Eastern European prefabricated housing blocks are often vilified as the visible manifestations of everything that was wrong with state socialism. For many inside and outside the region, the uniformity of these buildings became symbols of the dullness and drudgery of everyday life. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity complicates this common perception. Analyzing the cultural, intellectual, and professional debates surrounding the construction of mass housing in early postwar Czechoslovakia, Zarecor shows that these housing blocks served an essential function in the planned economy and reflected an interwar aesthetic, derived from constructivism and functionalism, that carried forward into the 1950s.With a focus on prefabricated and standardized housing built from 1945 to 1960, Zarecor offers broad and innovative insights into the country's transition from capitalism to state socialism. She demonstrates that during this shift, architects and engineers consistently strove to meet the needs of Czechs and Slovaks despite challenging economic conditions, a lack of material resources, and manufacturing and technological limitations. In the process, architects were asked to put aside their individual creative aspirations and transform themselves into technicians and industrial producers.Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity is the first comprehensive history of architectural practice and the emergence of prefabricated housing in the Eastern Bloc. Through discussions of individual architects and projects, as well as building typologies, professional associations, and institutional organization, it opens a rare window into the cultural and economic life of Eastern Europe during the early postwar period.

Everyone would agree that urban development, especially when involving the building of residential areas, should be accompanied by sufficient and good public infrastructure and facilities. We all want neighbourhoods with the necessary roads, green areas, social facilities, affordable housing and public spaces of high quality. At the same time, nowadays, governments are facing severe cuts in public expenditure. So who is going to pay for all that quality? In the Netherlands and in many other countries, achieving these public goals has become a problem, especially in the regeneration of deteriorated inner-city sites. This book offers insight in how the economic value increase that arises from urban development can serve to finance the quality we want, without the need for public subsidies. The findings and recommendations made in this book focus on Western Europe, mainly on successful and alternatively less successful recent experiences in Spain, England and the Netherlands. Public bodies can use the recommendations to create the necessary conditions to improve the involvement of property developers and landowners in the financing of infrastructure and facilities. Property developers and landowners can find formulas for private-public partnership that can lead to lower development costs and risks, allowing them to pay for good infrastructure and facilities while maintaining profitability. Scholars will find here the theoretical backgrounds for this relevant topic. The author has both an academic and a professional background in the practice of urban development.

In the past few years the image of tender procedures in which Dutch public clients selected an architect has been dominated by distressing newspaper headlines. Architects fear that the current tender culture will harm the quality of our built environment due to a potential lack of diversity, creativity and innovation in architectural design. Due to potential risks clients often allow legal requirements to overrule their actual wishes. This PhD research addresses the origin of the problems as currently experienced by public commissioning clients in architect selection and proposes pragmatic implications for future practice. It is therefore of interest for commissioning clients, management consultants, policy makers and legal advisors but also for designers and researchers in the field of architecture and decision making.

As the center of domestic life, the house is perhaps the most important building type in a democratic society. Drawing Toward Home: Designs for Domestic Architecture from Historic New England showcases a variety of drawings of domestic buildings that range in date from the late eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, and depict an array of building types estates, modest single-family houses, summer cottages, and even a typical Boston multi-family dwelling known as a three-decker. Architectural drawings have a history of their own, and this exceptional assemblage outlines how the medium has morphed to meet the growing expectations of clients, the increasing complexity of the construction process, and the demands of new technologies. A large number of beautifully executed perspectives created primarily for formal presentations to clients are featured. As Benjamin Linfoot put it back in 1884, the "architect... must keep his client's enthusiasm alive and active by sending or submitting bright, jaunty little perspectives of his contemplated work." This survey successfully melds Gilded Age works from the venerable offices McKim, Mead& White, and Peabody & Stearns with designs from a century before and after, ranging from the hand of influential pattern-book author Asher Benjamin to those drafted by Dutch-born modernist R. W. Huygens. Drawing Toward Home illustrates changes in taste and technology and presents many of the drawings as works of art. It includes designs by both famous and little-known architects and houses designed in the Federal, Victorian, Arts and Crafts, and International styles. From Great Diamond Island, Maine, to Boston's Beacon Street, and from cottages on Cape Cod to mansions in Newport, the houses featured in this book remind us that the architecture of New England is a touchstone of American architecture.

