Review of 'Architecture and Pilgrimage 1100-1500'

Books Paul Davies, Deborah Howard, and Wendy Pullan, eds. Architecture and Pilgrimage, 1000– 1500: Southern Europe and Beyond Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2013, 304 pp., 79 b/w illus. £70, ISBN 9781472410832 Pilgrimage was big business in the Middle Ages. Accommodating the needs of visitors to holy sites affected the design, use, and decoration of some of Europe’s finest religious buildings. This essay collection examines the overlooked but closely intertwined relationship between architecture and pilgrimage, making a significant contribution to the ongoing debate regarding form and function in medieval buildings. Following an excellent, wide-ranging introduction by Paul Davies and Deborah Howard (1–18), the volume is divided into two parts: “Mediterranean Perspectives” and “Italian Sacred Places as Pilgrimage Destinations.” The geographical scope of the volume is ambitious—from Mecca to Venice, from Santiago to Rome—fitting into the current scholarly trend toward intercultural Mediterranean studies. Due to its relatively strong focus on Christian pilgrimage, however, it includes only one essay addressing Islam, and Jewish culture is omitted entirely. The Mediterranean theme of the book’s first section begins with Henry Maguire’s essay “Pilgrimage through Pictures in Medieval Byzantine Churches” (21–37). Maguire examines Christological images in Byzantine cult churches, which Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 74, no. 2 (June 2015), 248–263. ISSN 0037-9808, electronic ISSN 2150-5926. © 2015 by the Society of Architectural Historians. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/ reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jsah.2015.74.2.248. 248 specifically referenced the architecture and topography of the Holy Land, such as the Dome of the Rock and the cross that marked the location of Christ’s baptism. Maguire concludes that such specific allusions highlighted the parallel experiences of pilgrims visiting the local cult and the Holy Land, respectively, and forged close comparisons between the local saint and Christ. Texts written by Byzantine pilgrims indicate that when they visited the Holy Land, their experience was fundamentally affected by this familiar iconography. As Avinoam Shalem explains, the Ka’ba in Mecca, with its almost cubic shape and diaphanous black covering, is a unique building whose image is firmly fixed in the Muslim psyche (“The Four Faces of the Ka’ba in Mecca,” 39–58). When pilgrims visit the building they form new memories of its three-dimensional form that “clash” with previously constructed mental images, “revealing to the Muslim pilgrim a further dimension of the most holy” (53). The highly visual description by twelfthcentury pilgrim Ibn Jubayr demonstrates the iconographic power of the Ka’ba, conveyed through its sumptuous materials and the strikingly large covering, or kiswa, whose gentle movement in the breeze was reputedly caused by the vibrating wings of seventy thousand guardian angels. Wendy Pullan’s examination of the pervasive symbol of Christian pilgrimage, the scallop shell, begins with the observation that the supporting visual apparatus of pilgrimage, its “white noise,” can have symbolic value despite its ubiquity (“Tracking the Habitual: Observations on the Pilgrim’s Shell,” 59–85). A short history of the shell reveals that it was associated with Santiago de Compostela before being narratively linked to Saint James and later became a generic symbol for pilgrimage of all kinds. Its presence in the myth of Venus demonstrates that the shell—seen in architectural surface decoration, liturgical textiles, and painted images—is ultimately a symbol of regeneration. As a point of embarkation rather than arrival, Venice took a careful approach to pilgrimage, navigating among religious, commercial, and diplomatic objectives, which are evocatively characterized by Deborah Howard in “Venice as Gateway to the Holy Land: Pilgrims as Agents of Transmission” (87–110). With their strong mercantile origins, Venetians maintained Muslim trade links, facilitated repairs to holy sites, and offered “package tour” deals to pilgrims. But beyond mere commercial interests, Howard suggests, Venetian architecture specifically emulated biblical landmarks—many of which were located around the embarkation point of the Arsenal—constructing a symbolic identity for the city as New Jerusalem. The Italian focus of the book’s second section begins with Claudia Bolgia’s analysis of a new type of microarchitectural tabernacle for Marian icons in Roman churches (“Icons ‘in the Air’: New Settings for the Sacred in Medieval Rome,” 113–42). Formally similar to relic tabernacles, icon shrines were elevated threelevel superstructures above altars. Bolgia considers these complex structures in terms of their patronage, accessibility, visibility, changing use, and meaning for pilgrims, emphasizing their apotropaic value on a local level. Joanna Cannon confronts the lack of significant Dominican places of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages, questioning whether certain shrines tried to attract devotion and failed (“Dominican Shrines and Urban Pilgrimage in Later Medieval Italy,” 143–63). Tracking the locations of shrines within architectural space, Cannon observes that the Dominicans were initially reluctant to promote cults of saints and beati. At first the friars placed shrines in liturgically elevated but restrictive areas, only to move them later to the western sections of churches, beyond partitions or screens (tramezzi), to facilitate access by the laity. Although this disposition may have diluted the impact of the shrines, it seems to have been a response to the increasing late medieval tendency toward local urban pilgrimage. Donal Cooper and Janet Robson assess late thirteenth-century alterations to the Lower Church at Assisi, which included removal of the choir screen and construction of a “pergola” to house the altar and tomb of Saint Francis (“Imagery and the Economy of Penance at the Tomb of St Francis,” 165–86). Increases in the numbers of pilgrims hoping to obtain the annual Perdono plenary indulgence at a nearby Franciscan shrine prompted the creation of more fluid architectural space in the Lower Church as well as visual stimuli based on themes of penance. These changes were also targeted toward new “vicarious” pilgrims, who were given receipts for having completed the pilgrimage in proxy for deceased persons. Whereas architectural similarities have often been interpreted as mere “artistic influence,” Paul Davies argues for multiple explanations derived from devotional, rather than artistic, concerns (“Likeness in Italian Renaissance Pilgrimage Architecture,” 187–211). Davies reveals that the image tabernacle in Santa Maria di Impruneta bears close similarities with an earlier Florentine counterpart, and its setting is analogous to the disposition of twinned tabernacles in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. Various motivations informed this practice of architectural copying, including the ambition to emulate the sanctity of another shrine and the desire to create an inclusive identity among shrines with similar dedications. Although Santa Maria delle Carceri in Prato and Santa Maria della Pietà in Bibbona may be stylistically classified as ideal centrally planned Renaissance churches, Robert Maniura examines their form in the context of Marian devotion (“Two Marian Image Shrines in FifteenthCentury Tuscany, the ‘Iconography of Architecture’ and the Limits of ‘Holy Competition,’ ” 213–29). Avoiding the mundane explanation of mere competition, Maniura argues that cult sites of the Virgin Mary complemented and emulated one another. The architectural iconography of the domed central plan ultimately derived from the Pantheon (Santa Maria Rotonda), which housed a miraculous cult image known throughout Europe, as evidenced by images on surviving lead pilgrim badges. In an innovative move away from conventional architect-focused inquiry, the essays in Architecture and Pilgrimage, 1000– 1500 examine architecture in context. The contributors integrate buildings within broad analyses of images, relics, objects, and texts, arguably devising more accurate interpretations of the all-encompassing nature of pilgrimage. Images of architecture, microarchitectural structures, and the organization of interior space are investigated together with studies of entire buildings. The essays by Cooper and Robson and Cannon, for example, make important contributions toward a greater understanding of the use of tramezzi, fundamental yet little-understood components of the Italian church interior. Moreover, some of the volume’s scholars (Cooper and Robson, Davies, Maniura) find solutions to longestablished architectural problems precisely through this holistic approach. Cooper and Robson, for example, overturn previous pragmatic explanations of changes to the Lower Church at Assisi with their focus on the new spatial requirements of pilgrims. Significantly, this book challenges a restrictive definition of pilgrimage as a long-distance journey to a major site. Cannon highlights the prevalence of local urban pilgrimage, Maguire alludes to the power of images to facilitate prayerful pilgrimages of the mind, and Cooper and Robson discuss the late medieval practice of vicarious pilgrimages commissioned in testamentary bequests. The essays reveal that alongside international sites (Compostela, Rome, Assisi, Mecca), local shrines were highly popular and spiritually efficacious (Roman Marian churches, Sant’Eustorgio in Milan, Santa Maria di Impruneta). A further original approach explores the psychological effect on pilgrims who, upon reaching their destinations, had to reconcile their personal experience with their preexisting mental constructs of those sites, a process Shalem terms the “accumulative gaze” (42). Maguire explains, for example, that pilgrims to the Holy Land interpreted sites through the lens of Byzantine iconography, reporting visions of biblically inaccurate images clearly inspired by familiar frescoes and mosaics. As Herbert L. Kessler remarks in his afterword, subtitled “Pilgrimage and Transformation” (231–41), many of the essays (Maguire, Howard, Davies, Maniura) revise aspects of Richard Krautheimer’s seminal 1942 article “Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Mediaeval Architecture,’ ” further clarifying the precise nature of architectural “copying” and “imitation.” 1 Davies, for example— employing the less loaded term “likeness” (187)—expands on Krautheimer’s observation that copies often replicated precise measurements, concluding that this feature (undetectable to the observer) was “a means of transferring some of the sanctity of the original structure to a new location” (197). This subtle, exacting approach characterizes all the essays in Architecture and Pilgrimage, 1000–1500. The authors expertly analyze specific ways in which pilgrimage influenced the articulation of sacred space, the construction of religious images, and the nature of architectural symbolism. Scholars wishing to deepen their understanding of the complex relationships among architecture, religion, and society in the Middle Ages will find this book highly valuable. joanne allen American University Note 1. Richard Krautheimer, “Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Mediaeval Architecture,’ ” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942), 1–33. Margaret Muther D’Evelyn Venice and Vitruvius: Reading Venice with Daniele Barbaro and Andrea Palladio New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012, 504 pp., 1 color and 142 b/w illus. $75, ISBN 9780300174519 In this important publication, Margaret Muther D’Evelyn sets forth an ambitious agenda to examine the theories and BOOKS 249 writings of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio through the eyes of Daniele Barbaro and Andrea Palladio, two of the most influential architectural minds of sixteenthcentury Venice. To accomplish this goal, D’Evelyn divides her text into two main sections. The first, “Composing the Commentaries,” examines the place of Barbaro’s Commentaries on Vitruvius’s The Ten Books on Architecture within the context of the genre of the architectural treatise in late fifteenth-century to early sixteenthcentury Italy. Having established the literary backdrop for the Commentaries, D’Evelyn then focuses on the relationships among her three protagonists— Barbaro, Palladio, and Vitruvius—as experienced within the complex sociopolitical world that was Renaissance Venice. Few, if any, texts from antiquity proved more thought provoking in Renaissance intellectual circles than Vitruvius’s The Ten Books on Architecture. This work also boasted notably dense Latin. As a result, a pressing demand existed for an Italianlanguage edition that would be useful to the growing population of architectural practitioners and enthusiasts whose facility with Latin may not have enabled them to comprehend the nuances of Vitruvius’s prose. Several authors in the early sixteenth century offered translations, but none proved as authoritative or accessible as that produced by the Venetian diplomatcum-prelate Daniele Barbaro. As a result of his vast diplomatic experience, Barbaro approached Vitruvius from the standpoint of a humanist scholar rather than that of a cleric. He also recognized that in order to carry out his translation project he would need access to the expertise of a practicing architect, and he ultimately sought the input of Andrea Palladio, the premiere architect working in Venice and the Veneto. Together the men took up the challenge to produce a “more apprehensible and eloquent” edition of the ancient text. Theirs was not an overnight endeavor by any means. Rather, they created at least four separate texts: two handwritten preparatory versions now in the Biblioteca Marciana, Venice (CL. IV, cod. It. 152 [=4106], and Cl. IV, cod. It. 37 [=5133]), a 1566 edition published by Francesco Marcolini, and a revised version published in 1567 by Francesco de’ Franceschi. 