Awards
- Winner of <PrizeName>Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles for 2018</PrizeName> 2018
Overview
Engaging essays that roam across uncertain territory, in search of sunken forests, unclassifiable islands, inflammable skies, plagiarized tabernacles, and other phenomena missing from architectural history.This collection by ""architectural history's most beguiling essayist"" (as Reinhold Martin calls the author in the book's foreword) illuminates the unfamiliar, the arcane, the obscure-phenomena largely missing from architectural and landscape history. These essays by Edward Eigen do not walk in a straight line, but roam across uncertain territory, discovering sunken forests, unclassifiable islands, inflammable skies, unvisited shores, plagiarized tabernacles. Taken together, these texts offer a group portrait of how certain things fall apart. We read about the statistical investigation of lightning strikes in France by the author-astronomer Camille Flammarion, which leads Eigen to reflect also on Foucault, Hamlet, and the role of the anecdote in architectural history. We learn about, among other things, Olmsted's role in transforming landscape gardening into landscape architecture; the connections among hedging, hedge funds, the High Line, and GPS bandwidth; timber-frame roofs and (spider) web-based learning; the archives of the Houses of Parliament through flood and fire; and what the 1898 disappearance and reappearance of the Trenton, New Jersey architect William W. Slack might tell us about the conflict between ""the migratory impulse"" and ""love of home."" Eigen compares his essays to the ""gathering up of seeds that fell by the wayside."" The seedlings that result create in the reader's imagination a dazzling display of the particular, the contingent, the incidental, and the singular, all in search of a narrative.
Full Product Details
Author: Edward Eigen (Associate Professor of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Harvard University) ,
Reinhold Martin ,
Cynthia Davidson (ANYOne Corporation / Log)
Publisher: MIT Press Ltd
Imprint: MIT Press
Dimensions:
Width: 13.70cm
, Height: 2.10cm
, Length: 20.30cm
ISBN: 9780262534840
ISBN 10: 0262534843
Pages: 408
Publication Date: 02 February 2018
Recommended Age: From 18 years
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Author Information
Edward Eigen is Associate Professor of History of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Associate Editor of Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes. His writing has appeared in Cabinet, Pamphlet, Grey Room, and other publications. Reinhold Martin is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University, and a partner in the firm of Martin/Baxi Architects.
