State Of Architecture Research Articles

‘The Whole Thing was Numbingly Bland and it was Deliberately So’: Food and Power in Ireland's Magdalene Laundries, 1922–1996

AbstractFor survivors of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries, food is a sensory embodiment of the punishment and powerlessness they experienced while contained within the institutions. As part of the Irish Free State's architecture of containment, the relationship between the Laundries and the state is unique: the Catholic‐run institutions operated outside of state bureaucracy, yet they were central to its attempts to consolidate sovereignty as a fledgling nation. For historians, the sensing body is one of the few avenues to understanding the Magdalene institutions and their place in twentieth‐century Irish history. This article uses memories of food as a point of access to the subjectivities of survivors, and in doing so reveals the affective imprint of institutional power on embodied experience.

The relationship between social welfare policy and multidimensional well-being: An analysis using the South African Child Support Grant

Socio-historical context and ideology are often overlooked in analyses of how social welfare policy is used to promote well-being. This paper uses the South African Child Support Grant (CSG) to illuminate how a policy may enhance or hinder well-being, not only for individuals but also for a society. Forged through a combination of the inherited apartheid state's architecture, the redistributive ideology of the ruling African National Congress, social development theory and the constraints of economic globalisation, the CSG has produced paradoxically positive material well-being outcomes for many poor South Africans and possibly reproduced problematic subjective and relational forms of well-being nationally. Analysing how the grant, as a social policy, is historically and ideologically situated illuminates some of the constraints imposed upon a twenty-first century democratic developmental state as it tries to find its way in a global market, redistribute wealth, satisfy different constituencies and promote individual and collective well-being. Grants are a necessary but insufficient strategy for a twenty-first century democratic developmental state like South Africa.

Il Pnf tra Stato e costituzione. Le interpretazioni della storiografia giuridica

This essay aims to study the contributions of juridical historiography to interpretino the role and position of the PNF (National Fascist Party) in the Italian constitutional system. This is a recent contribution, because juridical historiography - traditionally interested mainly in the Middle Ages) has always been very suspicious of the contemporary age. Given the lack of studies by law historians, many other social sciences have studied fascism and the PNF. In particular, political historiography has produced a pair of opposing interpretations: the first (asserted mostly by Aquarone and Pombeni) describes the PNF as a State organ, namely a party completely subjugated to the State. Conversely, the second interpretation (asserted by Gentile) describes the PNF as a primary builder of the fascist State's architecture. From the point of view of the constitutional historian, these two interpretations do not seem to be necessarily in conflict. Indeed, in the fascist constitutional culture, they coexist. This was because the fascist constitutional culture was not a flat landscape. To the contrary, constitutional science during the fascist regime was characterized by a lively debate. There was an interpretation firmly anchored in the tradition of the so-called «Theories of State», but at the same time, during the 1930s and 1940s, new theories were to arise - the so called «doctrines of constitution», in which the role of the political party (or, a few years later, of «political parties») become different: no longer the State's servant, but a maker, from below, of political unity and Constitution.

Buildings of Alaska

Buildings of Alaska traces Alaska's architecture from the earliest dwellings made of sod, whalebone, and driftwood to the glass and metal skyscrapers of modern-day Anchorage. Focusing on the various cultural traditions that have helped shape the state's architecture, the volume also explores how Alaska's buildings reflect Alaskan's attempt to adapt to the unique conditions of their environment. Here, Alison K. Hoagland examimes the contribution to the state's architectural history of three major cultural groups: native Alaskans, Russian settlers, and Americans for the lower 48. Divided into six regions--South Central, Southeastern, Interior, Northern, Western, and Southwestern--entries cover such structures as aboriginal houses, Russian Orthodix chruches, log roadhouses, false-front commercial buildings constructed during the gold-rush, concrete Moderne public buildings of the 1930s, and high-rise office buildings erected during the oil boom of the 1970s and 1980s. With over 250 photgraphs, drawings, and maps, Buildings of Alaska is an unprecedented look at how Alaska's buildings reveal the personal attitudes and cultural precepts of its diverse group of inhabitants.

The Making of Virginia Architecture by Charles E. Brownell et al., and: Palladia in Alabama by Louise Joyner et al., and: Overstreet & Overstreet, A Legacy in Architecture by Michael W. Fazio et al.

