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Architecture
Architecture May 20, 2022

Sixteenth Street NW

Washington, DC's Avenue of Ambitions

John DeFerrari and Douglas Peter Sefton

Hosted by Bryan Toepfer
Sixteenth Street NW in Washington, DC, has been called the Avenue of the Presidents, Executive Avenue, and the Avenue of Churches. From the front door of the White House, this …

Architecture

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Interviews with architects and scholars of architecture about their new books.

Art April 20, 2022

The Invention of Norman Visual Culture

Art, Politics, and Dynastic Ambition

Lisa Reilly

Hosted by Tanja Tolar
In The Invention of Norman Visual Culture: Art, Politics, and Dynastic Ambition (Cambridge UP, 2020), Lisa Reilly establishes a new interpretive paradigm for the eleventh and twelfth-century art and architecture …
Architecture April 19, 2022

Architecture, State Modernism and Cultural Nationalism in the Apartheid Capital

Hilton Judin

Hosted by Bryan Toepfer
Hilton Judin's book Architecture, State Modernism and Cultural Nationalism in the Apartheid Capital (Routledge, 2021) is the first comprehensive investigation of the architecture of the apartheid state in the period of …
Environmental Studies April 13, 2022

Wild by Design

The Rise of Ecological Restoration

Laura J. Martin

Hosted by Kathryn (Kate) Carpenter
Environmental restoration is a global pursuit and a major political concern. Governments, nonprofits, private corporations, and other institutions spend billions of dollars each year to remove invasive species, build wetlands …
General History April 1, 2022

Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages

Lucy Donkin

Hosted by Miranda Melcher
Dr. Lucy Donkin’s Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 2022) illuminates how the floor surface shaped the ways in which people in Medieval Western Europe …
Architecture April 1, 2022

American Urbanist

How William H. Whyte's Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life

Richard K. Rein

Hosted by Bryan Toepfer
On an otherwise normal weekday in the 1980s, commuters on busy Route 1 in central New Jersey noticed an alarming sight: a man in a suit and tie dashing across …
Architecture March 11, 2022

Architecture, Philosophy, and the Pedagogy of Cinema

From Benjamin to Badiou

Nadir Lahiji

Hosted by Bryan Toepfer
Philosophers on the art of cinema mainly remain silent about architecture. Discussing cinema as ‘mass art’, they tend to forget that architecture, before cinema, was the only existing ‘mass art’ …
Architecture March 3, 2022

Louis Kahn: The Importance of Drawing

Michael Merrill

Hosted by Bryan Toepfer
“The importance of a drawing is immense, because it’s the architect’s language,” said the architect Louis Kahn to his masterclass in 1967. While most studies of Kahn focus on his …
SSEAC Stories March 3, 2022

Architecture, Climatic Privilege, and Migrant Labour in Singapore

Jennifer Ferng

Hosted by Natali Pearson
Migration and architecture have emerged as a new topic of research at a global level. Migrant worker dormitories in Singapore, for example, are sites where structural inequities in architecture and …
Architecture February 23, 2022

Follies in America

A History of Garden and Park Architecture

Kerry Dean Carso

Hosted by Bryan Toepfer
Follies in America: A History of Garden and Park Architecture (Cornell UP, 2021) examines historicized garden buildings, known as "follies," from the nation's founding through the American centennial celebration in …
Architecture February 22, 2022

Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body

Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design

Kristina Wilson

Hosted by Nushelle de Silva
In the world of interior design, mid-century Modernism has left an indelible mark still seen and felt today in countless open-concept floor plans and spare, geometric furnishings. Yet despite our …
Architecture February 17, 2022

Form and Flow

The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice

Kian Goh

Hosted by Bryan Toepfer
Cities around the world are formulating plans to respond to climate change and adapt to its impact. Often, marginalized urban residents resist these plans, offering “counterplans” to protest unjust and …
Art February 17, 2022

Medium Design

Knowing How to Work on the World

Keller Easterling

Hosted by Pierre d'Alancaisez
How do we formulate alternative approaches to the world’s unresponsive or intractable dilemmas, from climate change, to inequality, to concentrations of authoritarian power? Keller Easterling argues that the search for singular …
Architecture February 9, 2022

Beautiful Light

An Insider’s Guide to LED Lighting in Homes and Gardens

Randall Whitehead and Clifton Stanley Lemon

Hosted by Bryan Toepfer
Beautiful Light: An Insider’s Guide to LED Lighting in Homes and Gardens (Routledge, 2021) by internationally acclaimed lighting designer Randall Whitehead and lighting industry expert and educator Clifton Stanley Lemon is …
Architecture January 28, 2022

The Architecture of Madness

Insane Asylums in the United States

Carla Yanni

Hosted by Bryan Toepfer
Elaborately conceived, grandly constructed insane asylums—ranging in appearance from classical temples to Gothic castles—were once a common sight looming on the outskirts of American towns and cities. Many of these …
German Studies January 21, 2022

Decay and Afterlife

Form, Time, and the Textuality of Ruins, 1100 to 1900

Aleksandra Prica

Hosted by Lea Greenberg
Western ruins have long been understood as objects riddled with temporal contradictions, whether they appear in baroque poetry and drama, Romanticism’s nostalgic view of history, eighteenth-century paintings of classical subjects …
Architecture January 18, 2022

Savage Mind to Savage Machine

Racial Science and Twentieth-Century Design

Ginger Nolan

Hosted by Bryan Toepfer
Attempting to derive aesthetic systems from natural structures of human cognition, designers looked toward the “savage mind”—a way of thinking they associated with a racialized subaltern. In Savage Mind to …
Architecture January 11, 2022

The Architecture Concept Book

James Tait

Hosted by Bryan Toepfer
Inspired by the complexity and heterogeneity of the world around us, and by the rise of new technologies and their associated behavior, The Architecture Concept Book (Thames and Hudson, 2018) …
Architecture January 7, 2022

Architecture and the Senses in the Italian Renaissance

The Varieties of Architectural Experience

David Karmon

Hosted by Bryan Toepfer
Architecture and the Senses in the Italian Renaissance: The Varieties of Architectural Experience (Cambridge UP, 2021) is the first study of Renaissance architecture as an immersive, multisensory experience that combines …
Intellectual History January 5, 2022

The Forces of Form in German Modernism

Malika Maskarinec

Hosted by Stephen Dozeman
The late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe were times of intense technological, social and political change and transformation, and so it’s no surprise that much of the …