New Books in Architecture
327 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 11 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Architecture about their New Books
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Episodes
Victoria Perry, "A Bittersweet Heritage: Slavery, Architecture and the British Landscape" (Hurst, 2022)
March 14, 2024 08:00 - 54 minutesThe 2020 toppling of slave-trader Edward Colston's statue by Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol was a dramatic reminder of Britain's role in trans-Atlantic slavery, too often overlooked. Yet the legacy of that predatory economy reaches far beyond bronze memorials; it continues to shape the entire visual fabric of the country. Architect Victoria Perry explores the relationship between the wealth of slave-owning elites and the architecture and landscapes of Georgian Britain. She reveals h...
Piotr Florczyk, "Swimming Pool" (Bloombury, 2024)
March 12, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesThis instalment of the Object Lessons series focuses on the Swimming Pool (Bloomsbury, 2024). The book explores the pool as a place where humans seek to attain the unique union between mind and body. As a former world-ranked swimmer whose journey toward naturalisation and U.S. citizenship began with a swimming fellowship, Piotr Florczyk reflects on his own adventures in swimming pools while taking a closer look at artists, architects, writers, and others who have helped to cement the swimming...
Hsuan L. Hsu, "Air Conditioning" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
March 08, 2024 09:00 - 44 minutesAir conditioning aspires to be unnoticed. Yet, by manipulating the air around us, it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical, mental, and emotional experience. From offices and libraries to contemporary art museums and shopping malls, climate control systems shore up the fantasy of a comfortable, self-contained body that does not have to reckon with temperature. At the same time that air conditioning makes temperature a non-issue in (some) people's daily lives, thermoceptio...
Sarah El-Kazaz, "Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul" (Duke UP, 2023)
February 15, 2024 09:00 - 51 minutesIn Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul (Duke UP, 2023), Sarah El-Kazaz takes readers into the world of urban planning and design practices in Istanbul and Cairo. In this transnational ethnography of neighborhoods undergoing contested rapid transformations, she reveals how the battle for housing has shifted away from traditional political arenas onto private crevices of the city. She outlines how multiple actors—from highly capitalize...
Kateryna Malaia, "Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room: Domestic Architecture before and after 1991" (Northern Illinois UP, 2023)
January 07, 2024 09:00 - 44 minutesIn Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room: Domestic Architecture Before and After 1991 (Northern Illinois UP, 2023) Kateryna Malaia examines the transformation of domestic spaces and architecture during the period of perestroika (1985-1991) and the first post-Soviet decades. In analysing how Soviet and post-Soviet city dwellers altered their homes amidst a period of profound socio-cultural change, Malaia provides unique insight into the relationship between the transformation of domestic ...
Seth Bernard, "Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy" (Oxford UP, 2018)
January 07, 2024 09:00 - 35 minutesBuilding Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018), offers a holistic treatment of the development of the Mid-Republican city from 396 to 168 BCE. As Romans established imperial control over Italy and beyond, the city itself radically transformed from an ambitious central Italian settlement into the capital of the Mediterranean world. Seth Bernard describes this transformation in terms of both new urban architecture, much of it unprecedent...
Virginia Chieffo Raguin, "The Illuminated Window: Stories Across Time" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
January 05, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesThe Illuminated Window: Stories Across Times (Reaktion, 2023) is a unique journey through stained-glass installations that spans both time and place. Diverse in technique and style, these windows speak for the communities that created them. From the twelfth to the twenty-first century, we find in the windows stories of conflict, commemoration, devotion and celebration. Dr. Virginia Chieffo Raguin is our guide through the cathedrals of Chartres, Canterbury and Cologne, and takes us from Paris’...
Susanna Phillips Newbury, "The Speculative City: Art, Real Estate, and the Making of Global Los Angeles" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
January 04, 2024 09:00 - 38 minutesUnderlying every great city is a rich and vibrant culture that shapes the texture of life within. In The Speculative City: Art, Real Estate, and the Making of Global Los Angeles (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Susanna Phillips Newbury teases out how art and Los Angeles shaped one another’s evolution. She compellingly articulates how together they transformed the Southland, establishing the foundation for its contemporary art infrastructure, and explains how artists came to influence Los Angeles’s ...
Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, "Open Plan: A Design History of the American Office" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
December 28, 2023 09:00 - 50 minutesAlbeit inspired by a progressive vision of a working environment without walls or hierarchies, the open plan office has come to be associated with some of the most dehumanizing and alienating aspects of the modern office. Jennifer Kaufman-Buhler's fascinating new book Open Plan: A Design History of the American Office (Bloomsbury, 2021) examines the history of the open plan office concept from its early development in the late 1960s and 1970s, through its present-day dominance in working spac...
Daniel Campo, "Postindustrial DIY: Recovering American Rust Belt Icons" (Fordham UP, 2023)
December 20, 2023 09:00 - 37 minutesA pioneering Detroit automobile factory. A legendary iron mill at the edge of Pittsburgh. A campus of concrete grain elevators in Buffalo. Two monumental train stations, one in Buffalo, the other in Detroit. These once noble sites have since fallen from their towering grace. As local elected leaders did everything they could to destroy what was left of these places, citizens saw beauty and utility in these industrial ruins and felt compelled to act. Postindustrial DIY: Recovering American Rus...
Tristan G. Brown, "Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China" (Princeton UP, 2023)
December 11, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesWelcome to another episode of New Books in Chinese Studies. I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and I am speaking today to Prof. Tristan Brown about his book, Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China (Princeton UP, 2023). Brown’s book considers fengshui, that is, the knowledge of orienting structures, such as graves and houses, in accordance with well-established cosmological principles, as an administrative technology and language of power that was intrinsic to governance ...
Joshua Skarf, "ArchitecTorah: Architectural Ideas in Judaism and the Weekly Torah Portion" (Urim, 2023)
December 02, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesJoshua Skarf's book ArchitecTorah: Architectural Ideas in Judaism and the Weekly Torah Portion (Urim, 2023) is a collection of 178 short essays that investigate the Torah through the lens of architecture. Each essay briefly introduces a piece of architectural theory, a building, or a section of building code and then reexamines a well-known topic in the Torah to uncover new and insightful interpretations. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and...
Daniel Jütte, "Transparency: The Material History of an Idea" (Yale UP, 2023)
December 01, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourTransparency is a mantra of our day. It is key to the Western understanding of a liberal society. We expect transparency from, for instance, political institutions, corporations, and the media. But how did it become such a powerful—and global—idea? From ancient glass to Apple’s corporate headquarters, Transparency: the Material History of an Idea (Yale University Press, 2023) is the first to probe how Western people have experienced, conceptualized, and evaluated transparency. Dr. Daniel Jütt...
Richard Schoch, "Shakespeare’s House: A Window onto his Life and Legacy" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
November 29, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesIn the wide realm of Shakespeare worship, the house in Stratford-upon-Avon where William Shakespeare was born in 1564 – known colloquially as the 'Birthplace' – remains the chief shrine. It's not as romantic as Anne Hathaway's thatched cottage, it's not where he wrote any of his plays, and there's nothing inside the house that once belonged to Shakespeare himself. So why, for centuries, have people kept turning up on the doorstep? In Shakespeare’s House: A Window onto his Life and Legacy (Blo...
Lydia Zvyagintseva and Mary Greenshields, "Land in Libraries: Toward a Materialist Conception of Education" (Library Juice Press, 2022)
November 23, 2023 09:00 - 38 minutesThe question of land is largely absent in libraries. Deeply committed to the neoliberal project as a guiding ideology of the profession, libraries exist at once as ahistorical, atheoretical, and landless institutions in their understanding of themselves, their work, and their impact on people. Land in Libraries: Toward a Materialist Conception of Education (Library Juice Press, 2023) seeks to contribute to the growing body of work on libraries and the anthropocene, decolonization, and climate...
Ruth Dalton, "Living in Houses: A Personal History English Domestic Architecture" (Lund Humphries, 2022)
November 22, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesIn Living in Houses: A Personal History of English Domestic Architecture (Lund Humphries, 2022), Dr. Ruth Dalton presents a rich and rewarding history of houses in England through the stories of nine houses, dating from the 1600s to the 1980s, which have been inhabited by the author, an architect and academic. Chronologically ordered, the book covers rural vernacular houses from the 17th Century, Georgian and Victorian townhouses, villas and converted industrial buildings, Edwardian semis and...
