New Books in Architecture

By Marshall PoeArts Visual Arts

New Books in Architecture episodes

January 09, 2018 Liss C. Werner, “Cybernetics: State of the Art” (Tech Uni of Berlin Press, 2017)
It’s no secret that we continue to live in the midst of digital revolution that continues to unfold in a rapidly accelerating fashion. Digital connectivity and the Internet of Things make possible not only Smart Homes, but Smart Cities. As with all technological revolutions, the road ahead is equally dotted with possibilities and pitfalls. Liss C. Werner and her colleagues brought together a collection of thinkers and practitioners in the realms of architecture, design, and urban planning to wrestle with questions around ways we might utilize today’s digital design tools to enable more responsive, resilient, and ultimately, inclusive and democratic forms of urban design and governance without tipping the balance over to a technocratic project that might imprison us within its algorithmic logics. All of the contributors to this discussion share the hope that the insights of second-order cybernetics might provide valuable guidance as we attempt to find that particular “sweet-spot” of human/machine interaction. Their insights are gathered together in Cybernetics: State of the Art edited by our guest, Liss C. Werner, and available free online from the Technical University of Berlin. As editor, Werner has skillfully crafted a dialectic arc that allows the productive tensions between digital utopianism and skepticism enabling a provocative investigation of the revolution that is happening whether we like it or not, and might help us find the means to steer its emergence in ways that are most beneficial for all of us and our environment.
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1 hr 15 min
November 22, 2017 Mike Wallace, “Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898-1919” (Oxford UP, 2017)
In 1898, a new metropolis emerged from the consolidation of New York City with East Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island and the western part of Queens County. In Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mike Wallace describes the first two decades of this city’s expanded history, a period in which it led and embodied the developments that were taking place nationally. As he explains, consolidation was a trend throughout America during this era. Big business was at the forefront of this, as Wall Street provided the financing necessary for numerous industries to form dominant corporate combinations through mergers and takeovers. The enormous wealth controlled by these titans was prominent throughout the city, both in the new skyscrapers rising to dominate the city’s skyline and in the cultural and educational institutions that flourished with infusions of their capital. Similar mergers took place in many sectors and aspects of city life, from entertainment to labor, with even the criminal underworld consolidating in a reflection of the times. Wallace’s book chronicles all of this, as well as the developments in the many communities of a richly diverse city that during these years experienced dramatic growth and changes wrought by a global war.
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49 min
November 09, 2017 Bruce R. Berglund, “Castle and Cathedral in Modern Prague” (CEU Press, 2017)
As Bruce R. Berglund, points out in his terrific book Castle and Cathedral in Modern Prague: Longing for the Sacred in a Skeptical Age (CEU Press, 2017), the Czech Republic is an odd place, religion-wise. It’s among the most secular in the world, yet Czechs have a long tradition of believing in “Something.” They even have a thing called “Somethingism.” Just what that Something is and what that Something means for Czechs to do, of course, is and long has been the subject of debate. Bruce takes us into the heart of that debate in the interwar period, a time of great intellectual ferment and creativity in what was then Czechoslovakia. It turns out Czech intellectuals (Masaryk being the foremost of them) wanted the Czechs the be guided by Something in all their affairs. Bruce does a great job of telling us why and how.
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1 hr
October 26, 2017 Jeffrey Kidder, “Parkour and the City: Risk, Masculinity, and Meaning in a Postmodern Sport” (Rutgers UP, 2017)
The meaning assigned to architecture is complex and varied. Urban architecture is often stripped of meaning when people abandon the neighborhoods or are absent of meaning at the time of their inception. This leaves the people who inhabit the terrain to assign their own meaning to the architecture. Jeffrey Kidder, the author of Parkour and the City: Risk, Masculinity, and Meaning in a Postmodern Sport (Rutgers University Press, 2017) and my guest for this episode, observed the way traceurs in Chicago, Illinois use urban architecture to express masculinity and risk-taking in their performance of parkour. In our interview, we discuss how this study was shaped from his past observations of message carriers, as well as topics such as the impact that history has on the development of parkour in nations around the world, the perception that traceurs have on hyper-masculine males who are viewed as dangerous when performing parkour, and the difference between risk-taking behavior and thrill-seeking behavior. We also learn about his thoughts on the current environment of risk-taking in lifestyle sports and how these sports are different from competitive (or team) sports.
Jeffrey Kidder, Ph.D. is an associate professor of sociology at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois. Dr. Kidder has focused his research and teaching pursuits on the intersection of cultural sociology and urban sociology. He is currently on a one year sabbatical in Colorado where he is continuing his research on risk-taking behavior and lifestyle sports—this time observing skiers, snowboarders, mountain bikers, climbers, etc.
Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is a graduate of the public policy and public administration program at Walden University. His most recent paper, to be presented at the upcoming American Society for Environmental History conference, is titled “Down Lover’s Lane: A Brief History of Necking in Cars.” You can learn more about Johnston’s work here.
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45 min
September 14, 2017 Jamin Creed Rowan, “The Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition” (U. Penn Press, 2017)
Jamin Creed Rowan is an assistant professor of English and American Studies at Brigham Young University. His book The Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) offers a history of how American intellectuals and planners thought about urban relationships shaping modern cities. He traces how cities’ physical landscape changed as ideas about the nature of their social life were reconceived. Beginning with Frederick Law Olmsted in the nineteenth century who expressed anxiety over the erosion of social sympathy, to the progressive era’s deployment of the family ideal for urban friendships, to mid-century models that saw these relationships as part of and analogous to an ecological system. Along the way he examines the thought of Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, the journalists at the New Yorker, Rachel Carson and Jane Jacobs and the disruptive force of urban renewal projects. Rowan provides the reader with a new way to value “sociable fellow-feelings” in the midst of the diversity and the rapid change of today’s cities.
Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is tentatively entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
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56 min
July 12, 2017 Alexia Yates, “Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siecle Capital” (Harvard UP, 2015)
