Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2024 -

There is a vast literature on Frank Lloyd Wright, but this book offers a new level of insight. The approach is twofold: first, Rahmani uses psychoanalysis to explain Wright's complex motivations, the driving forces of his imagination. More importantly, he then uses Wright's favorite thinker, Emerson, as a lens to explore Wright's conception of himself as a prophet whose architecture would unsettle and elevate Americans. The chapter on the concept of the sublime is specially valuable. The sublime both disturbs and exalts, effects that Wright wanted in his buildings. The chapter on furniture shows why Wrights' buildings and their custom-made furnishings are not meant to be comfortable. His ambition is often mistaken for failure. The climax of Rahmani's study is the chapter on Wright's masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum, a work of profound originality. The author uses thought experiments (car crashes, runaway wheelchairs) and allusions to the films of Alfred Hitchcock to illuminate the mysterious effects of the building. This lucidly written work is a real contribution to American studies as well as to the history of architecture. Profusely illustrated and thoroughly documented with notes and bibliography.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through researchers and faculty; general readers.

The topic of architecture and patents is particularly timely as architects continue to design and build increasingly complex structures that draw on the skills of various contributors. Architecture has long been seen as a creative endeavor not so easily pinned down to a formula or mechanism. However, Christensen (Univ. of Rochester) uses the patent specifically to better understand three key features of intellectual property in architecture: creativity, novelty, and property. He organizes the book around several sites: the home, the studio, the corporate lab, the repository, the courtroom, and the commons. Readers will find an impressive array of individuals, materials, and institutions represented, including Sarah Guppy, Alvar Aalto, Santiago Calatrava, Guastavino tiles, Tyvek wrap, BASF colors, and the South Kensington Museum. The author deftly grounds the issues with concrete examples, such as the copycat Eiffel Tower in China, Saunders's "Self-Serving Grocery Stores," or Hardoy's "butterfly chair." The scope of this book will attract a broad range of readers in not only the design disciplines and education but also engineering, history of science, and intellectual property law. It is written accessibly with a clear command of the existing literature.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers.

This excellent, thought-provoking book is very different from the many traditional books about Greek architecture that focus on the Doric style and its evolution in purely architectural terms. Instead, Zuchtriegel (director of the Pompeii archaeological park) takes an innovative approach to the origins of Doric architecture in the Archaic period, considering it to be a complex development conditioned by the transformation of politics, society, religion, economics, and colonization. Particularly important in the development of Doric architecture and the internationalization of its style was the political ideology of local elites and tyrannoi ("tyrants") concerned with maintaining and promoting their power, image, prestige, and patronage. The author provides interesting discussion of how and why the Doric temple, set within a sanctuary, came to define religious space and at the same time shift the focus from traditional religious beliefs in gods as spiritual forces that dwelled in various environments in nature to anthropomorphic temple cult images in urban contexts. Well written and rich in ideas and approaches, this is a book for scholars.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.