Chad Randl and D. Medina Lasansky, "Playing Place: Board Games, Popular Culture, Space" (MIT Press, 2023)
November 09, 2023 09:00 - 37 minutesAn essay collection exploring the board game's relationship to the built environment, revealing the unexpected ways that play reflects perceptions of space. Board games harness the creation of entirely new worlds. From the medieval warlord to the modern urban planner, players are permitted to inhabit a staggering variety of roles and are prompted to incorporate preexisting notions of placemaking into their decisions. To what extent do board games represent the social context of their producti...
Faiza Moatasim, "Master Plans and Encroachments: The Architecture of Informality in Islamabad" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
October 30, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesAmong urban designers and municipal officials, the term encroachment is defined as a deviation from the official master plan. But in cities today, such informal modifications to the urban fabric are deeply enmeshed with formal planning procedures. Master Plans and Encroachments: The Architecture of Informality in Islamabad (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) examines informality in the high-modernist city of Islamabad as a strategic conformity to official schemes and regulations rather ...
Janice Rieger, "Design, Disability and Embodiment: Spatial Justice and Perspectives of Power" (Routledge, 2023)
October 04, 2023 08:00 - 31 minutesJanice Rieger's book Design, Disability and Embodiment: Spatial Justice and Perspectives of Power (Routledge, 2023) explores the spatial and social injustices within our streets, malls, schools, and public institutions. Taken-for-granted acts like going for a walk, seeing an exhibition with a friend, and going to school are, for people with disabilities, conditional or precluded acts due to exclusion by design. This book stimulates debate and discussion about current practice and studies in s...
Antony Kalashnikov, "Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time" (Cornell UP, 2023)
September 23, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesAntony Kalashnikov's Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time (Cornell UP, 2023) analyzes Stalinist monument-building. From the 1930's through the Great Patriotic War, architectural monuments such as subway stations were designed to emphasize the perpetual endurance of the nation, regardless of the many crises of the period. The contemporary popularity of Stalinist-era architectural forms has endured. Why this should be so is a question worth pondering, an...
Moisés Kopper, "Architectures of Hope: Infrastructural Citizenship and Class Mobility in Brazil's Public Housing" (U Michigan Press, 2022)
September 19, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesMoisés Kopper's Architectures of Hope: Infrastructural Citizenship and Class Mobility in Brazil's Public Housing (U Michigan Press, 2022) examines how communal idealism, electoral politics, and low-income consumer markets made first-time homeownership a reality for millions of low-income Brazilians over the last ten years. Drawing on a five-year-long ethnography among city planners, architects, street-level bureaucrats, politicians, market and bank representatives, community leaders, and past...
A Better Way to Buy Books
September 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesBookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communiti...
Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek, "After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time" (Verso, 2023)
September 06, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesDoes it ever feel like you have no free time? You come home after work and instead of finding a space of rest and relaxation, you're confronted by a pile of new tasks to complete – cooking, cleaning, looking after the kids, and so on. In After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time (Verso, 2023), Dr. Helen Hester and Dr. Nick Srnicek lay out how unpaid work in our homes has come to take up an ever-increasing portion of our lives – how the vacuum of free time has been taken up...
Shira Gill, "Organized Living: Solutions and Inspiration for Your Home" (Ten Speed Press, 2023)
September 03, 2023 08:00 - 28 minutesIn Organized Living: Solutions and Inspiration for Your Home (Ten Speed Press, 2023), Gill takes us on a global tour of home organizers learning organizing protips along the way. Kickstart your organized life with this inspiring visual guide from the author of Minimalista. “A fresh, global, and beautifully diverse perspective on calming the clutter.”—Kelli Lamb, author of Home with Rue and editorial director of Rue People are naturally curious about the homes of professional organizers. Organ...
Stephanie Barczewski, "How the Country House Became English (Reaktion, 2023)
August 23, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesHow the Country House Became English (Reaktion, 2023) by Dr. Stephanie Barczewski is an exploration of the evolution of the quintessentially English country house. Country houses have come to be regarded as quintessentially English, not only in terms of their architectural style but because they appear to embody national values of continuity and insularity. The histories of country houses and England, however, have featured episodes of violence and disruption, so how did country houses come t...
