New Books in Architecture

O’Neil Ford on Architecture (University of Texas Press, 2019) brings together Ford’s major professional writings and speeches for the first time. Revealing the intellectual and theoretical underpinnings of his distinctive modernism, they illuminate his fascination with architectural history, his pioneering uses of new technologies and construction systems, his deep concerns for the landscape and environment, and his passionate commitments to education and civil rights. An interlocutor with titans of the twentieth century, including Louis Kahn and J. Robert Oppenheimer, Ford understood architecture as inseparable from the social, political, and scientific developments of his day. An introductory essay by Kathryn E. O’Rourke provides a critical assessment of Ford’s essays and lectures and repositions him in the history of US architectural modernism. As some of his most important buildings turn sixty, O’Neil Ford on Architecture demonstrates that this Texas modernist deserves to be ranked among the leading midcentury American architects.Kathryn E. O’Rourke is an associate professor of art history at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. She is the author of Architecture in Mexico City: History, Representation, and the Shaping of a Capital. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Paul McClean grew up in Irelands where he studied architecture before moving to Southern California and establishing McClean Design. Over the past 18 years it has grown into one of the leading contemporary residential design firms in Los Angles committed to excellence. Today we're taking about his book McClean Design: Creating the Contemporary House (Rizzoli, 2019)Design is not just a job for Paul McClean. It is a dream realized from his childhood. It is his passion. This is evident in every one of his visionary custom-built residences. His firm’s projects reflect an interest in modern living and a desire to connect their clients to the beauty of the surrounding natural environment. The incorporation of water and the elimination of the barrier between indoors and outdoors are hallmarks of McClean’s designs. His firm makes extensive use of glazing systems to maximize views and provide a warm light-filled contemporary space. With his designs, McClean strives for simplicity with expansive views. He places an emphasis on texture and natural materials with the homes he creates, and his firm is committed to environmentally sustainable design practices. McClean Design continues to strive for excellence in design and to push the boundaries of imagination in creating extraordinary spaces they hope will provide enjoyment for many years to come. McClean’s eponymous firm has become one of the leading contemporary residential design firms in Southern California, with a reach that can be felt as far as British Columbia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Written as an advocacy of melancholy’s value as part of landscape, experience, Melancholy and the Landscape: Locating Sadness, Memory, and Reflection in the Landscape(Routledge, 2018) situates the concept with landscape’s aesthetic traditions, and reveals how it is a critical part of ethics and empathy. With a history that extends back to ancient times, melancholy has hovered at the edges of the appreciation of landscape, including the aesthetic exertions of the 18th century. Implicated in the more formal categories of the sublime and the picturesque, melancholy captures the subtle condition of beautiful sadness....Jacky Bowring is a professor of Landscape Architecture at Lincoln University, Christchurch, New Zealand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

In The Meanings of Landscape: Essays on Place, Space, Nature and Justice (Routledge, 2019), Kenneth Olwig presents explorations in landscape geography and architecture from an environmental humanities perspective. With influence from art, literature, theatre staging, architecture, and garden design, landscape has now come to be viewed as a form of spatial scenery, but this reading captures only a narrow representation of landscape meaning today. This book positions landscape as a concept shaped through the centuries, evolving from place to place to provide nuanced interpretations of landscape meaning. The essays are woven together to gather an international approach to understanding the past and present importance of landscape as place and polity, as designed space, as nature, and as an influential factor in the shaping of ideas in a just social and physical environment.Olwig is an American-born landscape geographer, specializing in the study of the Scandinavian landscape. He is best known for advocating a "substantive" understanding landscape, one that incorporates legal and other lived significances of landscape, rather than viewing it in a more purely aesthetic way. His writings include Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic (2002) and Nature's Ideological Landscape (1984). Olwig is Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture Planning and Management at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Alnarp, Sweden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

