A thought-provoking, elegantly crafted collection of essays by one of architecture's most influential figures Among practicing architects today, perhaps only Robert A. M. Stern once contemplated a career as a historian, an interest that has informed both his built work and his writings. Tradition and Invention in Architecture brings together 26 of Stern's essays and conversations from the past five decades. Topics range from modern classicism, American housing, gardens, and New York City to the work of Norman Foster, Louis Kahn, Charles Moore, and Robert Moses. Reminders of Stern's own broad career in architecture are found in his thoughts on his PBS television series Pride of Place, his discussion of the planning of Seaside and Celebration, Florida, and his view on institutional branding through architecture. Known as much for his candor as for his profound knowledge of American architecture, Stern's observations on the architecture of his time are equally valuable. As he writes, "For an architect, writing is one way of reconsidering history while working in the present--always in search of the best from the past and the present, which allows us to invent for the future."

Emulation is a challenging middle ground between imitation and invention. The idea of rivaling by means of imitation, as old as the Aenead and as modern as Michelangelo, fit neither the pessimistic deference of the neoclassicists nor the revolutionary spirit of the Romantics. Emulation thus disappeared along with the Renaissance humanist tradition, but it is slowly being recovered in the scholarship of Roman art. It remains to recover emulation for the Renaissance itself, and to revivify it for modern practice. Mayernik argues that it was the absence of a coherent understanding of emulation that fostered the fissuring of artistic production in the later eighteenth century into those devoted to copying the past and those interested in continual novelty, a situation solidified over the course of the nineteenth century and mostly taken for granted today. This book is a unique contribution to our understanding of the historical phenomenon of emulation, and perhaps more importantly a timely argument for its value to contemporary practice.

The interplay of psychology, design, and politics in experiments with urban open space As suburbanization, racial conflict, and the consequences of urban renewal threatened New York City with “urban crisis,” the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay (1966–1973) experimented with a broad array of projects in open spaces to affirm the value of city life. Mariana Mogilevich provides a fascinating history of a watershed moment when designers, government administrators, and residents sought to remake the city in the image of a diverse, free, and democratic society. New pedestrian malls, residential plazas, playgrounds in vacant lots, and parks on postindustrial waterfronts promised everyday spaces for play, social interaction, and participation in the life of the city. Whereas designers had long created urban spaces for a broad amorphous public, Mogilevich demonstrates how political pressures and the influence of the psychological sciences led them to a new conception of public space that included diverse publics and encouraged individual flourishing. Drawing on extensive archival research, site work, interviews, and the analysis of film and photographs, The Invention of Public Space considers familiar figures, such as William H. Whyte and Jane Jacobs, in a new light and foregrounds the important work of landscape architects Paul Friedberg and Lawrence Halprin and the architects of New York City’s Urban Design Group. The Invention of Public Space brings together psychology, politics, and design to uncover a critical moment of transformation in our understanding of city life and reveals the emergence of a concept of public space that remains today a powerful, if unrealized, aspiration.

From the very beginning of architecture-long before the invention of masonry-buildings were constructed of wood. With its unique qualities of form, color, and structure, wood is the most reliable building material at the core of architecture. This epic history is the first comprehensive survey of the use of wood in architecture throughout the ages.The book is organized both chronologically and geographically. It surveys works from the oldest heritage of wooden buildings (Kyoto's Buddhist temples and Scandinavia's pagan-inspired stave churches) to the latest cutting-edge designs, proving that wood is on the rise as the preferred material in these ecologically conscious times.No region of the world with a native tradition of building with wood is left out. In North America, the book demonstrates the European origins of New England's clapboards and saltboxes, and later shows how such sophisticated California architects as Greene & Greene or Bernard Maybeck could blend age-old traditions of the Far East and Switzerland with a Pacific Coast sense of novelty and whimsy. Spectacular and diverse photographs highlight the architectural masterpieces of wooden architecture throughout the world, illustrating that wood is a building material with a deep history as well as a vibrant future.

Almost forty years after the publication of Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition, the subject of invented traditions—cultural and historical practices that claim a continuity with a distant past but which are in fact of relatively recent origin—is still relevant, important, and highly contentious. Invented Traditions in North and South Korea examines the ways in which compressed modernity, Cold War conflict, and ideological opposition has impacted the revival of traditional forms in both Koreas. The volume is divided thematically into sections covering: (1) history, religions, (2) language, (3) music, food, crafts, and finally, (4) space. It includes chapters on pseudo-histories, new religions, linguistic politeness, literary Chinese, p’ansori, heritage, North Korean food, architecture, and the invention of children’s pilgrimages in the DPRK. As the first comparative study of invented traditions in North and South Korea, the book takes the reader on a journey through Korea’s epic twentieth century, examining the revival of culture in the context of colonialism, decolonization, national division, dictatorship, and modernization. The book investigates what it describes as “monumental” invented traditions formulated to maintain order, loyalty, and national identity during periods of political upheaval as well as cultural revivals less explicitly connected to political power. Invented Traditions in North and South Korea demonstrates that invented traditions can teach us a great deal about the twentieth-century political and cultural trajectories of the two Koreas. With contributions from historians, sociologists, folklorists, scholars of performance, and anthropologists, this volume will prove invaluable to Koreanists, as well as teachers and students of Korean and Asian studies undergraduate courses.

Villa Madama, Raphael's late masterwork of architecture, landscape, and decoration for the Medici popes, is a paradigm of the Renaissance villa. The creation of this important, unfinished complex provides a remarkable case study for the nature of architectural invention. Drawing on little known poetry describing the villa while it was on the drawing board, as well as ground plans, letters, and antiquities once installed there, Yvonne Elet reveals the design process to have been a dynamic, collaborative effort involving humanists as well as architects. She explores design as a self-reflexive process, and the dialectic of text and architectural form, illuminating the relation of word and image in Renaissance architectural practice. Her revisionist account of architectural design as a process engaging different systems of knowledge, visual and verbal, has important implications for the relation of architecture and language, meaning in architecture, and the translation of idea into form.