Carved from eight square miles of Bucks County farmland northeast of Philadelphia, Levittown, Pennsylvania, is a symbol of postwar suburbia and the fulfillment of the American Dream. Begun in 1952, after the completion of an identically named community on Long Island, the second Levittown soon eclipsed its New York counterpart in scale and ambition, yet it continues to live in the shadow of its better-known sister and has received limited scholarly attention. Second Suburb uncovers the unique story of Levittown, Pennsylvania, and its significance to American social, architectural, environmental, and political history. The volume offers a fascinating profile of this planned community in two parts. The first examines Levittown from the inside, including oral histories of residents recalling how Levittown shaped their lives. One such reminiscence is by Daisy Myers, part of the first African American family to move to the community, only to become the targets of a race riot that would receive international publicity. The book also includes selections from the syndicated comic strip Zippy the Pinhead, in which Bill Griffith reflects on the angst-ridden trials of growing up in a Levittown, and an extensive photo essay of neighborhood homes, schools, churches, parks, and swimming pools, collected by Dianne Harris. The second part of the book views Levittown from the outside. Contributors consider the community's place in planning and architectural history and the Levitts' strategies for the mass production of housing. Other chapters address the class stratification of neighborhood sections through price structuring; individual attempts to personalize a home's form and space as a representation of class and identity; the builders' focus on the kitchen as the centerpiece of the home and its greatest selling point; the community's environmental and ecological legacy; racist and exclusionary sales policies; resident activism during the gas riots of 1979; and "America's lost Eden." Bringing together some of the top scholars in architectural history, American studies, and landscape studies, Second Suburb explores the surprisingly rich interplay of design, technology, and social response that marks the emergence and maturation of an exceptionally potent rendition of the American Dream.

This book presents a broad overview of the planning profession, and discusses many of the major problems encountered in urbanism and planning. The essays discuss topics that include education, the urban community, the place of planning in governmental hierarchy, and its relationship to urban political dynamics.

This volume tells the complete story of the Westminster Abbey chapter house, which ranks as one of the spectacular achievements of European Gothic art and architecture; and that is precisely what its builder, King Henry III, intended. Begun in the mid-1240s, and completed within a decade, its pre-eminence was recognized in its own day, when the chronicler Matthew Paris described Westminster as having 'a chapter house beyond compare'. Papers by leading scholars in the field of medieval art and architecture reveal the reasons for the construction of the chapter house and trace the possible influences upon the master mason in charge of the project. The subsequent history of the structure is revealed as it evolved from a meeting place of the king's Great Court, the predecessor of the English Parliament, and as a royal treasury into a repository for government archives after the Dissolution, home to the Public Record Office until the late 1850s, and its subsequent restoration at the hands of Sir George Gilbert Scott. Now under the care of English Heritage, the chapter house has just been cleaned and restored again, leading to the spectacular light-filled building that we see today, to which full justice is done by this richly illustrated book, filled with pictures of the architectural and sculptural details, the medieval tilework and the wall painting that justify the motto inscribed in the chapter house floor: 'as the rose is the flower of flowers, so is this the house of houses'.

In Between Garden and City, Dorothée Imbert examines the career of Belgian landscape architect Jean Canneel-Claes (1909-1989), firmly establishing his place in the modernist movement. Canneel's theoretical positions and innovative designs sought to align the emergent landscape profession with architecture and urbanism while demonstrating its potential to address the needs of modern society. Canneel studied at La Cambre (Belgium's equivalent to the Bauhaus) under landscape urbanist Louis van der Swaelmen and graduated as the school's first landscape architect in 1931. Dedicated to connecting architecture and garden design, he commissioned a house from Le Corbusier and collaborated with prominent Belgian modernist architects Louis Herman De Koninck, Huib Hoste, and Victor Bourgeois. Seeing the garden as part of a larger design environment, Canneel expanded the scale of his interventions to urban greening and the planning of cities. In 1938, Canneel joined forces with Christopher Tunnard to found the International Association of Modernist Garden Architects and further the cause of landscape modernism across Europe. Two years later, Canneel applied his theory of the functionalist garden to postwar reconstruction with designs for cemeteries, sports grounds, and town squares. Imbert examines the social context and the aesthetic and theoretical influences that shaped Canneel's work. She positions him as a major figure at the confluence of art, architecture, and urbanism in the early twentieth century and opens new avenues for understanding the relationship of modernism to gardens, nature, and the city.

