Traces the significance of the human body in architecture from its early place as the divine organizing principle to its present near elimination

Crumbled shells of mosques in Iraq, the bombing of British cathedrals in World War II, the fall of the World Trade Center towers on September 11: when architectural totems such as these are destroyed by conflicts and the ravages of war, more than mere buildings are at stake. The Destruction of Memory reveals the extent to which a nation weds itself to its landscape; Robert Bevan argues that such destruction not only shatters a nation’s culture and morale but is also a deliberate act of eradicating a culture’s memory and, ultimately, its existence. Bevan combs through world history to highlight a range of wars and conflicts in which the destruction of architecture was pivotal. From Cortez’s razing of Aztec cities to the carpet bombings of Dresden and Tokyo in World War II to the war in the former Yugoslavia, The Destruction of Memory exposes the cultural war that rages behind architectural annihilation, revealing that in this subliminal assault lies the complex aim of exterminating a people. He provocatively argues for “the fatally intertwined experience of genocide and cultural genocide,” ultimately proposing the elevation of cultural genocide to a crime punishable by international law. In an age in which Frank Gehry, I. M. Pei, and Frank Lloyd Wright are revered and yet museums and temples of priceless value are destroyed in wars around the world, Bevan challenges the notion of “collateral damage,” arguing that it is in fact a deliberate act of war.

Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body brings together cutting-edge scholarship examining the myriad ways that architects, urban planners, medical practitioners, and everyday people have applied modern ideas about health and the body to the spaces in which they live, work, and heal. The book’s contributors explore North American and European understandings of the relationship between physical movement, bodily health, technological innovation, medical concepts, natural environments, and architectural settings from the nineteenth century through the heyday of modernist architectural experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s and onward into the 1970s. Not only does the book focus on how professionals have engaged with the architecture of healing and the body, it also explores how urban dwellers have strategized and modified their living environments themselves to create a kind of vernacular modernist architecture of health in their homes, gardens, and backyards. This new work builds upon a growing interdisciplinary field incorporating the urban humanities, geography, architectural history, the history of medicine, and critical visual studies that reflects our current preoccupation with the body and its corresponding therapeutic culture.

"These essays explore the historic and contemporary effects of race upon the development of the built environment, and examine the myths and realities of America's racial landscapes. Its multi-disciplinary approach identifies and interprets the black cultural landscape, examining its visual, spatial, and ideological dimensions.".

Architecture and designed landscapes serve as grand mnemonic devices that record and transmit vital aspects of culture and history. Spatial Recall casts a broad net over the concept of memory and gives a variety of perspectives from twelve internationally noted scholars, practicing designers, and artists such as Juhani Pallasmaa, Adriaan Geuze, Susan Schwartzenberg, Georges Descombes and Esther da Costa Meyer. Essays range from broad topics of message and audience to specific ones of landscape production. Beautifully illustrated, Spatial Recall is a comprehensive view of memory in the built environment, how we have read it in the past, and how we can create it in the future. Please note this is book is now printed digitally.

There have been five different settings that at one time or another have contained the dead body of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, organizer of the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923) and first president of the Republic of Turkey. Narrating the story of these different architectural constructions - the bedroom in Dolmabahçe Palace, Istanbul, where he died; a temporary catafalque in this same palace; his funeral stage in Turkey’s new capital Ankara; a temporary tomb in the Ankara Ethnographic Museum; and his permanent and monumental mausoleum in Ankara, known in Turkish as ‘Anitkabir’ (Memorial Tomb) - this book also describes and interprets the movement of Atatürk’s body through the cities of Istanbul and Ankara and also the nation of Turkey to reach these destinations. It examines how each one of these locations - accidental, designed, temporary, permanent - has contributed in its own way to the construction of a Turkish national memory about Atatürk. Lastly, the two permanent constructions - the Dolmabahçe Palace bedroom and Anitkabir - have changed in many ways since their first appearance in order to maintain this national memory. These changes are exposed to reveal a dynamic, rather than dull, impression of funerary architecture.

An extraordinary book that explores the art, architecture, and design of memorials around the world from the late twentieth century to today - an important book for our time