What comes to mind when you think of Paris in the nineteenth century? For me, its revolutionary politics, the circulation of increasing numbers of people and goods, a range of spectacular cultural displays and amusements, an emergent urban modernity including a host of negotiations between social classes, public and private, men and women, citizens and the state. And if I had to name one historical figure to stand for the transformation of the nineteenth-century capital? Haussmann. Hands down.
Alexia Yates‘s book, Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siecle Capital (Harvard UP, 2015), opened my eyes to a whole other world of everyday urbanism and historical actors in the city during the first decades of the Third Republic. Acknowledging the undeniable impact of Haussmann and Haussmannization on the city that Paris became under and after the Second Empire, Selling Paris considers the activities, interests, and effects of a host of other figures who shaped the city’s property relations and commercial culture from the early years of the Third Republic to the First World War. In the books chapters, readers will find a social history of the business of French building during this period, from planning and production to use. Focused on the architects, private developers, municipal authorities, speculators, real estate agents, notaries, property owners, and tenants whose interactions and negotiations influenced the form, representation, and experience of Parisian real estate in purposeful ways, the book makes significant contributions to our understanding of the history of the capital and capitalism in France.
Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of French culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: [email protected].
*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as hazy). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.
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1 hr 1 min
July 08, 2017 Brigitte Le Normand, “Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade” (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2014)
NB: An earlier version of this podcast has been replaced with a new file in which the the technical problems of the first were corrected. -NBn, 7/11/17
At the end of World War II, Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia lay in ruins. Modernist architects believed they could build a new city that would match the modernization goals of the new communist government. In Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014) , Brigitte Le Normand reveals the ideals that under girded these architects plans for Belgrade, along with the postwar realities that thwarted their attempts to foster a new society through a modernist built environment. She analyzes the political, social, and ideological implications of urban planning and the built environment, demonstrating how modernist architects were able to mold their ideal cityscape to fit Yugoslavia’s third way after the Tito-Stalin split and how market socialism created expectations that undermined their vision of social spaces. Her work demonstrates how architects and urban planners in Belgrade were part of a larger movement of modernism in postwar Europe and were affected by the movement away from modernism in the 1960s.
Brigitte Le Normand is Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan.
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59 min
June 15, 2017 Jordan Lacey, “Sonic Rupture: A Practice-led Approach to Urban Soundscape Design” (Bloomsbury, 2016)
Sonic Rupture: A Practice-led Approach to Urban Soundscape Design (Bloomsbury 2016) by Jordan Lacey offers a practice-led alternative approach to urban soundscape design. Rather than understanding the functional noises of the city as solely problematic or unaesthetic annoyances to be eliminated, Lacey instead suggests ways in which they can be creatively harnessed to give new expression to urban life. Featuring expansive theoretical discussions and detailed analysis of Lacey’s own work as a sound artist, the book proposes the 5 element sonic rupture model as a way to diversify our experiences of city life.
New Books in Sound Studies is a collaboration between the Centre for Media Data and Society at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary and the New Books Network.
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47 min
May 26, 2017 Marilyn Palmer and Ian West, “Technology and the Country House” (Historic England Publishing/U.Chicago, 2016)
For the aristocracy in Britain and Ireland, country house living was dependent upon the labors of men and women who performed innumerable chores involving cooking, cleaning, and the basic operation of the household. In the 18th century, however, the Industrial Revolution began to change this by introducing new devices and systems that simplified a wide range of duties. In Technology in the Country House (Historic England Publishing, 2016; distributed in the U.S. by University of Chicago Press) Marilyn Palmer and Ian West detail the extensive range of innovations adopted by country house owners from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries and their impact on the operations of their homes and estates. As West explains in this podcast, though many of these innovations were labor-saving devices, often they required not fewer servants, but ones trained in the new tasks of how to operate and maintain them. Their introduction was often undertaken by owners out of a personal interest in the innovations of the age, or who adopted them because of their fashionability–motives which, as West explains, provide useful examples of how technology is introduced into society generally both then and today.
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1 hr
March 28, 2017 Serhat Unaldi, “Working Towards the Monarchy: The Politics of Space in Downtown Bangkok” (U. of Hawaii Press, 2016)
In Working Towards the Monarchy: The Politics of Space in Downtown Bangkok (University of Hawaii Press, 2016), Serhat Unaldi offers a provocative and original interpretation of the relationship between space, architecture and power in one of Southeast Asia’s biggest and most complicated cities. Climbing the towers and exploring the alleyways of Siam-Ratchaprasong, that part of Bangkok famous for its gaudy malls, pretentious hotels and tourist strips, Unaldi finds that the charismatic authority of the royal institution has combined with the political economy of the capitalist marketplace to form a highly potent yet unstable admixture of elements for modern state formation. The dense concentration of forces for elite domination of Thailand in these few city blocks at once affirms and celebrates the project’s success, enabling the dominant classes to be seen exactly as they would have themselves seen. But these spaces are also fraught with danger, subject to instability caused by realignments among erstwhile allies within, and to increasingly overt challenges to the status quo from opponents without — expressed most dramatically in the antigovernment protests of 2010, which left in their wake the smoldering ruins of the very architectural hierarchy intended to signify modernity via proper relations of inequality.
Serhat Unaldi joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about Siam Paragon and the politics of space, the appeal of Thaksin Shinawatra, the Erawan Shrine and its others, disappeared and hidden palaces, Phibun Songkhram and the making of Chulalongkorn University, and how all roads in Bangkok lead to the monarchy.
Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at [email protected]
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58 min

About New Books in Architecture

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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.