This book is the first comprehensive monograph on Polish modern architect Jerzy Sołtan’s work including his designs, theory, and teachings in Poland and America based on extensive archival research and oral history interviews with former students. The Life and Work of Jerzy Sołtan takes the reader on a journey to both sides of the iron curtain, the communist Poland and the capitalist United States, contributing to the existing scholarship on modernism in post-socialist counties, on CIAM, and on Team 10. It pictures Sołtan as a central player in the history of modernism, building on his own contribution and on close relationships with Le Corbusier and Team 10. This book illustrates not only Sołtan’s work but also his life and how it influenced twentieth-century architecture. Looking in detail at his designs and texts enables the reader to discover how modern architecture tendencies can fit into a larger geopolitical context and how designs can be true manifestos to an architect’s theory. The reader will be immersed in a series of different contexts – from communist Poland, the vibrant academic atmosphere at Harvard to lively discussions on the future of modern architecture. This publication will be of particular interest for those studying modern architecture in Central Europe and in post-socialist countries, in particular Poland. Architects, designers, architectural and design students, and modern architecture enthusiasts will find this publication on the “last modernist” architect revealing new perspectives thanks to the unpublished and unresearched sources.

Emotions and Architecture: Forging Mediterranean Cities Between the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time explores architecture as a medium to arouse or conceal emotions, to build consensus through shared values, or to reconnect the urban community to its alleged ancestry. The chapters in this edited collection outline how architectonic symbols, images, and structures were codified – and sometimes recast – to match or to arouse emotions awakened by wars, political dominance, pandemic challenges, and religion. As signs of spiritual and political power, these elements were embraced and modulated locally, providing an endorsement to authorities and rituals for the community. This volume provides an overview of the phenomenon across the Italian region, stressing the transnationality of selected symbols and their various declinations in local contexts. It deepens the issue of refitting symbols, artworks, and structures to arouse emotions by carefully analysing specific cases, such as the Septizodium in Rome, the Holy House of Loreto in Venice, and the reconstruction of L'Aquila. The collection, through its variegated contributions, offers a comprehensive view of the phenomenon: exploring the issue from political, social, religious, and public health perspectives, and seeking to propose a new definition of architecture as a visual emotional language. Together, the chapters show how the representation of virtues and emotions through architecture was part of a symbolic practice shared by many across the Italian context. This book will be of interest to researchers and students studying architectural history, the history of emotions, and the history of art.

This edited collection examines the development of Atlantic World architecture after 1492. In particular, the chapters explore the landscapes of extraction as material networks that brought people, space, and labor together in harvesting raw materials, cultivating agriculture for export-level profits, and circulating raw materials and commodities in Europe, Africa, and the Americas from 1500 to 1850. This book argues that histories of extraction remain incomplete without careful attention to the social, physical, and mental nexus that is architecture, just as architecture’s development in the last 500 years cannot be adequately comprehended without attention to empire, extraction, colonialism, and the rise of what Immanuel Wallerstein has called the world system. This world system was possible because of built environments that enabled resource extraction, transport of raw materials, circulation of commodities, and enactment of power relations in the struggle between capital and labor. Separated into three sections: Harvesting the Environment, Cultivating Profit, and Circulating Commodities: Networks and Infrastructures, this volume covers a wide range of geographies, from England to South America, from Africa to South Carolina. The book aims to decenter Eurocentric approaches to architectural history to expose the global circulation of ideas, things, commodities, and people that constituted the architecture of extraction in the Atlantic World. In focusing on extraction, we aim to recover histories of labor exploitation and racialized oppression of interest to the global community. The book will be of interest to researchers and students of architectural history, geography, urban and labor history, literary studies, historic preservation, and colonial studies.

