A groundbreaking history of the confluence of regulatory thinking and building design in the United States What is the origin of “room temperature”? When did food become considered fresh or not fresh? Why do we think management makes things more efficient? The answers to these questions share a history with architecture and regulation at the turn of the twentieth century. This pioneering technological and architectural history of environmental control systems during the Gilded Age begins with the premise that regulation—of temperature, the economy, even the freshness of food—can be found in the guts of buildings. From cold storage and scientific laboratories to factories, these infrastructures first organized life in a way we now call “modern.” Drawing on a range of previously unexplored archival resources, Michael Osman examines the increasing role of environmental technologies in building design from the late nineteenth century. He shows how architects appropriated and subsumed the work of engineers as thermostats, air handlers, and refrigeration proliferated. He argues that this change was closely connected to broader cultural and economic trends in management and the regulation of risk. The transformation shaped the evolution of architectural modernism and the development of the building as a machine. Rather than assume the preexisting natural order of things, participants in regulation—including architects, scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, managers, economists, government employees, and domestic reformers—became entangled in managing the errors, crises, and risks stemming from the nation’s unprecedented growth. Modernism’s Visible Hand not only broadens our conception of how industrial capitalism shaped the built environment but is also vital to understanding the role of design in dealing with ecological crises today.

Examines the role of architecture in the history of global development and decolonization. In Modernism’s Magic Hat, Ijlal Muzaffar examines how modern architects and planners help resolve one of the central dilemmas of the mid-twentieth-century world order: how to make decolonization plausible without accounting for centuries of capital drain under colonial rule. In the years after World War II, architects and planners found extensive opportunities in new international institutions—such as the World Bank, the UN, and the Ford Foundation—and helped shape new models of global intervention that displaced the burden of change onto the inhabitants. Muzaffar argues that architecture in this domain didn’t just symbolically represent power, but formed the material domain through which new modes of power acquired sense. Looking at a series of architectural projects across the world, from housing in Ghana to village planning in Nigeria and urban planning in Venezuela and Pakistan, Muzaffar explores how architects and planners shaped new ideas of time, land, climate, and the decolonizing body, making them appear as sources of untapped value. What resulted, Muzaffar argues, is a widespread belief in spontaneous Third World “development” without capital, which continues to foreclose any global discussion of colonial theft.

In Media Hot and Cold Nicole Starosielski examines the cultural dimensions of temperature to theorize the ways heat and cold can be used as a means of communication, subjugation, and control. Diving into the history of thermal media, from infrared cameras to thermostats to torture sweatboxes, Starosielski explores the many meanings and messages of temperature. During the twentieth century, heat and cold were broadcast through mass thermal media. Today, digital thermal media such as bodily air conditioners offer personalized forms of thermal communication and comfort. Although these new media promise to help mitigate the uneven effects of climate change, Starosielski shows how they can operate as a form of biopower by determining who has the ability to control their own thermal environment. In this way, thermal media can enact thermal violence in ways that reinforce racialized, colonial, gendered, and sexualized hierarchies. By outlining how the control of temperature reveals power relations, Starosielski offers a framework to better understand the dramatic transformations of hot and cold media in the twenty-first century.

Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image explores architecture’s entanglement with contemporary image culture. It looks closely at how changes produced through technologies of mediation alter disciplinary concepts and produce political effects. Through both historical and contemporary examples, it focuses on how conventions of representation are established, maintained, challenged, and transformed. Critical investigations are conjoined with inquiries into aesthetics and technology in the hope that the tensions between them can aid an exploration into how architectural images are produced, disseminated, and valued; how images alter assumptions regarding the appearances of architecture and the environment. For students and academics in architecture, design and media studies, architectural and art history, and related fields, this book shows how design is impacted and changed by shifts in image culture, representational conventions and technologies.

A highly original exploration of the history of architecture in relation to fish, shedding light on the connection between marine environments and terrestrial landscapes. Architecture Follows Fish is set in the North Atlantic, and its protagonist is fish. In this book author and architect André Tavares explores the notion of fishing architecture, a concept coined to describe architectural practices that are spawned by fisheries. To encompass the scope of fishing architecture, and to establish the connections between marine ecology and architectural practice, the book oscillates between different continents, centuries, and species. Fisheries are unique, and this book sheds light on that uniqueness through an articulated narrative and a wealth of iconography. Up until now there has been no history of architecture from the perspective of fish, although there are counterparts for meat, timber, oil, and many other industries. Tavares provides a counternarrative to the traditional history of marine environments, which tends to focus on water ecosystems, and instead forms a bridge between what happens at sea and what happens on land. The hope is that, after reading this book, readers will better understand life in the sea in relation to urban growth and terrestrial landscapes.

Cities have historically supported production, commerce, and consumption, all central to urban life. But in the contemporary Western city, production has been hidden or removed, and commerce and consumption have dominated. This book is about the importance of production in the life of the city, and the relationships between production, architecture, and urban form. It answers the question: What will cities be like when they become, once again, places of production and not only of consumption? Through theoretical arguments, historical analysis, and descriptions of new initiatives, Working Cities: Architecture, Place and Production argues that contemporary cities can regain their historic role as places of material production—places where food is processed and things are made. The book looks toward a future that builds on this revival, providing architectural and urban examples and current strategies within the framework of a strong set of historically-based arguments. The book is illustrated in full colour with archival and contemporary photographs, maps, and diagrams especially developed for the book. The diagrams help illustrate the different variables of architectural space, urban location, and production in different historical eras and in different kinds of industries, providing a compelling visual understanding for the reader.

