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Architectural history + theory Faculty Research
- 1. Architecture, Social Justice, and Human Rights
- 2. Medieval and Early Modern Architecture, Urbanism, and Theory
- 3. Islamic Art, Architecture, and Urbanism
- 4. Architecture, Science, and Technology
- 5. Questioning Modernity
- 6. Post-war Architecture and Architectural Theory
- 7. Trauma, Memory, and Memorialization
- 8. Cities, Suburbs, and Urban Life
- 9. Colonial and Postcolonial Architecture and Urbanism
- 10. Contemporary Practices and Architecture Cultures
- 1. Architecture, Social Justice, and Human Rights
- Andrew Herscher's work focuses on intersections between architecture, social justice, and human rights. Much of this work involves public scholarship in collaboration with international organizations dedicated to human rights and peace-building. His documentation of the destruction of cultural heritage during the 1998–99 Kosovo War formed the basis of the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic for that destruction in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. He co-founded and co-directed the Kosovo Cultural Heritage Project, a NGO that sponsored the restoration of architectural heritage damaged there during the war.
- 2. Medieval and Early Modern Architecture, Urbanism, and Theory
- Lydia Soo works in the area of the Renaissance and Baroque architecture, specializing in 17th century theory. Her book, Wren's "Tracts" and Other Writings, published by Cambridge University Press in 1998, examines how the theoretical writings of Christopher Wren reflect the reformulation of earlier architectural and antiquarian discourses in terms of the new scientific values promulgated at the Royal Society. She has written articles investigating specific problems of 17th century culture, theory, and architecture, including "The Study of China and Chinese Architecture in Restoration England" (Architectura, 2001) and "Fashion and the Idea of National Style in Restoration England" (Thresholds, 2001). Her work on London after the Great Fire of 1666 includes "A Baroque City?: London After the Great Fire of 1666," in Giambattista Nolli, Rome and Mapping: Before and After the Pianta Grande (forthcoming). She is currently completing an article examining Wren's knowledge of Early Christian, Byzantine, and Islamic architecture in the Levant and its impact on his buildings and theory. Ongoing work includes the study of the mathematical diagrams in Guarino Guarini's 17th century treatise, Architettura civile. Soo teaches courses on Renaissance and Baroque architecture, on the history of theory, and on specialized topics relating to these subjects.
- Achim Timmermann's scholarly interests include Gothic architecture. He has published several articles on medieval and Renaissance sacrament houses in central and northern Europe, including "Designing a House for the Body of Christ, ca. 1300: The Beginnings of Eucharistic Architecture in Western and Northern Europe" (Arte Medievale, 2005) and "Altissimum ac pretiosum: The Vienna Cathedral Lodge and Sacrament House Design in East Central Europe," (Umení, 2005). His book, Staging the Eucharist: Gothic and Renaissance Sacrament Houses in Central Europe, c. 1280–c. 1630, is in preparation. He teaches courses on the history of medieval architecture, including a graduate seminar on Chartres cathedral.
- 3. Islamic Art, Architecture, and Urbanism
- Sussan Babaie's research includes the architecture of the early modern Persianate world, in particular of Safavid (16th to 17th century) Iran. Her publications include "Building on the Past: The Shaping of Safavid Architecture, 1501-76," in the catalog of the exhibit Hunt for Paradise: Court Arts of Iran, 1501–76, (2003). In her forthcoming book Feasting in the City of Paradise; Isfahan and its Palaces, she continues to investigate cultural representations and visual enunciations of power and its socially constructed meanings. She teaches the history of Islamic architecture and art, including courses devoted to funerary architecture, palaces, and cities.
- Will Glover is currently researching the role played by Sufi shrines in urban South Asia, focusing on how commemoration practices at shrines articulate with modern notions of public space and collective memory. This is part of a larger project exploring "heterotopic" spaces in the modern South Asian city.
- 4. Architecture, Science, and Technology
- Amy Kulper's research concerns the intersection of biological and architectural discourse in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Her doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University, on the representation of the natural in the architecture of the art nouveau, focuses on the contributions of 19th-century biology to fin-de-siècle architectural discourse. This theme is enlarged in her graduate seminar Less is Morph: Biologism, Blobs and Emergent Morphologies, examining the emergence of morphology—the science for the study of the history of the variation of forms—and its gradual incorporation into modern art historical and architectural practices. Her article "Of Stylized Species and Specious Styles" (The Journal of Architecture, 2006) argues that the overlap of biology and architecture can be measured by the interchangeability of the terms "species" and "style" in the 19th century.
- Lydia Soo's research investigates the reciprocal relationship between technical means and architectural vision within the context of cultural history. This theme arises in her work on Christopher Wren's theory, in her article examining the use of maps during the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire, and in her research on Guarini's mathematical diagrams. She teaches History of Building Technology, which explores issues of technology and architectural form through history.