Christian Parreno, "Boredom, Architecture, and Spatial Experience" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
August 14, 2023 18:52 - 35 minutesBoredom is a ubiquitous feature of modern life. Endured by everyone, it is both cause and effect of modernity, and of situations, spaces and surroundings. As such, this book argues, boredom shares an intimate relationship with architecture-one that has been seldom explored in architectural history and theory. Boredom, Architecture, and Spatial Experience (Bloomsbury, 2021) investigates that relationship, showing how an understanding of boredom affords us a new way of looking at and understand...
Flora Samuel, "Housing for Hope and Wellbeing" (Routledge, 2022)
August 07, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesHousing and neighborhoods have an important contribution to make to our wellbeing and our sense of our place in the world. Housing for Hope and Wellbeing (Routledge, 2023), written for a lay audience (with policy makers firmly in mind) offers a useful and intelligible overview of our housing system and why it is in ‘crisis’ while acting as an important reminder of how housing contributes to social value, defined as community, health, self development and identity. It argues for a holistic dig...
Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information
August 02, 2023 20:02 - 16 minutesThe world is filling with ever more kinds of media, in ever more contexts and formats. Glowing rectangles have become part of the scene; screens, large and small, appear everywhere. Physical locations are increasingly tagged and digitally augmented. Amid this flood, your attention practices matter more than ever. You might not be able to tune this world out. So it is worth remembering that underneath all these augmentations and data flows, fixed forms persist, and that to notice them can impr...
Finola O'Kane, "Landscape Design and Revolution in Ireland and the United States, 1688-1815" (Paul Mellon Centre, 2023)
July 30, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesLandscape Design and Revolution in Ireland and the United States, 1688-1815 (Yale University Press, 2023) by Dr. Finola O’Kane explores how revolutionary ideas were translated into landscape design, encompassing liberty, equality, improvement and colonialism. Spanning the designed landscapes of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1776 and the Irish rebellion of 1798, with some detours into revolutionary France, this book traces a comparative history of property s...
Simone Ferracina, "Ecologies of Inception: Design Potentials on a Warming Planet" (Routledge, 2022)
July 08, 2023 08:00 - 29 minutesResponding to increasing levels of planetary pollution, waste generation, carbon dioxide emission and environmental collapse, Simone Ferracina's book Ecologies of Inception: Design Potentials on a Warming Planet (Routledge, 2022) re-thinks potentiality―an object’s ability to change―in architecture and design. The book problematizes the still-prevailing modern paradigm of design practice: the technical tabula rasa, a tendency to begin from scratch and use raw, amorphous, and obedient materials...
Bleak Houses: Disappointment and Failure in Architecture
June 29, 2023 21:29 - 18 minutesThe usual history of architecture is a grand narrative of soaring monuments and heroic makers. But it is also a false narrative in many ways, rarely acknowledging the personal failures and disappointments of architects. In Bleak Houses, Timothy Brittain-Catlin investigates the underside of architecture, the stories of losers and unfulfillment often ignored by an architectural criticism that values novelty, fame, and virility over fallibility and rejection. As architectural criticism promotes ...
Constant’s “New Babylon": An Interview with Jérémie McGowan
June 21, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutes“New Babylon” is an architectural and urban planning project designed by the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys between 1959 and 1974 in response to certain economic and social conditions he perceived to exist in the modern city: its emphasis on work and the production of capital, its highly-planned, gridded spaces. “New Babylon” put forward an ideal city planning model in which people would be able to enter a state of what Constant called homo ludens, “men at play.” “New Babylonians” would b...
The History of the American Shopping Mall and Its Cultures
June 19, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWriter and design critic Alexandra Lange talks about her book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Shopping Mall (Bloombury, 2023), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Meet Me by the Fountain is a history of the American shopping mall from its emergence to recent attempts to reinvent and reconceptualize the shells of “dead” shopping centers. Along the way, it details the mall’s many ironies and contradictions and how it became the center and icon of community and culture, es...
Gabriel Schwake, "Dwelling on the Green Line" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
June 17, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesToday I talked to Gabriel Schwake about his book Dwelling on the Green Line (Cambridge UP, 2022). Concealed within the walls of settlements along the Green-Line, the border between Israel and the occupied West-Bank, is a complex history of territoriality, privatisation and multifaceted class dynamics. Since the late 1970s, the state aimed to expand the heavily populated coastal area eastwards into the occupied Palestinian territories, granting favoured groups of individuals, developers and en...
