New Books in Architecture

Urban Labyrinths: Informal Settlements, Architecture, and Social Change in Latin America examines intervention initiatives in informal settlements in Latin American cities as social, spatial, architectural, and cultural processes. From the mid-20th century to the present, Latin America and other regions in the Global South have experienced a remarkable demographic trend, with millions of people moving from rural areas to cities in search of work, healthcare, and education. Without other options, these migrants have created self-built settlements mostly located on the periphery of large metropolitan areas. While the initial reaction of governments was to eliminate these communities, since the 1990s, several Latin American cities began to advance new urban intervention approaches for improving quality of life. This book examines informal settlement interventions in five Latin American cities: Rio de Janeiro, Medellín, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Tijuana. It explores the Favela-Bairro Program in Rio de Janeiro during the 1990s which sought to improve living conditions and infrastructure in favelas. It investigates projects propelled by Social Urbanism in Medellín at the beginning of the 2000s, aimed at revitalizing marginalized areas by creating a public transportation network, constructing civic buildings, and creating public spaces. Furthermore, the book examines the long-term initiatives led by SEHAB in São Paulo, which simultaneously addresses favela upgrading works, water pollution remediation strategies, and environmental stewardship. It discusses current intervention initiatives being developed in informal settlements in Buenos Aires and Tijuana, exploring the urban design strategies that address complex challenges faced by these communities. Taken together, the Latin American architects, planners, landscape architects, researchers, and stakeholders involved in these projects confirm that urbanism, architecture, and landscape design can produce positive urban and social transformations for the most underprivileged. This book will be of interest to students, researchers, and professionals in planning, urbanism, architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, urban geography, public policy, as well as other spatial design disciplines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

After centuries of colonial rule, the end of Angola’s three-decade civil war in 2002 provided an irresistible opportunity for the government to reimagine the Luanda cityscape. Awash with petrodollars cultivated through strategic foreign relationships, President José Eduardo dos Santos rolled out a national reconstruction program that sought to transform Angola’s capital into what he considered to be a modern, world-class metropolis. Until funds dried up in 2014, the program—in conjunction with sweeping private investments in real estate—involved mass demolitions of vernacular architecture to make way for high-rise buildings, large-scale housing projects, and commercial centers. The program thus underestimated the values enshrined in the materials and designs of Luanda’s existing “informally” constructed neighborhoods, or musseques. The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) explores the political significance of aesthetics in the remaking of the city. Dr. Claudia Gastrow’s archival and ethnographic work, which includes interviews with city planners, architects, nonprofit leaders, and urban dwellers, shows how government infrastructure projects and foreign-inspired designs came to embody displacement and exclusion for many. This, Dr. Gastrow argues, catalyzed a countermovement, an aesthetic dissent rooted in critically reframing informal urbanism as Indigenous—a move that enabled the possibility of recognizing the political potential of informal settlements as spaces that produce belonging. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

With implications for the history of religion and art alike, an exploration of the lasting influence of Christian liturgy across a range of media. Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy (Reaktion Books, 2025) offers a captivating journey through the history of religious rituals in Western Europe, showcasing the profound impact of Christian liturgy on art, literature, music, and architecture. Through ten evocative stories, it explores medieval rituals and their cultural influence up to the present day, providing fresh insights into the enduring legacy of the liturgy as an expression of human emotion and religious experience. Accessible to all, this guide provides translations and explanations to uncover the hidden treasures of ancient rites and their lasting significance, appealing to those seeking a deeper understanding of Western liturgical traditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