- 5. Questioning Modernity
- Interests in the conceptual and experiential aspects of meaning in architectural form underlie Caroline Constant's research. In it she questions the traditional disciplinary boundaries of architecture by exploring interdisciplinary relationships between architecture, landscape design and the "decorative arts." Her book on Eileen Gray (2002) explores how Gray's designs challenged certain theoretical assumptions of modern architecture to reinstate the bodily experience of space as a primary value. Her study of Adolf Loos's House for Josephine Baker calls into question many of the architect's longstanding architectural principles, defying the distinctions he maintained between art and daily life and challenging the issues of decorum that motivated his architectural production to engage the symbolic dimension of architecture. Constant explores the reintegration of architecture and landscape in 20th century architectural practice, a current within modernism that falls outside its polemical boundaries, yet evolves out of its utopian aspirations. Her book The Modern Architectural Landscape (forthcoming) includes essays on Mies's Barcelona Pavilion, Le Corbusier's work at Chandigarh, Plecnik's transformations of Prague Castle, Asplund's park for the Stockholm Public Library and his collaborative design with Lewerentz for the Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm, as well as the efforts of Hilberseimer and Caldwell at Lafayette Park, Detroit. In process are essays on Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, New York, and a study of the relationship between the disciplines of architecture and landscape architecture in early-20th-century practice. Her books The Palladio Guide (1985) and The Woodland Cemetery: Toward a Spiritual Landscape (1994) also center on this theme.
- Claire Zimmerman studies the relationships between architecture and its media of representation and dissemination in the modern period, with an emphasis on the agency of photographic representation in architecture culture. This includes both architectural photography directly, and the role that new media played in the formation of architectural ideas in the early years of the 20th century and since. These interests are pursued in a number of articles and in a book project, Rhythm and Abstraction: Modern Architecture and Media Representation, on the relationship between architecture and the broader framework of the Weimar and post-Weimar avant-gardes. Focusing on new frontiers of knowledge within the old, this work considers how the historiography of 1920s and 30s modernism so fully reflected its prewar aspirations, and its post-war political realities. Zimmermann examines the transfer between American and European notions of "modern" life in the article "?Neue Amerikanische Architektur', 1926" (forthcoming) on the influence of Louis Sullivan and Chicago architecture on Weimar architecture culture. It explores the ideological coordinates of Weimar modernism, yet to be fully historicized, hemmed in as they were by World War I on the first hand, and post-1933 German history on the other.
- Amy Kulper's essay "Public House, Private House: Victor Horta's Ubiquitous Domesticity" in The Intimate Metropolis (Routledge, forthcoming), considers the role of art nouveau domestic architecture in the construction of social space in fin-de-siècle Belgium. The Hôtel Tassel and the Maison du Peuple demonstrate Horta's "ubiquitous domesticity," his extension of the sphere of intimacy beyond the implicit boundaries of the private home. Her course Modern Architecture in Perspective utilizes the advent of linear perspective as an alternative lens through which to frame and question modernity. By tracing the gradual enculturation of Renaissance perspective techniques through various aesthetic, historic, and technological manifestations, including the contemporary usage of "perspective" as an individual point of view, modernity is interrogated through its representations and the highly instrumental techniques that produce them.
- Will Glover's research on South Asian architecture and urbanism interrogates the nature of architectural and urbanistic ideas that traveled back and forth between Europe and Asia during the 19th and 20th centuries, and the distinctive forms of modern urban experience they helped produce. The main thrust of his scholarship is the profound impact colonialism wrought on both sides of the colonizer/colonized relationship, rather than colonialism as a one-way delivery system for Western values, norms, and forms. Glover explores these themes in his book, Making Lahore Modern (University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
- 6. Post-war Architecture and Architectural Theory
- Claire Zimmerman has worked on the relationship between architectural abstraction and other forms of abstraction in the modern period, pursued in work on the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. These interests have resulted in several articles, and underpin the monograph, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (Taschen, 2006). They are also explored in an upcoming article, "Variants on Modern Abstraction," which tracks the rich, if rather neglected, discourse on architectural abstraction in the early 20th c.
Zimmerman is currently at work on a research project on post-war architecture culture, with a specific emphasis on the conflicted history of the architect James Stirling. An exhibition on the subject is tentatively planned under the sponsorship of the Yale Center for British Art, and is intended to make use of newly-catalogued archival material from the Canadian Center for Architecture. Spanning a critical forty years of the 20th c., years marked by energetic conflict between different factions of the architectural neo-avant-garde, the case of Stirling raises important issues for understanding the trajectory of 'late' modernism, as well as forms of rhetorical historicism still amply in evidence today, cateogorized in their earlier iterations as "post-modern." The hypothesis, that the sort of referentiality first explored by Stirling and his generation are still prominent features in contemporary architecture culture, is only one of the themes to be explored in this project.
- Amy Kulper's current project "Atmospheres, Environments, and Ecologies" examines three extra-disciplinary models for spatial production that emerged within the environmental movement of the 1960s, and became critical terms of engagement for the post-war design practices of Reyner Banham, Buckminster Fuller, Archigram, Superstudio, and others. Her study of the shared conceptual formulations of these three models will contribute to a forthcoming book on the intersection of architectural and biological discourse.