Michael T. Friedman, "Mallparks: Baseball Stadiums and the Culture of Consumption" (Cornell UP, 2023)
June 07, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Mallparks: Baseball Stadiums and the Culture of Consumption (Cornell UP, 2023), Michael T. Friedman observes that as cathedrals represented power relations in medieval towns and skyscrapers epitomized those within industrial cities, sports stadiums exemplify urban American consumption at the turn of the twenty-first century. Grounded in Henri Lefebvre and George Ritzer's spatial theories in their analyses of consumption spaces, Mallparks examines how the designers of this generation of bas...
Celia Fisher, "The Story of Follies: Architectures of Eccentricity" (Reaktion Books, 2022)
June 04, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesIn The Story of Follies: Architectures of Eccentricity (Reaktion, 2023), Celia Fisher presents an amusing, informative guide to a fanciful and charming building, the folly. Are they frivolous or practical? Follies are buildings constructed primarily for decoration, but suggest another purpose through their appearance. In this superbly illustrated book Celia Fisher describes follies in their historical and architectural context, looks at their social and political significance and highlights t...
Publishing in Art, Architecture and Visual Culture
May 26, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesThis episode features discussions with Thomas Weaver (Senior Acquisitions Editor for Art and Architecture) and Victoria Hindley (Acquisitions Editor in Visual Culture and Design) about publishing in the fields of art, architecture, and visual culture, as part of our virtual attendance of the 2021 College Art Association Conference. Hosted and produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Suppor...
Infrastructural Brutalism: Art and the Necropolitics of Infrastructure
May 20, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesMichael Truscello, author of Infrastructural Brutalism: Art and the Necropolitics of Infrastructure, discusses the ways in which infrastructure determines who may live and who must die under contemporary capitalism. In this book, Michael Truscello looks at the industrial infrastructure not as an invisible system of connectivity and mobility that keeps capitalism humming in the background but as a manufactured miasma of despair, toxicity, and death. Truscello terms this “infrastructural brutal...
Garrett L. Washington, "Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
May 16, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourGarrett Washington’s Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan (Hawai’i 2022) brings a fresh perspective to the question of Protestant Christianity’s outsized influence in modernizing Japan from almost the moment the centuries-long ban was lifted in the 1870s. Washington roots his research in the physical space of Protestant houses of worship in Tokyo, exploring the ways that the churches became distinctively Japanese spaces and institutions that nurtured discourses and practices that affe...
Barbara Penner et al., "Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects" (Reaktion Books, 2021)
May 08, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourSo-called extinct objects are those that were imagined but were never in use, or that existed but are now unused—superseded, unfashionable, or simply forgotten. Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects (Reaktion Books, 2021) gathers together an exceptional range of artists, curators, architects, critics, and academics, including Hal Foster, Barry Bergdoll, Deyan Sudjic, Tacita Dean, Emily Orr, Richard Wentworth, and many more. In eighty-five essays, contributors nominate “extinct” objects an...
The Garage: A History
April 16, 2023 08:00 - 25 minutesOn this episode of the MIT Press podcast, Olivia Erlanger and Luis Ortega Govela discuss their book, Garage. Frank Lloyd Wright invented the garage when he moved the automobile out of the stable into a room of its own. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (allegedly) started Apple Computer in a garage. Suburban men turned garages into man caves to escape from family life. Nirvana and No Doubt played their first chords as garage bands. What began as an architectural construct became a cultural constru...
Howard Gillette, Jr., "The Paradox of Urban Revitalization: Progress and Poverty in America's Postindustrial Era" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
April 09, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn the twenty-first century, cities in the United States that had suffered most the shift to a postindustrial era entered a period widely proclaimed as an urban renaissance. From Detroit to Newark to Oakland and elsewhere commentators saw cities rising again. Yet revitalization generated a second urban crisis marked by growing inequality and civil unrest reminiscent of the upheavals associated with the first urban crisis in the mid-twentieth century. The urban poor and residents of color have...
Thresholds 46: SCATTER!
April 03, 2023 08:00 - 19 minutesAnne Graziano and Eliyahu Keller, editors of Thresholds 46: SCATTER!, talk about the mission of the journal; the making of the SCATTER! issue; the role of student journals; and how to make architectural knowledge and education more accessible. Established in 1992, Thresholds is the annual peer-reviewed journal produced by the MIT Department of Architecture. Each independently themed issue features content from leading scholars and practitioners in the fields of architecture, art, and culture....
Eva Hagberg, "When Eero Met His Match: Aline Louchheim Saarinen and the Making of an Architect" (Princeton UP, 2022)
April 01, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutesAline B. Louchheim (1914-1972) was an art critic on assignment for the New York Times in 1953 when she first met the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen. She would become his wife and the driving force behind his rise to critical prominence. When Eero Met His Match: Aline Louchheim Saarinen and the Making of an Architect (Princeton UP, 2022) draws on the couple's personal correspondence to reconstruct the early days of their thrilling courtship and traces Louchheim's gradual takeover of ...
Wake Smith, "Pandora's Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climate Intervention" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
March 28, 2023 08:00 - 29 minutesReaching net zero emissions will not be the end of the climate struggle, but only the end of the beginning. For centuries thereafter, temperatures will remain elevated; climate damages will continue to accrue and sea levels will continue to rise. Even the urgent and utterly essential task of reaching net zero cannot be achieved rapidly by emissions reductions alone. To hasten net zero and minimize climate damages thereafter, we will also need massive carbon removal and storage. We may even ne...
Larisa Grollemond and Bryan C. Keene, "The Fantasy of the Middle Ages: An Epic Journey through Imaginary Medieval Worlds" (Getty, 2022)
March 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThis abundantly illustrated book is an illuminating exploration of the impact of medieval imagery on three hundred years of visual culture. From the soaring castles of Sleeping Beauty to the bloody battles of Game of Thrones, from Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings to mythical beasts in Dungeons & Dragons, and from Medieval Times to the Renaissance Faire, the Middle Ages have inspired artists, playwrights, filmmakers, gamers, and writers for centuries. Indeed, no other historical era has c...
Kristin Hass, "Blunt Instruments: Recognizing Racist Cultural Infrastructure in Memorials, Museums, and Patriotic Practices" (Beacon Press, 2022)
March 26, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBlunt Instruments: Recognizing Racist Cultural Infrastructure in Memorials, Museums, and Patriotic Practices (Beacon Press, 2022) provides a field guide to the memorials, museums, and practices that commemorate white supremacy in the United States—and how to reimagine a more deeply shared cultural infrastructure for the future. Cultural infrastructure has been designed to maintain structures of inequality, and while it doesn’t seem to be explicitly about race, it often is. Blunt Instruments h...
Reinhold Martin, "Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University" (Columbia UP, 2021)
March 25, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhat do the technical practices, procedures, and systems that have shaped institutions of higher learning in the United States, from the Ivy League and women’s colleges to historically black colleges and land-grant universities, teach us about the production and distribution of knowledge? Addressing media theory, architectural history, and the history of academia, Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University (Columbia UP, 2021) reconceives the university as a ...
Jake Rudin and Erin Pellegrino, "Out of Architecture: The Value of Architects Beyond Traditional Practice" (Routledge, 2022)
March 25, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutesJake Rudin and Erin Pellegrino's book Out of Architecture: The Value of Architects Beyond Traditional Practice (Routledge, 2022) is both a call to reassess the architecture profession and its education, and a toolkit for graduates and working architects to untangle their skills, passions, and value from traditional architectural practice and consider alternate pathways. Written by design professionals and expert career consultants, this book is informed by numerous client accounts as well as ...
Brian Tokar and Tamra Gilbertson, "Climate Justice and Community Renewal: Resistance and Grassroots Solutions" (Routledge, 2020)
March 20, 2023 08:00 - 30 minutesBrian Tokar and Tamra Gilbertson's book Climate Justice and Community Renewal: Resistance and Grassroots Solutions (Routledge, 2020) brings together the voices of people from five continents who live, work, and research on the front lines of climate resistance and renewal. The many contributors to this volume explore the impacts of extreme weather events in Africa, the Caribbean and on Pacific islands, experiences of life-long defenders of the land and forests in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and...