Japan’s postwar urban imagination through the Metabolism architecture movement and visionary science fiction authors The devastation of the Second World War gave rise to imaginations both utopian and apocalyptic. In Japan, a fascinating confluence of architects and science fiction writers took advantage of this space to begin remaking urban design. In The Metabolist Imagination, William …
After World War II, America’s religious denominations spent billions on church architecture as they spread into the suburbs. In this richly illustrated history of midcentury modern churches in the Midwest, Gretchen Buggeln shows how architects and suburban congregations joined forces to work out a vision of how modernist churches might help reinvigorate Protestant worship and community. T…
How can architecture develop better aesthetic directions for the twenty-first-century built environment? Our world, increasingly defined by efficient but unconsidered architecture and cities, seems to be getting uglier. In On the Appearance of the World, Mark Foster Gage asks why. He imagines a future scenario where architectural design and ideas from aesthetic philosophy align toward the prod…
Shows how the intersection of biotech, art, and architecture are transforming the world we live in As living matter becomes more and more the domain of art and architecture, the life sciences are enabling a major cultural and aesthetic transformation. Vital Forms explores how the intersection of biology, art, and architecture has transformed these disciplines, offering heretofore unimagined p…
When the interstate highway program connected America’s cities, it also divided them, cutting through and destroying countless communities. Affluent and predominantly white residents fought back in a much heralded “freeway revolt,” saving such historic neighborhoods as Greenwich Village and New Orleans’s French Quarter. This book tells of the other revolt, a movement of …
How photography and a modernizing Berlin informed an urban image—and one another—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city that once visually epitomized a divided Europe has thrived in the international spotlight as an image of reunified statehood and urbanity. Yet research on Berlin’s past has focused on the interwar yea…
Too close to the wiles and calculations of consumption, stores and shopping centers are generally relegated to secondary, pedestrian status in the history of architecture. And yet, throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, stores and shopping centers were an important locus of modernist architectural thought and practice. Under the mantle of modernism, the merchandising problems a…
A radical critique of architecture that places disability at the heart of the built environment Disability critiques of architecture usually emphasize the need for modification and increased access, but The Architecture of Disability calls for a radical reorientation of this perspective by situating experiences of impairment as a new foundation for the built environment. With its provocative p…
Washington, D.C. has long been known as a frustrating and sometimes confusing city for its residents to call home. The monumental core of federal office buildings, museums, and the National Mall dominates the city’s surrounding neighborhoods and urban fabric. For much of the postwar era, Washingtonians battled to make the city their own, fighting the federal government over the basic ques…
Winner of the 2015 Abbott Lowell Cummings prize from the Vernacular Architecture Forum Winner of the2015Sprio Kostof Book Award from theSociety of Architectural Historians Winner of the2016 International Planning History Society Book Prize for European Planning History Honorable Mention:2016 Wylie Prize in French Studies In the three decades following World War II, the French government engag…