,, I .•, i' I "· Book Reviews Figure 1. N. W. Overstreet, Bailey Junior High School,Jackson MS, 1936. Rendering of main facade (Manuscripts Division, Special Collections Department, Mitchell Memorial Library, Mississipi State University, reprint courtesy of Mississippi Museum of Art). Charles E. Brownell et al., The Making ofVirginia Architecture , Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1992, xiii + 457 pp. (465 illus.). Louise Joyner et al., Palladia in Alabama, Montgomery: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, 1991, 80 pp. (98 illus.). Michael W. Fazio et al., Overstreet & Overstreet, A Legacy in Architecture, Jackson : Mississippi Museum of Art, 1993, 16 unnumbered pp. (20 illus.). In the last 20 years, the architectural exhibit has become an important part of the repertoire of art museums. The research behind these exhibits, chronicled in the exhibit catalogs, has made a substantial contribution to architectural history. The three catalogs reviewed here are the most recent southern representatives of this phenomenon. The three exhibits and their catalogs are so different in scope and topic that they are best considered separately. The Making of Virginia Architecture is a large and beautifully produced catalog, full of significant and apparently impeccable scholarship, that marks a major advance in our knowledge of architecture in Virginia. It was motivated by the belief that Virginia has made its greatest artistic contribution in the field of architecture. The catalog is divided into three sections: three essays on different periods in Virginia's architecture; two chapters on architectural drawings (the chosen medium of the exhibit); and a survey of the exhibit. This format works well, although the reasons behind the periodization are unclear, and one of the authors even admits that it was devised for expediency of production. 56 William M.S. Rasmussen's essay on Virginia colonial architecture is an excellent review of the period, using the vast body of scholarship on 18th-century Virginia produced during the last 20 years. It is particularly suited to the theme of the book because it explicitly addresses what was uniquely Virginian about colonial houses, churches, and public buildings in the Commonwealth. Charles E. Brownell's essay on the period from the Revolution to 1870 is a thoughtful discussion of the neoclassicaltraditioninVirginia -itssources, itsepitomization in the architecture of Thomas Jefferson, and its 19th-century classical modes. No mere chronological survey, this essay explores a sequence of themes such as the orders, the temple type, and the theory of architectural character, and offers intriguing insights into Jefferson's architecture. The essayis an importantaddition to architecturalscholarship. Richard Guy Wilson closes this section of the book with an essay on trends in Virginia architecture during the last century. His is the hardest job because this period witnessed an explosion in styles and trends as well as a self-consciousness about architecture, seen perhaps most clearly in movements such as post-modernism and historic preservation. Like his previous scholarship, Wilson's essay is most important for the connections it makes between architectureand broadersocialand historicalforces. All three authors contribute to a long chapter on the process and product of architectural drawing and other representation, and Calder Loth provides a chapter on the ARRIS Volume 4: 56-60. 1993 search for drawings of Virginia architecture. Besides giving insight into the process of architecture, these chapters establish a context for the drawings that follow. The survey consists of excellent short essays, the majority by Brownell and Wilson, on particular architectural drawings. Forthe most part, the surveyselectionsare well coordinated with the period essays. But the scarcity of surviving colonial drawings weakens the representation of this period, and Brownell's focus on the classical tradition slights such movements as the Gothic Revival, which is actually well represented in the catalog. If there is any general problem with this splendid book, it lies in defining what makes a state's architecture unique to that territorial area-in other words, what is Virginian about Virginia's architecture? Several of the authors wrestle with this issue. Wilson even admits that "wide divergences and little commonality exist among the many buildings constructed within the fictive boundaries of the Commonwealth," although he aims to identify "certain patterns that appear to be uniquely Virgininan." But beyond a certain mode of the colonial revival, which consciously...

North Carolina Architecture by Catherine W. Bishir, and: Architects and Builders in North Carolina: A History of the Practice of Building by Catherine W. Bishir et al

48 Book Reviews _[ -,-....l ·. [j i+-~--'---'--"'-"""-'------rr . ·.:. Catherine W. Bishir. North Carolina Architecture. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. xiv + 514 pp. 490 duotone photographs, 18 color plates, 65 line drawings. Catherine W. Bishir, Charlotte V. Brown, Carl R. Lounsbury, and Ernest H. Wood III. Architects and Builders in North Carolina: A History ofthe Practice ofBuilding. Chapel Hill and London: University of North · Carolina Press, 1990. xi+ pp. Illustrations, maps, and plans (not numbered). How often does a writer of architectural history, who is associated with two titles on related subjects that are published in the same year, become a winner of awards for both publications? Catherine Bishir has achieved this distinction. She wrote North Carolina Architecture although she also credits the many field researchers in the State Historic Preservation Office in North Carolina for data on thousands of individual structures from which she could select. In 1991 this book won the Author Award of the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians and the A.I.A. International Architecture Book Award. In Architects and Builders in North Carolina: A History ofthe Practice ofBuilding, Bishir contributed two chapters. This title won the Best Edited Book Award from Pioneer America Society in 1990. Although these two volumes were published by the University of North Carolina Press, they were printed in different formats and sizes as separate entities. Yet any reader of architecture can easily see that the books belong beside each other on the same book shelf as companions. The North Carolina Society for the Preservation of Antiquities, founded in 1939, helped by underwriting publication costs for this history of the state's architecture, one reason, perhaps, that North Carolina Architecture is such a spectacular production with the very best photography, paper, and graphic design that all writers dream of having. Although less weighty, Architects and Builders is packed with complementary information not found in its oversized complement. During the past ten years it has been fashionable to publish books on the architectural heritage of individual states in oversize formats, having plenty of illustrations and a beautiful color dust jacket, all geared to the public that is looking for a coffee table book. While North Carolina Architecture's cover will attract some buyers, the text is also a multifaceted and thorough survey of the state's historic architecture. First it is a chronological survey of architecture from its seventeenth century beginnings to 1945. It analyses every imaginable type of architecture from private houses to commercial, agricultural, industrial, ecclesiastical, civic and governmental, and from simple log buildings by unknown artisans to complex high-style steel frame and reinforced concrete structures by architects and engineers. Because of the nature of settlement in North Carolina, which is more rural than urban, the book carefully maintains a balance between buildings in the country and city, representing more small towns in the beginning while focusing on urban II centers at the end. Bishir also is concerned with the subregional developments within the state, showing its coastal beginnings and moving inwards. Despite the rapid urbanization that took place from the late nineteenth century onwards, Bishir was sensitive to include a worthwhile section on log structures at the end of the century, something I believe that some writers would have been tempted to delete since log structures were covered in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century sections. She also presents documentation showing that log structures were built during the seventeenth century, but none of these survive. Architects and Builders examines the history of builders and building construction practices in North Carolina from the late seventeenth century to the present. This theme integrates the construction practices with a history of building technology and mechanization, new industrial materials, and a history of the urbanization of the state. For example, railroad construction during the 1880s linked North Carolina to national markets, facilitating the export of raw products and the import of prefabricated houses as well as enabling urban migration and the development of new industries in cities and towns. Architects and Builders was inspired by the vast collection of interesting documents that architectural historians discover when researching buildings, such as those found in courthouse contracts...