 |
Eve Blau
Adjunct Professor and Program Director Department of Architecture |
Publications
Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition,
Strategy, Practice
Zagreb is the perfect site for examining the generative dynamic of transition: currently preparing for Croatia's entry into the European Union and negotiating the rocky shoals of the "transition economy," but also a city in which political and economic transition has been the status quo for the last century and a half. Practicing in conditions of continuous instability, architects and planners in 20th century Zagreb developed new strategies of urbanism and architecture for creatively engaging the transitional, conditional, mutable, and open-ended -- for absorbing, accommodating, anticipating and instrumentalizing the condition of irresolution. This book examines how these strategies, once stabilized in built form, become available to practice, generating new techniques for achieving previously unforeseen results. In this way the city itself becomes an actor in the transformation of architectural and urban practices. Transition thus emerges as a condition that not only foregrounds practice and privileges design over planning, but that also enables architecture to play an active, performative role in the formation of the city itself. Based on new mapping and diagrams, along with many original texts and photos which have never been published, the book features contributions by Hrvoje Njiric, Helena Paver Njiric, Charles S. Maier, Vedran Mimica, Vladimir Mattioni, Ivan Rogic, Fedja Vukic, Snjeska Knezevic, Aleksander Laslo and others. This study was initiated as a seminar at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Urban Form: Städtebau
in der postfordistischen Gesellschaft
This book is the product of a workshop, "Conceiving Urban Form in the Post-Fordist Economy," organized by Eve Blau and Renate Banik-Schweitzer, Urban Historian and Director, Historical Atlas of Vienna Project of the City of Vienna, at the IFK-International Institute for Cultural Studies in Vienna in May 2002. The purpose of the workshop was to examine the urban spatial consequences and possibilities of the Post-Fordist economy for the existing city. Spatially, the small independent enterprises of the new Post-Fordist information economy operate much as they did in the Pre-Fordist economy, according to economies of urbanization and agglomeration: locating in cities, where they can use existing infrastructures and services; sometimes "clustering" together to share skills and costs. At the same time, the new demand for multifunctional urban density has not favored this kind of flexible "open" city but has instead fostered the construction of developer-controlled, inward-oriented, often socially exclusive "implantations" or "islands" disconnected from the existing urban tissue. The objective of the essays in the volume—on Vienna, Paris, Barcelona, Johannesburg, Silicon Valley, and the proliferation of "industrial districts" in American and European cities—is to examine these conditions in terms of the physical fabric of the city. The conception of urban form, which resonates throughout the essays, is both historical and programmatic. It is informed by theoretical conceptions of the ideology and production of space that understand spatial structures as the concrete manifestations of social structures and relations, and space itself (in Henri Lefebvre's words) "as neither a 'subject' nor an 'object' but rather a social reality. . . a set of relations and forms" both dynamic and mutable. It is at the level of urban typological form, therefore, that social and spatial practices most clearly intersect with each other and the dynamics of history and that the social and cultural contents of urban society are inscribed in the physical form and daily life of the city itself. The concern in this volume and the workshop from which it originated is to conceptualize "urban form," both in the context of the Post-Fordist economy and as adequate to that economy, to engage the possibility of new urban morphologies that might foster the development of open civil society at the same time as examining the adaptability of existing typologies to the demands of advanced societies in a globalized world. Both the workshop and the book focus on research but are directed toward practice. They represent a first step toward understanding both how the social and economic forces that are shaping Post-Fordist society at the cusp of the 21st century impact on traditional urban structures and organizations and—perhaps more importantly—what potentialities the new phase of capitalist development might hold for cities as sites not only for new economic life but also for cultural and political life. This book includes essays in German by GSD faculty Eve Blau, Adjunct Professor in Architectural History ("The Polycentric Metropolis: Otto Wagner's 'Grossstadt' Revisited"); Joan Busquets, Martin Bucksbaum Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Design ("Barcelona: Generating New Urban Technologies"); Marco Cenzatti, Lecturer in Urban Planning ("Industrial Districts and Urban Restructuring"), and Margaret Crawford, Professor of Urban Design and Planning Theory ("Post-Fordist Landscapes in the San Francisco Bay Region: Silicon Valley, Multimedia Gulch and Little Kabul"), as well as by Jean-Louis Cohen, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; Renate Banik-Schweitzer, Vienna; Johannes Fiedler, Vienna and Johannesburg. Architecture and Cubism
A fundamental tenet of the historiography of modern architecture holds that cubism forged a vital link between avant-garde practices in early twentieth-century painting and architecture. This collection of essays, commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, takes a close look at that widely accepted but little scrutinized belief. In the first historically focused examination of the issue, the volume returns to the original site of cubist art in pre-World War I Europe and proceeds to examine the historical, theoretical, and socio-political relationships between avant-garde practices in painting, architecture, and other cultural forms, including poetry, landscape, and the decorative arts. The essays look at works produced in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia during the early decades of the twentieth century. Together, the essays show that although there were many points of intersection—historical, metaphorical, theoretical, and ideological—between cubism and architecture, there was no simple, direct link between them. Most often the connections between cubist painting and modern architecture were construed analogically, by reference to shared formal qualities such as fragmentation, spatial ambiguity, transparency, and multiplicity; or to techniques used in other media such as film, poetry, and photomontage. Cubist space itself remained two-dimensional; with the exception of Le Cobusiers work, it was never translated into the three dimensions of architecture. Cubisms significance for architecture also remained two-dimensional—a method of representing modern spatial experience through the ordering impulses of art. Shaping the Great City Modern Architecture