250 J S A H | 74 . 2 | J U N E 2 01 5 D’Evelyn’s meticulous comparison of the handwritten notes and printed versions allows the reader to understand the active dialogue that took place between the two authors and their ancient Roman predecessor. To understand fully the implications of the Barbaro/Palladio enterprise, D’Evelyn acknowledges the influence of authors such as Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Sebastiano Serlio. As she outlines in chapter 1, “The Arrival of the Italian Renaissance Illustrated Architectural Book,” the printed and illustrated architectural treatise emerged as an important locus of aesthetic discourse in sixteenthcentury Italy. It was di Giorgio who recognized the limitations of writing for conveying architectural ideas and thus included drawings in his treatise. According to D’Evelyn, the addition of illustrations allowed the Sienese architect to support his reinterpretation of two longstanding theoretical underpinnings: sign and signified. (It should be noted that in this very thorough analysis, D’Evelyn does not reference or cite Ferdinand de Saussure, which comes as something of a surprise given her lengthy examination of the usage of the terms signifier and signified here and in other sections of the text.) She then turns to a discussion of di Giorgio’s architectural “grandson” (via Baldassare Peruzzi), Sebastiano Serlio. Whereas personal experience was the inspiration for di Giorgio’s treatise, Serlio’s work was inspired by the stage. Serlio was profoundly influenced by the theater, going so far as to identify the architectural orders with actors on the dramatic stage. As D’Evelyn ably demonstrates, both di Giorgio and (especially) Serlio loomed large in the mind of Daniele Barbaro when he decided to write his Commentaries on Vitruvius. In turn, Palladio offered his collaborator important insights, such as the need to address archaeological evidence in support of interpretations. Having methodically analyzed the specifics of Barbaro’s Commentaries within the genre of the architectural treatise, D’Evelyn turns her attention to the broader social, political, and, most important, architectural environment of early modern Venice. She divides the book’s second section, “Reading Venice,” into seven chapters, further subdividing these into “tesserae,” a clear reference to Venice’s fascination with pastiche and mosaic, intended to give the reader insights into the multitude of subjects addressed by Barbaro and Palladio. Throughout this section—which accounts for two-thirds of the book—D’Evelyn envisions her protagonists wandering Venice’s narrow calli and discussing the singular environment. Often the two men had to account for those elements that distinguished Venetian architecture of the early modern period from the ancient examples studied by Vitruvius. In the first of their many imagined urban peregrinations, “Building in Venice without Proper Foundations,” Barbaro and Palladio address arguably the most important aspect of any building, and one with notoriously unique challenges in Venice: the foundation. Obviously, Vitruvius did not address building in Venice specifically, but his ideas on this most important of elements can be discerned in numerous structures in the lagoon city, including the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, San Francesco della Vigna, and the Redentore. Renaissance architectural treatises served as more than records of stylistic suggestions and design principles. They also addressed decorum and propriety and recognized that space articulates behavior. This notion is manifested most fully in chapter 3, “Open Doors and Welcoming Atria.” This chapter likewise offers the reader some particularly important insights into the minds of Barbaro and Palladio regarding the inherent differences between the domestic architecture of ancient Rome and that of early modern Venice. For example, D’Evelyn demonstrates the ways in which Vitruvius’s notion of the tablinum was understood as comparable to, perhaps even conflated with, the mezzanine area found in many Venetian palaces. The conflation of business activities and family life within the private palace often inspired comment from visitors to Venice. However, the permeability of public and private was not the only element of architectural intrigue. Windows constituted a subject of equal, if not greater, interest, and it is this most important feature that serves as the focus of chapter 4. This chapter has the added benefit of allowing the reader glimpses into other aspects of Barbaro’s intellectual interests, notably his fascination with scientific endeavors, especially the metaphysics of light. Similar engineering concerns are addressed in chapter 5, “The Roof.” Chapter 6, “Bricks That Swim,” transitions from the microcosmic analysis of individual building parts and influences to consider the macrocosm of Venetian urbanism through discussion of one of the city’s most ubiquitous elements: the brick. It is considered here not merely as a building material. Rather, brick offers D’Evelyn an entrée into an analysis of the quality of building materials in general and the implications of the material decisions made by architects and patrons alike. Not surprisingly, much of this analysis focuses on one of the city’s most famous, and most controversial, marble-clad structures, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. As the meetinghouse of one of Venice’s wealthiest and most socially active religious lay confraternities, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco played an important role in the civic and spiritual life of the Renaissance city. As D’Evelyn outlines in chapter 7, “The City as Theater,” Venice was steeped in ritual and public processions. The city offered many unique spaces for public display and performance, including the altane. For Barbaro and Palladio, these platforms, found on the roofs of many Venetian palazzi, seemingly shared many characteristics with the maeniana described by Vitruvius. Linking the maeniana with the altane offered the Renaissance authors the opportunity to provide a definable built example for a space that was often the subject of imagination and speculation. Such issues provide the thematic leitmotif for the eighth and final chapter, “Literary Light.” Barbaro and Palladio relied on a variety of sources, most notably the works of Pliny and Ovid, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (the most enigmatic illustrated book of the era), and the writings of Leon Battista Alberti. Surprisingly, it is Alberti’s work that emerges as perhaps the strongest influence on Barbaro and Palladio. When viewed as an ensemble, D’Evelyn’s tesserae enable insightful glimpses into the minds of two of Venice’s foremost architectural thinkers and novel interpretations of structures in which they were directly involved, such as San Francesco della Vigna, and those that they certainly knew well, such as Codussi’s San Michele in Isola. The organizational principle of Venice and Vitruvius is made all the stronger by D’Evelyn’s decision to use only high-quality reproductions of original line drawings for illustration. This design allows the reader a more direct interaction with Barbaro and Palladio’s original publications and will surely appeal to scholars seeking to experience as much of the original texts as possible; it has the added benefit of offering Palladio a greater voice in the analysis. However, this decision might prove problematic for some readers. D’Evelyn makes many references to existing structures in Venice, some of which, such as the Palazzo Ducale and San Giorgio Maggiore, enjoy such acclaim as to not require illustrations. But other structures discussed, such as Palazzo Giovanelli in San Felice and the apartment blocks on the Calle del Paradiso, do not enjoy the same recognition. As a result, a reader not intimately familiar with Venetian architecture may need to undertake a modicum of independent research to understand fully the implications of the interpretive arguments presented. In sum, Margaret Muther D’Evelyn’s extraordinarily close reading of the primary documents and multiple early editions of the Commentaries, as well as her detailed and erudite observations about the thought processes that went into the creation of the Commentaries, renders Venice and Vitruvius indispensable to scholars of architectural history and Venetian studies. blake de maria Santa Clara University Scott Redford and Nina Ergin, eds. Cities and Citadels in Turkey: From the Iron Age to the Seljuks Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2013, 356 pp., 3 color and 192 b/w illus. 86. ISBN 9789042927124 This volume is the formal product of a symposium held in December 2009, one of the annual symposia organized by the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations at Koç University. The editors and contributors have put in painstaking effort to create a collection of essays of great substance that will serve for many years as a major resource on Anatolian citadels, fortresses, and their defensive structures as cultural artifacts and as sociospatial phenomena in their specific historical contexts. Readers may be puzzled to find such a heavy representation of the Iron Age coupled with a focus on medieval Byzantine and Seljuk Anatolia, but the book illustrates the state of the discipline of archaeology/architectural history in the Anatolian context. It is widely accepted that the Late Bronze Age in the Near East saw the development of large entrepreneurial urban centers, and that, following the collapse of the circum-Mediterranean trade network in the late thirteenth to the early twelfth centuries BCE, the communities of the Early Iron Age returned to the countryside in a more dispersed way, occupying marginal landscapes and taking refuge in high places. As illustrated particularly in Assyrian, Urartian, and Syro-Hittite geographies, the fortified citadel became a favored architectural unit to house royal palaces, military establishments, and other urban features. It is possible to argue that such architectural innovation continued to be used heavily during the Achaemenid, Hellenistic, and early Roman periods in Anatolia, yet classical archaeologists largely tend to prefer the Mediterranean and Aegean coastlands for their field research. In this sense, Cities and Citadels in Turkey implicitly suggests an unusual affinity between the Syro-Anatolian Iron Age and the medieval period, which presents a similar fragmentation of the Anatolian landscape. One wishes that this historiographic problem, as well as gaps of research, were discussed more explicitly in the book. One aim of the volume is to “recoup a sense of the value of city and citadel walls commensurate with a variety of important functions: as urban architecture par excellence, as delineators and protectors, and as markers of status, display, and ritual” (2). Despite its slightly overambitious title, the book is less about cities and urban space than it is about citadels—with their fortification walls, gates, bastions, and towers— as architectonic expressions of power with explicit references to military power, architectural technologies of monumental enclosures, and commemorative narratives of the state embedded in them. BOOKS 251 These “monumental presences in the urban landscape” (2) acted not only as sites of military and architectural innovations but also as loci of power negotiations and stately representation for political agents. A notable point made by many of the essays in the volume, particularly well argued in Scott Redford’s brilliant contribution on Seljuk citadels