In Modern Architecture, Empire, and Race in Fascist Italy, Brian L. McLaren examines the architecture of the late-Fascist era in relation to the various racial constructs that emerged following the occupation of Ethiopia in 1936 and intensified during the wartime.

A highly interdisciplinary work, The Black Skyscraper reclaims the influence of race on modern architectural design as well as the less-well-understood effects these designs had on the experience and perception of race.

This dissertation examines the evolution of Western and Modern architecture in Siam and Thailand. It illustrates how various architectural ideas have contributed to the physical design and spatial configuration of places associated with negotiation and allocation of political power, which are throne halls, parliaments, and government and civic structures since the 1850s.

How climate influenced the design strategies of modernist architects Modern Architecture and Climate explores how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and shows how regional approaches to climate adaptability were essential to the development of modern architecture. Focusing on the period surrounding World War II—before fossil-fuel powered air-conditioning became widely available—Daniel Barber brings to light a vibrant and dynamic architectural discussion involving design, materials, and shading systems as means of interior climate control. He looks at projects by well-known architects such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Lúcio Costa, Mies van der Rohe, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the work of climate-focused architects such as MMM Roberto, Olgyay and Olgyay, and Cliff May. Drawing on the editorial projects of James Marston Fitch, Elizabeth Gordon, and others, he demonstrates how images and diagrams produced by architects helped conceptualize climate knowledge, alongside the work of meteorologists, physicists, engineers, and social scientists. Barber describes how this novel type of environmental media catalyzed new ways of thinking about climate and architectural design. Extensively illustrated with archival material, Modern Architecture and Climate provides global perspectives on modern architecture and its evolving relationship with a changing climate, showcasing designs from Latin America, Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Africa. This timely and important book reconciles the cultural dynamism of architecture with the material realities of ever-increasing carbon emissions from the mechanical cooling systems of buildings, and offers a historical foundation for today’s zero-carbon design.

The conditions in which present-day architecture is produced are partly local and singular and partly global and universal. Understanding contemporary architecture means understanding all of these aspects. What are the pivotal themes? Gert Wingårdh and Rasmus Wærn, Sweden’s most active architect and its best-known architecture critic, asked themselves this question and made a selection of approximately fifty terms and concepts, including Branding, Collaborators, Corporate, Desire, Future, Everyday, Ornament, and Wheelchair. The result is a very special dictionary with humorous illustrations and original articles by interesting protagonists such as Denise Scott Brown, Kenneth Frampton, Massimiliano Fuksas, Hans Ibelings, Peter Blundell Jones, Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Juhani Pallasmaa, Joseph Rykwert, Jaime Salazar, Axel Sowa, and Wilfried Wang. A special highlight is the text by Nobel laureate Ohran Pamuk. Die Voraussetzungen, unter welchen heutige Architektur entsteht, sind teils lokal und einmalig bedingt, teils sind sie von globaler und allgemeingültiger Natur. Zeitgenössische Architektur verstehen heisst, all diese Aspekte verstehen. Welches sind dabei die entscheidenden Themen? Gert Wingårdh und Rasmus Wærn, Schwedens aktivster Architekt beziehungsweise bekanntester Architekturkritiker, haben sich diese Frage gestellt und eine kritische Auswahl von rund 50 Begriffen getroffen, etwa Branding, Collaborators, Corporate, Desire, Future, Everyday, Ornament, Wheelchair. Dadurch ist ein ganz spezielles, witzig illustriertes Begriffs-Wörterbuch entstanden, mit Originalbeiträgen von so interessanten Protagonisten wie etwa Denise Scott Brown, Massimiliano Fuksas, Hans Ibelings, Peter Blundell Jones, Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Juhani Pallasmaa, Joseph Rykwert, Jaime Salazar, Axel Sowa, Wilfried Wang; ein besonderes Highlight ist der Text von Nobelpreisträger Orhan Pamuk.

How American architecture can address systemic anti-Black racism: a creative challenge in 10 case studies Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in Americais an urgent call for architects to accept the challenge of reconceiving and reconstructing our built environment rather than continue giving shape to buildings, infrastructure and urban plans that have, for generations, embodied and sustained anti-Black racism in the United States. The architects, designers, artists and writers who were invited to contribute to this book--and to the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art for which it serves as a "field guide"--reimagine the legacies of race-based dispossession in 10 American cities (Atlanta; Brooklyn, New York; Kinloch, Missouri; Los Angeles; Miami; Nashville; New Orleans; Oakland; Pittsburgh; and Syracuse) and celebrate the ways individuals and communities across the country have mobilized Black cultural spaces, forms and practices as sites of imagination, liberation, resistance, care and refusal. A broad range of essays by the curators and prominent scholars from diverse fields, as well as a portfolio of new photographs by the artist David Hartt, complement this volume's richly illustrated presentations of the architectural projects at the heart of MoMA's groundbreaking exhibition.

This personal history chronicles the triumph and loss of a 1960s initiative to recruit minority students to Columbia University’s School of Architecture. At the intersection of US educational, architectural, and urban history, When Ivory Towers Were Black tells the story of how an unparalleled cohort of ethnic minority students overcame institutional roadblocks to earn degrees in architecture from Columbia University. Its narrative begins with a protest movement to end Columbia’s authoritarian practices, and ends with an unsettling return to the status quo. Sharon Egretta Sutton, one of the students in question, follows two university units that led the movement toward emancipatory education: the Division of Planning and the Urban Center. She illustrates both units’ struggle to open the ivory tower to ethnic minority students and to involve those students in improving Harlem’s slum conditions. Along with Sutton’s personal perspective, the story is narrated through the oral histories of twenty-four fellow students who received an Ivy League education only to find the doors closing on their careers due to Nixon-era urban disinvestment policies.