The Barrack, 1572–1914: Chapters in the History of Emergency Architecture (Park Books, 2024) tells the little-known history of a building type that many people used to register as an alien interloper in conventionally built-up areas. The barrack is a mostly lightweight construction, a hybrid between shack, tent, and traditional building. It is a highly efficient structure that sometimes also proves to be extremely durable. Easy to erect and to take down, it is—after the introduction of railways and later motor vehicles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—also easy to transplant from one location to another. Originating as a standardized accommodation in the late 16th century, the barrack became a mass-produced utility of military and civilian mobilization in the 19th century, providing immediate shelter for soldiers as well as for displaced persons, disaster victims, or prisoners. The barrack played a decisive role in shaping the political space of modernity. This interview was conducted by Matthew Wells, Senior Lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester. His research explores nineteenth-century architecture, focusing on artistic techniques, technology, and political economy. Wells is the author of Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design (Oxford UP, 2025) explores how objects and the domestic spaces seep into the aesthetic consciousness of movement-based artists, like dancers and urban designers, significantly shaping their approach to movement invention and choreography. If these objects and spaces happen to have been designed by a leading modernist architect and landscape designer working with the dancer, then the aesthetic imprint is amplified. Dance innovation becomes pressed into dialogue with spatial, environmental, and urban agendas. The Choreography of Environments builds on this premise to consider the use of ordinary objects from a private residence as lenses into viewing dance innovation. Author Janice Ross posits the Halprins' 1950s iconic mid-century modern home and expansive outdoor dance deck as a hidden archive. She explores four objects from their house and gardens -- staircase, deck, chair, and window -- to trace how, despite the conservative postwar climate, this intimate domestic space became a radical template reshaping postmodern dance invention and its expansion into civic, social, and environmental engagement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The work that happened in this white, middle class, Jewish-American home in a San Francisco suburb paved the way for changes that continue to resonate today across contemporary dance, performance, and urban design. These include: defamiliarizing urban landscape and gardens as cloistered theaters where civic identities are rehearsed, orchestrating collective problem solving and invention, normalizing the nude body, privileging a utilitarian and responsive rather than sentimental approach to dance in the environment, and re-positioning choreography as a vital medium for urban problem solving. These four representative objects in the Halprin home are also used to trace the burgeoning of dance as a forceful medium for civic engagement, and its valorization of the ordinary in movement. As a whole, this book shows how dance, architecture, and landscape design would have a profound confluence through these shared domestic spaces and objects of the Halprins' lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Hostel, House and Chambers: Accommodating the Victorian and Edwardian Working Woman (Liverpool University Press, 2025) by Emily Gee is the first comprehensive study of the campaigns to house a new generation of working women, the specialised design of the buildings and the women whose lives were changed by this architectural movement. After 1900, the rapid rise of women working as clerks, secretaries or typists, in London and other cities, created an urgent need for affordable and respectable accommodation. Building on models of elegant Victorian ladies’ residential chambers and the vast working men’s lodging houses, a new type of single working women’s hostel emerged. The handsome, if occasionally austere, façades blended into the Edwardian streetscape. However, architectural plans, literary descriptions and historic photographs reveal distinctive interiors. The hostels featured efficiently planned tiny private spaces alongside generous communal dining and sitting rooms, as well as libraries, music rooms and bicycle stores. Emphatically not charitable or municipal affairs, these were business-minded enterprises, established and advocated by other Edwardian women. In turn, these little-known buildings supported, enabled and empowered a new generation of intrepid working women. This book brings the buildings, and the residents, to vivid life through previously untapped sources. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

The Architecture of the Wire explores the development of telecommunications infrastructure and its impact on the architectural and urban culture of the modern age—from poles, wires, and cables, to “micro-architectures,” such as the théâtrophone and the telephone booth. Starting with the intrepid worldwide infrastructures of the late nineteenth century, Carlotta Darò proposes a new history that explores the multiple links and crossroads of such technical “things” with architecture and art.Based on extensive research of North American company archives, and French institutional ones, and drawing on secondary literature in art and architectural history, media studies, and the history of technology, Darò examines the aesthetic implications of material objects that have forever changed our urban, rural, and domestic environments. This interview was conducted by Matthew Wells, Senior Lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester. His research explores architecture in the long nineteenth century, focusing on artistic techniques, technology, and political economy. Wells is the author of Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

By the end of the twentieth century, US architecture and engineering firms held more capital than entire countries, employed more people than were housed in most cities, and rented offices in more nations than comprised the UN. Within them, architects were designing not single buildings but urban systems, including the multinational infrastructures, legal codes, and financial mechanisms on which those systems came to depend. However, despite the extraordinary power of these architects, their histories remain shrouded in myth and concealed—by design. In Incorporating Architects: How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire (U California Press, 2025) Dr. Aaron Cayer provides a forensic analysis that traces a history of architects at one such firm, AECOM, as they assembled their own multinational corporation and embedded themselves in the operations of American empire after World War II, shielding themselves from the instabilities of a postwar political economy. Incorporating Architects reveals how architects, through their businesses more than their drawings or buildings, modulated the political economy, gripped the reins of their profession, and produced the global injustices that define our neoliberal present. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