- 7. Trauma, Memory, and Memorialization
- Andrew Herscher's work on the former Yugoslavia, exploring the destruction, reconstruction, and memorialization of cultural heritage in the contexts of violence and trauma, is found in two essays: "Cultural Heritage and the Ethnicization of Violence," published in The Case for Kosova: Pathways to Independence (2006), and "Counter-Heritage and Violence," published in Future Anterior (2006).
- 8. Cities, Suburbs, and Urban Life
- Robert Fishman's research concentrates on the history of urban form. His books Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (1987) and Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (1977) attempt to relate urban form to issues of social change and social equity. Bourgeois Utopias tells the story of how the middle class created a new urban form – the middle-class residential suburb – to gain the benefits of the new industrial cities but to escape their ecological and social consequences. The "fall" of suburbia meant its end as an escape from the city and its emergence as a new form of low-density city. Urban Utopias explores the consequences of using urban form to reform society, and the strengths and perils of utopian planning as a way to critique existing injustices and to put forward a model of a just society. Fishman's present research continues to concentrate on the urban periphery as the strategic site for the future of urban form – and the future of post-industrial society generally. From the exurbs of the United States to "global suburbs," he investigates American-style middle-class developments at the edge of the mega-cities of the developing world. His essays appear in the catalogues of the "Shrinking Cities" exhibit in Berlin and of the Robert Moses exhibit at Columbia University (forthcoming). He wrote the lead article, "The Fifth Migration," in the issue on urbanism (2005) of the Journal of the American Planning Association. He delivered the annual Urban Studies Lecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004 and a keynote lecture at the Harvard University conference on "Reconceptualizing the American Built Environment" in 2005. At UM he teaches graduate seminars on the history of suburbia (including "global suburbs), the history of American planning and urbanism, and "American Space."
- In addition to her research on London after the Great Fire of 1666, Lydia Soo teaches courses on urban history that involve instruction on site, enabling students to experience the city at first hand and uncover the layers of its historical development. Her graduate seminar on Rome's history from antiquity to the present includes a trip to Rome, and her course on the history of urban design, which she teaches for UM's Florence program, includes on-site teaching in Florence and its environs, and field work by students in other European cities.
- Andrew Herscher explores the destruction of cities as a specific mode of political violence, both within and outside of war. In "Urban Formations of Difference: Borders and Cities in Post-1989 Europe" (European Review, 2005), he explores the split between European narratives of urban destruction in Bosnia and Croatia, which focused on the European cultural identity of the destroyed cities, and simultaneous European immigration and asylum policies, which excluded Bosnians and Croatians from EU cities. In "American Urbicide" (Journal of Architectural Education, 2006), he examines how the effects of so-called "natural disasters" are mediated by social ideology and public policy, posing the post-Katrina destruction of New Orleans as a result of a confluence of racial segregation, structural impoverishment, urban disinvestment, and natural hazard. He also studies "urbicide" as a tactic of warfare in ex-Yugoslavia. In the seminar Urbicide: Violence Against the City, he explores the wider historical and theoretical contexts of this subject.
- Will Glover's research focuses on the theoretical and practical traditions through which the colonial Indian city was governed, redesigned, and made the object of social reform. He is currently researching the genealogy of "public space" as a legal and conceptual category in both colonial and contemporary South Asia. In "Objects, Models, and Exemplary Works: Educating Sentiment in Colonial India" (Journal of Asian Studies, 2005), he examines the early 20th century development of "Model Town," a comprehensive new town development outside Lahore, Pakistan, based on Ebenezer Howard's Garden City model.
- 9. Colonial and Postcolonial Architecture and Urbanism
- Will Glover's major research and writing activities are focused on the social, cultural, intellectual, and material cultural histories of colonial architecture and urbanism in South Asia. His particular focus has been on the trajectory of modern architectural and urbanistic thought and practice in South Asia's colonial-era cities, an interest most fully articulated in his book, Making Lahore Modern, published by the University of Minnesota Press (2007). Glover has written specialized articles on British domesticity and residential architecture in colonial India, the role of gender and women in South Asian colonial cities, and the articulation of colonial planning discourse with 19th-century British materialist philosophy. Glover's research explores the development of the architectural profession in colonial India, focusing on the theoretical and institutional overlaps between architectural training in Britain and India during the 19th and early-20th centuries. He teaches graduate seminars on colonial architecture and urbanism, and courses that address critical issues in architecture and urbanistic discourse (public and private space, architecture and memory, alternative notions of modernity) by exploring them within a comparative and cross-cultural framework.
- 10. Contemporary Practices and Architecture Cultures
- Andrew Herscher's work on reconstruction as a global paradigm for post-crisis urbanism, posing contemporary post-crisis reconstruction as the urban component of neo-liberal structural adjustment, has been presented in guest lectures at the Bauhaus and The Hague. He is currently working on a comparative analysis of global post-crisis urbanism, and teaches a seminar on the same topic.
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