The Mental Life of the Architectural Historian
The Mental Life of the Architectural Historian

Author: Gevork Hartoonian

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-08-11

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1443865958

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Starting with the question concerning the discursive formation of architectural history, the chapters compiled in this book attempt to re-read the historiography of early modern architecture from the point of view of the theoretical work produced since the post-war era. Central to the objectives of the argument are the ways in which, firstly, architectural history differs from the traditions of art history, and, secondly, that the historical narrative works its autonomy through theoretical representation, the discursive flow of which is interrupted by the historian’s urge to support arguments with references to buildings, texts, drawings, and historical events. The historians discussed in this volume are those regularly addressed by most critics revisiting modern architectural history. Individual chapters are dedicated to N. Pevsner, H. R. Hitchcock, and S. Giedion, an economy of selection that is formative for a critical understanding of the canon established by these historians. Themes such as periodization, autonomy, and time are discussed, and the coda of the final chapter expands on the scope of “critical historiography” popularised by Kenneth Frampton and Manfredo Tafuri.

The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health
The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health

Author: Greg Eghigian

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-04-07

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 1351784390

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This volume explores the history and historiography of madness from the ancient and medieval worlds to the present day. Covering Africa, Asia and South America as well as Europe and North America, chapters discuss broad topics such as the representation of madness in literature and the visual arts, the material culture of madness, madness within life histories and the increased globalization of knowledge and treatment practices. Chronologically and geographically wide-ranging and providing a fascinating overview of the current state of the field, this is essential reading for all students of the history of madness, mental health, psychiatry and medicine.

Time, History and Architecture
Time, History and Architecture

Author: Gevork Hartoonian

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-10-12

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1351981390

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Time, History and Architecture presents a series of essays on critical historiography, each addressing a different topic, to elucidate the importance of two influential figures Walter Benjamin and Gottfried Semper for architectural history. In a work exploring themes such as time, autonomy and periodization, author Gevork Hartoonian unpacks the formation of architectural history; the problem of autonomy in criticism and the historiographic narrative. Considering the scope of criticism informing the contemporaneity of architecture, the book explores the concept of nonsimultaneity, and introduces retrospective criticism the agent of critical historiography. An engaging thematic dialogue for academics and upper-level graduate students interested in architectural history and theory, this book aims to deconstruct the certainties of historicism and to raise new questions and interpretations from established critical canons.

The Historiography of Modern Architecture
The Historiography of Modern Architecture

Author: Panayotis Tournikiotis

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2001-02-27

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780262700856

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The history of modern architecture as constructed by historians and key texts. Writing, according to Panayotis Tournikiotis, has always exerted a powerful influence on architecture. Indeed, the study of modern architecture cannot be separated from a fascination with the texts that have tried to explain the idea of a new architecture in a new society. During the last forty years, the question of the relationship of architecture to its history—of buildings to books—has been one of the most important themes in debates about the course of modern architecture. Tournikiotis argues that the history of modern architecture tends to be written from the present, projecting back onto the past our current concerns, so that the "beginning" of the story really functions as a "representation" of its end. In this book the buildings are the quotations, while the texts are the structure. Tournikiotis focuses on a group of books by major historians of the twentieth century: Nikolaus Pevsner, Emil Kaufmann, Sigfried Giedion, Bruno Zevi, Leonardo Benevolo, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Reyner Banham, Peter Collins, and Manfredo Tafuri. In examining these writers' thoughts, he draws on concepts from critical theory, relating architecture to broader historical models.

The Visibility of Modernization in Architecture
The Visibility of Modernization in Architecture

Author: Gevork Hartoonian

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-28

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1000907457

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This edited collection explores the visibility of modernization in architecture produced in different capitalist regions across the world and provides readers with a historico-theoretical and historico-geographical discussion. Focusing on a particular building type, an influential architect’s work, as well as relevant texts and documents, each chapter addresses the many facets of "delay" which are central to the problematization of capitalism’s progressive dissemination of technological and aesthetic regimes of modernism. This collection underlines the centrality of temporality for a critical understanding of colonialism, modernism, and capitalism. The book is primarily concerned with the historical timeline, the tangential point when a nation enters modernization processes. In exploring modernism in diverse regions such as East Asia, Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Iran, each chapter addresses the historiographic and architectonic unfolding of modernization beyond the western hemisphere. The exploration of these diverse case-studies will be of interest to students of architecture and researchers working on the collision of temporalities and the subject's critical importance for different country’s built-environments.

