The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra

2023-02-24

Author : Joseph Godlewski
Release : 2023-02-24
Genre :
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 171/5 ( reviews)

Book Synopsis The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra by : Joseph Godlewski

Download or read book The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra written by Joseph Godlewski. This book was released on 2023-02-24. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the relative absence of physical architectural documentation, this study draws from a close reading of written sources--traveler's accounts, slave traders' diaries, memoirs, colonial records, and oral histories-- as well as contemporary field work to trace transformations in the region's-built environment from the sixteenth century to today.

The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra

2024-03-06 Architecture

Author : Joseph Godlewski
Release : 2024-03-06
Genre : Architecture
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 958/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra by : Joseph Godlewski

Download or read book The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra written by Joseph Godlewski. This book was released on 2024-03-06. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra challenges linear assumptions about agency, progress, and domination in colonial and postcolonial cities, adding an important sub‐Saharan case study to existing scholarship on globalization and modernity. Intersected by small creeks, rivulets, and dotted with mangrove swamps, the Bight of Biafra has a long history of decentralized political arrangements and intricate trading networks predating the emergence of the Atlantic world. While indigenous merchants in the region were active participants in the transatlantic slave trading system, they creatively resisted European settlement and maintained indigenous sovereignty until the middle of the nineteenth century. Since few built artifacts still exist, this study draws from a close reading of written sources—travelers’ accounts, slave traders’ diaries, missionary memoirs, colonial records, and oral histories—as well as contemporary fieldwork to trace transformations in the region’s built environment from the sixteenth century to today. With each chapter focusing on a particular spatial paradigm in this dynamic process, this book uncovers the manifold and inventive ways in which actors strategically adapted the built environment to adjust to changing cultural and economic circumstances. In parallel, it highlights the ways that these spaces were rhetorically constructed and exploited by foreign observers and local agents. Enmeshed in the history of slavery, colonialism, and the modern construction of race, the spatial dynamics of the Biafran region have not been geographically delimited. The central thesis of this volume is that these spaces of entanglement have been productive sites of Black identity formation involving competing and overlapping interests, occupying multiple positions and temporalities, and ensnaring real, imagined, and sometimes contradictory aims. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of architecture, architectural history, urban geography, African studies, and Atlantic studies.

Dahomey’s Royal Architecture

2023-06-23 Architecture

Author : Lynne Ellsworth Larsen
Release : 2023-06-23
Genre : Architecture
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 683/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Dahomey’s Royal Architecture by : Lynne Ellsworth Larsen

Download or read book Dahomey’s Royal Architecture written by Lynne Ellsworth Larsen. This book was released on 2023-06-23. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dahomey’s Royal Architecture examines the West African kingdom of Dahomey, located in present-day Republic of Benin. The book explores the Royal Palace of Dahomey’s relationship to the religious, cultural, and national identity of the pre-colonial Kingdom of Dahomey (c. 1625–1892), colonial Dahomey (1892–1960) and post-colonial Benin (1960–present). The Royal Palace of Dahomey covers more than 108 acres and was surrounded by a wall over two miles long. When the French colonial army arrived in Abomey in 1892, the ruling king set fire to the palace to keep it from falling into enemy hands. Though much of the palace structure was subsequently left to ruin, a portion of it was restored from which the French ruled for a short period. In 1945, the colonial administration transformed part of the palace into a museum, and in 1985 the entire palace was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list. This book documents the palace’s physical transformations in relation to its changing purposes and explores how the space maintained religious significance despite change. The palace’s construction, destruction, and restorations demonstrate how architecture can be manipulated and transformed according to the agendas of governments or according to the religious and cultural needs of a populace. The palace functions as a historic record by discussing aspects of documentation, revision, language, and interpretation. Covering almost four centuries of Dahomey’s history, this book will be of interest to researchers and students of African art and architecture, religious studies, west African history, and post-colonial studies.

Architecture for Spain's Recovered Democracy

2023-03-30 Architecture

Author : Manuel López Segura
Release : 2023-03-30
Genre : Architecture
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 722/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Architecture for Spain's Recovered Democracy by : Manuel López Segura

Download or read book Architecture for Spain's Recovered Democracy written by Manuel López Segura. This book was released on 2023-03-30. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical studies on the involvement of architecture in twentieth-century politics have overlooked its contribution to building Spain’s democracy. This pioneering book seeks to fill that void. Between the late 1970s and early 1990s, Spain founded representative institutions, launched its welfare state, and devolved autonomy to its regions. The study brings forth the architectural incarnation of that threefold program as it deployed in the Valencian Country, a Catalan-speaking region on Spain’s Mediterranean shores. There, social democratic authorities mobilized architects, planners, and graphic artists to devise a newly open public sphere and to recover a local identity that Franco’s dictatorship had repressed for decades. The research follows the impetus of reform and its contradictions through urban projects, designs for cultural amenities, and the renovation of governmental and professional bodies. Architecture for Spain’s Recovered Democracy contributes to current debates on nationalism and the arts, the environments of democratic socialism, and postmodernism and neoliberalism. As a result, it widens our understanding of how peripheral regions may yield egalitarian architectures of resistance. This book is written for students and researchers in architecture and planning, art history, spatial politics, and Hispanic studies, as well as for a general readership interested in inclusive politics in the built environment.

Arieh Sharon and Modern Architecture in Israel

2023-11-30 Architecture

Author : Eran Neuman
Release : 2023-11-30
Genre : Architecture
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 777/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Arieh Sharon and Modern Architecture in Israel by : Eran Neuman

Download or read book Arieh Sharon and Modern Architecture in Israel written by Eran Neuman. This book was released on 2023-11-30. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arieh Sharon and Modern Architecture in Israel: Building Social Pragmatism offers the first comprehensive survey of the work of Arieh Sharon and analyzes and discusses his designs and plans in relation to the emergence of the State of Israel. A graduate of the Bauhaus, Sharon worked for a few years at the office of Hannes Mayer before returning to Mandatory Palestine. There, he established his office which was occupied in its first years in planning kibbutzim and residential buildings in Tel Aviv. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Arieh Sharon became the director and chief architect of the National Planning Department, where he was asked to devise the young country’s first national masterplan. Known as the Sharon Plan, it was instrumental in shaping the development of the new nation. During the 1950s and 1960s, Sharon designed many of Israel’s institutions, including hospitals and buildings on university campuses. This book presents Sharon’s exceptionally wide range of work and examines his perception of architecture in both socialist and pragmatist terms. It also explores Sharon’s modernist approach to architecture and his subsequent shift to Brutalist architecture, when he partnered with Benjamin Idelson in the 1950s and when his son, Eldar Sharon, joined the office in 1964. Thus, the book contributes a missing chapter in the historiography of Israeli architecture in particular and of modern architecture overall. This book will be of interest to researchers in architecture, modern architecture, Israel studies, Middle Eastern studies and migration of knowledge.

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The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra

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