In 1893, the year that marked the four hundredth anniversary of the landing of Columbus in the New World, Chicago was host to an exposition to mark the occasion. Although the World's Columbian Exposition was the fifteenth world's fair, it was of vastly greater scope than any of its predecessors. Chicago created a veritable new city. It was not only larger than any previous exposition but also more elaborately designed, more precisely laid out, more fully realized, and more prophetic. It was the first exposition truly to solicit the participation of the entire world.In this study of the White City, David F. Burg shows America at a crossroads in its development. It was in the process of moving from a largely agricultural society to a predominately urban and industrial one. The exposition was an index of American values, achievements, and expectation in this era of profound and complex change. The exposition was an achievement of cooperative endeavor and expertise. It demonstrated that both artistic capacity and technology were available to transform, in agreeable combination, burgeoning industrial cities into well-designed centers of business, culture, and community.Burg places his discussion in the context of the United States and Chicago during the early 1890s. Besides dealing with the multifaceted fair itself -- its architecture, artworks, music, technological achievements -- he discusses the congresses that were held on a variety of subjects, two of the most significant being the Congresses of Women and the World's Parliament of Religions.In the exposition's theme was the potential of fashioning the Kingdom of God on earth in contrast to the chaotic, dirty, industrial cities of the time. Burg finds in the exposition a significant legacy to architecture, city planning, and civic organization. Its most promising aftereffect occurred in the City Beautiful movement; its influence extended also to such ordinary concerns as well-lighted streets, efficient waste disposal, and honest government.

From its founding in 1758, Pittsburgh has experienced several epic transformations. It began its existence as a fortress, on a site originally selected by George Washington. A hundred years later, and well into our own time, no other American city was as intensively industrialized, only to be later consigned to "rustbelt" status. Remade as a thriving twenty-first-century city and an international center for science, medicine, biotechnology, and financial services, Pittsburgh is now routinely acclaimed as one of the most promising and livable of America's cities. Franklin Toker shows us why.Toker highlights this remarkable story of urban reinvention by focusing on what makes Pittsburgh so resilient and appealing - its strong neighborhoods and their surprisingly rich architectural history. The many unique, lively urban communities that make up Pittsburgh are a treasure trove of every imaginable style of structure, from Victorian to Bauhaus, Gothic to Art Deco, and from Industrial to Green. These ordinary homes expressed the aspirations of people who came from around the world to settle in Pittsburgh, while they built the city itself into an economic powerhouse. With the wealth generated by this everyday work, local captains of industry could build their own monumental additions to Pittsburgh's urban landscape, including two of America's greatest buildings: H. H. Richardson's Allegheny Courthouse and Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. With accessible prose, Toker examines Pittsburgh in its historical context (from Indian settlement to postmodern city), in its regional setting (from the playgrounds of the Laurel Highlands to the hard-working mill towns dotting the landscape), and from the street level (leading the reader on a personal tour through every neighborhood). Lavishly illustrated with photos and maps, Pittsburgh: A New Portrait reveals the true colors of a truly great American city.

This is the complete history of a building that began as a hunting lodge, late in the eleventh century and that grew to be the principal house of the manor of Theydon Mount in Essex, a small country retreat within easy reach of London. In 1556, the house was acquired by Sir Thomas Smith (1512-77), a man of humble origins but precocious intellect who became Regius Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge at the age of thirty and Chancellor of the University two years later. He then forsook academic for political life, becoming Master of Requests to the Lord Protector Somerset. From 1557, Smith rebuilt the house in French-influenced classical style and decorated it with wall paintings of Cupid and Psyche and King Hezekiah, conveying complex messages of morality and affinity as part of a coherent programme of images in paint, glass and tiles. Four centuries on, the house was first used as an open prison, then, in 1969, largely gutted by fire and finally, in 1980, taken into the care of the Department of the Environment. Archaeological excavation and detailed recording of the surviving fabric took place prior to the restoration of the house and its mural paintings, the results of which are now presented in this copiously illustrated account of one of the most important and influential houses to be built in Elizabethan England.