How climate influenced the design strategies of modernist architects Modern Architecture and Climate explores how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and shows how regional approaches to climate adaptability were essential to the development of modern architecture. Focusing on the period surrounding World War II—before fossil-fuel powered air-conditioning became widely available—Daniel Barber brings to light a vibrant and dynamic architectural discussion involving design, materials, and shading systems as means of interior climate control. He looks at projects by well-known architects such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Lúcio Costa, Mies van der Rohe, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the work of climate-focused architects such as MMM Roberto, Olgyay and Olgyay, and Cliff May. Drawing on the editorial projects of James Marston Fitch, Elizabeth Gordon, and others, he demonstrates how images and diagrams produced by architects helped conceptualize climate knowledge, alongside the work of meteorologists, physicists, engineers, and social scientists. Barber describes how this novel type of environmental media catalyzed new ways of thinking about climate and architectural design. Extensively illustrated with archival material, Modern Architecture and Climate provides global perspectives on modern architecture and its evolving relationship with a changing climate, showcasing designs from Latin America, Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Africa. This timely and important book reconciles the cultural dynamism of architecture with the material realities of ever-increasing carbon emissions from the mechanical cooling systems of buildings, and offers a historical foundation for today’s zero-carbon design.

Commendation, the Colvin Prize 2023 (Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain) Reconstruction explores the impact of the First World War on the built environment – examining the immediate and longer term aftermath of the Great War on the architecture of Britain and the British Empire during the interwar years. While much attention has been paid by historians to post-war architectural reconstruction after 1945, the earlier developments of the interwar period (1919-1939) have been comparatively overlooked. This volume reveals how the architectural developments of this period not only provided important foundations for what happened after 1945 – they are also of real significance in their own right. Sixteen essays written by leading and emerging scholars bring together new and diverse approaches to the period – a period of reconstruction, fraught with the challenges of modernity and democratisation. The collection considers the complex effects of reconstruction on design, discourse, practice, and professionalism, and deals with the full spectrum of architectural styles and approaches, privileging neither Modernism nor traditional styles like the neo-Georgian. It brings to the fore social and political histories of the built environment, and makes important postcolonial interventions into the architectural history of British Imperialism at home and in its far reaches; in Cairo, South Africa, Australia, and India.

Examining architecture’s foundational role in the repression of democracy Reinhold Martin and Claire Zimmerman bring together essays from an array of scholars exploring the troubled relationship between architecture and antidemocratic politics. Comprising detailed case studies throughout the world spanning from the early nineteenth century to the present, Architecture against Democracy analyzes crucial occasions when the built environment has been harnessed as an instrument of authoritarian power. Alongside chapters focusing on paradigmatic episodes from twentieth-century German and Italian fascism, the contributors examine historic and contemporary events and subjects that are organized thematically, including the founding of the Smithsonian Institution, Ellis Island infrastructure, the aftermath of the Paris Commune, Cold War West Germany and Iraq, Frank Lloyd Wright’s domestic architecture, and Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Through the range and depth of these accounts, Architecture against Democracy presents a selective overview of antidemocratic processes as they unfold in the built environment throughout Western modernity, offering an architectural history of the recent “nationalist international.” As new forms of nationalism and authoritarian rule proliferate across the globe, this timely collection offers fresh understandings of the role of architecture in the opposition to democracy. Contributors: Esra Akcan, Cornell U; Can Bilsel, U of San Diego; José H. Bortoluci, Getulio Vargas Foundation; Charles L. Davis II, U of Texas at Austin; Laura diZerega; Eve Duffy, Duke U; María González Pendás, Cornell U; Paul B. Jaskot, Duke U; Ana María León, Harvard U; Ruth W. Lo, Hamilton College; Peter Minosh, Northeastern U; Itohan Osayimwese, Brown U; Kishwar Rizvi, Yale U; Naomi Vaughan; Nader Vossoughian, New York Institute of Technology and Columbia U; Mabel O. Wilson, Columbia U.

This is a book about contemporary literary and artistic entanglements: word and image, media and materiality, inscription and illustration. It proposes a vulnerable, fugitive mode of reading poetry, which defies disciplinary categorisations, embracing the open-endedness and provisionality of forms. This manifests itself interactively in the six case studies, which have been chosen for their distinctness and diversity across the long twentieth century: the book begins with the early twentieth-century work of writer and artist Djuna Barnes, exploring her re-animation of sculptural and dramatic sources. It then turns to the late modernist artist and poet David Jones considering his use of the graphic and plastic arts in The Anathemata, and next, to the underappreciated mid-century poet F.T. Prince, whose work uncannily re-activates Michelangelo's poetry and sculpture. The second half of the book explores the collaborations of the canonical poet Ted Hughes with the publisher and artist Leonard Baskin during the 1970s; the innovative late twentieth-century poetry of Denise Riley who uses page space and embodied sound as a form of address; and, finally, the contemporary poet Paul Muldoon who has collaborated with photographers and artists, as well as ventriloquising nonhuman phenomena. The resulting unique study offers contemporary writers and readers a new understanding of literary, artistic, and nonhuman practices and shows the cultural importance of engaging with their messy co-dependencies. The book challenges critical methodologies that make a sharp division between the textual work and the extra-literary, and raises urgent questions about the status and autonomy of art and its social role.