Henry Hobson Richardson, the author of the style known today as Richardson Romanesque, was, as were his ambitions, persona, and physique, larger than life. Richardson's designs are unmistakable: From Sever Hall at Harvard to Trinity Church, Boston, his structures bear the inimitable imprint of his signature style. Here, in this short-form book, is his little-told story.
Willa Cather wrote about the places she knew, including Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, and Virginia. Often forgotten among these essential locations has been Pittsburgh. During the ten years Pittsburgh was her home (1896-1906), Cather worked as an editor, journalist, teacher, and freelance writer. She mixed with all sorts of people and formed friendships both ephemeral and lasting. She published extensively--and not just profiles and reviews but also a collection of poetry, April Twilights, and more than thirty short stories, including several collected in The Troll Garden that are now considered masterpieces: "A Death in the Desert," "The Sculptor's Funeral," "A Wagner Matinee," and "Paul's Case." During extended working vacations through 1916, she finished four novels in Pittsburgh. Cather Studies, Volume 13 explores the myriad ways that these crucial years in Pittsburgh shaped Cather's writing career and the artistic, professional, and personal connections she made there. With contributions from fourteen well-known Cather scholars, this collection of essays recognizes the importance Pittsburgh played in Cather's life and work and deepens our appreciation of how her art examines and elucidates the human experience.
Materiality is a recurring and central issue in architecture. This book explains how materials are "constructed", how they become cultural substances. Metamorphism investigates the complex relationship between natural materials and technology, science and sensuality. Gottfried Semper (1803–1879) made the notion of Stoffwechsel the key element of his theory. With this concept he intended to explain how a structural form originally bound to a method of processing is transferred from one material to another, liberated from its original function. For the first time, the book investigates the subject from a historic point of view whilst reflecting on current interdisciplinary research. Examples from Aalto to Zumthor illustrate the specific aspects of historic and contemporary material concepts.
This “lively” dual biography is “an enormously rich book, offering an absorbing portrait of the world of anarchists in turn-of-the-century America” (The New York Times Book Review). In 1889 two Russian immigrants, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, met in a coffee shop on the Lower East Side. Over the next fifty years Emma and Sasha would be fast friends, fleeting lovers, and loyal comrades. This dual biography offers an unprecedented glimpse into their intertwined lives and the lasting influence of the anarchist movement they shaped. Berkman shocked the country in 1892 with “the first terrorist act in America,” the failed assassination of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick for his crimes against workers. Passionate and pitiless, gloomy yet gentle, Berkman remained Goldman’s closest confidant though the two were often separated—by his fourteen-year imprisonment and by Emma’s growing fame as a champion of causes from sexual liberation to freedom of speech. The blazing sun to Sasha’s morose moon, Emma became known as “the most dangerous woman in America.” Through an attempted prison breakout, multiple bombing plots, and a dramatic deportation from America, these two unrelenting activists insisted on the improbable ideal of a socially just, self-governing utopia, a vision that has shaped movements across the past century, most recently Occupy Wall Street. Sasha and Emma is the culminating work of acclaimed historian of anarchism Paul Avrich. Before his death, Avrich asked his daughter to complete his magnum opus. The resulting collaboration, epic in scope, intimate in detail, examines the possibilities and perils of political faith and protest, through a pair who both terrified and dazzled the world. “A narrative laced with irony details the remarkable reorientation of this pair after they were deported to a Soviet Russia they had lauded as a utopia but soon fled as a monstrous dystopia. A fully human portrait of two tightly linked yet forever fiercely independent spirits.” —Booklist (starred review) “An in-depth look at a lesser-known chapter of American and world history.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Advanced industrial societies are becoming aware of the impact of what they do to the physical and biological environment, and also what that environment does to individuals. In The Signature of Power, Harold D. Lasswell examines the symbolic use people make of their surroundings and the complexity of the way they interpret an altered environment. Transformed habitats can change experiences and behaviors. All people seek to maximize their preferred events, such as power and wealth, when they use the environment—be it through glass skyscrapers or Gothic estates. In all cases, physical structures give expression to the perspectives of influential individuals and groups. This volume considers the complex interplay between the material and the symbolic. Physical changes introduced for political purposes by architects, planners, and engineers are guided by the perspectives of designers. These and other interactions in human society are simultaneous acts of communication and collaboration. Regardless of whether physical resources are used to transmit messages, such interactions nevertheless have a degree of communicative impact. Physical structures may be profoundly affected by the purposes, assumptions, and identities of those people who plan or change them. Environmental design, says Lasswell, is an instrument of political power.