From the 1890s to the 1930s, Claude Bragdon enjoyed an international reputation as an architect, designer, and critic working in the progressive tradition associated with Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Prairie School. In 1915 Bragdon created “projective ornament,” a system of geometric patterns designed to serve as a universal form-language integrating not only architecture, art, and design, but also a society divided by differences of class, gender, religion, culture, and national origin. Spreading across the surfaces of buildings, posters, books, and the settings Bragdon designed for massive community singing festivals, projective ornament came to symbolize the progressive potential of modernity for thousands of Americans. Bragdon disappeared from memory when mid-century histories promoted a narrow view of modern architecture that emphasized functional planning, industrial building technique, continuous space, and the suppression of ornament. But his work left an ongoing legacy when younger architects such as Buckminster Fuller found new ways of using geometric pattern to promote architectural and social integration. Now that architects and designers are once again generating innovative work based on geometry, ornament, and pattern, Crystal and Arabesque draws on a rich trove of previously unpublished work to show how American modernists committed to social reform used ornament in new ways to engage the media and audiences of mass society.

Henry Austin's (1804-1891) works receive consideration in books on nineteenth-century architecture, yet no book has focused scholarly attention on his primary achievements in New Haven, Connecticut, in Portland, Maine, and elsewhere. Austin was most active during the antebellum era, designing exotic buildings that have captured the imaginations of many for decades. James F. O'Gorman deftly documents Austin's work during the 1840s and '50s, the time when Austin was most productive and creative, and for which a wealth of material exists. The book is organized according to various building types: domestic, ecclesiastic, public, and commercial. O'Gorman helps to clarify what buildings should be attributed to the architect and comments on the various styles that went into his eclectic designs. Henry Austin is lavishly illustrated with 132 illustrations, including 32 in full color. Three extensive appendices provide valuable information on Austin's books, drawings, and his office.

More than one third of the world's population lives in houses made of unfired earth bricks or stamped earth, materials also known as mud brick, adobe , terre crue , pisé , or rammed earth. Houses in the middle east have been made out this material for at least 10,000 years, but in many places this form of architecture is slowly being superceded by more recent building techniques using reinforced concrete and concrete blocks. This study contains a description of the remaining mud brick architecture in several villages in the Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt. It includes a brief history of mud brick, a discussion of the distinct local building techniques of the Oasis, and three architectural case studies of traditional mud brick houses in the Oasis, and it has many plans and photographs of local houses. The study was carried out as preparation for the design and construction of an archaeological working and training centre in the Dakhleh Oasis, which has been made according to the local traditions in mud brick vernacular. It is based on a field trip carried out in 1997 by Wolf Schijns (architect), Margriet Schijns (architect), Olaf E Kaper (Egyptologist) and Joris D Kila (art historian).

The 1876 United States Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia was not only the United States' first important world's fair, it signaled significant changes in the very shape of knowledge. Quarrels between participants in the exhibition represented a greater conflict as the world transitioned between two different kinds of modernity--the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the High Modern period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.At the center of this movement was a shift in the perceived relationship between seeing and knowing and in the perception of what makes an object valuable--its usefulness as a subject of study and learning versus its ability to be bought and sold on the market. Arguments over design of the Centennial reflected these opposing viewpoints. Initial plans were rigidly structured, dividing the exhibits by country and type. But as some exhibitors became more interested in the preferences of their audience, they adopted a more modern stance. Objects traditionally displayed in isolated glass boxes were placed in fictive context -- the necklace draped over a mannequin, the vase set on a table in a model room. As a result, the audience could more easily perceive these items as commodities suitable for their own environments and the fair as a place to find ideas for a material lifestyle.Designing the Centennial is a vital first look at the design process and the nature of the display. Bruno Giberti uses official reports of the U.S. Centennial Commission and photographs of the Centennial Photographic Company, as well as the ephemera of the exhibition and literary accounts in books, magazines, and newspapers to illuminate how the 1876 fair revealed changes to come: in future world's fairs, museums, department stores, and in the nature of display itself.

South Africa is recognized as a site of both political turmoil and natural beauty, and yet little work has been done in connecting these defining national characteristics. Washed with Sun achieves this conjunction in its multidisciplinary study of South Africa as a space at once natural and constructed. Weaving together practical, aesthetic, and ideological analyses, Jeremy Foster examines the role of landscape in forming the cultural iconographies and spatialities that shaped the imaginary geography of emerging nationhood. Looking in particular at the years following the British victory in the second Boer War, from 1902 to 1930, Foster discusses the influence of painting, writing, architecture, and photography on the construction of a shared, romanticized landscape subjectivity that was perceived as inseparable from \u201cbeing South African,\u201d and thus helped forge the imagined community of white South Africa. In its innovative approach to South Africa's history, Washed with Sun breaks important new ground, combining the persuasive theory of cultural geography with the material specificity of landscape history.