In her book, The Caesar of Paris:  Napoleon Bonaparte, Rome, and the Artistic Obsession That Shaped An Empire (Pegasus Books, 2018), Susan Jaques offers up a richly detailed and researched account of Napoleon’s fascination with ancient Rome, and how this obsession shaped not only France in the early part of the nineteenth century, but also the city of Paris we know today.  In this interview, she traces the cultural history and legacy of the Napoleonic era, discussing topics such as the looting of artworks from conquered states, the creation of the Empire style by architects Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, the Roman inspirations for the Arc de Triomphe, the Arc du Carrousel, and the Vendôme column, and the politics of art repatriation after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo.Susan Jaques is a Los Angeles-based author and journalist with a consuming interest in history and art. Her biography, The Empress of Art: Catherine the Great and the Transformation of Russia explores the tsarina’s bold, unprecedented use of art and architecture to legitimize her reign and transform Russia into a European superpower.  Her new cultural history, The Caesar of Paris: Napoleon Bonaparte, Rome, and the Artistic Obsession that Shaped an Empire examines Napoleon’s fascination with antiquity and its impact on the urban landscape of Paris (Pegasus Books, April 2016 & December 2018).Susan’s articles, profiles, and reviews have appeared in such publications as Fine Arts Connoisseur, The Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Toronto Globe and Mail, and NY Review of Books.Susan holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Stanford University and an MBA from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a member of Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art & Architecture and the Napoleon Historical Society. Susan is a docent at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.Beth Mauldin is an Associate Professor of French at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Her research interests include French cultural studies, film, and the social and cultural history of Paris. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

The book today is Cultural Landscapes of South Asia : Studies in Heritage Conservation, and Management (Routledge, 2017) edited by Kapila D. Silva and Amita Sinha. It's the Winner of the Environmental Design Research Association's 2018 Achievement Award. South Asian architecture and landscapes are not as well known in the western design schools. This book adds to our body of knowledge about “how to” design spaces with culturally sensitivity for projects in South Asia but also what we can learn from them. It's about how their multi-faceted cultural appreciation of the land that derives from their religion, food, and way of living with ecologies affects their designs and placemaking. It’s a fascinating book to view western cultures in a new light and also our current struggles with sea level rise and ecological challenges. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Chris Reed and Nina-Marie Lister's book  Projective Ecologies (Harvard Graduate School of Design 2014) is about how landscape architecture can move forward in the design field beyond garden landscapes to delve into the serious issues of climate change and land use master planing affecting our global landscapes today. Projective ecologies is a “how to get started” guide to understanding what we can control, what we can’t control, and to embrace all of the creative chaos to produce good and meaning peacemaking for humans and nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

In Making Space for the Dead: Catacombs, Cemeteries, and the Reimagining of Paris, 1780-1830 (Cornell University Press, 2019), Dr. Erin-Marie Legacey, Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech University, explores the transformation of burial practices in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Public health concerns under the Old Regime prompted reforms in how the French buried their dead, with millions of bones carted away from church graveyards to the deserted mining tunnels underneath the city. After the Revolution, the Catacombs, as well as newly established cemeteries such as Père Lachaise, became more than simply places for the disposal of the deceased. Amidst the turmoil and upheaval wrought by the Revolution, these burial sites became public spaces for Parisians to, as Dr. Legacey writes, “assert and assess their radical break with the past, to reconsider a new set of moeurs in the wake of that break, to reconnect with their fellow Parisians, both alive and dead, and to reimagine their past and its relationship to the present.”Beth Mauldin is an Associate Professor of French at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Her research interests include French cultural studies, film, and the social and cultural history of Paris. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

In this segment of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Elizabeth “Libby” Otto, Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies and Executive Director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Buffalo about her forthcoming work, Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics (MIT Press, 2019). The MIT press release appropriately notes that Otto “liberates Bauhaus history” with this work, drawing the focus from the handful of male artists like Klee and Breuer outward as she considers the other 1200 odd Bauhäusler. Otto discusses spiritism, gender constructions, and the nature of queer before turning her attention to the unavoidable political landscape of the 1930s. Our conversation was wide ranging and as edifying as it was fun. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Nadia Amoroso's last book Representing Landscapes: Analogue (Routledge, 2019) focuses the art of hand drawings and why they are still relevant and important in our digital age. Nadia takes us on a journey through the diverse Landscape Architecture University programs showcasing the best in student work. Simple hand drawings can tell powerful stories if we know “how to “ do them. Each chapter illustrates a different style and type of drawing along with an essay from the leading professors at the major universities. Visual communication is the heart of Landscape Architecture. Her book series captures that spirt.Nadia Amoroso, PhD, is a faculty member at the University of Guelph, Department of Landscape, School of Environmental Design and Rural Development. She was the Lawrence Halprin Fellow at Cornell University and the Garvan Chair Visiting Professor at the University of Arkansas. She holds a PhD from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London, and degrees in Landscape Architecture and Urban Design from the University of Toronto. She specializes in visual communication in landscape architecture, digital design, data visualization and creative mapping. She also operates an illustration studio, under her name, focusing on landscape architectural visual communication. She has written a number of articles and books on topics relating to creative mapping, visual representation, and digital design including, The Exposed City: Mapping the Urban Invisibles, Representing Landscapes: Digital, and more recently Representing Landscapes: Hybrid. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture