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DE sign:
(Deconstructing in-order to find new meanings)

A blogging space about my personal interests; was made during training in Stockholm #Young Leaders Visitors Program #Ylvp08 it developed into a social bookmarking blog.

I studied #Architecture; interested in #Design #Art #Education #Urban Design #Digital-media #social-media #Inhabited-Environments #Contemporary-Cultures #experimentation #networking #sustainability & more =)


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Showing posts with label #CSBE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #CSBE. Show all posts

Sunday, November 2

CSBE Book Lists on #Architecture II

This is a Followup post, kindly check
http://ylvp08woroud.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/csbe-book-lists-on-architecture.html


All is Copied of CSBE http://csbe.org/activities/favorite-book-lists-on-architecture-and-the-built-environment/



Favorite Book Lists on Architecture and the Built Environment


Rami Farouk Daher
CEO: TURATH: Architecture & Urban Design Consultants
Amman, Jordan
I read this book at a later stage in my academic and professional life, specifically in 2001 while spending a sabbatical at the University of California, Berkeley. I even read it twice as I did not understand much of it the first time around. This book not only introduced me to the concept of “discourse,” but also helped me understand how ‘ideas’ are formed and how they are related to practices of power, which is conceived beyond the over-simplistic binary structural separation of ‘empowered’ and ‘dominator’ on the one hand, and ‘marginalized’ and ‘dominated’ on the other. I was able to project many concepts I have learnt from this book onto real-life situations through projects I have worked on relating to building, architecture, and place transformations.  This book, together with other writings by Foucault, triggered me to reveal, qualify, and grant voice to disguised and subjugated ‘local’ realities and knowledge.
I have developed an interest over the years in the epistemologies of knowledge. This book on the phenomenology of architecture introduced me to notions of place, and to an understanding of a higher order and of a different nature of such notions. Norberg-Schulz, who was influenced by Martin Heidegger, helped me arrive at a phenomenological understanding of place beyond its physical qualities and even beyond a ‘romantic’ and over-simplified relationship between place and the individual.  The meaning of place accordingly reveals itself to you based on the nature of your level of engagement and understanding.  Again, and as is the case with the first book in this list, a second reading of this book - and especially after reading Heidegger as well - revealed ‘hidden’ concepts that were not clear to me the first time around I read it, and helped me arrive at a different level of understanding of place.
This remarkable narrative on Modern architecture presented to me architectural, technical, and territorial transformation that took place in Europe and the United States during the past three centuries. Embedded in social theory and political economy, I consider this book a fundamental reference to the understanding of Modernity as a cultural movement of change and transformation that also affected the rest of the world - including our Arab World - towards the end of the first half of the twentieth century.  
I find Edward Said a fascinating personality, and his book Orientalism an eye opener. It is true that he borrowed many concepts, and specifically the relationship between the production of knowledge and the exercise of power, from Michel Foucault, but he brilliantly projected these concepts on theOrient to be conceived as discourse and discussed how the West ‘appropriated,’ talked about, described, and inscribed the Orient during the past two centuries. The details of such a process are so fascinating. Even today, many local Arab institutions and individuals unfortunately still perpetuate such concepts in their practices in many fields related to cultural production, architecture, education, and tourism, to mention a few.
I have developed over the past twenty years or so an interest in public space, not only in terms of understanding its processes of production, but also its design and occupation. This fascinating book, which concentrates on contemporary trends in the design of open and public space, addresses the challenge of delineating and building a new identify as well as searching for a new meaning for this transient and continually-transforming category: open and public space. The book looks at space beyond the binary division of ‘building’ and ‘landscape,’ and rather investigates landscape urbanism through emerging ‘surfaces,’ ‘verticals,’ ‘enclosures,’ ‘shelters,’ and ‘events.’

November 2, 2014


Han Tumertekin
Principal and Founder, Mimarlar Tasarim Danismanlik LtdIstanbul, Turkey

Editor's note: Han Tumertekin's list is different from previous lists we have published so far in that he chose to present his books through a narrative that is defined by the challenges he faced as a student joining Istanbul Technical University in 1976, when Turkey was undergoing intense political turbulences.

When I was admitted to Istanbul Technical University (ITU) in 1976, an informal civil war was going on in Turkey. Each day, nearly twenty people were killed due to the conflict between rightists and leftists. This troubling period lasted until the army’s intervention in 1980. In this kind of an environment, it was unavoidable that education would be hampered, especially at ITU, which was a leftist university. One positive outcome of those difficult years – during which many paid a serious price, both socially and personally - was that we had a good amount of time to read. Naturally, the majority of the books read and the arguments discussed were political. The discussions were very intense and everything was open to discussion. This condition also applied to architectural education. My education was supposed to begin with a period where reading was as important as drawing, but due to boycotts, the start date of the term was delayed from September to May. I used the incredible amount of free time I had to read books that my brother picked for me. That is how I started to read about architecture.
One of the first books I read during that period was Bruno Zevi’s Apprendre A Voir L’Architecture(1948; translated into English under the title of Architecture as Space: How to Look at Architecture). I suppose that my unexpectedly easy understanding of the concept of “space” comes from two drawings in Zevi’s book that consisted of plans of Saint Peter’s Cathedral in Rome placed side by side. In one plan, he marked the walls and columns to attract attention to the void. In the other, he marked the void instead. Through this comparison, I understood that the “void” is not what remains after one removes the walls and columns, but that it actually has a body and a mass itself. Zevi presented an amazing way to make the void visible.
During that same period, I also read Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (1941). The book was about how modern architecture emerged through industrial developments, and how it is still developing through various dynamics. For instance, the invention of the elevator and the development of structural steel enabled the building of skyscrapers. These kinds of relationships made me understand that architecture cannot only be handled in a formal world that merely involves the manipulation of forms, spaces, and surfaces.
Following that, I read Auguste Choisy’s Histoire De L’Architecture (1899), which chose drawings of some structures that also showed their building processes. I was so impressed by the book’s bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye sectional axonometrics that showed both spaces and supports. It is a technique that I still use when sketching. These drawings made me realize that we always need to think about the entire components of the space together with the plan.
I also read the French translation of Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture(1966; De L’Ambiguite En Architecture). It is an important book as it warns the mind, which is busy creating spaces, about the use of these spaces. I remember being impressed with the way Venturi refers to the normal behaviors of everyday life to discuss space. I realized through reading this book that architecture is not about building structures; it is more about designing spaces, which allow us to live in an organized fashion. I remember how enlightened I felt after reading how staircases not only work as circulation systems, but also as spaces as one may sit on their steps and have a chat.
October 1, 2014

Emre Arolat
Founding Partner, EAA - Emre Arolat Architects
Istanbul, Turkey

Without any doubt, this classic work, which has been republished numerous times, is one of the most influential sources on modern architectural thought. Sigfried Giedion (1888 – 1968) was an important historian and a significant actor in the Modern Movement. He was the first secretary-general of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) in 1928, and had very close contacts with the pioneers of Modern Architecture. All this makes this book very enticing.
A Pattern Language, which is the second in a three-book series that Alexander wrote, had a very assuasive effect on me during my university studies. I remember the comfort and confidence I felt when I finished reading this book as I was struggling with other cumbersome texts. As a very rough summary, I can describe it as a long text that uses several scales, different ranges, and various instruments to scan the whole architectural field and build a perceptible working document about designing and constructing the various elements of the built environment.
“La Tendenza” was the pioneering international architectural movement that came out of Italy in the post-war period. As a practicing architect, Rossi was the leader of this movement, but he also was an influential theorist. The Architecture of the City is his major written work and is a critique of the Modern Movement that focuses on cities and emphasizes the collective memory and the public realm. I remember how as a university student I had a lot of difficulty reading this book in French. I found it boring and confusing. A few years later, I tried to read it in English, but still found it boring, and I realized that the problem was not with the language in which I read it. Just like his buildings, Rossi’s writings are important and deserve to be considered very carefully, but they are not easy to live with. Despite that, this book is one of my all-time favorites, as is the case with most of Rossi’s buildings.
Some say that Lynch’s The Image of the City is as important as Camillo Sitte’s The Art of Building Cities. Others find it too formalistic. It is one of my favorite writings about large-scale design theory. This easy to follow book discusses environmental images in our urban lives by mostly analyzing the central areas of three American cities: Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles, and by focusing on the evaluation of city form. In addition to the readability of whole text, its images, maps and other graphics are extremely clear and informative.
I find this book by far the most useful and impressive source about early modern Turkish Architecture. Architectural historian Sibel Bozdogan expresses the cultural history of a very critical period in the evolution of modern Turkey, which begins with the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and extends until 1950, when Kemal Ataturk’s Republican People’s Party was first voted out of power. The text is very valuable not only because of the information it provides us about the architectural approaches of this era, but also because it sheds light on the complex relationship that took place between modernity and nationalism in Turkey.
This work by Juhani Pallasmaa is a significant criticism of the domination of sight over the other four senses in architectural culture and design. The book is a revelation for its readers, and it provides new and fresh insights regarding architectural culture.
This collection of writings includes essays by more than forty important historians, critics, and architects, including Christopher Alexander, Alan Colquhoun, B. V. Doshi, Kenneth Frampton, Sigfried Giedion, Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra, Suha Ozkan, Juhani Pallasmaa, and James Stirling. The book provides a very useful exploration of the concept of regionalist thinking in architecture, which is extremely important today as the notion and sense of “place” is being rapidly crushed and blurred under the influence of global neo-liberalism.
September 7, 2014

Nora Akawi
Curator, Studio X, Amman LabColumbian University Middle East Research Center, Columbia Global Centers
Amman, Jordan
This volume was my first encounter, as a first-year architecture student, with architectural theory. The texts included here provided me with the tools to begin exploring the relationship between architecture and politics.
This book was recommended to me by my advisor, Professor Felicity Scott, as I was working on my thesis focusing on the political role of the archive in imagining alternative political and spatial organization. This book, which culminated from a symposium held at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1998, made it impossible to think about the politics of the archive in Palestine without studying the South African experience. This might, at first glance, seem irrelevant to the built environment, unless we understand the city as the surface of inscription of events and cultures. The process of selecting of the narratives which are to take part in the official archive of a place or a state (whether through the preservation of places, documents, or oral histories), and consequently the erasure (destruction) of those rendered invisible, directly shapes our built environment.
Illustrating the impossibility of democracy without conflict, Jacques Rancière offers the tools to explore and experiment with visual representations of the multiplicity of (conflicting) narratives existing within a territory, and of the stages where those left "unselected" from the official archive (see above) are given space to perform.
I only regret getting to this book as late as I did. I wish I would have had it accompany me from the first day I began my journey as an architecture student.
Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 2008
Since this list is meant to contain books rather than film, this one stands for fiction and the city. Whether through films or novels, I want to stress the importance of the narrative and the experiential in portraying or imagining a place and exploring the political, economic, and social forces that shape it.

August 4, 2014



Tuesday, July 1

CSBE Book Lists on #Architecture

Favorite Book Lists on Architecture and the Built Environment

Copied of CSBE http://csbe.org/activities/favorite-book-lists-on-architecture-and-the-built-environment/

"CSBE has asked a number of distinguished colleagues to each provide us with a list of their favorite books on architecture and the built environment, and to explain why they selected those books. A new list will be added to the CSBE website periodically."

 

Nasser Rabbat

Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic ArchitectureDepartment of ArchitectureMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
This is both a story of an unusual architectural experience, the building of the village of New Gourna in Upper Egypt, and a loosely-structured philosophical musing on society, ecology, poverty, pride, craft, the built environment, modes of empowerment, and architectural professional engagement in community building.  It is also the book that marked my formation as an architect more than any other book, even though I came to be very critical of the book and the ideas of Hassan Fathy later on when I became a historian and a critic.  I read the book in its French edition in one night in 1978 (No Arabic edition was yet available anyway).  I was a fourth-year architecture student looking for ideas for a graduation project.  Fathy’s book was a revelation, an eye-opener, almost a transcendental experience (for a materialist man at least).  I stayed up all night reading and bursting with identifications with what I read.  Not only did the book inspire my graduation project but also my plans for my academic and intellectual future.  It was through my interest in environmentally sensitive architecture, which I learned from Fathy, that I graduated to looking at historical examples, and ultimately to history pure and simple.  I also learned from Fathy a certain architectural idealism, which still informs my academic politics, and a certain social realism, extracted negatively from Fathy’s writing, which still encumbers my attempts to be optimistic towards the possibility of building a fair and civic society in the Arab and Islamic worlds without a critical and sustained struggle against established socioeconomic and religious structures.
Grabar was my PhD advisor and I learned a lot from him, both in the classroom and outside, mostly over meals or drinks.  He was a charming, sublimely erudite scholar.  His impact on the study of Islamic art and architecture is immeasurable.  His opus magnum was The Formation of Islamic Art: a series of highly speculative and provocative lectures delivered in the early 1970s, the book remains till today one of the most thoughtful attempts to theorize Islamic art and architecture.  Focusing on the problems of the emergence of Islamic art and architecture in the first three centuries Hegira and their relationship to the art of Byzantium and Persia, the book investigates how a nascent Islamic artistic tradition acquired and disseminated distinct forms and meanings primarily in conjunction with its cultural, social, and ideological contexts.  This strongly historicizing framework gives the book its energy and underscores its palpable sense of purpose.  It also endows it with remarkable coherence despite the otherwise selective character of its content.  But the book's significance lies ultimately not in answering questions about the formation of Islamic art, which it actually avoids doing; it is rather in setting the tone for a whole generation of historians of Islamic art and architecture to begin to reassess the geographic, historical, religious, and cultural boundaries of their discipline.  As such, The Formation of Islamic Art became the foundation upon which most historical interpretations in the field have depended until now.
Candilis was an Azeri/Greek/French member of Team Ten, but I did not know that when I first met him.  He was the teacher of one of my teachers, who was not particularly kind, but very intelligent, and who invited Candilis to give a talk at our school at the University of Damascus. I was mesmerized by the life story of the architect and its entanglement both with his professional pursuit and his architectural modernist ideology.  Reading his book later just reconfirmed my first impression.  Here was a compassionate modernist who tried to practice what he preached, even when his firm was involved in very large, government-sponsored projects.  He and his two partners built elegant, streamlined housing projects and university campuses in the Arab world that distilled the essence of a self-historicizing, or evolutive, modernism.  His book reads like a novel with a strong but utterly sympathetic central character with a strong mission who managed to convince colleagues, bureaucrats, and ordinary citizens of the validity of his design, and built it.
This short, sweet, and lyrical book opened my eyes to the aesthetics of environmentally responsive design.  Scanning the history of spatial and architectural solutions to environmental constraints from Roman bath to Islamic gardens, Heschong presents a convincing argument about the embeddedness of environmental considerations in many human activities, cultural preferences, and design.  She explores how the senses work together to achieve what she terms delight in architecture: an aspiration for architecture akin to the kind of feeling one experience with music, nature, and art.  This small book was like an exegesis for me as I was negotiating my way around the hard science of climatology, passive solar design, and the mechanics of sustainability during my March years at UCLA.  I recommend it to every architect committed to environmentally responsive design who wants to maintain the ethics and aesthetics of his/her commitment.
April 17, 2014

 

Nadim Karam

Founder, Nadim karam & Atelier Hapsitus
Beirut, Lebanon
I remember buying this book from a bookshop in Aoyama, Tokyo that always stayed open until 3am – often the best time for browsing through books. Nitschke’s perceptive anthropological approach to Japanese concepts of space and time through their rituals, language, and culture is a fascinating read that gives depth to Japanese spatial concepts that have now become familiar in the West.
Rudofsky spent a lifetime challenging the traditional boundaries of architecture, touching on anthropology, fashion, and design with his curiosity and desire to heighten the sensuality of the daily business of living, eating, and dressing through design. Architecture without Architects is the product of his many travels, a humbling lesson to us architects about the beautiful simplicity of indigenous architecture.
This book was offered to me by one of my students, who felt that there are similarities between my work and Hejduk's. The book is full of drawings, plots, scenarios, objects, and subjects, all of which are intermingled with extravagant ideas and architectural shapes /installations full of imagination, elevating the observer to a parallel world full of dreams and stories.
This is a book to savor slowly. The contrast between the rigorous mathematical organization of the 55 cities that the book features in its eleven chapters and the poetry of the description of each of the cities in a manner that is not bound by any urban or physical limitations is wonderful. There is also the poignancy of the encounters between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Not sharing a common language, they are free to wander together through the imaginative potentialities of cities, using only visuals.
This book, of course, was the product of September 11, 2011 and its aftermath in European cities that spurred a whole new enquiry into terrorism, war, and cities. I was writing “Can Cities Dream?” at the eve of our own summer war in 2006, when we had to leave Lebanon suddenly. I remember coming across this book, and how it struck a chord with me. Virilio writes in the grey areas between physics, philosophy, politics, and urbanism - sometimes straying into anecdotes, but then comes back with a perceptive punch.
May 4, 2014

 

Rahul Mehrotra

Professor and Chair, Department of Urban Planning and Design
Graduate School of Design
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
The following are books I read during my first three years of architectural education, and they continue to be the ones that I would say have had the greatest influence on me, and that also have stayed with me.
This book showed me how to think outside the box. The author systematically deconstructs the taboos that condition our thinking - which often limit creativity on account of the biases we already have embedded in our minds. I read this book during the month I entered architecture school, and it was the greatest introduction one could get to conceptual thinking as a critical tool for design.
This book is a classic in that through abstraction, Christopher Alexander blurs the boundaries between the vernacular, timeless, modern, and the everyday, as well as between architecture and the way people inhabit space. Besides equipping designers to think at the fine grain, it also was for me a great introduction to design research and its usefulness as we observe the world around us
The mind-blowing thing about this book was that besides communicating through its title the finite nature of our planet and its resources (something that took the world many decades to articulate), it provided an amazing insight into how systems are interconnected and into the synergies that are critical to creating a sustainable and efficient management of the planet. But the concepts here were also a fabulous introduction to understanding cities and more complex landscapes.
In some sense, this was my introduction to ecology, environmentalism, and optimistic thinking. A wonderful format of quotes, stories, ideas, and projections of the future collide in this little paperback. It went on to become a trilogy with the Peter Principle and Peter Prescription. I would describe The Peter Plan as a primer that gave real images (through people and stories) to what books like Silent Spring and other literature on environmentalism from the early 1970 were warning us about.
This is a seminal book, which I read the year after it was published. It was confusing for me as a student on account of the richness of its disparate images, but it added an incredible dimension to the otherwise pure historical narratives we were being offered in architecture school. Studying in India, this book also made sense because as students we saw the coexistence of many architectural vocabularies in the Indian urban landscape, and the book’s arguments were therefore familiar to us. But, fortunately, as one saw the implications of post-modernism, the book finally taught me to watch out for the pitfalls of the superficial caricaturing of history in contemporary architecture.
May 18, 2014

 

George Katodrytis

Associate Professor of ArchitectureAmerican University of SharjahSharjah, United Arab Emirates
 
This novel makes you see cities differently. This book is like space; every time you revisit it has a different meaning. You should read it at the beginning of your architectural career. It will open a new world of spatial possibilities that will make sense every time you visit a new city. You should also read this book before you visit Venice.
This book is a series of essays on contemporary architecture using the uncanny and alienation as a way to understand why architecture can be fragmented. The complexity of space is related to the "unhomely" modern condition.
All architects should be urbanists. This book is a manifesto about the city, the street, its media, its anarchy, and the visual interpretation of complex urban systems. It elevates the collective and participatory condition of culture into a mainstream popular approach.
Moving beyond looking at cities as romantic places made of historic squares and pedestrians, this book - through the analysis of Las Vegas - celebrates the system and dynamics of speed, of signs, of surfaces, and of artificiality. Read this book and then drive through the city.
Architectural space, like a film script, can only be experienced through time. This book is a visual essay of photographs, notations, and tectonics, constructing narratives of experience and events to geometric spaces. I bought this book in Paris when I worked with Bernard Tschumi. The next day in the office, I understood better the Parc de la Villette project. Read this book before you visit New York.
The technology of optics and war machines was in effect a simulation of space as image and representation. This book will open possibilities of looking at architectural space as illusion with edited sequence of scenes as though looking through a viewfinder. Read this book before you go to a film.
June 1, 2014


Mohammad al-Asad

Founding Director
Center for the Study of the Built Environment
Amman, Jordan

I consider James Ackerman, who is 94 years old, to be one of the greatest architectural historians of our day. This book presents an example of superb writing on architectural history, theory, and criticism. Ackerman's writing is clear, concise, incisive, and illuminating. One only wishes that most of today's architectural historians and critics are able to write half as well as and half as clearly as he does.
I do not recall who it was, but someone once wrote that if he is stranded on a deserted island and could only have one book, it would be this one. The book provides a most useful guide for designing architectural elements, spaces, and environments, ranging from a window to a kitchen to a town. It provides very thoughtful information based on how people interact with and relate to the built world around them.
This book features in-depth and honest conversations about architecture with a number of the great architects of their time including Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson, Charles Moore, Paul Rudolph, Robert Venturi, and Denis Scott Brown. I read it as a third-year student of architecture; it transformed my understanding of architecture.
Jan Gehl is one of the great urbanists of our time, as is evident in his design / planning work and his writings. Our understanding today of how cities may interact with people in a humane manner that values the pedestrian and celebrates public spaces where all can come together is very much influenced by Gehl's work and by his writings, including New City Spaces.
William Mitchell died prematurely in 2010. He was a true visionary. He wrote beautifully and insightfully about how the ongoing revolutionary changes affecting information technologies are transforming our built environments and how we interact with them. Much of what he predicted in his writings is taking place today.
Witold Rybczynski has an ability to communicate the complexities of architecture and urbanism in a crisp and clear manner to both specialists and to the general audience, but without descending into oversimplification and overgeneralization. In the first of these two books, he addresses the evolution of the house; in the second, he addresses the evolution of the city.
This book has been reprinted a number of times, most lately in 2009. It provides a sharp and witty attack on both Modern and Post-modern architecture. It also serves as a strong reminder to architects that they should not take themselves too seriously, for their influence on society and on the built environment is far more limited than they wish to believe.

D. Fairchild Ruggles

Professor of art, architecture and landscape history
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Editor’s note: After publishing a number of the lists of favorite books on architecture and the built environment, we received a note from Professor D. (Dede) Fairchild Ruggles pointing out the absence of books written by women in the lists. She commented that the lists imply that women have not written any interesting books on architecture and the built environment. The lists obviously express the choices of their individual authors and do not make claims of universalism. Still, Dede’s comments do point out the fact that the lists published so far do not fully cover the considerable diversity and richness of contemporary architectural writing, particularly in relation to gender.
Consequently we asked Dede, who herself is an accomplished author, if she would share with us a booklist that presents her selection of the writings of prominent women authors on architecture and the built environment, and also asked her if she would provide a short introduction to the list that addresses the issue of gender and the practice of writing on architecture and the built environment. In response, she developed the list and introductory comments provided below.
With Dede’s list, our endeavor on favorite booklists begins to feature a richer and more diverse selection of writings on architecture and the built environment. We very much thank her for that.
 
Gender is often treated as an intervention in a practice of architectural history and theory that is already in place, already gendered as male, and on which it therefore has a marginal impact. This notion of limited intervention is not a description of how things actually are, but rather a byproduct of the continuing blindness to gender as a significant force in the making of the built environment and writing about it. However, since Joan Scott’s famous “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis” first appeared in 1986, it is no longer tenable to assert or imply through omission that gender doesn’t matter. Gender is an important aspect of how we think and write about architecture. Just as it affects the space that we write about, it has a formative effect on the writers themselves. Among other things, gender awareness teaches us to be cognizant of how we construct lists and canons that, although written with innocent intentions, serve to exclude not only women but also non-Europeans and others characterized by religious, ethnic, class, or sexual difference, the canon both creating the category of difference and then using it to justify exclusion. Awareness is key here. The incomplete list of key authors below who wrote classic texts and/or changed what we know about the built environment is a modest intervention that places women back into the conversation about favorite writers about architecture.
Wilhelmina Jashemski, Gardens of Pompeii (published in two volumes in 1979 and 1993)
This archaeological work on the gardens of Pompeii literally created a new field of study. Instead of seeing Roman (and all other) gardens entirely through the lens of literature, Wilhelmina Jashemski has allowed us to view them as archaeologically knowable entities, thus giving us a better understanding of their forms and materials.
Dolores Hayden draws important, ground-breaking connections between politics, urban space, gender, and ethnicity. Her work has provided us with a richer understanding of how Americans of diverse backgrounds have shaped their landscapes, towns, and buildings.
This book became an instant classic, stimulating architects and historians to think about registers of design that are typically ignored by architects as tasteless and yet are encountered constantly in the everyday landscape: billboards, signs, motels, parking lots, and casinos. It demands that architects “learn from the existing landscape” and “gain insight from the commonplace.”
Gwendolyn Wright writes about urbanism, the role of history in architectural design schools, and architectural history, especially the history of domestic housing. Housing — and there are far more ordinary homes built than grand museums, palaces, and public buildings — is a virtually ignored field, but it is an architectural arena in which the impact of women consumers and non-professional builders becomes most visible.
Alice Friedman is a pioneer in writing about gender in European and American architecture. In Women and the Making of the Modern House Friedman investigates the role that women architectural patrons have taken on in transforming domestic architectural design. She examines a number of iconic houses of the twentieth century, and creates detailed portraits of these houses as well as of the people who commissioned, designed, and lived in them through examining personal letters, diaries, office records, photo albums, and interviews.
Labelle Prussin is a leading historian of African architecture. In African Nomadic Architecture she extensively explores the technologies, styles, designs, as well as the symbolic and ritual meanings of the tent and related vernacular architecture in various African cultures.
This edited collection has in a short space of time gained fundamental importance. The essays examine the historiographic and socio/cultural implications of the mapping of British architectural history with particular reference to eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain. They consider a range of writings from biographical and social histories to visual surveys and guidebooks. The book has become an essential reference on methods and critical approaches to architectural history, and also the kind of evidence used in its formation.
Other women scholars who have made an impact on my own work in Islamic architecture and landscape history include Janet Abu-Lughod, whose many publications include Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (1971); Nurhan Atasoy, whose Garden for the Sultan (2002) opened up the topic of Ottoman gardens; Catherine Asher, author of Architecture of Mughal India (1992), which is now the definitive source in that area; Naomi Miller, the historian of French and Italian Renaissance architecture as well as built garden elements such as fountains; and Ann Bermingham whose Landscape and Ideology (1986) illuminated the intimate yet masked connection between landscape and politics.

This Story was featured at the "Damascene Rose Window Weekly online Digital Publication" issue
https://paper.li/Woroud/1394570954?edition_id=80d28210-ce4d-11e3-a7b4-0025907210e9