Title: Garrett Eckbo: modern landscapes for living 
Author: Treib, Marc
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Architecture | Art History | California and the West
Publisher's Description: One of the central figures in modern landscape architecture, Garrett Eckbo (1910-2000) was a major influence in the field during an active career spanning five decades. While most of the early American designers concentrated on the private garden and the corporate landscape, Eckbo's work demonstrated innovative design ideas in a social setting. This engagement with social improvement has stayed with Eckbo throughout his life, distinguishing both his intentions and achievements, from his early work for the Farm Security Administration to his partnerships (including one of the most prominent landscape firms in the world, Eckbo, Dean, Austin, and Williams - EDAW) and his years as chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.In an elegant and detailed book that includes more than 100 of Eckbo's designs, Marc Treib examines the aesthetic formation of Eckbo's manner, and by implication the broader field of landscape architecture since the 1930s. Dorothée Imbert writes about Eckbo's social vision, including his belief that ultimately, landscape design is the "arrangement of environments for people ." The book also contains a biographical and professional chronology and a complete bibliography of publications by and about Garrett Eckbo.   [brief]
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Title: The political landscape: constellations of authority in early complex polities
Author: Smith, Adam T
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Archaeology | Political Theory | Geography
Publisher's Description: How do landscapes - defined in the broadest sense to incorporate the physical contours of the built environment, the aesthetics of form, and the imaginative reflections of spatial representations - contribute to the making of politics? Shifting through the archaeological, epigraphic, and artistic remains of early complex societies, this provocative and far-reaching book is the first systematic attempt to explain the links between spatial organization and politics from an anthropological point of view. The Classic-period Maya, the kingdom of Urartu, and the cities of early southern Mesopotamia provide the focal points for this multidimensional account of human polities. Are the cities and villages in which we live and work, the lands that are woven into our senses of cultural and personal identity, and the national territories we occupy merely stages on which historical processes and political rituals are enacted? Or do the forms of buildings and streets, the evocative sensibilities of architecture and vista, the aesthetics of place conjured in art and media constitute political landscapes - broad sets of spatial practices critical to the formation, operation, and overthrow of polities, regimes, and institutions? Smith brings together contemporary theoretical developments from geography and social theory with anthropological perspectives and archaeological data to pursue these questions.   [brief]
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Title: Sacred landscape: the buried history of the Holy Land since 1948
Author: Benvenisti, Meron 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Religion | Middle Eastern Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: As a young man Meron Benvenisti often accompanied his father, a distinguished geographer, when the elder Benvenisti traveled through the Holy Land charting a Hebrew map that would rename Palestinian sites and villages with names linked to Israel's ancestral homeland. These experiences in Benvenisti's youth are central to this book, and the story that he tells helps explain how during this century an Arab landscape, physical and human, was transformed into an Israeli, Jewish state.Benvenisti first discusses the process by which new Hebrew nomenclature replaced the Arabic names of more than 9,000 natural features, villages, and ruins in Eretz Israel/Palestine (his name for the Holy Land, thereby defining it as a land of Jews and Arabs). He then explains how the Arab landscape has been transformed through war, destruction, and expulsion into a flourishing Jewish homeland accommodating millions of immigrants. The resulting encounters between two peoples who claim the same land have raised great moral and political dilemmas, which Benvenisti presents with candor and impartiality.Benvenisti points out that five hundred years after the Moors left Spain there are sufficient landmarks remaining to preserve the outlines of Muslim Spain. Even with sustained modern development, the ancient scale is still visible. Yet a Palestinian returning to his ancestral landscape after only fifty years would have difficulty identifying his home. Furthermore, Benvenisti says, the transformation of Arab cultural assets into Jewish holy sites has engendered a struggle over the "signposts of memory" essential to both peoples. Sacred Landscape raises troublesome questions that most writers on the Middle East avoid. The now-buried Palestinian landscape remains a symbol and a battle standard for Palestinians and Israelis. But it is Benvenisti's continuing belief that Eretz Israel/Palestine has enough historical and physical space for the people of both nations and that it can one day be a shared homeland.   [brief]
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Title: The origins of modernism in Russian architecture 