For almost seven years after World War II, a small group of architects took on an exciting task: to imagine the spaces of global governance for a new political organization called the United Nations (UN). To create the iconic headquarters of the UN in New York City, these architects experimented with room layouts, media technologies, and design in tribunal courtrooms, assembly halls, and council chambers. The result was the creation of a new type of public space, the global interior. Assembly by Design: The United Nations and Its Global Interior (U of Minnesota Press, 2024) shows how this space leveraged media to help the UN communicate with the world. With its media infrastructure, symbols, acoustic design, and architecture, the global interior defined political assembly both inside and outside the UN headquarters, serving as the architectural medium to organize multilateral encounters of international publics around the globe. Demonstrating how aesthetics have long held sway over political work, Olga Touloumi posits that the building framed diplomacy on the ground amid a changing political landscape that brought the United States to the forefront of international politics, destabilizing old and establishing new geopolitical alliances. Uncovering previously closed institutional and family archives, Assembly by Design offers new information about the political and aesthetic decisions that turned the UN headquarters into a communications organism. It looks back at a moment of hope, when politicians, architects, and diplomats—believing that assembly was a matter of design—worked together to deliver platforms for global democracy and governance. Olga Touloumi is associate professor of architectural history at Bard College. She is coeditor of Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground. Nushelle de Silva is assistant professor of architectural history at Fordham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Urban Planning in Nazi Germany: Attack, Triumph, Terror in the European Context, 1933–1945 (DOM, 2025) is edited by Uwe Altrock, Harald Bodenschatz, Victoria Grau, Jannik Noeske, Christiane Post, and Max Welch Guerra. The book includes contributions from Christian von Oppen, Piero Sassi, and Jannik Noeske.  Two co-editors, Victoria Grau and Max Welch Guerra, join the New Books Network to discuss this work. In this book, urban planning under the Nazi dictatorship is for the first time examined not only as something that evolved during the different periods of Nazi rule but also in the context of other European dictatorships of the time. The period between 1933 and 1945 saw important changes in the focus of Nazi urban planning. These affected the cast of principal actors, the content of the regime’s propaganda, cities and areas affected, programs and practices, and winners and losers. The result of this survey is a multi-layered picture that goes beyond the usual presentation of well-known power-projecting buildings to consider a range of other important aspects including housing construction, urban renewal, internal colonization, buildings for rearmament, large-scale infrastructure, industrial areas, educational institutions, and camps. This volume marks the conclusion of a series of academic publications about urban planning and dictatorship – in the Soviet Union, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Urban Planning in Nazi Germany: Attack, Triumph, Terror in the European Context, 1933-1945 is the English language edition of Stadtbau im Nationalsozialismus: Angriff, Triumph, Terror im europäischen Kontext, 1933–1945. Guests: Victoria Grau (she/her), *1999, studied Urban Studies at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and at University College Dublin. Since 2022 research assistant at the Chair of Spatial Planning and Spatial Research at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Research focus: Relationship between planning, politics and economy in European metropolitan centers in the 20th and 21st century. PhD project: History of the discipline of urban planning and its reception after 1945.Max Welch Guerra (he/him), *1956, political scientist (FU Berlin), since 2003 head of chair for spatial planning and spatial research at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Research and teaching on spatial planning and politics with a focus on German and European history in the 20th century. Member of the International Planning History Society (IPHS), the Academic Advisory Board of the Documentation Center Nazi Party Rally Grounds / Zeppelin Grandstand and Zeppelin Field, Nuremberg, and Chairman of the Academic Advisory Board of the Academy for Territorial Development in the Leibniz Association (ARL). . Host:    Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Find Jenna on Scholars@Duke or her Linktree. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, seemed to encapsulate an entire era in this nation’s urban history. Across that decade, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, destroying entire neighborhoods home to poor communities of color. Yet as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City (Norton, 2025), the vast majority of the fires were not set by residents, as is commonly assumed, but by landlords looking to collect insurance payouts. Driven by perverse incentives—new government-sponsored insurance combined with tanking property values—landlords hired “torches,” mostly Black and Brown youth, to set fires in the buildings, sometimes with people still living in them. Tens of thousands of families lost their homes to these blazes, yet for much of the 1970s, tenant vandalism and welfare fraud stood as the prevailing explanations for the arson wave, effectively indemnifying landlords. Ansfield’s book, based on a decade of research, introduces the term “brownlining” for the destructive insurance practices imposed on poor communities of color under the guise of racial redress. Ansfield shows that as the FIRE industries—finance, insurance, and real estate— eclipsed manufacturing in the 1970s, they began profoundly reshaping Black and Brown neighborhoods, seeing them as easy sources of profit. At every step, Ansfield charts the tenant-led resistance movements that sprung up in the Bronx and elsewhere, as well as the explosion of popular culture around the fires, from iconic movies like The Towering Inferno to hit songs such as “Disco Inferno.” Ultimately, they show how similarly pernicious dynamics around insurance and race are still at play in our own era, especially in regions most at risk of climate shocks. Bench Ansfield is Assistant Professor of History at Temple University. They hold a PhD in American Studies from Yale University and won the Allan Nevins Prize for the best dissertation in American history from the Society of American Historians. They live in Philadelpha, Pennsylvania. Bluesky. Website. Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

