The Illinois School of Architecture Lecture | Spring 2022
Publications
- Under the Bed is a Cool, Dark Place byPublication Date: 2016
- The Mound of Vendôme byPublication Date: 2015
- Urban Space or State Monument?: The Maydan in Kiev byPublication Date: 2003
Spatial Revolution by
Spatial Revolution is the first comparative parallel study of Soviet architecture and planning to create a narrative arc across a vast geography. The narrative binds together three critical industrial-residential projects in Baku, Magnitogorsk, and Kharkiv, built during the first fifteen years of the Soviet project and followed attentively worldwide after the collapse of capitalist markets in 1929. Among the revelations provided by Christina E. Crawford is the degree to which outside experts participated in the construction of the Soviet industrial complex, while facing difficult topographies, near-impossible deadlines, and inchoate theories of socialist space-making. Crawford describes how early Soviet architecture and planning activities were kinetic and negotiated and how questions about the proper distribution of people and industry under socialism were posed and refined through the construction of brick and mortar, steel and concrete projects, living laboratories that tested alternative spatial models. As a result, Spatial Revolution answers important questions of how the first Soviet industrialization drive was a catalyst for construction of thousands of new enterprises on remote sites across the Eurasian continent, an effort that spread to far-flung sites in other socialist states--and capitalist welfare states--for decades to follow. Thanks to generous funding from Emory University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellopen.org) and other repositories.
ISBN: 9781501759192Publication Date: 2022
Chicago: Two Grids Between Lake and River (Redesigning Gridded Cities series) by
Redesigning Gridded Cities focuses with extreme detail on four paradigmatic gridded cities, Manhattan, Chicago, Barcelona, and Hangzhou by analyzing these cities and proposing their own interventions that implicate the grid in productive ways. They emphasize the value of open forms for city design, and specifically insist that the grid has the unique capacity to absorb and channel urban transformation flexibly and productively. In both historical and projective, this series of books explore the potential of the grid as a design tool to produce a multitude of urban processes and forms. This publication about the city of Chicago is the product of a research project at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design to reinterpret the theme of the regular-- gridded--city and to test its potential to assist in designing the contemporary city. There were two main aims for this research. The first pedagogical aim was to identify the morphological attributes of the gridded city and to understand the current value of this tool that has been built in the most varied cultures. The second, speculative, aim was to explore broadly urban design principles that can address issue particular to the 21st century city.
ISBN: 9781939621528Publication Date: 2017
Urban Housing Atlas by
Urban Housing Atlas is a compendium of more than twenty multi-family projects that Utile, a Boston-based architecture and urban planning firm, designed from 2003 through 2007. The book was originally developed as an in-house manual to record housing solutions for both implemented projects and for proposals not carried forward that ran the risk of becoming lost design efforts. As a reference book, the compendium was to communicate collective knowledge gained to an ever-growing design team and would avoid instances of wheel-reinvention, a problem in a busy office with a horizontal management structure. Except in rare instances, all of the projects comprise between eight and forty units, are four stories or fewer, and were planned for urban infill sites in the Boston metropolitan area. Although the collection of proposals represents a wide range of building types, the projects were developed under uniform regulatory and economic constraints and with a consistent design methodology. See also: https://www.utiledesign.com/resources/urban-housing-atlas/
ISBN: 9781605855864Publication Date: 2008
"The Case to Save Socialist Space" in Routledge Research Companion to Landscape Architecture by
The Routledge Research Companion to Landscape Architecture considers landscape architecture's increasingly important cultural, aesthetic, and ecological role. The volume reflects topical concerns in theoretical, historical, philosophical, and practice-related research in landscape architecture - research that reflects our relationship with what has traditionally been called 'nature'. It does so at a time when questions about the use of global resources and understanding the links between human and non-human worlds are more crucial than ever.　 The twenty-five chapters of this edited collection bring together significant positions in current landscape architecture research under five broad themes - History, Sites and Heritage, City and Nature, Ethics and Sustainability, Knowledge and Practice - supplemented with a discussion of landscape architecture education. Prominent as well as up-and-coming contributors from landscape architecture and adjacent fields including Tom Avermaete, Peter Carl, Gareth Doherty, Ottmar Ette, Matthew Gandy, Christophe Girot, Anne Whiston Spirn, Ian H. Thompson and Jane Wolff seek to widen, fuel, and frame critical discussion in this growing area. A significant contribution to landscape architecture research, this book will be beneficial not only to students and academics in landscape architecture, but also to scholars in related fields such as history, architecture, and social studies.
ISBN: 9781472484680Publication Date: 2018
Previous Lecture & Digital Scholarship
- Atlanta Housing Interplay
"Atlanta was the site of both the first so-called “slum clearance” project in the United States, in 1934, and of America's first completed—racially segregated—federally-funded public housing: Techwood Homes (1936-1996, for white families), and University Homes (1937-2009, for Black families). These projects, composed of low-slung brick apartment buildings set in footpath-crossed open spaces, became models for New Deal housing projects built throughout the U.S. in the years following enactment of the National Housing Acts of 1934 and 1937. Techwood and University were foundational sites that played a significant role in setting the aesthetic language and planning logic for American public housing of the mid-20th century, yet they have been overshadowed by later projects in cities like New York and Chicago, where architectural scholarship is already abundant. Through a detailed investigation of Techwood and University Homes, this research project seeks to plot Atlanta on the interwar architectural map, establishing the city’s role as a clearinghouse for European social housing ideas in the U.S., and as one of the earliest home-grown precedents for New Deal public housing...
The project will chart a geography of architectural influence for Techwood and University through archival research, digitization, and mapping of foreign precedents brought back to Atlanta by real-estate mogul turned housing crusader, Charles F. Palmer, the driving force behind Techwood’s development."