Architecture: public and commercial Books

Book SynopsisExamines New Orleans's complicated relationship with the history of the Confederacy pre- and post-Civil War. The book opens and closes with the dramatic removal of the city's Confederate statues. While the book is a narrative of the rise and fall of the four monuments, it is also about a city engaging history.Trade ReviewThis well-researched book puts into historical context the useful discussion we had in New Orleans about removing Confederate monuments. It is important for us to understand history, to memorialize it, and to continually reassess it. This can be a difficult balance. James Gill and Howard Hunter do a judicious job of listening to all perspectives. Tearing Down the Lost Cause is a highly readable match of narrative history and journalism at its best—probing, dispassionate, with a seasoned take on historical memory warped by myth. Beyond its appeal to general readers, James Gill and Howard Hunter have delivered a gift to college professors and high school teachers tasked with giving young people a fair-minded viewfinder on raging issues of our day and the long arc of justice. Fraught with hard feeling, the subject of the Lost Cause and fallen monuments nowadays is almost guaranteed to end in daggers drawn. So, it’s refreshing to discover a narrative that manages to stay evenhanded without pulling punches. Tearing Down the Lost Cause is how history is supposed to be written. James Gill and Howard Hunter revisit the bygone days surrounding New Orleans’s Civil War statuary. In so doing, expertly and without fanfare, they nudge us closer to common ground. The fact that it looks increasingly unattainable is all the more reason for making the effort. A must read. As if untangling Mardi Gras beads, Gill and Hunter deftly deconstruct the bruising history behind the removal of the New Orleans Confederate monuments: a satisfying read.

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Book SynopsisThe author writes in his introduction that evening is the magical moment to wander about Rome: "That is the moment to see the city of conflicting moods as it always has been and still is, hateful and holy, wicked and wise, pagan and papal, sometimes so beautiful that it is scarcely to be endured, and always quite inscrutable. That is the supreme moment to rhapsodize and pay homage, to make the final assault upon the hidden secret of Rome's eternal decay, and to be deliciously deceived… The early morning on the other hand is more to our purpose, for it is not at all romantic." The early morning serves to light for Lees-Milne the eight Roman buildings–from the somber Pantheon first built by Marcus Agrippa in 27 B.C. to the Trevi fountain, whose waters were brought to Rome via aqueduct by the same Agrippa, but whose completion had to await the eighteenth century–that are in the author's opinion the chef architectural monuments of the city. All of them, he says, are powerful archetypes, and two among them, the Pantheon and the Tempietto, have individual features that are reflected in practically every town in Europe, the British Commonwealth, and America.Trade ReviewA brief, lyrical introduction. -- Michael Webb * L.A. Architect *Less-Milne offers not scholarship but, rather, entertainment of the most elegant and eye-opening kind. -- Deborah Howard * Architecture *

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Book SynopsisPrior to the nineteenth century, few Americans knew anything more of Egyptian culture than what could be gained from studying the biblical Exodus. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century, however, initiated a cultural breakthrough for Americans as representations of Egyptian culture flooded western museums and publications, sparking a growing interest in all things Egyptian that was coined Egyptomania. As Egyptomania swept over the West, a relatively young America began assimilating Egyptian culture into its own national identity, creating a hybrid national heritage that would vastly affect the memorial landscape of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Far more than a study of Egyptian revivalism, this book examines the Egyptian style of commemoration from the rural cemetery to national obelisks to the Sphinx at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Giguere argues that Americans adopted Egyptian forms of commemoration as readily as other neoclassical styles such as Greek revivalism, noting that the American landscape is littered with monuments that define the Egyptian style’s importance to American national identity. Of particular interest is perhaps America’s greatest commemorative obelisk: the Washington Monument. Standing at 555 feet high and constructed entirely of stone—making it the tallest obelisk in the world—the Washington Monument represents the pinnacle of Egyptian architecture’s influence on America’s desire to memorialize its national heroes by employing monumental forms associated with solidity and timelessness. Construction on the monument began in 1848, but controversy over its design, which at one point included a Greek colonnade surrounding the obelisk, and the American Civil War halted construction until 1877. Interestingly, Americans saw the completion of the Washington Monument after the Civil War as a mending of the nation itself, melding Egyptian commemoration with the reconstruction of America. As the twentieth century saw the rise of additional commemorative obelisks, the Egyptian Revival became ensconced in American national identity. Egyptian-style architecture has been used as a form of commemoration in memorials for World War I and II, the civil rights movement, and even as recently as the 9/11 remembrances. Giguere places the Egyptian style in a historical context that demonstrates how Americans actively sought to forge a national identity reminiscent of Egyptian culture that has endured to the present day.Trade Review“This book is solidly and intelligently researched. Giguere presents a worthy subject, a reassessment of a variety of memorials constructed amid the Egyptian revival in the United States, and proposes that Egyptian forms, such as the gateway, the obelisk, and the sphinx—once considered pagan and foreign—ultimately left such a strong mark on US memorialization in the nineteenth century that they became “characteristically American.” —Cynthia Mills, former executive editor of American Art

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Book SynopsisOf the more than seventy sites associated with the Civil War era that the National Park Service manages, none hold more national appeal and recognition than Gettysburg National Military Park. Welcoming more than one million visitors annually from across the nation and around the world, the National Park Service at Gettysburg holds the enormous responsibility of preserving the war’s “hallowed ground” and educating the public, not only on the battle, but also about the Civil War as the nation’s defining moment. Although historians and enthusiasts continually add to the shelves of Gettysburg scholarship, they have paid only minimal attention to the battlefield itself and the process of preserving, interpreting, and remembering the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. In On a Great Battlefield, Jennifer M. Murray provides a critical perspective to Gettysburg historiography by offering an in-depth exploration of the national military park and how the Gettysburg battlefield has evolved since the National Park Service acquired the site in August 1933. As Murray reveals, the history of the Gettysburg battlefield underscores the complexity of preserving and interpreting a historic landscape. After a short overview of early efforts to preserve the battlefield by the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association (1864–1895) and the United States War Department (1895–1933), Murray chronicles the administration of the National Park Service and the multitude of external factors—including the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, the Civil War Centennial, and recent sesquicentennial celebrations—that influenced operations and molded Americans’ understanding of the battle and its history. Haphazard landscape practices, promotion of tourism, encouragement of recreational pursuits, ill-defined policies of preserving cultural resources, and the inevitable turnover of administrators guided by very different preservation values regularly influenced the direction of the park and the presentation of the Civil War’s popular memory. By highlighting the complicated nexus between preservation, tourism, popular culture, interpretation, and memory, On a Great Battlefield provides a unique perspective on the Mecca of Civil War landscapes. Jennifer M. Murray, assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, is the author of The Civil War Begins. Her articles have appeared in Civil War History, Civil War Times, and Civil War Times Illustrated.Trade Review“Murray excels at getting the reader to the ground level of the preservation and interpretive battles at Gettysburg without losing the broader political and social context in which these debates occurred.” ­—Peter S. Carmichael, Civil War History

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Book SynopsisAn important part of the built heritage of the Northern Highlands is Victorian and Edwardian. Andrew Maitland, two sons and a grandson, architects based in Tain, made significant contributions across the region - including farm buildings, churches, shooting lodges, hotels, courthouses, town halls, commercial buildings, villas and whisky distilleries, including Glenmorangie, where they played a pivotal role. Tain itself became a place of rare charm and beauty. Hamish Mackenzie has researched the people who commissioned the Maitlands and why they did so. He brings to life a fascinating variety of characters against a backdrop of social, religious, political and technological change.

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Book SynopsisIn tracing the process through which monuments give rise to collective memories, this path-breaking book emphasizes that memorials are not just inert and amnesiac spaces upon which individuals may graft their ever-shifting memories. To the contrary, the materiality of monuments can be seen to elicit a particular collective mode of remembering which shapes the consumption of the past as a shared cultural form of memory.In a variety of disciplines over the past decade, attention has moved away from the oral tradition of memory to the interplay between social remembering and object worlds. But research is very sketchy in this area and the materiality of monuments has tended to be ignored within anthropological literature, compared to the amount of attention given to commemorative practice. Art and architectural history, on the other hand, have been much interested in memorial representation through objects, but have paid scant attention to issues of social memory.Cross-cultural and interdisciplinary in scope, this book fills this gap and addresses topics ranging from material objects to physical space; from the contemporary to the historical; and from high art to memorials outside the category of art altogether. In so doing, it represents a significant contribution to an emerging field.Trade Review'This volume presents a new and intriguing perspective on the relationship between the material and immaterial dimensions of culture, suggesting that people's material technologies of memory are always also their technologies of forgetting.'The Journal of the Royal Anthropological InstituteTable of ContentsPart 1 Ephemeral monuments: ephemeral monuments, memory and royal sempiternity in a grass-fields kingdom, Nicholas Argenti; the place of memory, Susanne Kuchler. Part 2 Remembering and forgetting in images past: Girodet's "Portrait of Citizen Belley, Ex-Representative of the Colonies" - in remembrance of "things sublime", Helen Weston; bribing the vote - 18th-century monuments and the futility of commemoration, David Bindman; forgetting Rome and the voice of Piranesi's "speaking ruins", Tarnya Cooper. Part 3 War memorials: remembering to forget - sublimation as sacrifice in war memorials, Michael Rowlands; remembering and forgetting in the public memorials of the Great War, Alex King; commemorating 1916, commemorating difference, Neil Jarman.

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