in Central Europe 1890-1937
The explosion of architectural ideas during the last decades of the Hapsburg Empire and in the first adventurous years of the new republics of Central Europe that followed it is the subject of this stimulating and wide-ranging study. Despite the cultural battleground of competing linguistic, ethnic, religious, and national traditions and aspirations, the region was nevertheless host to a persistent cosmopolitan ideal. This publication looks at the city as both the principal site of innovation and experimentation in the period, and the generator of a vibrant urban culture. Shaping the Great City examines the distinctive character, composition, and cultural dynamics of place and the importance of the city in defining and expressing identity. It addresses the astonishing range of architectural searching and experiment that took place in Vienna, Budapest, and Prague, as well as in other cities, such as Lemberg, Cracow, Zagreb and Ljubljana, and reviews the urban architectural ideas of Otto Wagner, Camillo Sitte, Adolf Loos, Max Fabiani, Joze Plecnik, also drawing attention to less well-known 20th-century modernists. The book is richly illustrated with drawings, prints, photographs, and models drawn from archives and museums throughout the region, as well as the books, journals, and manifestos that circulated these new ideas. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians Volume 58 / Number 3 / September 1999
CONTENTS The Academy Architectural History in Schools of Architecture
Architectural History and the History of Art: A Suspended Dialogue
Academics in Tennis Shoes: Historic Preservation and the Academy Museums and Historic Sites The Architectural Museum: A Founder's Perspective Exhibitionist Revisionism: Exposing Architectural History Architectural History and the Practice of Historic Preservation
in the United States Open-Air Museums: Architectural History for the Masses Publishing History and Theory in Architectural Periodicals: Assembling Oppositions Writing the Architectural Survey: Collective Authorities and
Competing Approaches Digital Technologies and Architectural Publishing Sites of Research Cities Meaning and Experience: Urban History From Antiquity to the Early
Modern Period New Approaches to the "Non-Western" City Microhistory of the Modern City: Urban Space, Its Use and
Representation Dwellings Ancient Housing: Oikos and Domus in Greece and Rome The Way You Do the Things You Do: Writing the History of Houses
and Housing Sacred Sites Sic et Non: Recent Trends in the Study of Gothic Ecclesiastical
Architecture Non-Western Sacred sites: African Models Cultivated and Vernacular Landscapes The Postmodernization of Landscape: A Critical Historiography Making New Connections in Vernacular Architecture Perspectives and Parameters The Architect as Reader Collaborations: The Private Life of Modern Architecture Fashion and Fabrication in Modern Architecture Technologies of Space/Spaces of Technology The Disciplinary Dislocations of (Architectural) History Theory into History: or, The Will to Anthology Papers Delivered in the Thematic Sessions of the Fifty-first Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians, Houston, Texas, 15-18 April 1999 Index to Volume 58 The Architecture of Red Vienna,
1919-1934
In 1919 the Social Democratic city council of Vienna initiated a radical program of reforms designed to reshape the city's infrastructure along socialist lines. The centerpiece and most enduring achievement of "Red" Vienna was the construction of the Wiener Gemeindebauten, 400 communal housing blocks, distributed throughout the city, in which workers' dwellings were incorporated with kindergartens, libraries, medical clinics, theaters, cooperative stores, and other public facilities. The 64,000 units housed one tenth of the city's population. Throughout this socialist building campaign, however, Austria was ruled by a conservative, clerical, and antisocialist political majority. Thus the architecture of Red Vienna took shape in the midst of highly charged, and often violent, political conflict between left and right. In this book, Eve Blau looks at how that ideological conflict shaped the buildings of Red Vienna—in terms of their program, spatial conception, language, and use—as well as how political meaning itself is manifested in architecture. She shows how the architecture of Red Vienna constructed meaning in relation to the ideological conflicts that defined Austrian politics in the interwar period--how it was shaped by the conditions of its making, and how it engaged its own codes, practices, and history to stake out a political position in relation to those conditions. Her investigation sheds light both on the complex relationship among political program, architectural practice, and urban history in interwar Vienna, and on the process by which architecture can generate a collective discourse that includes all members of society. Published with the assistance of the Getty Grant Program. Architecture and Its Image
Drawing on an incomparable collection of architectural drawings and prints, photographs, books, and periodicals, Architecture and Its Image explores the idea of serial imagery in architectural representation through works dating from the Renaissance to today. Although drawings and photographs of architecture are often viewed as single images, they are generally produced in series. The most basic of these is the set of drawings that shows a building in plan, elevation, and section. But as Architecture and Its Image reveals, the concept can be extended to other types of architectural representations: theater sets, travel accounts, photographic surveys, pattern books, even the alternative designs submitted for competition. All relate in different ways to their subjects; viewed in series, all reveal underlying principles of organization that can convey new understanding of architectural imagery. Under the headings Architecture in Three Dimensions, Architecture in Place and Time, and Architecture in Process, essays by six scholars use the concept of serial imagery to explore the complex relationship between various types of architectural representations and their subject matter: projective drawings (Robin Evans), 19th-century urban survey photography (Eve Blau), the travel narratives of English architectural "explorers" from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century (Edward Kaufman), festival and theater architecture (William Alexander McClung), architectural publications, competitions, and exhibitions (Helene Lipstadt), and computer graphics (Robert Bruegmann). An accompanying catalog describes 350 examples, drawn from the CCA collections, of work by architects and architectural delineators, photographers, and cartographers. The book is illustrated by over 400 superbly reproduced duotone illustrations and 16 pages of color. Eve Blau is Curator of Exhibitions and Publications at the CCA. Edward Kaufman is Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at Columbia University. Architecture and Its Image is a publication of the Centre Canadien d'Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal Distributed by The MIT Press. |
