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This remarkable volume is the first in any language to offer a comprehensive treatment of building in the Maghreb region, stretching across North Africa from Libya to Morocco and Spain, and to consider buildings from the conquest in the 7th century to the beginning of the colonial period in the 19th. It is lavishly illustrated with color images, many by Bloom (formerly, Boston College and Virginia Commonwealth Univ.), many showing interiors of mosques now closed to non-Muslims. It is not a guidebook, although anyone traveling in the region would be well repaid by consulting it beforehand. The language is clear but sometimes technical--the superb descriptions of structures employ terminology that will be familiar to nonspecialists. Fully annotated and including a rich bibliography, the book offers cogent, fresh observations on nearly every page, often highlighting innovations of local builders. (The author's knowledge of the scholarly literature is evident throughout.) The variety of styles and ornament is astounding. Bloom eschews sweeping oversimplification, recognizing the individuality of structures and patrons, but he also sets the great Spanish monuments of Cordoba and the Alhambra in their broader context. A delight for anyone interested in Islamic architecture and culture, and a required resource for any scholarly work treating this region.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers.

"Buildings tell us what we are and what we want to be, and sometimes it is the average ones that tell us the most." So wrote Paul Goldberger in the introduction to Why Architecture Matters (CH, Feb'10, 47-2981). Hubka's intensive study considers post-Civil War average vernacular housing in the US. Hubka (emer., architecture, Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) did extensive research for this very technical, sociological treatment of vernacular architecture. He considers the rising middle class and its new standards of living from 1900 to 1940. This American "middle majority" culture is reflected in its housing. These are underdocumented houses. Hubka studies many types of this common popular housing--single family, multifamily, subdivided, remodeled--showing all in pictures, floor plans, and diagrams. As with the ubiquitous bungalow, most of the houses will be familiar even to lay-people. Acquiring modern housing resulted in improvements for women in homemaking, which Hubka considers. Providing new interpretations and a new vocabulary and placing these houses in cultural context, this book will be enlightening for those interested in vernacular architecture across the US. Hubka's book becomes the new bible of this architecture for material culture studies, architectural historians, and sociologists. Excellent quality black-and-white pictures, line drawings, charts, and explanatory diagrams. Extensive explanatory notes and sources.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Searching for ways that fortitude, resistance, and imagination can work in an area characterized by unimaginable despair and degradation is the driving logic of this book. The book's specific focus is the Gaza Strip, an area roughly the size of Mobile, Alabama, occupied and controlled by Israel despite having a Palestinian population of 1.8 million. The book's broader project is to present visions and architectural or urban interventions of all scales intended to improve the lives of its inhabitants--in many ways rethinking the very strategies that those inhabitants use to not only survive but make a life for themselves. Besides offering descriptions of the systems of tunnels used to transport, among other things, medicines, building materials, and individuals visiting their families, the book also presents propositions for ecologically based zones and cities, projects centered on water remediation and collection, residential developments of all scales, places for learning and making, and ways to occupy spaces and rebuild from the rubble resulting from the all-too-frequent Israeli bombings. Open Gaza is an urgent plea for humanitarianism and imaginative, critical involvement, needs that become more pronounced with each passing day.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers.

Unlike many politicians, John Lindsay placed a premium on the impact of the design of the built environment on people's lives. While he was mayor of New York from 1966 to 1973 Lindsay contracted with architects, landscape architects, and planners of exceptional talent in an array of ventures to make New York, then a metropolis beset with decline, more livable and engaging. Many of these initiatives were intended to help the city's poor, and almost all of them were experimental in nature. In The Invention of Public Space, Mogilevich (historian of architecture and urbanism and editor in chief of Urban Omnibus, the publication of The Architectural League of New York) focuses on what was indeed a rich period of change in the ways professionals and public figures alike sought to improve the urban setting, through both innovative designs and new processes such as participatory planning. In contrast to the physical legacy of Robert Moses a generation earlier, much of what Lindsay fostered proved to be ephemeral, but Mogilevich argues that much can be learned from his endeavors. Thanks to the author's original research and acute analysis, this is an important book, not just for the history of 20th-century New York but also for the history of urban America more broadly.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.