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The City Crown by Bruno Taut
This book is the first English translation of the German architect Bruno Taut’s early twentieth-century anthology Die Stadtkrone (The City Crown). Written under the influence of World War I, Taut developed The City Crown to promote a utopian urban concept where people would live in a garden city of ’apolitical socialism’ and peaceful collaboration around a single purpose-free crystalline structure. Taut’s proposal sought to advance the garden city idea of Ebenezer Howard and rural aesthetic of Camillo Sitte’s urban planning schemes by merging them with his own ’city crown’ concept. The book also contains contributions by the Expressionist poet Paul Scheerbart, the writer and po...
Provisional Cities
This book considers the provisional nature of cities in relation to the Anthropocene – the proposed geological epoch of human-induced changes to the Earth system. It charts an environmental history of curfews, admonitions and alarms about dwelling on Earth. ‘Provisional cities’ are explored as exemplary sites for thinking about living in this unsettled time. Each chapter focuses on cities, settlements or proxy urbanisations, including past disaster zones, remote outposts in the present and future urban fossils. The book explores the dynamic, changing and contradictory relationship between architecture and the global environmental crisis and looks at how to re-position architectural and...
The Gesamtkunstwerk in Design and Architecture
The history of modern design and architecture has seen many attempts to embrace and merge different art forms, and to bring art into the framing of everyday life and the organisation of modern society, in a process understood as total design or total architecture. These attempts were historically based on the romanticist idea of merging all art forms into a uniting and transgressing work of art, mostly associated with – but certainly not limited to – Richard Wagner’s theoretical writings and musical dramas. This utopian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or Total Work of Art, was intended both to bring unity to the people and to bring art into the everyday life of their homes, as well as in...
The Practice Turn in Architecture: Brussels after 1968
What makes a city? What makes architecture? And, what is to be included in the discussions of architecture and the city? Attempting to answer such ambitious questions, this book starts from a city’s specificity and complexity. In response to recent debates in architectural theory around the agency and locus of critical action, this book tests the potential of criticality through-practice. Rather than through conceptual and ideological categorisations, it studies how architecture and criticality work within specific circumstances. Brussels, a complex city with a turbulent architectural and urban past, forms a compelling case for examining the tensions between urban politics, architectural i...
Film, Architecture and Spatial Imagination
Films use architecture as visual shorthand to tell viewers everything they need to know about the characters in a short amount of time. Illustrated by a diverse range of films from different eras and cultures, this book investigates the reciprocity between film and architecture. Using a phenomenological approach, it describes how we, the viewers, can learn how to read architecture and design in film in order to see the many inherent messages. Architecture’s representational capacity contributes to the plausibility or 'reality' possible in film. The book provides an ontological understanding that clarifies and stabilizes the reciprocity of the actual world and a filmic world of illusion and human imagination, thereby shedding light on both film and architecture.
Religion and Sustainability: Interreligious Resources, Interdisciplinary Responses
This volume brings sustainability studies into creative and constructive conversation with actions, practices, and worldviews from religion and theology supportive of the vision and work of the UN SDGs. It features more than 30 chapters from scholars across diverse disciplines, including economics, ethics, theology, sociology, ritual studies, and visual culture. This interdisciplinary content presents new insights for inhibiting ecospheric devastation, which is inextricably linked to unsustainable financial, societal, racial, geopolitical, and cultural relationships. The chapters show how humanistic elements can enable the establishment of sustainable ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. T...
Architecture of Great Expositions 1937-1959
This book investigates architecture as a form of diplomacy in the context of the Second World War at six major European international and national expositions that took place between 1937 and 1959. The volume gives a fascinating account of architecture assuming the role of the carrier of war-related messages, some of them camouflaged while others quite frank. The famous standoffs between the Stalinist Russia and the Nazi Germany in Paris 1937, or the juxtaposition of the USSR and USA pavilions in Brussels 1958, are examples of very explicit shows of force. The book also discusses some less known - and more subtle - messages, revealed through an examination of several additional pavilions in ...
Architecture after God
Architecture after God A vivid retelling of the biblical story of Babel leads from the contested site of Babylon to the soaring towers of the modern metropolis, and sets the bright hopes of early modernism against the shadows of gathering war. Dealing in structural metaphor, utopian aspiration, and geopolitical ambition, Dugdale exposes the inexorable architectural implications of the event described by Nietzsche as the death of God. The Exploring Architecture series makes architectural scholarship accessible, introduces the latest research methods, and covers a wide range of periods, regions, and topics. Critical reappraisal of early modernism Based on the fable The Emperor and the Architect (1924) by Uriel Birnbaum New volume in the Exploring Architecture series
Hans Scharoun and China
This book presents the first systematic overview and analysis of the deep connection between Scharoun and China, offering insights into East-West cultural exchange and enriching existing understandings of modernism. The German architect Hans Scharoun has typically been pigeonholed as a leading figure in “expressionist” architecture. As this book shows, however, this understanding oversimplifies the multifaceted nature of Scharoun’s career and overlooks his central role within the tradition of Neues Bauen. The book begins with Scharoun’s early interactions with East Asian architects in the 1930s, his active involvement in the Chinese Werkbund (1941–42), and his extensive research on...
Architecture, Death and Nationhood
In the nineteenth century, new cemeteries were built in many Italian cities that were unique in scale and grandeur, and which became destinations on the Grand Tour. From the Middle Ages, the dead had been buried in churches and urban graveyards but, in the 1740s, a radical reform across Europe prohibited burial inside cities and led to the creation of suburban burial grounds. Italy’s nineteenth-century cemeteries were distinctive as monumental or architectural structures, rather than landscaped gardens. They represented a new building type that emerged in response to momentous changes in Italian politics, tied to the fight for independence and the creation of the nation-state. As the first...