The rise and fall of William J. Levitt, the man who made the suburban house a mass commodity. Two material artifacts defined the middle-class American lifestyle in the mid-twentieth century: the automobile, which brought gas stations, highways, commercial strips, and sprawl; and the single-family suburban home, the repository of many families’ long-term wealth. While the man who did the most to make the automobile a mass commodity—Henry Ford—is well known, few know the story of the man who did the same for the suburban house. Edward Berenson describes the remarkable career of William Levitt, who did more than anyone else to create the modern suburb. In response to an unprecedented housing shortage as veterans returned home from World War II, his Levittown developments provided inexpensive mass-produced housing that was wildly popular—prospective buyers would camp out in line for two days for the chance to put down a deposit on a Levitt house. He was a celebrity, a life-changing hero to tens of thousands, and the pitchman of a renewed American Dream. But Levitt also shared Ford’s dark side. He refused to allow Black people to buy or rent in his developments and doggedly defended this practice against legal challenges. Leading the way for other developers who emulated his actions, he helped ensure that suburbs nationwide remained white enclaves. These legacies are still with us. Levitt made a major contribution to the stubborn wealth disparity between white families and Black families, and his solution to the housing crisis of the 1940s—the detached house and surrounding yard—is a primary cause of the housing crisis today. As a person, Levitt was a strangely guileless and tragic figure. He accumulated vast wealth but, after losing control of his building company, surrendered it all through foolish investments and a lavish lifestyle that included a Long Island mansion and a two-hundred-foot yacht. Just weeks before his death, as a charity patient in a hospital to which he had once given millions, he was still imagining his great comeback. Edward Berenson is a professor of history at New York University and director of its Institute of French Studies. His books include Europe in the Modern World, The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story, and The Accusation. He lives in Tarrytown, NY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

The relationship between the city and cinema is formidable. The images and sounds of the city found in movies are perhaps the only experience that many people will have of cities they may never visit. Films influence the way we construct images of the world, and accordingly, in many instances, how we operate within it. Cinematic Cairo: Egyptian Urban Modernity from Reel to Real offers a history of Cairo’s urban modernity using film as the primary source of exploration, and cinematic space as both an analytical tool and a medium of critique. Cairo has provided rich subject material for Egypt’s film industry since the inception of the art form at the end of the nineteenth century. The “reel” city—imagined, perceived, and experienced—provides the spatial domain that mirrors change and allows for an interrogation of the “real” city as it encountered modernity over the course of a century.Bringing together chapters by architects and art and literary historians, this volume explores this parallel and convergent relationship through two sections. The first uses films from the 1930s to the end of the twentieth century to illustrate the development of a modern Cairo and its modern subjects. The second section is focused on tracing the transformation of the cinematic city under conditions of neoliberalism, religious fundamentalism, and gender tensions. The result is a comprehensive narrative of the urban modernity of one of the most important cities in the Arab world and Global South. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