Author: Brumfield, William Craft 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Architecture | Architectural History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: The dramatic transformation of Russian architecture from the 1880s to the 1917 revolution reflected the profound changes in Russian society as it entered the modern industrial age. William Craft Brumfield examines the extraordinary diversity of architectural styles in this period and traces the search by architects and critics for a "unifying idea" that would define a new architecture. Generously illustrated with archival materials and with the author's own superb photographs, this is the first comprehensive study by a Western scholar of a neglected period in European architectural and cultural history.Brumfield explores the diverse styles of Russian modernism in part by analyzing the contemporary theoretical debate about them: the relation between technology and style, the obligation of architecture to society, and the role of architecture as an expression of national identity. Steeped in controversy, Russian modernism at the beginning of the century foreshadowed the radical restructuring of architectural form in the Soviet Union during the two decades after the revolution. This authoritative work provides a new understanding of Russian architecture's last brief entrepreneurial episode and offers insight on our own era, when individual freedom and initiative may once again find expression in Russian architecture.   [brief]
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Title: Inscribed landscapes: travel writing from imperial China 
Author: Strassberg, Richard E
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literature in Translation | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: Alongside the scores of travel books about China written by foreign visitors, Chinese travelers' impressions of their own country rarely appear in translation. This anthology is the only comprehensive collection in English of Chinese travel writing from the first century A.D. through the nineteenth. Early examples of the genre describe sites important for their geography, history, and role in cultural mythology, but by the T'ang dynasty in the mid-eighth century certain historiographical and poetic discourses converged to form the "travel account" ( yu-chi ) and later the "travel diary" ( jih-chi ) as vehicles of personal expression and autobiography. These first-person narratives provide rich material for understanding the attitudes of Chinese literati toward place, nature, politics, and the self.The anthology is abundantly illustrated with paintings, portraits, maps, and drawings. Each selection is meticulously translated, carefully annotated, and prefaced by a brief description of the writer's life and work. The entire collection is introduced by an in-depth survey of the rise of Chinese travel writing as a cultural phenomenon. Inscribed Landscapes provides a unique resource for travelers as well as for scholars of Chinese literature, art, and history.   [brief]
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Title: Toward a simpler way of life: the arts & crafts architects of California
Author: Winter, Robert
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Art | Architecture | Architectural History | Californian and Western History
Publisher's Description: This book celebrates one of the richest and most enduring themes in American architecture - California's Arts and Crafts Movement. Echoing the writings of Helen Hunt Jackson, Charles F. Lummis, and Charles Keeler, this movement represented a retreat into a quieter place from the materialism of American society. Anti-commercial, anti-modern, Arts and Crafts practitioners drew on the decorative schemes of English Tudor, Swiss chalet, Japanese temple, and Spanish mission, evoking an earlier time before modern industry and technology intruded. And if only one word is used to describe virtually every Arts and Crafts house in California, that word is "woodsy": wood shingles outside, wood paneling inside, a wood fire burning in the homey, welcoming fireplace.Most chapters in this impressive and very readable book focus on one building by a particular architect or designer and illustrate that person's development and influences. Familiar architects such as Bernard Maybeck, Charles and Henry Greene, John Galen Howard, and Julia Morgan are here, but so too are less well-known names who were a vibrant part of the Arts and Crafts Movement. These late Romantics designed houses to complement nature rather than contrast with it. Their eclecticism and historicism reflected a Romantic bent as well, no doubt cultivated by their familiarity with the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where, in fact, Howard, Maybeck, and Morgan studied.The book's contributors also give attention to the builders, contractors, and craftsmen whose skills contributed to the lasting impact of the California Arts and Crafts Movement. Superb illustrations provide examples of elevations, composition details, interior fixtures, and gardens, all designed to promote the "simple living and high thinking" of the Craftsman style, an esthetic that continues to influence architecture today.   [brief]
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Title: Displaying the Orient: architecture of Islam at nineteenth-century world's fairs 
Author: Çelik, Zeynep
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Architecture | European History | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Gathering architectural pieces from all over the world, the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867 introduced to fairgoers the notion of an imaginary journey, a new tourism en place . Through this and similar expositions, the world's cultures were imported to European and American cities as artifacts and presented to nineteenth-century men and women as the world in microcosm, giving a quick and seemingly realistic impression of distant places.Çelik examines the display of Islamic cultures at nineteenth-century world's fairs, focusing on the exposition architecture. She asserts that certain sociopolitical and cultural trends now crucial to our understanding of historical transformations in both the West and the world of Islam were mirrored in the fair's architecture. Furthermore, dominant attitudes toward cross-cultural exchanges were revealed repeatedly in Westerners' responses to these pavilions, in Western architects' interpretations of Islamic stylistic traditions, and in the pavilions' impact in such urban centers.Although the world's fairs claimed to be platforms for peaceful cultural communication, they displayed the world according to a hierarchy based on power relations. Çelik's delineation of this hierarchy in the exposition buildings enables us to understand both the adversarial relations between the West and the Middle East, and the issue of cultural self-definition for Muslim societies of the nineteenth century.   [brief]