Global Perspectives on Critical Architecture
Global Perspectives on Critical Architecture

Author: Gevork Hartoonian

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-03

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1317127447

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Judging from the debates taking place in both education and practice, it appears that architecture is deeply in crisis. New design and production techniques, together with the globalization of capital and even skilled-labour, have reduced architecture to a commodified object, its aesthetic qualities tapping into the current pervasive desire for the spectacular. These developments have changed the architect’s role in the design and production processes of architecture. Moreover, critical architectural theories, including those of Breton, Heidegger and Benjamin, which explored the concepts of technology, modernism, labour and capital and how technology informed the cultural, along with later theories from the 1960s, which focused more on the architect’s theorization of his/her own design strategies, seem increasingly irrelevant. In an age of digital reproduction and commodification, these theoretical approaches need to be reassessed. Bringing together essays and interviews from leading scholars such as Kenneth Frampton, Peggy Deamer, Bernard Tschumi, Donald Kunze and Marco Biraghi, this volume investigates and critically addresses various dimensions of the present crisis of architecture. It poses questions such as: Is architecture a conservative cultural product servicing a given producer/consumer system? Should architecture’s affiliative ties with capitalism be subjected to a measure of criticism that can be expanded to the entirety of the cultural realm? Is architecture’s infusion into the cultural the reason for the visibility of architecture today? What room does the city leave for architecture beyond the present delirium of spectacle? Should the thematic of various New Left criticisms of capitalism be taken as the premise of architectural criticism? Or alternatively, putting the notion of criticality aside is it enough to confine criticism to the production of insightful and pleasurable texts?

The Political Unconscious of Architecture
The Political Unconscious of Architecture

Author: Nadir Lahiji

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-24

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1317020685

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Thirty years have passed since eminent cultural and literary critic Fredric Jameson wrote his classic work, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, in which he insisted that 'there is nothing that is not social and historical - indeed, that everything is "in the last analysis" political'. Bringing together a team of leading scholars including Slavoj Zizek, Joan Ockman, Jane Rendell, and Kojin Karatani, this book critically examines the important contribution made by Jameson to the radical critique of architecture over this period, highlighting its continued importance to contemporary architecture discourse. Jameson's notion of the 'political unconscious' represents one of the most powerful notions in the link between aesthetics and politics in contemporary discourse. Taking this, along with other key concepts from Jameson, as the basis for its chapters, this anthology asks questions such as: Is architecture a place to stage 'class struggle'?, How can architecture act against the conditions that 'affirmatively' produce it? What does 'the critical', and 'the negative', mean in the discourse of architecture? and, How do we prevent architecture from participating in the reproduction of the cultural logic of late capitalism? This book breaks new ground in architectural criticism and offers insights into the interrelationships between politics, culture, space, and architecture and, in doing so, it acts as a counter-balast to the current trend in architectural research where a general aestheticization dominates the discourse.

Sir Herbert Baker
Sir Herbert Baker

Author: John Stewart

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2021-11-30

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1476644438

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This is the first full biography from childhood of the eminent British Architect Sir Herbert Baker. Written with the full cooperation of his family and with access to his archive and private papers, it gives an account of his remarkable life as the leading architect to the British Empire. From London, through the commemoration of the empire's war dead in France, via South Africa and Australia to India, he celebrated the might of an empire that once ruled a quarter of the world. He was an intimate friend of many of most fascinating men of his age, including Cecil Rhodes, Lawrence of Arabia, John Buchan, Jan Smuts and, of course, his fellow architect Sir Edwin Lutyens. After a Victorian architectural apprenticeship in London and on to becoming the most prolific architect of his age in South Africa, he built the new imperial capital of New Delhi in India with Lutyens, before returning to London. These built or rebuilt such landmark buildings as the Bank of England, South Africa House, India House, Rhodes House, and the stands for Lords Cricket Ground, as well as numerous churches and private houses.

Architecture Post Mortem
Architecture Post Mortem

Author: Donald Kunze

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1317179080

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Architecture Post Mortem surveys architecture’s encounter with death, decline, and ruination following late capitalism. As the world moves closer to an economic abyss that many perceive to be the death of capital, contraction and crisis are no longer mere phases of normal market fluctuations, but rather the irruption of the unconscious of ideology itself. Post mortem is that historical moment wherein architecture’s symbolic contract with capital is put on stage, naked to all. Architecture is not irrelevant to fiscal and political contagion as is commonly believed; it is the victim and penetrating analytical agent of the current crisis. As the very apparatus for modernity’s guilt and unfulfilled drives-modernity’s debt-architecture is that ideological element that functions as a master signifier of its own destruction, ordering all other signifiers and modes of signification beneath it. It is under these conditions that architecture theory has retreated to an 'Alamo' of history, a final desert outpost where history has been asked to transcend itself. For architecture’s hoped-for utopia always involves an apocalypse. This timely collection of essays reformulates architecture’s relation to modernity via the operational death-drive: architecture is but a passage between life and death. This collection includes essays by Kazi K. Ashraf, David Bertolini, Simone Brott, Peggy Deamer, Didem Ekici, Paul Emmons, Donald Kunze, Todd McGowan, Gevork Hartoonian, Nadir Lahiji, Erika Naginski, and Dennis Maher.

Architecture Against the Post-Political
Architecture Against the Post-Political

Author: Nadir Lahiji

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-05-23

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 131770231X

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Written by a team of renowned contributors and carefully edited to address the themes laid out by the editors in their introduction, the book includes theoretical issues concerning the questions of aesthetics and politics and addresses city and urban strategies within the general critique of the "post-political". By focusing on specific case studies from Warsaw, Barcelona, Dubai, Tokyo and many more the book consolidates the contributions of a diverse group of academics, architects and critics from Europe, the Middle East and America. This collection fills the gap in the existing literature on the relation between politics and aesthetics, and its implications for the theoretical discourse of architecture today. In summary, this book provides a response to the predominant de-politicization in academic discourse and is an attempt to re-claim the abandoned critical project in architecture.