and Carolyn Chabot Aslan and Charles Brian Rose’s thorough work on Troy, is that the citadels became sites of memory and of intimate, material engagements with the deep past. The writing of ancient architectural histories has long suffered from a certain level of dryness, caused partially by strictly positivistic and functionalist approaches to architecture and partially by archaeologists’ overall disinterest in space and spatiality as cultural phenomena. Many of this volume’s chapters offer glimpses of hope for ways out of this conundrum, although closer collaboration among the authors (and perhaps a more informed exchange between Iron Age archaeologists and medievalists) would have made for more balance. For example, the reuse of architectural and sculptural fragments from former episodes of history (spolia) as a cultural practice of situated remembering is as common in Syro-Hittite and Phrygian urban architecture as it is in Byzantine and Seljuk appropriation of antiquity. The direct relationship of medieval citadels to the countryside and the extraurban environs has striking parallels in the Assyrian and Syro-Hittite citadels. The function of city gates as sites of political commemoration in Seljuk citadels is strongly reminiscent of the function of gates in fortified Iron Age cities such as Ayanis, Karkamish, and Karatepe. One common historiographic problem for all the contributors to this book seems to have been the contrast between citadels as products of social relations and citadels as foundations of imperial agency. When the authors work critically within a rich texture of archaeological data (e.g., Voigt, Aslan and Rose) or epigraphic evidence (Macrides, Redford), the complexity of each case study is revealed; however, many of the authors uncritically accept the agency of rulers a priori. Aslan and Rose’s strictly chronological description of the development and collapse of the citadel at Troy resonates well 252 J S A H | 74 . 2 | J U N E 2 01 5 with Mary M. Voigt’s meticulous and longawaited overview of the Yassıhöyük Stratigraphic Sequence and James Crow’s historical study of Sinope’s içkale and its multiple episodes of construction. These documentary pieces contrast with Scott Redford’s thematic exploration of the Seljuk citadels in Anatolia. In fact, many of the contributions in the volume (Aslan and Rose on Troy, Çilingiro lu on Ayanis, Voigt on Gordion, Summers and Summers on Kerkenes Da , Özyar on KaratepeAslanta , and Harrison on Tayinat) present extremely useful overviews of the archaeology of the sites they discuss. These contributions all derive from many years of site-based research and will surely be appreciated by the students of their respective fields. The difficult task in presenting such cases in the context of a cross-disciplinary publication is precisely the ability to take a step back and cast critical eyes on the urban spaces and their diachronic histories, making them relevant to broader debates on the making of urban spaces and places, the political economy of architectural construction, and visual programs. What are the architectural implications of the design of citadels and the palatial complexes housed in them in Assyrian, Urartian, Syro-Hittite, and Byzantine cities, for example? Why did the architectural patrons of both Urartian Ayanis and Seljukide Sinop commemorate their accomplishments by placing inscriptions at the city gates? In this sense, Özlem Çevik’s discussion of Urartian fortresses as a regionally esoteric practice, Harrison’s overview of urbanization in the balkanized Syro-Hittite states, and Mehmet-Ali Ataç’s discussion of the typical Neo-Assyrian citadels would probably have benefited from a consideration of the shared practices of citadel construction, urban renewal, and the use of finely dressed stone surfaces in the Iron Age Near East, where it turned into a royal koine of sorts. In contrast, Redford’s meticulous study of medieval citadel construction projects and their commemorative inscriptions draws parallels and relationships between Syria and Anatolia, particularly among the cities of Damascus, Aleppo, Sinop, Konya, Antalya, Alanya, and others during the last decade of the twelfth century BCE and the first quarter of the thirteenth, and between the Ayyubid and Seljukide political geographies. This multisited study of a narrow episode in medieval architectural history allows Redford not only to offer a breathtaking cross-regional perspective on the political economy of citadel construction but also to portray in detail notable personalities, local political/cultural dynamics, and social classes. Discussing how “towers, walls, and gates” served “as loci of elite expression of power hierarchies at that time” (306), the author is able to reach out to both the utopian, ambitious ideals of the sultans and the realpolitik of their subordinate emirs. Such discussion suggests how fruitful it would be to pursue the study of similar kinds of relationships between Syrian and Anatolian cities at the time of the Hittite Empire and in the aftermath of its collapse. The periods of geopolitical balkanization that took place on the Anatolian peninsula during the Iron Age and the medieval period arguably have fascinating similarities (as well as major differences), and scholars who specialize in these two historical episodes have much to learn from each other. Especially for this reason, the organizers of the 2009 symposium and the editors of this volume must be congratulated. Ruth Macrides’s investigation of the reasons behind the Byzantine imperial choice to move to the Blachernai Palace despite the limitations of the neighborhood is refreshing and intriguing for enthusiasts of the urban history of Byzantine Istanbul. The excellent depth of Macrides’s chapter on the sociospatial and political economic history of the Blachernai Palace and its relationship to the rest of the urban/extraurban landscape allows the reader to evaluate this development in relation to the courtly ceremonies, imperial crossings through the city, and other state spectacles that had important impacts on the spatial configuration of the city. One wonders if architectural “height as a feature of Palaiologan ceremonial” (294)— as a feature of prokypsis and peripatos ceremonies—and the visual impact of seeing the Byzantine emperor were also experienced at the Assyrian and Urartian citadels that looked over bodies of water and extraurban landscapes. The more technical discussion of the same urban landscape by Neslihan Asutay-Effenberger is harder to follow for the nonspecialist. This author’s frequent and abrupt swings between historical and architectural evidence result in an unsustainable argument, as becomes clear when she juxtaposes her interpretations of literary tropes and metaphors with hard evidence. This urge to seek direct architectural or archaeological evidence to verify historical sources is problematic and relegates material culture and architecture to a secondary status with respect to written sources. Examples of this scholarly tendency are abundant in Near Eastern archaeology. A final point has to do with what I refer to as the poetics of architectural technologies and materials, which surfaces in many of the contributions. Aslı Özyar’s discussion of the development of carved orthostates in the Syro-Hittite sphere argues for origins in the Hittite Empire, contrasting with my own association of this architectural innovation with the long tradition of stonecutting and masonry in northern Syria.1 More important, I believe it is misleading to conceive of architectural technologies, visual programs, and building functions as unrelated aspects of building construction. Redford, for example, argues for a “visual regime” of the decorative aspects of Seljuk citadels concerning the use of spolia, sculptural pieces, and other special treatment of architectural surfaces, but I would have preferred that he address this as an impressive bringing together of architectonic, representational, and epigraphic elements in a complex semantic environment. The making of Urartian citadels through the use of impressive stone masonry structures, as discussed by Altan Çilingiro lu and Çevik, and the building of Early Phrygian Gordion, with its multiple phases of architectural experimentation and innovation, relate to a similar kind of architectonic culture that derives from a distinctive poetics of architectural technologies and materials. Aslan and Rose’s excellent argument about how the citadel walls of Troy “conferred an aura of antiquity and prestige” (11) and functioned as meaningful sites of memory in post–Bronze Age phases of the city is also intriguing to consider from this perspective. Voigt’s thoughtful and meticulous investigation of different episodes of architectural construction on Gordion’s citadel offers exciting possibilities for a discussion of issues of memory and the materiality of stones. This volume fills a gap in the scholarship on ancient architecture in Turkey in the urban context. The wealth of architectural and historical evidence provided by the many contributors constitutes a welcome addition to the field of Anatolian and Near Eastern architectural history. Perhaps more important, the book suggests a fruitful way forward for the field in broader terms by bringing unusual historical periods, the Iron Age and the medieval period, onto the same platform of discussion. ömür harman ah University of Illinois at Chicago Note 1. Ömür Harman ah, “Upright Stones and Building Narratives: Formation of a Shared Architectural Practice in the Ancient Near East,” in Ancient Near Eastern Art in Context: Studies in Honor of Irene J. Winter by Her Students, ed. Jack Cheng and Marian H. Feldman (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 69–99. Esther Diana Santa Maria Nuova Ospedale dei Fiorentini: Architettura ed assistenza nella Firenze tra Settecento e Novecento Florence: Polistampa, 2012, 632 pp., 60 color and 236 b/w illus. $121, ISBN 9788859610489 In 2010 Esther Diana and Marco Geddes da Filicaia published a superb edition of Regolamento dei regi spedali di Santa Maria Nuova e di Bonifazio (1789) by Marco Covoni (1742–1824), the first lay director of Santa Maria Nuova Hospital.1 Founded in 1288 in the area around the Church of Sant’Egidio, Santa Maria Nuova is one of Florence’s oldest and most significant hospitals. The reforms elaborated in Covoni’s Regolamento, like those implemented in other major European hospitals such as the General Hospital of Vienna, mark the birth of the modern hospital in Europe. Drawing on unedited material in the State Archives of Florence, Diana’s current volume offers the first comprehensive picture of the hospital’s architectural modernization, which spans from Covini’s time to 1968, and shows how the architectural modernization of Santa Maria Nuova was shaped by a complex interplay of developments in medical science and social hygiene, new approaches to hospital design, advances in technology, the dynamics of medical associations, and a range of social and political forces operating at the local and international levels. Prior to Diana’s work, this period had been the least studied stage of the history of the hospital’s built environment. Grounded in rich visual and documentary evidence, the book fills a major gap in studies of the architectural history of Santa Maria Nuova and modern public health reform in Florence. This book will be of interest to architectural historians as well as to historians of medicine, public health, science and technology, urbanization, and art. The book is organized chronologically into five parts, each subdivided into chapters. Part 1 establishes the early stages of the hospital’s path toward modernization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the first chapter, Diana reconstructs the hospital’s early eighteenthcentury form using ground plans, which show it was aligned into two cruciform plans of open wards, one for men and one for women. She elaborates how the hospital, though retaining its basic cruciform layout, incorporated important structural and organizational reforms that point to its nascent modernization. Diana relates these changes to the development of eighteenthcentury systems of taxonomy, showing how the classification of diseases by pathology, diagnosis, and treatment led to an institutional shift away from mass, regimented patient management to individual care and cure. Among the examples of this paradigm shift, she cites the development of the clinical specialization of surgery at Santa Maria Nuova and the establishment of the first surgical clinic for women not directly tied to obstetrics. In the second chapter, Diana documents debates among the hospital’s administrators about removing the hospital from the old city center and rebuilding it elsewhere. She situates these debates in the context of the influence of the pavilion plan, a type of hospital design developed in France in the late eighteenth century and based on the principle that patients should be segregated and arranged by diagnosis and cared for in well-ventilated pavilions of limited size. The pavilion plan was realized in architectural form in 1846 when the BOOKS 253 Hôpital Lariboisière was built to replace the notoriously unhygienic and overcrowded Hôtel-Dieu in Paris. The influence of the Hôpital Lariboisière is the backdrop of Diana’s account of city administrators’ efforts to remove Santa Maria Nuova from the old city center and rebuild it according to the pavilion-plan model in a less congested area on the outskirts of the city. Giuseppe Martelli’s pavilion-plan design, based on the French model, was proposed for the rebuilt hospital. Diana documents the development of Martelli’s plan, which came close to being implemented, and demonstrates that its ultimate rejection was related to nationalist concerns for cultural patrimony in the years leading up to the Italian unification. Part 2 is composed of five chapters that focus on issues related to increasingly demanding standards of public hygiene. The first chapter documents the fierce critiques of Santa Maria Nuova for failing to meet new standards of hygiene, and the second addresses the debates surrounding the use of the cadaver within the hospital as a tool of research and study. The third chapter looks at the reform of hygiene standards for the city generally, noting that public health reform was well under way before the major urban improvements in Florence in the second half of the nineteenth century. The fourth chapter looks at the annexation of the historical Convent of the Angels to the hospital, and the fifth documents how criticism of the hospital’s unhygienic conditions led to the removal and addition of rooms and to the opening up of some areas for better light and ventilation. In this context the author elaborates a conservative impulse on the part of administrators to protect the hospital’s scientific and artistic heritage. Diana shows that while historical medical instruments and texts were integrated into the educational aspects of the hospital, the institution’s art had no place in its clinical space. Documenting the art’s removal and the troubled efforts by the hospital to establish a gallery to display its substantial artistic patrimony, Diana emphasizes that the separation of art from the therapeutic function of the hospital represents a major break from the medieval connection between art—especially sacred images— and healing. 254 J S A H | 74 . 2 | J U N E 2 01 5 Part 3 consists of five chapters focusing on the structural transformation of Santa Maria Nuova into a modern hospital. The first three chapters reconstruct the conditions and proposed plans to rebuild the hospital according to the principles of the pavilion plan. The years just preceding the unification of Italy in 1865 were marked by growing efforts among Santa Maria Nuova’s doctors, architects, and public health administrators to centralize standards of hospital care in accordance with the Risorgimento ideal of a unified Italian state. While concerns about loss of heritage and other similar issues relating to the hospital’s historic place in the city center had prevented major structural change in the earlier part of the century, proposals to rebuild the hospital into a modern institution gained traction in the context of Italian nationalism. They achieved further momentum when Casimir Tollet’s pavilion model circulated in Italy after it was presented at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1881. To demonstrate the influence of Tollet’s model, Diana documents its implementation elsewhere in Italy, citing the Ospedale Lugo di Romano (1881) and other hospitals in Genoa and Turin. The fourth chapter shows how the rebuilt hospital responded, despite significant spatial and financial limitations, to the structural and technological criteria of the modern pavilion plan. Reproducing numerous plans and photographs, Diana documents how the ancient double-cruciform ground plan was removed to make way for a pavilion model, the product of several architects’ designs and revisions. The last chapter focuses on the implementation of new technologies in the rebuilt space, ranging from heating and cleaning systems to a modern, steam-based cleaning method for the hospital’s laundry. Part 4, composed of nine chapters, relates less to major structural changes to the hospital’s architecture than to factors shaping the institution’s internal organization and public image from the beginning of the twentieth century to the years just before World War II. The first seven chapters attend to the new dynamics of medical professional organizations, technological advancements in pharmaceutical care, infectious disease control, and Santa Maria Nuova’s direct administrative relationships with other medical institutions in Florence, such as the Meyer Children’s Hospital. The eighth chapter contains an extensive account of the creation of a vast new hospital complex at the estate of Careggi, to which many of the clinical and teaching activities of Santa Maria Nuova were transferred in the 1920s and 1930s. The ninth chapter relates the modernization of Santa Maria Nuova and other Florentine hospital complexes to advances in systemization of hospital architecture and urban planning in Italy until the outbreak of World War II. Diana documents tensions between the urban infrastructure of Florence and the city’s modernized health facilities, challenges that would have to wait until the postwar period to be addressed effectively. Part 5 focuses on documents of the period—letters, reports, and various orders are quoted at length— that demonstrate how the hospital, despite major impediments, was able to continue to provide health care to the city under fascism and German occupation during World War II and continue its service during the laborious and difficult process of reorganization after the war. The book raises many issues that should be of wide interdisciplinary interest. Diana stresses the importance of the hospital’s secular character and how it enabled advances in scientific research, clinical debates, and implementation of new technology more rapidly than institutions bound to more paternal religious frameworks. She emphasizes how rapid advances in medical science and technology empowered doctors to become architects, engineers, and urban planners of the city’s health care facilities and policies. She also addresses advances in care for the specialized needs of women and children, the progress of patient advocacy and protection, the dynamics of labor relations, and the hospital’s relationship to major educational institutions. As the definitive work on Santa Maria Nuova Hospital’s modernization, this book is an essential resource for all scholars concerned with the subject. cassandra sciortino University of California, Santa Barbara Note 1. Esther Diana and Marco Geddes da Filicaia, Regolamento dei regi spedali di Santa Maria Nuova e di Bonifazio (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2010). Mrinalini Rajagopalan and Madhuri Desai, eds. Colonial Frames, Nationalist Histories: Imperial Legacies, Architecture, and Modernity Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2012, 317 pp., 63 b/w illus. $124.95, ISBN 9780754678809 The conceit of the Global South as a discursive social geography pervades questions of how and where to begin writing a history of architecture that is connective rather than autonomous in its outlook. From its antecedents in the 1950s and 1960s economic modeling of a “third world,” the term Global South has assumed the mantle of an expansive yet ill-defined arena in which the circulation of ideas concerning statehood, or at least selfdetermination, is at odds with the power structures that inform those ideas. Today we might understand the Global South as a concept that embodies the overlooked, the marginalized, and the contemptuous desires of governments to forestall equanimity in and of space. In its most recent incarnation as a discrete realm of inquiry at the intersection of national and individual identities, the Global South, as articulated in the preface and introduction of this book, might also include networks of urban and domestic topologies. Mrinalini Rajagopalan and Madhuri Desai’s edited collection of ten essays articulates a circuit of architecture as cultural capital against a backdrop of imperialism providing the foundation for modernity. At the heart of this engaging volume is a rich source of archival and graphic materials as well as locations that the authors seek to reconfigure by those “frames” or vexing relations through which we understand the limits of colonial and imperial missions. The contributions interrogate strategies of deferral and progress primarily within colonial South, Southeast, and East Asia through emergent relationships among architecture, building typologies, and urban planning and the means by which their representations were undone by conflicting approaches to design. Divided into three thematic sections, the book’s loosely interrelated essays converge at a series of inquiries: What are the continuities and discontinuities made present by overlaps found in representation during periods of colonialism? By extension, what are the “frames” through which we can now read the architecture and urbanism of imperial regimes? How do claims to national identity mask neocolonial modifications to modern vernaculars for a (postcolonial) state? Scaled by a diachronic observation of colonial architecture and urbanism, the sections commence with a broad rendering of visual and spatial instabilities within colonial India, progressively fragmented through incongruent articulations of the self and “Other” and finally mobilized in urban spaces of conflict. Among these associations, one finds a slight weakness in the ambitions of the volume. Had the editors perhaps focused on one geographic context, such as South and Southeast Asia, readers may have begun to understand far more precarious and destabilizing trends among imperial projects. With the addition of essays examining other politically charged contexts, such as Hawaii in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Georgian London, and contemporary museum capacities, the book disperses rather than concentrates issues of architecture as a method for reifying colonial order. Race is one such subject that dovetails with the examples above yet falls outside the scope of the book. Analogous to Freud’s situating the fragment at the center of an unconscious symbolic, in this volume the fragment is a spatial signifier that foreshadows the dissolution of those forms that construct subjectivities. William Glover explores the role of an architect-engineer working in India and present-day Pakistan in the book’s initial essay. By valorizing local tradition, Glover proposes, architects may be able to define “culture” as situated distinct from yet coeval with the political and economic regimes of colonial power. What follows are two essays by the volume’s editors in which the (re)production of the colonial urban landscape of India is intimately tied to formations of temporal and social perception. For Rajagopalan and Desai, what constitutes colonial knowledge follows the representation of sacred and monumental vernaculars. In both essays, how architecture is conceived through various media elicits how the monumental landscape of colonial India was reordered, historicized, and sublimated. The translation from memorial to monument as evidenced by Rajagopalan’s essay is also expressed across varying settings in this volume. That is, how does the reuse of architecture—as media and technique—prompt architecture’s rehabilitation into something else, a conflation of image and signifier? In the second thematic section, the “nation’s fragments” are those fundaments by which alterity is reconfigured, identity is mapped within interiors, and deterritorialized landscapes are quantified during three different periods. These heterotopic qualities did not remain external to imperial strategy. C. Greig Crysler’s examination of what constitutes the native as a function of the primitive highlights a continuing problem for historians of both art and architecture: within representation, how do we assemble histories that constitute the imagination of a particular society or culture? Echoing Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Crysler’s portrayal of two nations and their national museums, including the Musée du Quai Branly and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, reveals strikingly confrontational approaches to the assimilation of peoples and their ephemera. Beyond asking “What are we?” or “Who are we?” in light of the (colonial) museum, can we as historians begin to articulate how culture is rewritten at the point of violent incursion? Like such museums, the commercial and private quarters of Georgian London and the projective island state of Hawaii were in part generated by the dispersal of peoples and their objects into (state) collections. Similarly, the West African diaspora was demonstrated by the imagistic and material culture of slavery during the “Black Atlantic” of the nineteenth century. A harbinger of scopic appeal within urban and domestic spaces, Richard W. Hayes proposes, blackness and its imaging occurred within society itself while also finding dimension in the design of coffeehouses. Hayes articulates episodic adaptations of interior and exterior in which representation can be wholly indivisible yet disjointed. Akin to the preceding contributors, Kelema Lee Moses observes how buildings in Hawaii embodied the uncertainties of both local and national sovereignty within the governance of the American Pacific. Commencing with BOOKS 255 President Obama’s 2009 realignment of the United States as a Pacific Nation, Moses establishes a case for observing the contentious architecture of Honolulu as embedded in discourses of opposition and subjugation. The third section of the book provides a riposte to the dilemmas posed in the previous two sections by setting the stage for defining precarious boundaries within charged urban contexts. Anyone who has visited Singapore recently will note that, with renovation, colonial-era shophouses have taken on new meaning as sites for market-driven gentrification. Anoma Pieris’s characterization of a pluralized “graduated sovereignty” in the city-state extends to Singapore’s planning and zoning. Expanding a polemical trajectory for contemporary cities, the conflicts between a colonial past and a rigorous yet hyperbolic present are centered on the demands of control, statehood, and modernity via an architectural optics once contained by geography and now enforced by foreign construed markers. Such tensions augment Imran bin Tajudeen’s analysis of the design of kampung houses found in Malacca and Singapore. In addition to featuring visual components that speak to an aesthetic mobility found across the tropics, these buildings connote a hybridity within competing notions of local and regional vernaculars. What Tajudeen determines to be the longue durée of a racialized imperial present is also captured in other cities, including Hong Kong and Shanghai, discussed in the last two essays of the book. Housing typologies described by Cecilia Chu, such as the tong lau of Hong Kong, parallel those built forms seen in previous sections in which the inscription of boundaries governed by identity haunts divided cityscapes. In Shanghai, by contrast, the presence of the past registers a cultural nadir for an outward-looking Chinese middle class and elite while also harboring the remains of a staunch historicity strategized within colonial dictates. For Andrew Law, and significantly for this volume, “the colonial . . . has become an important symbol within a new political rhetoric of individual aspiration” (302). In each of the chapters, how the past is conveyed is not so much another litmus for appraising the imperial mission but rather 256 J S A H | 74 . 2 | J U N E 2 01 5 the upshot of a new territory in which the forces of global markets and political motives result in spatial disjunctions. One might describe Rajagopalan and Desai’s volume as an exegesis of a landscape of spatial events—even when occasionally foregrounded by elephants or nameless servants—inculcated by visual and spatial tactics of representation. For the contributors and those concerned by the ambiguous states of Being prior to and following a pivot toward a global modern architecture and urbanism, the inscription of affronts amid most urban spaces ultimately discloses colonial desire. sean anderson University of Sydney Nicholas Coetzer Building Apartheid: On Architecture and Order in Imperial Cape Town Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2013, 260 pp., 73 b/w illus. $119.95, ISBN 9781409446040 This volume, the fourth title in the Ashgate Studies in Architecture series, is a substantial achievement due to Nicholas Coetzer’s thorough scholarship drawing on archives and other primary sources to support a historical study of architecture, housing, and urban planning in Cape Town, South Africa, from the late nineteenth century to 1948, when apartheid officially began. Coetzer argues that the project of legal exclusion known as apartheid began fifty years before it was enforced through legislation. The book is admirable for its highly articulate portrayal of the social, political, and cultural contexts that, through architecture and the ordering of urban and suburban spaces, “were actively constructing Cape Town and South Africa into a territory of the British Empire—mapped out, ordered and remade through architecture into a landscape legitimizing their continued control and exploitation of the land and its people” (215). The book is strong in its historical treatment of pre-apartheid Cape Town through a postcolonial lens, though not an overly determined one. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of this study is the revelation that the seemingly innocuous humanist and scientifically based decisions around the aesthetics and ordering of space in pre-apartheid Cape Town gave rise to a dehumanized landscape and “unfold[ed] without contradiction from Empire to apartheid” (216), laying “the solid foundations onto which the ugly edifice of apartheid was built” (13). The organizational scheme of the book is grounded in the literature of “whiteness” and the premise that the construction of identity is a relational process involving the binary of “Self ” and “Other.” Conceptualized in such a fashion, the formation of “Self ” is a result not only of what the self is but also what it is in opposition to. Therefore, the unstable nature of identity sows the seeds for its own unraveling. Part I, “Self/Countryside,” brings this theoretical premise into the spatial realm as Coetzer discusses the built heritage of Cape Dutch rural homesteads and their architectural elements (e.g., gables, thatched roofs, whitewashed walls). The British and Afrikaner residents of Cape Town saw these as their common heritage. Given these buildings’ status as examples of a significant vernacular, which subsequently became the prototype for the so-called Cape Dutch revival in Cape Town and beyond, they were also understood as requiring preservation. At a social and political level, Cape Dutch architecture came to be construed by Europeans living in the Cape—as they positioned themselves as the stewards of the history and vast territory of southern Africa—as a mark of Western “advanced” civilization. Conveniently framed in this manner, “civilized” was seen in opposition to “native” or “Other,” although, as Coetzer points out, that relationship was often muddled. Part II, “Other/City,” extends this oppositional relationship to the urban scale as the city’s public health officials, engineers, planners, and architects attempted to make the cityscape pretty and inoffensive. Unsightly visual aspects of Cape Town, such as dense slums and dilapidated structures, were positioned in contrast to making the city beautiful through regulation of the aesthetics of built form and concomitant social space rooted in European heritage as well as romantic ideals of the garden city and Arts and Crafts movements. Regulatory mechanisms couched in “scientific” terms, but in reality rooted in racial and social assumptions about the “Other,” legitimated where and how certain inhabitants of the city should live and led to “the exclusion of social and racial Others from the city,” thereby transforming the city into a “White space” (107). By addressing the racialized underpinnings of planning regulations, Coetzer undermines an enduring myth of science and its applications as “disinterested” or “objective” and points to the shifting definitions of what constitutes progress and norms around how and where people live. The construction of difference involved the conflation of the “Other” with physical materials, such as corrugated iron, that were associated with low status. Buildings constructed from such materials were deemed disorderly hybrid eyesores and were consequently removed and relocated to the periphery of the city in an effort to “sanitize” the inner city and make it “safe” for middle-class and white inhabitants. Coetzer highlights this significant point through his discussion of the association of diseases, such as tuberculosis, with low social and economic class, blackness, and a lack of visible order, as well as with lowstatus construction materials. The prevalence of infectious diseases in the city’s “unsightly” quarters, such as the wellknown District Six, was yet another justification for the forced removal of people from the core of the city based on their race and social status. Coetzer’s discussion is a useful springboard for further research focused on the relationships among disease, public health, and the built environment in African cities. Part III, “Same/Suburb,” details a history of housing in Cape Town that grew out of Darwinian theories about the impact of the environment on living organisms as well as influential ideals of the garden city and Arts and Crafts movements. Through the spectacle of imperial exhibitions and design competitions, “the identity of Englishness (as signified through the cottage) was paraded and ‘naturalized’ as essential, whilst other ways of being in the city were excluded or downplayed” (175). The creation of social-spatial zones that dictated where and how people should live combined with antiurban low-density housing formed the backbone for municipal housing schemes in early twentiethcentury Cape Town and set the stage for later apartheid planning. Decisions about housing the “native” population, including permanent residents, migratory laborers, and well-educated nonwhites, were based on ridding the city of its ugly, dense, and insalubrious environment and thereby bringing order and beauty to Cape Town. The “natives” were pushed out to the margins of the city and into the suburbs, where they were rehoused in stripped-down freestanding cottages, block houses, or hostels in the hope that these new settings would be conducive to “civilizing” the nonwhite population. Coetzer argues that this reordering of urban space ironically created conditions in the city’s suburbs that brought whites into close proximity with “Others,” but this time in the city’s periphery. This uneasiness and uncertainty eventually led to new plans for achieving order. Overall, Building Apartheid: On Architecture and Order in Imperial Cape Town is an outstanding contribution to scholarship about the historical development of preapartheid Cape Town. While the book can be criticized for being repetitive at times, that is in part because the story of spatial planning in South Africa is one of repeated selective exclusion of people according to race and class based on social constructions of “Self,” “difference,” and “Other.” Carefully articulating the historical development of architectural space in Cape Town from many perspectives, Coetzer’s highly readable benchmark study has significant relevance for scholars of architectural and planning practices in contemporary South Africa. randall bird University of Johannesburg Lucy M. Maulsby Fascism, Architecture, and the Claiming of Modern Milan, 1922–1943 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014, 247 pp., 65 b/w illus. $65, ISBN 9781442646254 As historians continue to probe the recesses of the totalitarian politics of the interwar years in Italy, it seems that we are gaining a more complex and variegated view of the fascist regime and its cultural legacy. These studies lead one to reflect on the disparity between the rhetorical assertions of Mussolini, particularly as conveyed in the many instruments of propaganda that were under state control, and the expression of political ideals and implementation of political policies through the arts and architecture. While the gap between art and architecture and the reactionary politics of the fascist era was used in the immediate post–World War II period as a way to save certain individuals and their work from the stain of negative political associations, for some time now that gap has allowed a deep and productive questioning of this cultural legacy and its relationship to an intransigent and highly conflicted political movement. As much as this has been a constructive and useful development in the history of the arts and architecture of the modern period, quite rightly one can ask in each specific case to what end this kind of critical inquiry is moving. In short, how can we understand the artistic and architectural legacy of Italian fascism, and what picture does it create of the political ideals and initiatives of the regime? In tackling these and other difficult questions, Lucy M. Maulsby’s Fascism, Architecture, and the Claiming of Modern Milan, 1922–1943 provides some important insights into the kinds of urban negotiations in which the Fascist Party was involved regarding some of its most significant symbolic projects in this important northern Italian city. The basic assertions of the book are quite clear, the most important of these being that almost all of the scholarship concerning urban transformations during the interwar period has focused on Rome. Quite naturally this has led to the assumption that fascism’s urban ambitions were almost exclusively directed toward the legacy of ancient Rome and Italy’s Mediterranean origins, though with some references to the practical problems of the modern city. Two recent, and quite compelling, books support Maulsby’s contention of a Rome-centric scholarly focus on Italian fascism: Paul Baxa’s Roads and Ruins: The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome and Joshua Arthurs’s Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy.1 In concentrating on the city of Milan, Maulsby offers a different understanding of the relationship between architecture and politics during the fascist era—one that more clearly acknowledges the highly disputed agenda of the regime. Indeed, as she recognizes, Milan was not only the most important industrial, commercial, BOOKS 257 and financial center in Italy but also the city in which fascism was born and one that eventually came into conflict with fascism’s antibourgeois and antiurban agenda. Maulsby’s broad framing of her project in relation to the changing politics of the fascist regime as well as the evolving panorama of the city of Milan has produced a work of vital scholarship that, without question, makes a significant contribution to the literature. A concentration on the urban implications of the built environment is a significant feature that separates this volume from other recent scholarship on the architecture of the fascist era in Italy. In recounting the urban transformation of Milan during the fascist ventennio, Maulsby consults a wide range of actors, from urban planners and city officials to national political figures and prominent industrialists. What emerges is a complex picture in which the Fascist Party is only one of a series of powerful influences shaping the city. This urban focus is supported by the structure and organization of the book, which begins with a chapter (“Milan in Context”) that, in relating a concise urban history of this quintessentially modern Italian city, provides the narrative backbone for the work. The remaining five chapters offer a series of individual case studies of buildings and associated urban spaces that follow a rough chronology beginning with the early Fascist Party Headquarters (1922–31) and ending with the Palazzo del Popolo d’Italia (1938–42) and adjacent Piazza Cavour. Notably, these case studies include commercial spaces (the Trading Exchange and Piazza degli Affari, 1928–39) and institutional spaces (the Palace of Justice, 1932–40) while continuing the examination of the Fascist Party Headquarters (1931–40) into the wartime period. Read together, these chapters provide a detailed and wellresearched account of the manner in which individual buildings in Milan and their related urban spaces became contested sites, torn between competing political, economic, and cultural interests. Among the significant strengths of the book, perhaps the most compelling is the picture it conveys of the seemingly intractable conflicts between national and local interests as they played out over the course of a turbulent twenty-year period in 258 J S A H | 74 . 2 | J U N E 2 01 5 Milan’s history. While the entire book has considerable value, the most focused discussions are in the two chapters that, through concentrating on single buildings and their associated urban spaces, are likely to have the greatest appeal to architectural historians. The first of these examines Marcello Piacentini’s Palace of Justice, a massive freestanding building with a fascinating backstory that has rarely been discussed, let alone in the considerable detail offered in this volume. Of equal interest is the final chapter, on Giovanni Muzio’s Palazzo del Popolo d’Italia and nearby Piazza Cavour, which provides the book its most concrete example of how urban and architectural space were shaped by the interaction between fascist political ideals and the civic and cultural context of the time. By comparison, the other chapters, and particularly those on the Fascist Party Headquarters, offer a more diffuse picture of the urban and architectural negotiations in interwar Milan. This may in part be a result of the lack of compelling examples of Party Headquarters in the city, but it may also point to one of the most important issues raised by the book. In Maulsby’s fairly explicit effort to undermine the idea that fascist authorities had complete control over the face of Milan, and to instead convey a legacy of conflict between competing interests and shifting opinions, she leaves the reader with the kinds of questions with which this review began. If fascist architecture and the fascist city in Italy were not direct products of the antagonistic and offensive political ideals that the regime espoused in the late 1930s, then what kind of politics can be inferred from the architectural and urban negotiations that actually took place? While Maulsby provides us with a fascinating picture that disrupts any reading of architecture and urban space as an unmediated expression of fascist politics, that picture leaves us with a rather messy reality that begs further scholarly attention. brian l. m c laren University of Washington Note 1. Paul Baxa, Roads and Ruins: The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010); Joshua Arthurs, Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012). Martino Stierli Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film Trans. Elizabeth Tucker; Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013, 352 pp., 136 color and 88 b/w illus. $50, ISBN 9781606061374 Shortly after the publication of the first edition of Learning from Las Vegas in 1972, Robert Venturi commented, “I don’t know why, but we irritate architects very much.”1 As Martino Stierli’s Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film demonstrates, that irritation was prompted by a deep-rooted strategy of provocation. Stierli’s book locates Learning from Las Vegas within its intellectual antecedents, a set of theoretical positions and methodological propositions centered on the relations among urban form, modes of perception, automobility, and popular culture. As a contextual study, it posits that Learning from Las Vegas was more closely aligned with modernity than its critics allowed. Scholarship on the relation between theory and practice in the work of Venturi and Denise Scott Brown is plentiful.2 Stierli’s focus is on Learning from Las Vegas as a work of urban theory in its own right. Because of this emphasis, his book appears to share some similarities with Aron Vinegar’s I Am a Monument (2008). However, apart from offering their respective analyses of the design and production of the two editions of Learning from Las Vegas, Stierli’s and Vinegar’s books are quite distinct. Vinegar’s interpretive approach is word based, focusing on assembling the book’s philosophical underpinnings. 3 Stierli’s approach, more historical than theoretical, is primarily image based, positioning Learning from Las Vegas as a pivotal work in the transition of modernist practice to more site-specific research. The work has its origins in Stierli’s 2002 master’s thesis on Venturi’s Italian “grand tour” in the mid-1950s. Stierli’s broader interest is in the methodological potential of the image (both photograph and film) as a means for researching, analyzing, and representing the city. Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror complements Las Vegas Studio (2008), an exhibition catalog that Stierli coedited; the exhibition focused on the Yale architecture studio course on Las Vegas that Venturi, Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour taught in the fall of 1968.4 The photographs reproduced in both studies offer a reminder that, although Learning from Las Vegas was published in 1972 and its revised edition in 1977, the work was a distinct product of the 1960s. As Denise Scott Brown has noted recently, an interest in provocation, of being “agin” corporate authority and respectability, was the basis of the 1968 Yale studio. The origins of this position lie, in part, in Scott Brown’s teaching at Berkeley during the “Foul Speech movement” of 1965, the successor to the “Free Speech movement.”5 In meeting the challenges of the social, political, and professional upheavals of the 1960s, Venturi and Scott Brown proposed a strategy of urbanism through empirical study rather than utopian projection, to be generated from the “megatexture” of “what is” rather than the megastructures of what “ought to be.” Beginning with the colossal electric roadside billboards lining the Las Vegas Strip, they paid attention to the reality of the commercial landscape partly as a means of shocking their students into developing new modes of representing the built environment. Stierli’s focus on the urbanism of Learning from Las Vegas rather than its architectural arguments relies mostly on the first part of the now rare 1972 edition, the “empirical/urbanist section” that joined the text of the essay “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas” (first published in 1968) with the visual material from the Yale studio. In outlining the studio structure and its scientific methodology, Stierli cites the volume of images the studio produced (some five thousand color slides and seven films) as evidence that the visual material has theoretical value independent of the text; that the employment of still and moving images was part of a broader discourse regarding representational issues of perception, sequence, and mobility; and that the use of a “deadpan” photographic method was central to an analytical strategy of defamiliarization. Emphasizing the scientistic aspects of Learning from Las Vegas, Stierli establishes a more nuanced historical context, claiming an affinity between the book and the representational methods of the pedestrian- based English townscape movement of the late 1940s, for example (while at the same time noting that Venturi and Scott Brown’s analytical position of “nonjudgment” distinguishes their work from townscape’s sentimentalized urbanism). Venturi and Scott Brown’s adoption of Ed Ruscha’s “deadpan” approach to photography was, Stierli argues, a calculated artistic position, one intended to defamiliarize the urban landscape of the commercial strip. For Stierli one of the primary but least familiar contributions of the Las Vegas studio was the use of film to record the perceptions of the “automobilized observer” driving along the Las Vegas Strip. He locates the filming of the Strip and the study of its dynamics of mobility, perception, and sign within a diverse prewar modernist sensibility that later narrowed to a postwar urban discourse of sequence, image, and notation as a means for structuring view and perception. An ongoing criticism of Learning from Las Vegas is its ostensibly uncritical embrace of the “popular.” Departing from this reading, Stierli argues that Learning from Las Vegas instead implements the critical potential of art historian T. J. Clark’s notion of the “vulgar.” Where the popular narrows the gap between taste and class interests, the vulgar maintains it. The vulgar aesthetic is a provocation rather than an endorsement, and this, Stierli notes, was central to the representational challenges of the postwar American city. The strategy of defamiliarization, the adaptation of deadpan photography, and the premise of the nonjudgmental “scientific” survey all contribute to Stierli’s characterization of Learning from Las Vegas as an exploration of the vulgar. In this sense, the vulgar depiction of a middle-American culture forces discomfort rather than fascination because such a culture offers neither high “purity” nor low “spontaneity” but rather the difficult middle of personalized taste and derivative history. Stierli’s reading of the vulgar in Learning from Las Vegas suggests that the book anticipated, if not demanded, a controversial and critical response, if only to expose the latent biases of that criticism. A tension emerges between Stierli’s interest in a translatable methodology of an image-based “learning from” and a historically conditioned cultural critique. How does a methodology of “learning from” adjust to changing historical conditions? As more recent urban formations have increasingly displaced the critical value of Learning from Las Vegas, the book’s proposition of a method of urban analysis and documentation remains secure and wide-ranging, having been generalized as field research in the design studio and absorbed into high-profile studies such as Rem Koolhaas’s Project on the City. Koolhaas has recently acknowledged the formative influence Learning from Las Vegas had on his work. Stierli brings the two even closer, describing both Learning from Las Vegas and Koolhaas’s Delirious New York (1978) as “retroactive manifestos.”6 Moreover, in positing Learning from Las Vegas as a form of research, Stierli refocuses attention on Denise Scott Brown, in particular the importance that photography had for her theoretical work as well as her built work. Scott Brown’s forthcoming book of images culled from her extensive slide collection will likely further expand our understanding of her central role in the architectural representation of the postwar built environment.7 glenn forley Parsons The New School for Design Notes 1. Robert Venturi, in John W. Cook and Heinrich Klotz, Conversations with Architects (New York: Praeger, 1973), 248. 2. For example, see Stanislaus von Moos, “A Postscript on History, ‘Architecture Parlante,’ and Populism,” A+U (Dec. 1981), 199–204; Stanislaus von Moos, Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown: Buildings and Projects (New York: Rizzoli, 1987); Deborah Fausch, “Towards ‘An Architecture of Our Times’: Scaffold and Drapery in the Architecture of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates,” in Architecture: In Fashion, ed. Deborah Fausch et al. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), 344–61; Deborah Fausch, “Ugly and Ordinary: The Representation of the Everyday,” in Architecture of the Everyday, ed. Steven Harris and Deborah Berke (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), 75–106. 3. Aron Vinegar, I Am a Monument: On “Learning from Las Vegas” (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008). In addition, see Kester Rattenbury and Samantha Hardingham, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown: “Learning from Las Vegas” (Abingdon, England: Routledge, 2007); Aron Vinegar and Michael J. Golec, eds., Relearning from Las Vegas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). BOOKS 259 4. Hilar Stadler and Martino Stierli, eds., Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2008). 5. Rattenbury and Hardingham, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, 111, 113. 6. As the recent republication of O. M. Ungers’s The City in the City (1977) indicates, Delirious New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) had its beginnings in several urban research projects of the early 1970s, including those by Ungers, Venturi and Scott Brown, and Alvin Boyarsky. See Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas, with Peter Riemann, Hans Kollhoff, and Arthur Ovaska, The City in the City—Berlin: A Green Archipelago, ed. Florian Hertweck and Sébastien Marot (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2013). 7. Denise Scott Brown and Jesús Vassallo, “Signs in Sand,” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 38 (Spring/Summer 2014), 113–24. Also see Denise Scott Brown, “Still Learning from Denise Scott Brown: 45 Years of Learning from Las Vegas,” interview by Stephanie Salomon and Steve Kroeter, Designers & Books, 7 Jan. 2014, http://www.designersandbooks.com/blog/still -learning-from-denise-scott-brown (accessed 6 Jan. 2015). Peter McMahon and Christine Cipriani Cape Cod Modern: Midcentury Architecture and Community on the Outer Cape New York: Metropolis Books, 2014, 272 pp., 131 color and 186 b/w illus. $45.00, ISBN 9781935202165 This colorful history, focusing on the towns of Wellfleet and Truro, Massachusetts, near the tip of Cape Cod, expands our knowledge of some important figures in American modernism, introduces two architects of consequence, and shows the influence of American vernacular architecture on some sophisticated European modernists. This part of the Cape, a windswept spit of land with shifting sands on the open ocean, protected beaches along the bay, and poor soil for farming, was inhabited mainly by fishermen for most of its history. Until the 1950s, it was accessible only by unpaved roads and a backwoods railroad. Although a summer colony of artists and writers developed in nearby Provincetown at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was only in the late 1930s, after some American craftsmen-builders moved to the area and European modern architects arrived, that the work this book describes took form. 260 J S A H | 74 . 2 | J U N E 2 01 5 When Walter Gropius and his wife arrived in the United States in 1937, they rented a vacation house near Cape Cod and invited some European colleagues to join them. The Gropiuses never actually built on the Outer Cape, but Marcel Breuer, Serge Chermayeff, Olav Hammarström, and Paul Weidlinger eventually did. The area became a quiet hotbed of midcentury modern architecture, with important work by Boston architect Nathaniel Saltonstall and several local builders. It attracted a cast of intellectual celebrities as summer residents in rustic quarters. Peter McMahon, an architect and preservationist in Wellfleet, and Boston-based architecture writer Christine Cipriani describe the contributions of twelve builders and architects in four chapters. They draw on the building fabric itself as well as on interviews with the now-grown children of the original residents, and they manage to give the material drawn from books and archives the same immediacy as their original research. Illustrated with two hundred vintage photographs, forty-three sketches, plans, and drawings by Thomas Dalmas, and seventy new color photographs by Raimund Koch, the book is more lively social history than scholarly study, although a foreword by Kenneth Frampton adeptly sets the scene. Following an opening chapter on the history and physical character of the area, the second features the American “Brahmin Bohemians” who built on the Outer Cape. Jack Phillips, a Harvard-educated artist who had lived in Paris and knew the work of Le Corbusier, arrived around 1938 and erected a studio in Truro with a gently sloping roof, vertical cedar siding, and a wall of glass facing the ocean. In the same year, he built a white house with an L-shaped plan, flat roof, and Corbusian rooftop terraces with nautical railings, using recycled lumber and Homasote wallboard, which derived from the local vernacular and Yankee thrift. Though he took some architecture classes at Harvard starting in 1939, when Gropius and Breuer were there, Phillips built a group of houses after World War II that looked more traditional than modern, because they were made of salvaged a r my b a r r a c ks w ith p ea ked r o o fs. Although improvised, they had electricity, plumbing, fireplaces, and concrete patios. Most survive. The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. acquired one, as did the writer and editor Dwight Macdonald. In 1970, the critic Charles Jencks bought three overlooking the ocean and later designed a playful postmodern studio in the woods nearby— the last project discussed in this book. Jack Hall, a self-taught painter and builder who had studied English at Princeton, and Hayden Walling, a craftsmanbuilder who had studied theater at Bard, also moved to Wellfleet in the late 1930s. Hall lived in two modified historic Capes and built a modern house with butterfly roofs between them. His masterpiece, the Hatch House of 1962, is set on concrete pilings overlooking the bay, with separate structures for each living space connected by plein air decks. Walling built an eclectic house for himself between two ponds on old foundations, combining traditional forms and open spaces, and kept refining it for thirty years. The only architect discussed in the chapter titled “Brahmin Bohemians,” Nathaniel Saltonstall, has not had the recognition he deserves. 1 Anything but “Bohemian,” he studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1930s, when it still had a Beaux-Arts curriculum, and worked for some traditional firms. Then, in 1936, he founded the Boston Museum of Modern Art (now the Institute of Contemporary Art), where he organized exhibitions of work by Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Gropius. In the 1940s, working with Oliver Morton, Saltonstall designed some pioneering model solar houses for war veterans. In 1949, Saltonstall created the Colony, an art gallery surrounded by fourteen simple cruciform wood-and-glass-walled cottages intended as meeting places for artists and collectors. Economical, civilized, and private, the cottages, on a sloping ten-acre site overlooking the bay, have flat roofs and plywood walls painted dark red, brown, or taupe. Concrete-block interior walls, painted white, extend beyond their overhanging rooflines, in the de Stijl manner. Saltonstall later transformed the gallery into his own summer home. Over time, pitch pines obscured the cottages’ water views but provided privacy and the feeling of being in nature. The chapter “Community and Privacy,” named for Serge Chermayeff’s book of the same title, describes the work and lives of the European modernists in Wellfleet.2 They drew on local vernacular traditions but lived closer to nature than the Americans. In 1944, when Cape Cod cottages were so popular that even the innovative mass-produced postwar houses at Levittown would soon echo their forms, Chermayeff bought a simple Cape from Jack Phillips. The Russian-born, Britisheducated designer opened spaces with diagonal bracing and added a studio with cross-braced paneling in primary colors. The complex grew over the years while Chermayeff moved from Brooklyn College to László Moholy-Nagy’s Chicago Institute of Design and then to Harvard and finally to Yale teaching design and architecture, though he had never formally studied them himself. Although Chermayeff’s houses stand out amid their cedar-sided and white-stained neighbors, they are braced against the wind like native saltboxes. Marcel Breuer, the most influential midcentury modern architect in Wellfleet, moved there in large part because of his friendship with Chermayeff. When he bought land in Wellfleet in 1944, he had already built his own house in Lincoln, Massachusetts, left Harvard and his practice with Gropius, founded a firm in New York, and designed several influential houses for clients. In 1946, he built a demonstration house in the Museum of Modern Art garden and published, in Interiors, a scheme for five Wellfleet “long houses” perched on round cedar posts buried in the ground, like local oyster shacks on wood piers. Two years later, Breuer built a pair of modest “long houses” in Wellfleet, one for his own family and one for György Kepes and his family. These were supported by 4-inch-wide posts on concrete footings and infill stud walls. Originally from Hungary, Breuer had been the youngest student at the Weimar Bauhaus, where he studied cabinetmaking, since architecture was not yet offered. His work in cabinetry led to a love of craft and a fascination with the cantilever. Both the Kepeses’ house and the Breuers’ hovered over the land, affording dramatic views of several ponds, especially from screened roofed porches. Unpainted striated fir plywood siding, exposed framing inside and out, and sliding windows made of unframed plate glass in hardwood grooves gave them a raw natural character that blended into the landscape. Over the years, Breuer enlarged his house, refined it, installed electricity and running water, and even added vertical cedar siding and some brightly colored interior walls. Like Chermayeff, he spent his last days in Wellfleet, and on his death his ashes were buried there. The least widely known European architect discussed in this book is Olav Hammarström. Born and educated in Finland, Hammarström had designed and built a mining town in the Arctic and had worked for Alvar Aalto, Jørn Utzon, Eero Saarinen, Kevin Roche, and Walter Gropius’s TAC. At Saarinen’s firm, he became reacquainted with the Finnish weaver Marianne Strengell, and the two married. In 1950, they settled in Wellfleet. Over the next twenty-five years, Hammarström designed fifty-seven sensitively sited houses and several fascinating and innovative churches. His own 900-square-foot house is nestled in trees on a ridge and perched on stilts and concrete pilings, like Breuer’s. Its two sections, angled to maximize views, are connected by a breezeway usually left open in summer to direct arriving visitors toward the ocean view. The introduction of Hammarström’s and Saltonstall’s work to a wider audience is the most valuable contribution of this book, although its discussion of the work of the local craftsmen-builders is useful too. Breuer is the only architect included whose work has been published extensively, but even books that have mentioned his beloved Wellfleet cottage have not addressed it as fully as do McMahon and Cipriani; their discussion provides a helpful context for Breuer’s other work.3 Similarly, while Chermayeff’s views on design and urban form are well known, his Wellfleet house is not. The last chapter, “Late Modernism on Cape Cod,” shows intriguing work by architects of the next generation—Maurice K. Smith, Charles Zehner, Paul Krueger, Charles Gwathmey, and Charles Jencks— but it seems better suited to another book on later work in the area. McMahon and Cipriani are in an excellent position to tell that story if they choose to do so. In 1959 the two U.S. senators from Massachusetts, Leverett Saltonstall and John F. Kennedy, proposed the establishment of the Cape Cod National Seashore to preserve 46,400 coastal acres in Wellfleet and Truro from excessive development. The CCNS became a federally protected area two years later. Because the aim of this national reserve is to maintain the natural character of the area, the houses described here, built when the legislation was pending, face demolition if they are abandoned. Cape Cod Modern is part of an effort to preserve the best of them. jayne merkel New York City Notes 1. For example, Saltonstall’s work is not included in Alexander Gorlin’s perceptive Tomorrow’s Houses: New England Modernism (New York: Rizzoli, 2011). 2. Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander, Community and Privacy: Toward an Architecture of Humanism (New York: Doubleday, 1965). 3. The most complete previously published discussions of Breuer’s Wellfleet cottage appear in two books on Breuer that McMahon and Cipriani, curiously, fail to cite in their bibliography: David Masello, Architecture without Rules: The Houses of Marcel Breuer and Herbert Beckhard (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993); Robert F. Gatke, Marcel Breuer: A Memoir (New York: Monacelli Press, 2000). Sandra Alfoldy The Allied Arts: Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada Montreal: McGill University Press, 2012, 238 pp., 11 color and 52 b/w illus. $34.95, ISBN 9780773540033 There is a strong consensus among craft historians that craft is understudied, undertheorized, and undervalued within the framework of larger narratives of architecture and design. In his recent book The Invention of Craft, craft theorist and historian Glenn Adamson posits that craft is not a discipline but instead an approach to the making of things based in skills and processes.1 This position is corroborated within the history of craft, where multiple and often contradictory narratives emerge around the definition of craft, how craft should be studied, its relationship to architecture and the fine arts, the role it plays and should play in the wider field of design, and its position BOOKS 261 relative to the larger theoretical debates concerning ornament, material, and form that have featured prominently in architecture and design history for more than a century. Recent reassessments of craft, by Adamson and others, include increased attention to its regional, national, and cultural implications; exploration of the details of its material practices; and investigation into how craft relates to larger historical or cultural narratives. This is perhaps most evident in recent work on the Arts and Crafts movement, such as Fiona MacCarthy’s 2014 catalog for the exhibition Anarchy and Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy, 1860–1960 at the National Gallery in London, which traces the impact of Morris’s ideas into the twentieth century.2 The identity of craft in the modernist and postmodernist periods is more challenging to trace, in part because traditional narratives of architecture and design history tend to minimize the role of craft or even disregard it all together. While craft did indeed play a profound role in how many modernist buildings were experienced, the history of the modernist period does not reflect the full extent of this relationship. Craft historian Sandra Alfoldy’s The Allied Arts: Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada is an attempt to correct this absence of attention. The book makes a valuable contribution to the discussion of both architecture and craft in Canada, articulating their inextricable historical ties while simultaneously elucidating the theoretical obstacles to understanding the full significance of architecture and craft when they are employed in unison. The book is organized into five chapters and a conclusion, with each chapter devoted to a key concept or problem that Alfoldy argues intersects with both craft and architecture in critical ways: allied arts, materials, scale and form, ornament, and identities. The first chapter outlines the case for craft and architecture as intrinsically entwined endeavors, tracing their connection from the mid-nineteenth century into the present, taking into account architecture and design education, key people and events guiding this evolving relationship, and its overall significance. Alfoldy convincingly asserts that the separation of the “allied arts” is relatively recent, pointing out that the Greek word for architect, 262 J S A H | 74 . 2 | J U N E 2 01 5 architekton, does not distinguish between the two, meaning instead “master carpenter” (7). She draws on the theories of John Ruskin and William Morris to support her argument for the enmeshed nature of craft and architecture and notes that these two key advocates of handcraft within the Arts and Crafts movement were widely read in Canadian architecture schools at the end of the nineteenth century. Alfoldy further describes the increasing separation of the theory and practice of architecture and craft throughout the nineteenth century, when the image of the architect evolved into one of a solitary creator, directing skilled artisans rather than engaging in any collaborative process. In Canada in the mid-1960s, the union of architecture and craft found a powerful advocate in critic and curator Anita Aarons, who saw a great need to humanize Canadian modernist architecture via the introduction of craft. As editor of the periodical Allied Arts Catalogue from 1966 to 1968, Aarons argued forcefully for the collaboration of craftspeople and architects from the outset of building projects, rather than the insertion of additive craft elements after construction was completed. It is largely upon Aarons’s work that Alfoldy rests her arguments on behalf of the importance of the allied arts in modern Canada (20). There is much to praise throughout The Allied Arts. Alfoldy’s impeccable research and her analysis of highly diverse sources, along with her multidisciplinary methodology, support a compelling argument for a natural alliance between craft and architecture, both historically and for the future. Alfoldy acknowledges the rich and problematic question of Canadian identity, as well as the blind spots in the historical record that perpetuate the lack of understanding of craft’s importance to architecture, even during the heroic phase of modernism. She draws on a broad range of sources, including public art proceedings and debates, first-person accounts of architects and craftspeople as well as members of the general public, and histories of architecture and design. The color plates and black-and-white images provide powerful visual evidence of the strength of the allied arts across Canada, at a range of scales and in many different materials. Alfoldy’s energetic and thorough research yields a valuable account of an unwieldy subject and supports her argument for the fundamental connection of craft and architecture situated in the Canadian context. There are two areas in the book where one might ask for further work or more nuanced analysis. The first concerns the question of the relationship between craft and interior design. In discussing the “Canadiana” interiors created by Thor Hansen for the British American Oil Company in the 1950s and 1960s in the chapter “Materials,” Alfoldy confronts a field of study with an identity crisis perhaps equal to that of craft. She notes that within the context of postwar International Style Canadian architecture, both interior design and craft suffered from associations with the domestic, the quaint, the amateur, and the small. However, she is careful to distance herself from this field, stating, “This book is not about interior design, and intentionally states its area of investigation as the relationship between craft and architecture, but it is impossible to neatly separate these fields” (16). A more extensive examination of the complex relationship between craft and interior design could add greater depth to our understanding of both fields and challenge existing narratives that privilege the role of architecture. Many of the problems of interpretation and identity that Alfoldy cites within the realm of craft have direct parallels in the field of interior design, and the majority of the allied arts projects she discusses are actually interiors at a range of scales. The collaborations between Nova Scotia architect Brian MacKay-Lyons and textile designer Suzanne Swannie, for example, hint at the possibilities of further exploration of the interior in relation to the allied arts. A greater embrace of interior design as a critical site of enactment for many allied arts, as well as acknowledgment of the lack of either a historical or a theoretical canon for this field, might have allowed for a more nuanced, less binary analysis of the given examples. Further, the national focus of the book notwithstanding, Alfoldy could have provided greater depth by taking note of contemporary attempts outside Canada to align architecture, interiors, and craft, such as the hiring of various textile designers and artisans to work on the interiors of the United Nations Headquarters in New York.3 Finally, there is the question of craft considered in the context of indigenous culture. The chapter titled “Identities” is simultaneously the most intriguing and the most problematic, raising and yet only partially answering important questions about what constitutes Canadianness and whether this can be articulated via the allied arts as Alfoldy defines them. Canada’s colonial past and complex search for a national identity are explored in depth here, including the ways in which the artistic traditions of First Nations peoples have been consistently referenced and appropriated in attempts to synthesize a modern Canadian identity. Throughout this chapter, Alfoldy refers to First Nations artists alternately as craftspeople and as artists, leaving open the question of how notions of craft, design, and fine art were and are understood across the First Nations cultural traditions, with concomitant implications for the construction of a panCanadian identity. The British Columbian sculptor Robert Davidson’s 1984 work The Three Watchmen is one of the most provocative and interesting examples Alfoldy provides of First Nations artists’ contributions to allied arts projects. This work’s three large-scale carved-wood totem poles are installed in the atrium of the MacleanHunter Building in Toronto, designed by the architectural firm Webb Zerafa Menkes. While not the result of a direct collaboration between Davidson and the architects of the building, this contemporary work, based on traditional Haida totem poles, resides in a postwar atrium space that exhibits many of the possibilities of the allied arts as described by Alfoldy. This massive sculpture of hand-carved wood, made by a Haida artist whose oeuvre reinterprets the formal and symbolic traditions of indigenous West Coast peoples, occupies the public space within this sleek glass-and-steel Toronto building in a manner that is in no way subordinate to its architectural surroundings. It exemplifies the potential of the allied arts to refute the often-restrictive narratives of the modernist project while at the same time remaining staunchly modern. The Allied Arts: Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada is an important corrective to outdated narratives within the histories of both craft and architecture. The book offers a powerful reminder of the essential role of collaboration within both endeavors and will serve as a critical precedent for future studies, both within the Canadian context and beyond. alexa winton Pratt Institute Notes 1. Glenn Adamson, The Invention of Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 2. Fiona MacCarthy, Anarchy and Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy, 1860–1960 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2014). 3. See, for example, Ingeborg Glambek, “The Council Chambers in the UN Building in New York,” Scandinavian Journal of Design History 15 (2005), 8–39. BOOKS 263