Dell Upton

Impermanent Architecture in the Southern American Colonies

NCE IN A WHILE someone slows down to read the historical marker that the state put up alongside the county road years before the site was actually found. Now the location is known for certain, but no one bothers to move the sign, because seventeenth-century Middle Plantation-down a side road and halfway across a soybean field in the rolling farm country west of Annapolis, Maryland-is nothing to look at

Pattern Books and Professionalism: Aspects of the Transformation of Domestic Architecture in America, 1800-1860

T HE FOLLOWING ESSAY begins with a simple, easily verified observation: the houses of ordinary Americans in 18oo were fundamentally different from those of Americans in 1900oo. Most early nineteenth-century houses were based on traditional forms long in use but closely adapted to their local contexts. A traveler in the early republic would have noted great disparities among the rural buildings and some of the urban buildings from state to state and even differences within individual states. A hundred years later a traveler might still have noted regional differences, but these would hAve been masked to a considerable extent by formal and decorative elements that varied little from place to place. Thus the differences among houses within a single neighborhood would have been greater than the aggregate of differences among groups of houses in New York and Chicago or San Francisco. While it is a commonplace to note the change from traditional and local forms to popular and national ones in nineteenth-century American

Lancasterian Schools, Republican Citizenship, and the Spatial Imagination in Early Nineteenth-Century America

Joseph Lancaster9s educational methods, developed in England in the 1790s, were adopted in the public schools of most of the largest cities in the United States in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Lancasterianism demanded a very specific spatial setting: an enormous classroom in which hundreds of children were taught under the supervision of a single master. Children were broken into small classes to recite their lessons under the tutelage of a more advanced student, or monitor. Lancasterianism appealed to educational leaders of the new nation because it was cheap to implement and its orderly discipline promised relief from the social disorder of the new nation. Most important, the Lancasterian method seemed to offer a solution to a key theoretical problem in the formation of a republican polity: how to devise mechanisms for maintaining order within a free society. For those attuned to materialist social assumptions, Lancasterian schools seemed to offer a vision of republican citizenship and a spatialized method for shaping it. The lower-class students for whom Lancasterianism was intended and their parents rejected the method for its repressive and undemocratic intentions, while the method9s ineffectiveness and logistical contradictions led to its abandonment by American school boards by the 1850s.

Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums

project for a governmental complex in Ankara, and Kemal Ahmet Aru’s Levent housing projects. Furthermore, the author delves into modern Turkish literature to describe the experience of modernity in a context that is undergoing transformation. She also provides links between theoretical sources and archival material, making connections between alterity and domesticity; between melancholy and Istanbul; between Manfredo Tafuri, Gayatri Spivak, and subaltern possibilities of housing; and between Immanuel Kant’s theory of cosmopolitanism and Taut’s work as an exile in Istanbul. In relation to other works on similar topics, Akcan’s work is part of larger historical project to go beyond the binaries of West and non-West, national and international, colonial and postcolonial, and modern and traditional. If, for instance, Sibel Bozdoğan’s Modernism and Nation-Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic thoroughly articulated the top-down imposition of modern architecture in a nationalizing culture, Akcan introduces the multiple journeys of modernism through nationalism, and possibly more bottom-up approaches to modernism, by introducing the clients of the Garden City in Ankara, melancholic writers of Istanbul, and emigrant architects, who in different ways display their desires to become the “subjects of [their] own history” (141). And if in Bozdoğan’s work modern architecture is an ideological apparatus of the state, representing the building of a nation, in Akcan’s history, perhaps in congruence with the majority of the architectural examples of her study, architecture is a normative practice whose result is a building. From her descriptions of standardization and rationalization, to the analysis of several plans in terms of served and service spaces, the architecture of translations is one that is projected in order to be realized as a building. Perhaps the telos of architecture as building could also be critically addressed given the scrutiny to which several other modernist teloi are subjected. Adding to the narrative of translation and its ethos in cross-cultural exchanges, there are two praxes of translation that take place throughout the book: translations between disciplines, especially between literary and philosophical texts and architecture; and literary translations from Turkish, German, and French to English. Akcan references several theoretical texts and literary examples in order to reveal the consciousness of the built environment in the works of major figures of modern Turkish literature such as Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar, Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, Nâzim Hikmet Ran, and the encyclopedist Reşad Ekrem Koçu. In her literary translations, Akcan maintains some idioms and authorial expressions in their own languages, italicizing them within square brackets and thus signaling the difficulties and opacities of translation. In addition to these idioms, words connoting architectural and urban ideas like Siedlung, Weltarchitektur, sofa, and hol remain in their “native” languages, suggesting that they are either nominal or are signifiers of ideas about settlements which may be untranslatable due to their specificity. Yet the question arises whether idioms or expressions are the same kinds of linguistic and textual sets as words like sofa, and whether they correspond to the same kind of textuality and the same work of translation. Perhaps, in this respect, the cosmopolitan ethos of translation that Akcan proposes could be further expanded and differentiated in relation to other models of cosmopolitanism, which were also developed as responses to the same political exigencies. Furthermore, could one imagine disciplinary architectural un-translatables? If so, how would they interact with social norms? The readers of this book will find a history of modernism that goes beyond an imperial cartography, and will encounter multiple voices of modernism including those of patrons, clients, and inhabitants of modern architecture. In this cartography, the map that Akcan draws is a rich historical study of houses in Germany and Turkey.