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Title: William Faulkner and the tangible past: the architecture of Yoknapatawpha 
Author: Hines, Thomas S
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Architecture | Architectural History | Literature | American Literature | United States History
Publisher's Description: The world of William Faulkner is seen from a new perspective in Thomas Hines's imaginative and many-faceted study. Hines assesses the impact of the built environment on Faulkner's consciousness and shows how the architecture of the writer's fictional county of Yoknapatawpha reflects the actual architecture of Oxford, Mississippi, and neighboring areas. Over 110 distinctive photographs, in both color and black-and-white, beautifully complement the text, making this book both a reading and viewing pleasure.Much has been written on the role of nature in Faulkner's work, but architecture and the built environment - the opposite of nature - have been virtually ignored. Arguing that nature and architecture are of equal importance in Faulkner's cosmos, Hines examines the writer's use of architectural modes - primitive, classical, gothic, and modern - to demarcate caste and class, to convey mood and ambience, and to delineate character. Hines provides not only another way of understanding Faulkner's work but also a means of appreciating the power of architecture to reflect what Faulkner called "the comedy and tragedy of being alive."Hines's gifts as an architectural historian and photographer and his intimate knowledge of Faulkner country are evident throughout this handsome book. Combining cultural, intellectual, architectural, and literary history, William Faulkner and the Tangible Past will take Faulkner lovers, as well as lovers of architecture, on a fascinating tour of Yoknapatawpha County.   [brief]
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Title: Renaissance Paris: architecture and growth, 1475-1600 
Author: Thomson, David 1912-
Published: University of California Press,  1985
Subjects: Art | Architecture
Publisher's Description: In the modern literature on Renaissance art and architecture, Paris has often been considered the Cinderella of the European capitals. The prestigious buildings that were erected soon after François I decided in 1528 to make Paris his residence have long since been lost. Thomson, however, restores t . . . [more]
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Title: A river and its city: the nature of landscape in New Orleans
Author: Kelman, Ari 1968-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | United States History | Environmental Studies | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: This engaging environmental history explores the rise, fall, and rebirth of one of the nation's most important urban public landscapes, and more significantly, the role public spaces play in shaping people's relationships with the natural world. Ari Kelman focuses on the battles fought over New Orleans's waterfront, examining the link between a river and its city and tracking the conflict between public and private control of the river. He describes the impact of floods, disease, and changing technologies on New Orleans's interactions with the Mississippi. Considering how the city grew distant - culturally and spatially - from the river, this book argues that urban areas provide a rich source for understanding people's connections with nature, and in turn, nature's impact on human history.   [brief]
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Title: American urban architecture: catalysts in the design of cities 
Author: Attoe, Wayne
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Architecture | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Conceiving of urban design in terms of architectural actions and reactions, Attoe and Logan propose a theory of "catalytic architecture" better suited to specifically American circumstances than the largely European models developed in the last thirty years for the remaking of cities.After exploring instances of failed attempts to impose European visions on American cities, the authors examine urban design successes that illustrate the principles and goals of catalytic architecture. With a series of case studies they characterize urban design as a controlled evolution, one that must also be strategic, responding to existing elements and guiding those that follow. The authors argue that the failure of American cities to control and guide the energies released in urban development can be prevented by "design guidance". From their own combined experience as urban architects and scholars, they provide a taxonomy of methods to guide urban design toward higher standards and better results.   [brief]
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Title: Landscapes of power: from Detroit to Disney World
Author: Zukin, Sharon
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Politics | Politics | Postcolonial Studies | Urban Studies | Geography | Economics and Business
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Title: From craft to profession: the practice of architecture in nineteenth-century America
Author: Woods, Mary N 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Architecture | Architectural History | United States History