In Istanbul, there is a mosque on every hill. Cruising along the Bosphorus, either for pleasure, or like the majority of Istanbul’s denizens, for transit, you cannot help but notice that the city’s landscape would be dramatically altered without the mosques of the city. In Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton University Press, 2019), Ünver Rüstem takes a stab of a slice of that history, arguing that we should see the eighteenth-century Baroque period in Ottoman mosque architecture as innovative and not derivative in how Ottoman mosque architecture integrated Baroque elements. By doing so, he pushes back effectively against notions of Ottoman decline and demonstrates that such architecture, praised in the contemporary writings of both Ottoman and Western viewers, successfully rebranded the Ottoman capital for a changing world. He also draws our eyes to the complex social process by which mosque design develops, bringing in a cast of characters that includes non-Muslims as much as non-Muslims. On this New Books interview, we walk you through the book, Rüstem’s process, what Baroque means in different contexts and mosque architecture in Istanbul today. Ünver Rüstem is Assistant Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Johns Hopkins University. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

A History of the Church through its Buildings (Oxford University Press, 2021) by Allan Doig takes the reader to meet people who lived through momentous religious changes in the very spaces where the story of the Church took shape. Buildings are about people, the people who conceived, designed, financed, and used them. Their stories become embedded in the very fabric itself, and as the fabric is changed through time in response to changing use, relationships, and beliefs, the architecture becomes the standing history of passing waves of humanity. This process takes on special significance in churches, where the arrangement of the space places members of the community in relationship with one another for the performance of the church's rites and ceremonies. Moreover, architectural forms and building materials can be used to establish relationships with other buildings in other places and other times. Coordinated systems of signs, symbols, and images proclaim beliefs and doctrine, and in a wider sense carry extended narratives of the people and their faith. Looking at the history of the church through its buildings allows us to establish a tangible connection to the lives of the people involved in some of the key moments and movements that shaped that history, and perhaps even a degree of intimacy with them. Standing in the same place where the worshippers of the past preached and taught, or in a space they built as a memorial, touching the stone they placed, or marking their final resting-place, holding a keepsake they treasured or seeing a relic they venerated, probably comes as close to a shared experience with these people as it is possible to come. Perhaps for a fleeting moment at such times their faces may come more clearly into focus. Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Conservation of Twentieth-Century Furniture (Routledge, 2024) provides comprehensive and accessible coverage of the materials and techniques that are encountered in furniture of this century. After putting the design, manufacture and conservation of twentieth-century furniture into context, the volume then offers an A-Z of materials organised into 12 chapters. Within each chapter a wide variety of material types are discussed, observed, analysed and contextualised, and a list of further sources is provided. The furniture discussed in this book ranges from designer craftsman, individually made pieces, to factory-produced batch items, and includes cabinet work, decoration, surface finishes and upholstery, observing the traditional repertoire of materials, as well as innovative materials and processes introduced over the course of this century. Following the material chapters, the book also includes brief case studies that illustrate some examples of twentieth-century furniture conservation, with a focus on metal, plastic and wood. Conservation of Twentieth-Century Furniture is the primary resource for those working on the manufacture, history and care of furniture of this period, including conservators, curators, dealers and collectors. Lauren Fonto is a Master's student in the program Heritage and Cultural Sciences: Heritage Conservation at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She is currently a heritage conservation intern. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Along with the rise of Mussolini’s fascist regime, the interwar years in Italy also saw the widespread development of its modernist interior design and furnishing practices. While the regime’s politics were overtly manifest in monumental government architecture, Furnishing Fascism: Modernist Design and Politics in Italy (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) by Dr. Ignacio G. Galán examines the subtler yet effective role of household goods and decor in the cultivation of Italy’s exclusionary sense of national identity. Presenting a fresh look at the work of various architects and designers, including iconic figures such as Gio Ponti and Carlo Enrico Rava, Dr. Galán explores how seemingly neutral products of everyday life contributed to the propagation of fascist ideology. Through extensive promotion in popular magazines and department stores, on the film sets of Cinecittà Studios, and throughout the country’s colonial territories, Italy’s modernist design practices were part of a larger political project that aimed to produce a totalizing image of cultural hegemony. Interweaving design theory, architectural history, and media scholarship, Furnishing Fascism reexamines the period’s so-called minor arts to reveal the political entanglement of modernism in early twentieth-century Italy and offers valuable insight into the complications of cultural production under the auspices of authoritarian power. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Albeit inspired by a progressive vision of a working environment without walls or hierarchies, the open plan office has come to be associated with some of the most dehumanizing and alienating aspects of the modern office. Jennifer Kaufman-Buhler's fascinating new book Open Plan: A Design History of the American Office (Bloomsbury, 2021) examines the history of the open plan office concept from its early development in the late 1960s and 1970s, through its present-day dominance in working spaces throughout the world, examining the design, meaning, and use of the open plan from the perspective of architects and designers, organizations, and workers. Using the progressive vision of the early promoters of the open plan as a framework for analysis, and drawing on original archival research and contemporary discussions of the open plan, this book explores the various goals embedded in the open plan and examines how the design of the open plan evolved through the late 20th century in response to various social, cultural, organizational, technological and economic changes. Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