Why and how was the term ‘built environment’ first introduced? Inventing the Built Environment retrieves the origin of this ubiquitous term. The articulation of the ‘built environment,’ Kei demonstrates, coincided with the redefinition of education, research, and professional practices in architecture and town planning in 1960s Britain. Concentrating on the half-decade during which the term permeated the architectural and planning professions, this book recalls a time when the ‘built environment’ was conceived as a part of the British government’s effort in national economic planning. Inventing the Built Environment unpacks the proposal for a Research Council for the Built Environment to mobilise architecture and town planning for political economy. How a relatively small group of architects, planners, politicians, and researchers transposed scientific thoughts from biology, economics, and computation into the ‘built environment’ will be considered, too. Kei highlights the assumptions about and classification of the population that were made when inventing the ‘built environment.’ The architectural and biosocial implications of the making and remaking of this architectural-environmental notion, in Britain and beyond, will be revealed through the works of pre-eminent architect-planners including Richard Llewelyn-Davies and William Holford. At a time when environmental concerns again take the front seat of architectural and planning debates, this book offers, for scholars and students, an alternative lens to reflect on the assumptions and bias that can be embedded in our architectural lexicons.

The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra challenges linear assumptions about agency, progress, and domination in colonial and postcolonial cities, adding an important sub‐Saharan case study to existing scholarship on globalization and modernity. Intersected by small creeks, rivulets, and dotted with mangrove swamps, the Bight of Biafra has a long history of decentralized political arrangements and intricate trading networks predating the emergence of the Atlantic world. While indigenous merchants in the region were active participants in the transatlantic slave trading system, they creatively resisted European settlement and maintained indigenous sovereignty until the middle of the nineteenth century. Since few built artifacts still exist, this study draws from a close reading of written sources—travelers’ accounts, slave traders’ diaries, missionary memoirs, colonial records, and oral histories—as well as contemporary fieldwork to trace transformations in the region’s built environment from the sixteenth century to today. With each chapter focusing on a particular spatial paradigm in this dynamic process, this book uncovers the manifold and inventive ways in which actors strategically adapted the built environment to adjust to changing cultural and economic circumstances. In parallel, it highlights the ways that these spaces were rhetorically constructed and exploited by foreign observers and local agents. Enmeshed in the history of slavery, colonialism, and the modern construction of race, the spatial dynamics of the Biafran region have not been geographically delimited. The central thesis of this volume is that these spaces of entanglement have been productive sites of Black identity formation involving competing and overlapping interests, occupying multiple positions and temporalities, and ensnaring real, imagined, and sometimes contradictory aims. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of architecture, architectural history, urban geography, African studies, and Atlantic studies.

Journalist Flint recounts the life and times of the legendary architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, aka Le Corbusier, and provides illuminating details of his most iconic projects.

More than 150 inspired—and inspiring—novelists, poets, playwrights, painters, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians on how they subtly maneuver the many (self-inflicted) obstacles and (self-imposed) daily rituals to get done the work they love to do. Franz Kafka, frustrated with his living quarters and day job, wrote in a letter to Felice Bauer in 1912, “time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.” Kafka is one of 161 minds who describe their daily rituals to get their work done, whether by waking early or staying up late; whether by self-medicating with doughnuts or bathing, drinking vast quantities of coffee, or taking long daily walks. Thomas Wolfe wrote standing up in the kitchen, the top of the refrigerator as his desk, dreamily fondling his “male configurations”.... Jean-Paul Sartre chewed on Corydrane tablets (a mix of amphetamine and aspirin), ingesting ten times the recommended dose each day ... Descartes liked to linger in bed, his mind wandering in sleep through woods, gardens, and enchanted palaces where he experienced “every pleasure imaginable.” Here are: Anthony Trollope, who demanded of himself that each morning he write three thousand words (250 words every fifteen minutes for three hours) before going off to his job at the postal service, which he kept for thirty-three years during the writing of more than two dozen books ... Karl Marx ... Woody Allen ... Agatha Christie ... George Balanchine, who did most of his work while ironing ... Leo Tolstoy ... Charles Dickens ... Pablo Picasso ... George Gershwin, who, said his brother Ira, worked for twelve hours a day from late morning to midnight, composing at the piano in pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers.... Here also are the daily rituals of Charles Darwin, Andy Warhol, John Updike, Twyla Tharp, Benjamin Franklin, William Faulkner, Jane Austen, Anne Rice, and Igor Stravinsky (he was never able to compose unless he was sure no one could hear him and, when blocked, stood on his head to “clear the brain”).