Publisher's Description: This is the first in-depth study of how the architectural profession emerged in early American history. Mary Woods dispels the prevailing notion that the profession developed under the leadership of men formally schooled in architecture as an art during the late nineteenth century. Instead, she cites several instances in the early 1800s of craftsmen-builders who shifted their identity to that of professional architects. While struggling to survive as designers and supervisors of construction projects, these men organized professional societies and worked for architectural education, appropriate compensation, and accreditation.In such leading architectural practitioners as B. Henry Latrobe, Alexander J. Davis, H. H. Richardson, Louis Sullivan, and Stanford White, Woods sees collaborators, partners, merchandisers, educators, and lobbyists rather than inspired creators. She documents their contributions as well as those, far less familiar, of women architects and people of color in the profession's early days.Woods's extensive research yields a remarkable range of archival materials: correspondence among carpenters; 200-year-old lawsuits; architect-client spats; the organization of craft guilds, apprenticeships, university programs, and correspondence schools; and the structure of architectural practices, labor unions, and the building industry. In presenting a more accurate composite of the architectural profession's history, Woods lays a foundation for reclaiming the profession's past and recasting its future. Her study will appeal not only to architects, but also to historians, sociologists, and readers with an interest in architecture's place in America today.   [brief]
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Title: The American musical landscape 
Author: Crawford, Richard 1935-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Music | Musicology | American Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: In this refreshingly direct and engaging historical treatment of American music and musicology, Richard Crawford argues for the recognition of the distinct and vital character of American music. What is that character? How has musical life been supported in the United States and how have Americans understood their music? Exploring the conditions within which music has been made since the time of the American Revolution, Crawford suggests some answers to these questions.Surveying the history of several musical professions in the United States - composing, performing, teaching, and distributing music - Crawford highlights the importance of where the money for music comes from and where it goes. This economic context is one of his book's key features and gives a real-life view that is both fascinating and provocative. Crawford discusses interconnections between classical and popular music, using New England psalmody, nineteenth-century songs, Duke Ellington, and George Gershwin to illustrate his points.Because broad cultural forces are included in this unique study, anyone interested in American history and American Studies will find it as appealing as will students and scholars of American music.   [brief]
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Title: Landscapes of resistance: the German films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub 
Author: Byg, Barton 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | German Studies | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: Fervently admired and frequently reviled, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet - who have lived and worked together for almost forty years - may well be the most uncompromising, not to say intransigent, filmmakers in the history of the medium. Their radical and deeply political films placed them as forerunners of the New German Cinema movement in the 1960s and influential figures in the subsequent explosion of the European avant-garde. In Landscapes of Resistance , Barton Byg fills a significant gap in modern German and European cinema studies by tracing the career of the two filmmakers and exploring their connection to German modernism, in particular their relationship to the Frankfurt School.Although they are not German themselves, Straub and Huillet have used German material as the basis for the majority of their films. They have transcribed prose by Böll and Kafka, operas by Schoenberg, and verse dramas by Holderlin. Byg explores how their work engages German culture with a critical distance and affection and confronts the artificiality of divisions between high and low culture.   [brief]
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Title: The Society of Six: California colorists
Author: Boas, Nancy 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Art | Art History | California and the West | Californian and Western History
Publisher's Description: Six plein-air painters in Oakland, California, joined together in 1917 to form an association that lasted nearly fifteen years. The Society of Six - Selden Connor Gile, Maurice Logan, William H. Clapp, August F. Gay, Bernard von Eichman, and Louis Siegriest - created a color-centered modernist idiom that shocked establishment tastes but remains the most advanced painting of its era in Northern California. Nancy Boas's well-informed and sumptuously illustrated chronicle recognizes the importance of these six painters in the history of American Post-Impressionism.The Six found themselves in the position of an avant garde not because they set out to reject conventionality, but because they aspired to create their own indigenous modernism. While the artists were considered outsiders in their time, their work is now recognized as part of the vital and enduring lineage of American art. Depression hardship ended the Six's ascendancy, but their painterliness, use of color, and deep alliance with the land and the light became a beacon for postwar Northern California modern painters such as Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. Combining biography and critical analysis, Nancy Boas offers a fitting tribute to the lives and exhilarating painting of the Society of Six.   [brief]
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Title: Customers and patrons of the mad-trade: the management of lunacy in eighteenth-century London: with the complete text of John Monro's 1766 case book
Author: Andrews, Jonathan 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | History of Science | Psychology | Social Problems | Psychiatry
Publisher's Description: This book is a lively commentary on the eighteenth-century mad-business, its practitioners, its patients (or "customers"), and its patrons, viewed through the unique lens of the private case book kept by the most famous mad-doctor in Augustan England, Dr. John Monro (1715-1791). Monro's case book, comprising the doctor's jottings on patients he saw in the course of his private practice--patients drawn from a great variety of social strata--offers an extraordinary window into the subterranean world of the mad-trade in eighteenth-century London. The volume concludes with a complete edition of the case book itself, transcribed in full with editorial annotations by the authors. In the fragmented stories Monro's case book provides, Andrews and Scull find a poignant underworld of human psychological distress, some of it strange and some quite familiar. They place these "cases" in a real world where John Monro and othersuccessful doctors were practicing, not to say inventing, the diagnosis and treatment of madness.   [brief]
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Title: Asceticism and society in crisis: John of Ephesus and the Lives of the Eastern saints 
Author: Harvey, Susan Ashbrook
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Classics | Classical Religions | Classical History
Publisher's Description: John of Ephesus traveled throughout the sixth-century Byzantine world in his role as monk, missionary, writer and church leader. In his major work, The Lives of the Eastern Saints , he recorded 58 portraits of monks and nuns he had known, using the literary conventions of hagiography in a strikingly personal way. War, bubonic plague, famine, collective hysteria, and religious persecution were a part of daily life and the background against which asceticism developed an acute meaning for a beleaguered populace. Taking the work of John of Ephesus as her guide, Harvey explores the relationship between asceticism and society in the sixth-century Byzantine East.Concerned above all with the responsibility of the ascetic to lay society, John's writing narrates his experiences in the villages of the Syrian Orient, the deserts of Egypt, and the imperial city of Constantinople. Harvey's work contributes to a new understanding of the social world of the late antique Byzantine East, skillfully examining the character of ascetic practices, the traumatic separation of "Monophysite" churches, the fluctuating roles of women in Syriac Christianity, and the general contribution of hagiography to the study of history.   [brief]
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Title: Behind the postmodern facade: architectural change in late twentieth-century America 
Author: Larson, Magali Sarfatti
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Architecture | Architecture | Philosophy | Politics | American Studies | Sociology | Social Theory
Publisher's Description: Magali Larson's comprehensive study explores how architecture "happens" and what has become of the profession in the postmodern era. Drawing from extensive interviews with pivotal architects - from Philip Johnson, who was among the first to introduce European modernism to America, to Peter Eisenman, identified with a new "deconstructionist" style - she analyzes the complex tensions that exist between economic interest, professional status, and architectural product. She investigates the symbolic awards and recognition accorded by prestigious journals and panels, exposing the inner workings of a profession in a precarious social position. Larson captures the struggles around status, place, and power as architects seek to redefine their very purpose in contemporary America.The author's novel approach in synthesizing sociological research and theory proposes nothing less than a new cultural history of architecture. This is a ground-breaking contribution to the study of culture and the sociology of knowledge, as well as to architectural and urban history.   [brief]
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Title: Urban forms and colonial confrontations: Algiers under French rule 
Author: Çelik, Zeynep
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Architecture | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | French Studies | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: During its long history as the French colonial city par excellence , Algiers was the site of recurrent conflicts between colonizer and colonized. Through architecture and urban forms confrontations were crystallized, cultural identities were defined, and social engineering programs were shaped and challenged. In this pathbreaking book, Zeynep Çelik reads the city of Algiers as the site of social, political, and cultural conflicts during the 132 years of French occupation and argues that architecture and urban forms are integral components of the colonial discourse.Algiers' city planning, based on what Çelik calls "the trial-and-error" model of French colonial urbanism, included the fragmentation of the casbah, ambitious Beaux Arts schemes to create European forms of housing, master plans inspired by high modernism, and comprehensive regional plans. Eventually a dramatic housing shortage led all planning efforts to be centered on the construction of large-scale residential enclaves. French architects based their designs for domestic space on the concept of the "traditional house," itself an interdisciplinary colonial concept intertwined with the discourse on Algerian women. Housing also offered the French colonizers a powerful presence in a country where periodic resistance to the occupation eventually culminated in a seven-year war of liberation and an end to French rule.Extensively illustrated with photographs, maps, and housing plans, Çelik's book presents a fascinating example of colonial urban planning. Algiers comes alive as a city that reflected all the conflicts of colonialism while embracing innovation.   [brief]
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