Historiography by Nancy Stieber
This is my simple advocacy: the fruitfulness of recognizing the strengths and the claims of, on o... more This is my simple advocacy: the fruitfulness of recognizing the strengths and the claims of, on one side, our theories and conventions, that should not be held dogmatically, and, on the other, the realities, that are in some ways obdurate but often remarkably and fascinatingly malleable. To seek to live only a life of the mind at one pole, or of materiality at the other, or of coercive power from either, is to impoverish one's self, one's discipline, and one's smaller or greater community. 1
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2003
Architectural Histories, 2015
Architectural Histories, 2018
Architectural Histories, 2018
The first part of these field notes consists of three perspectives from Germany, Estonia, and Por... more The first part of these field notes consists of three perspectives from Germany, Estonia, and Portugal on the meaning of 'Europe' for the historiography of architecture. The second part contains four reflections on the history and role of the EAHN in opening new and inclusive venues of inquiry vis-Ã -vis the fragile concept of 'Europe'.
Architectural Histories
This introduction to the special collection 'The Meaning of "Europe" for Architectural History' r... more This introduction to the special collection 'The Meaning of "Europe" for Architectural History' raises issues about the relationship between knowledge and geopolitics, in particular the significance of 'Europe' for the production of architectural knowledge. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the European Architectural History Network, we invited scholars to join us in rethinking one of our founding questions, namely, how to interpret the inextricable ties between knowledge and geopolitics, an issue that arose from the naming of our network. How can we unpack the significance of 'Europe' for our scholarly domain today? What is the role that the idea, legacy, and institutions of Europe play within the new distributions of global power, and how does it currently affect the production of architectural knowledge? We dedicate this special issue of the EAHN's peerreviewed, public access journal Architectural Histories to these questions. Our questions pertain to the development of our disciplinary culture in and beyond the Age of the Three Worlds, to borrow Michael Denning's definition of 'that short half century between 1945 and 1989 when it was imagined that the world was divided into three-the capitalist first world, the communist second world, and the decolonizing third world' (Denning 2004: 2). The idea that 'Europe' as a geographical construct was split during this period between two 'worlds', and gradually retreated from controlling the 'third', testifies to the ambivalence and contingency of what we consider Europe. On the one hand, for the proliferating studies on ' other modernisms' 1 that go 'beyond Europe', 2 Europe continues to be the powerful foil against which knowledge is produced. On the other hand, the rise of our own network responded to the hegemony of the American Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), indicating the shifting powers within the First World and across the Atlantic Ocean. Indeed, from the EAHN's first meeting in 2006, we debated whether the 'European' in our name refers to cultural identity, to a geopolitical construct, or simply to its bureaucratic registration in Europe. From the start we acknowledged the significance of Europe's fragile and dynamic boundaries for our discipline. Papers in this collection continue to raise similar questions: Do these boundaries include the colonial expansion to Asia
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 1994
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2000
Urban Studies by Nancy Stieber
The creation of images by cities, called "urban representation," is a vital topic. Not only is th... more The creation of images by cities, called "urban representation," is a vital topic. Not only is the nature of "representation" on the intellectual agenda world wide, perhaps more importantly, the image of the city, the way the city represents itself, has become an issue for decisionmakers in the public and private sector, as well as for citizens themselves, and each has interests at stake.
The theoretical writings on cities and practical urban design of Dutch modernist architect and pl... more The theoretical writings on cities and practical urban design of Dutch modernist architect and planner H. P. Berlage have generally been interpreted within the intellectual history of urban design as moving from the medievalist influence of the Austrian theorist Camillo Sitte to the Baroque influence of the German planner A.E. Brinckmann. This narrowly construed, art historical approach fails to reflect either the interdisciplinary approach of Berlage or his embeddedness in the visual culture of cities. This paper proposes a re-reading of Berlage's influential conceptualization of the urban to demonstrate how his view of the city implied a visualization of its history.
Collections Electroniques De L Inha Actes De Colloques Et Livres En Ligne De L Institut National D Histoire De L Art, Sep 4, 2005
Les ecrits theoriques sur les villes et sur les realisations urbaines de l’architecte moderniste ... more Les ecrits theoriques sur les villes et sur les realisations urbaines de l’architecte moderniste neerlandais H. P. Berlage ont ete generalement interpretes par l’histoire intellectuelle de l’urbanisme comme provenant d’influences, de l’influence medievalisante du theoricien autrichien Camillo Sitte a l’influence baroque de l’urbaniste allemand A. E. Brinckmann. Cette approche restrictive de l’histoire de l’art echoue a mettre en lumiere l’approche interdisciplinaire de Berlage et son ancrage dans la culture visuelle des villes. Avec cette communication on proposera une relecture radicale de l’influente conceptualisation des phenomenes urbains de Berlage pour demontrer combien ce point de vue sur la ville implique une visualisation de son histoire.
Boston "The City of the Mind" "We'll always have Paris." In Humphrey Bogart's famous line from th... more Boston "The City of the Mind" "We'll always have Paris." In Humphrey Bogart's famous line from the film Casablanca, "Paris" evokes the carefree exultation of his romance with Ingrid Bergman and turns the city into the metaphor for a love affair that can only exist in memory. The brief passage in the film that
Boston "Self-Portraits and Autobiographies of the City: Comparative Sites of Urban Representation... more Boston "Self-Portraits and Autobiographies of the City: Comparative Sites of Urban Representation" One of the iconic images in the discourse on modern urbanism is Le Corbusier's hand gesturing magisterially above the model for the Plan Voisin. We have learned to be suspicious of the urban planner's totalizing view from above, now synonymous with "planning from above," detached, imposing values, overlooking the view from below. In the influential and frequently cited passage "Walking the City" from the book The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau describes the voluptuous pleasure of being lifted to a summit and becoming transformed into a voyeur, distanced from the mass below, looking down like a god with dominion over all surveyed and thereby transforming the city into a text that can be read. This totalizing eye which claims to know the city, this voyeur-god, de Certeau tells us, "must disentangle himself from the murky intertwining daily behaviors" of the ordinary practitioners of the city down below where they walk with a knowledge of the city that cannot be seen. The everyday, he says, escapes the imaginary totalizations produced by panoptic vision and he goes on to analyze in a poetic and pregnant fashion the rhetoric of walking the city that resists totalizing representation. 1 Theory like this begs for historical analysis. It raises question after question about how we frame our understanding of urban experience. Is the historian, like the planner, doomed to occupy the position of a totalizing voyeur who is cut off from the invisible workings of some authentic experience of the everyday? That may be the case, but the passage in de Certeau makes me want
Amsterdam by Nancy Stieber
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1986.MICROFICHE CO... more Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1986.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCHIncludes bibliographical references (v. 3, leaves 676-693).Housing design became an issue of public policy in Amsterdam when population growth spawned rapid urban expansion in the late nineteenth century. Dissatisfied with social, hygienic, and aesthetic aspects of the recent housing construction, between 1908 and 1919 the Amsterdam municipal council approved 87 housing projects to be built by housing societies and the municipality itself under the auspices of the 1902 Housing Act. In the attempt to improve housing design by public means and for collective benefit, the municipality drew on expertise from a variety of professions: medicine, architecture, law, and social work. However, the professionalization of housing design generated a number of conflicts: struggles between professions for authority, disagreements between laymen and experts, between mid...
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Historiography by Nancy Stieber
Urban Studies by Nancy Stieber
Amsterdam by Nancy Stieber