The 1960s continue to hold an almost mythical place in Western culture, particularly in Britain, where change was widespread and infiltrated many aspects of life. This included architecture, whose role in a modern democracy and the form it should take were hotly debated. 1960s University Buildings: The Golden Age of British Modern Architecture (Lund Humphries, 2025) by John Barr discusses the architectural thinking of the time through an examination of the design of university buildings. While there were notable buildings being built in other spheres, no other field of architecture provided the opportunity to express those ideas as freely, while also reflecting innovative new thinking about education and society. Somehow, the university buildings of the 1960s seemed to represent the cutting edge of modern architecture in the UK. This book provides the first critical analysis and overview of these buildings, designed by some of the leading British architects of the period including Basil Spence, Leslie Martin, Alison and Peter Smithson, Denys Lasdun, Powell and Moya and James Stirling. By placing the buildings in a wider social, cultural and political context, it examines the combination of circumstances and attitudes that produced results that are equally admired and detested and allows us to understand how we might replicate or avoid them in the future. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai (Stanford UP, 2020) by Todd Reisz is a critical historical account of Dubai’s transformation into a global urban spectacle. Reisz examines how architecture, master planning, and international expertise contributed to the construction of Dubai’s modern image, focusing particularly on the period between the 1950s and 1970s. Rather than narrating Dubai’s development as a spontaneous miracle of oil wealth, Reisz reveals it as a meticulously crafted project, shaped by deliberate strategies to project modernity, power, and cosmopolitanism. Throughout the book, Reisz uses a wide range of archival materials, planning documents, interviews, and visual sources to trace how architecture and city-making became tools of governance and spectacle. He brings attention to the invisible labor—both technical and physical—that undergirded Dubai’s rise. Yet, the workers, planners, and advisors often remain shadowy figures behind the gleaming facades they helped erect. One of the key figures Reisz highlights is British architect John Harris, whose firm was commissioned in the 1960s to create Dubai’s first master plan. Harris’s work embodied the desire to modernize without entirely erasing local culture. Yet, as Reisz notes, the imported modernist language of architecture often clashed with, or simply overrode, traditional urban forms. Dubai's early building boom was thus a hybrid project: shaped by Western notions of progress and functionality, but executed in a Gulf context where colonial histories and local aspirations intertwined. Importantly, Showpiece City challenges narratives that paint Dubai as either a rootless fantasy or a neoliberal dystopia. Reisz treats Dubai’s history seriously, demonstrating that its urban form is the result of pragmatic decisions, diplomatic negotiations, and speculative gambles rather than mere vanity. He also critiques the romanticization of "traditional" Arab cities by showing that Gulf urbanism has long been dynamic, experimental, and globally connected. Showpiece City presents Dubai’s urbanization not as an inevitable product of oil wealth or as a superficial extravagance, but as a complex, calculated project of image-making and infrastructural ambition. Reisz’s work contributes to Middle Eastern urban studies by insisting that cities like Dubai deserve nuanced, historically grounded analysis rather than simplistic dismissals or celebrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture