Architecture, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, has suspended historical references in favor of universalized abstraction. In the decades after the Second World War, when architectural historians began to assess the legacy of the avant-gardes in order to construct a coherent narrative of modernism's development, they were inevitably influenced by contempora...(展开全部)

Histories of Iran, as of the wider Middle East, have been dominated by the twin narratives of top-down modernization and methodological nationalism. In this book, Stephanie Cronin problematizes both of these narratives. Its attention is firmly fixed on subaltern social groups: the 'dangerous classes' and their constructed contrast with the new and avowedly modern bourgeois elit...(展开全部)

We live in a world saturated by future-consciousness. Our lives are constructed around expectations of the future as full and as flawed as our understandings of the past. This volume is a conceptual tool kit for thinking about the hopes and anxieties embodied in ideas of the future. Exploring links between panic and nostalgia, waiting and utopia, technology and messianism, and ...(展开全部)

This is the only text in English that details, step-by-step, the Beaux-Arts system of architectural education. With the reissue of this long-out-of-print book, the student or practitioner of classical design can reconstruct the course of study used to train every architect in America until the late 1940s, from the making of the initial sketch to the rendering of the project for...(展开全部)

In this book, David McMahan offers the first comprehensive attempt to chart the development of "modern Buddhism." His position is critical but empathetic: while he presents modern Buddhism as a construction of numerous parties with varying interests, he does not reduce it to a mistake, a misrepresentation, or a fabrication. Rather, he presents modern Buddhism as a complex histo...(展开全部)

“Rich, learned, briskly written, maddening yet necessary study.”—Lee Siegel, New York Times Book Review Peter Gay explores the shocking modernist rebellion that, beginning in the 1840s, transformed art, literature, music, and film. Modernism presents a thrilling pageant of heretics that includes Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, D. W. Griffiths, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S....(展开全部)

二十世纪的西方艺术历史是一个暴风雨般反叛、改变、价值重估和更新的叙事史。对于我们这些生活在这段历史后半段的人来说，很难察觉这个故事现在已经结束了——就是说，现代主义已经是过去的事了。尽管少数鼓吹者还存在，还很活跃，但是艺术追求的主流已经变了，只是给批评家和历史学家留下了叙述与清点这段历史的任务。 但是至今还没有人提供这样一个关于现代主义的综合性论叙。原因显然在于无人有能力对建筑师、舞蹈设计者、作曲家、电影制作者、小说家、画家和诗人的作品进行综合把握和评论。唯一的选择是省略现代主义观念，聚焦个别作品，这些作品的意义在于它们引起了所有门类的艺术和艺术家的改变。

A sharp and lively text that covers issues in depth but not to the point that they become inaccessible to beginning students, An Introduction to Architectural Theory is the first narrative history of this period, charting the veritable revolution in architectural thinking that has taken place, as well as the implications of this intellectual upheaval. The first comprehensive ...(展开全部)

Reyner Banham (1922-88) was one of the most influential writers on architecture, design, and popular culture from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s. Trained in mechanical engineering and art history, he was convinced that technology was making society not only more exciting but more democratic. His combination of academic rigor and pop culture sensibility put him in opposition to...(展开全部)

"The Histories" describes how a small band of Greek city states united to repel the might of the Persian empire. But while this epic struggle forms the core of his work, Herodotus'' natural curiosity frequently gives rise to colourful digressions: a description of the natural wonders of Egypt; an account of European lake-dwellers; and far-fetched accounts of dog-headed men and ...(展开全部)