecture.

In the mid-1880s The Builder, an influential British architectural journal, published an article characterizing Renaissance architecture as a corrupt bastardization of the classical architecture of Greece and Rome. By the turn of the century, however, the same journal praised the Renaissance architect Filippo Brunelleschi as the ?Christopher Columbus of modern architecture.? Victorian Perceptions of Renaissance Architecture, 1850-1914 examines these conflicting characterizations and reveals how the writing of architectural history was intimately tied to the rise of the professional architect and the formalization of architectural education in late nineteenth-century Britain. Drawing on a broad range of evidence, including literary texts, professional journals, university curricula, and census records, Victorian Perceptions reframes works by seminal authors such as John Ruskin, Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, and Geoffrey Scott alongside those by architect-authors such as William J. Anderson and Reginald Blomfield within contemporary architectural debates. Relevant for architectural historians, as well as literary scholars and those in Victorian studies, Victorian Perceptions reassesses the history of Renaissance architecture within the formation of a modern, British architectural profession.

H. Langford Warren (1857-1917) was an important link in the chain of individuals who contributed to the architectural practice, theories of design, and the teaching of architectural history in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Best known in the Boston area, Warren first worked under the renowned architect Henry Hobson Richardson before establishing his own practice. Friends and colleagues during this period included Charles Eliot Norton, the noted art historian, and Harvard's Charles Herbert Moore, a leading Ruskinian painter. Hired by Harvard University in 1893, Warren developed its architectural curriculum. In 1897 he helped found Boston's Society of Arts and Crafts. At the time of his death in 1917, Warren was Dean of the School of Architecture at Harvard and President of the Society of Arts and Crafts. At the turn of the century, Warren's philosophical vision offered a conservative and ethnocentric perspective attractive to many Bostonians and to a significant segment of Americans nationwide. According to this view, English culture was the basis of American culture. Through his work at Harvard and in the Arts and Crafts movement, he articulated and promoted an aesthetic guided by an attachment to the past, and he encouraged his students at Harvard to revive and reinterpret English and Anglo-American models. Another characteristic of Warren's aesthetic was "restraint," a quality generally attributed to the region's Puritan settlers. "Restraint" also meant a rejection of both the lavish ornamentation of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the more original styles such as Art Nouveau that were emerging at the turn of the century. Following the ideals of John Ruskin, William Morris, and later leaders of the English Arts and Crafts movement, Warren and his architect-colleagues promoted a close collaboration with the craftsmen who enhanced their buildings. The resulting building designs represent a significant contribution to the development of American Arts and Crafts architecture, complementing the proto-modern work of designers such as Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact, Arts and Crafts architecture in North America was extremely diverse. Meister examines the greater complexity of this architecture by exploring the eclectic historicism of Warren, a key figure in the movement that was centered in Boston.

This book explores how journals mediate and transform our understanding and experience of buildings urban spaces and architectural cultures.

Italian architecture has long exerted a special influence on the evolution of architectural ideas elsewhere - from the Beaux-Arts academy's veneration of Rome, to modernist and postmodern interest in Renaissance proportion, Baroque space, and Mannerist ambiguity. This book critically examines this enduring phenomenon, exploring the privileged position of Italian architects, architecture, and cities in the architectural culture of the past century. Questioning the deep-rooted myth of Italy within architectural history, the book presents case studies of Italy's powerful yet problematic position in 20th-century architectural ideologies, at a time when established Eurocentric narratives are rightly being challenged. It reconciles the privileged position of Italian architecture and design with the imperative to write history across a more global, diverse, heterogenous cultural geography. Twenty chapters from distinguished international scholars cover subjects and architects ranging from Alberti to Gio Ponti, Aldo Rossi, Manfredo Tafuri, Vittorio Gregotti; cities from Rome and Venice to Milan; and an array of international architects, movements, and architectural ideas influenced by Italy. The chapters each question where, how, and why the disciplinary edifice of 20th-century architecture-its canon of built, visual, textual, and conceptual works-relied on Italian foundations, examining where and how those foundations have become insecure. Indispensable for students and scholars of both Italian and global architectural history, Italian Imprints on Twentieth-Century Architecture provides an opportunity to consider the architectural and urban landscape of Italy from substantially new points of view.