Ancient Iran

One major challenge of the study of ancient Iran is that it does not exist in Western academia as a discrete field of study. Prehistory, for example, which ends in the 3rd millennium in Elam but persists into the 1st millennium bce elsewhere on the Iranian plateau, has been studied primarily by anthropologists, the Iron Age by Assyriologists, the Parthians by classical archaeologists, and the Sasanians by scholars of Iranian studies. As a result, ancient Iran does not belong to any individual academic discipline, and in the context of Near Eastern studies, perhaps its most obvious home, it has been treated largely as an ancillary field. Thus Iran has seen less archaeological fieldwork, including excavation, regional survey, and study of standing architectural remains, than other parts of the Near East. This problem has been further compounded by the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which effectively barred foreign archaeologists from the country and severed contacts between them and their Iranian colleagues. This situation has improved in recent decades, but there are nevertheless relatively few scholars working on ancient Iran and comparatively little scholarship on its architecture, especially compared to Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Egypt, or the Mediterranean. To study Iranian architecture, therefore, it is necessary to extract relevant examples from archaeological reports, both preliminary and final. This is especially true for prehistoric periods before the advent of stone masonry, but even for the Sasanian period most architectural scholarship documents individual sites or buildings. The titles listed here thus provide only the raw material for studying ancient Iranian architecture. This bibliography is dedicated to the memory of David Stronach (b. 1931–d. 2020), a prolific and consummate archaeologist and scholar whose contributions to the study of Iranian architecture have been enormous.

Apartments

The apartment (as housing type) is a set of rooms, including a kitchen, designed as a complete dwelling for occupation by a single household within a larger structure or complex, typically with other similar units. As an architectural type and way of living, the idea dates to ancient Rome. The roots of the apartment as known today, however, lie in the towns of early modern Europe. With the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the great metropolis in the 19th century, the apartment emerged as fundamental component of the urban built environment, mostly, to begin, for the upper middle classes and then, with the introduction of philanthropic and public housing, for workers, often in complexes with innovative courtyard designs emphasizing hygiene, nuclear-family domesticity, and, though community facilities, non-commercial forms of recreation. In the first half of the 20th century both the luxury and the social apartment began to appear beyond western Europe and the United States, including in the USSR, Latin America, and Japan, and under colonial regimes in Asia and Africa. In the second half of the 20th century, the apartment continued to spread. In Europe, the state disincentivized private development and house building, channeling production into apartments, typically grouped in suburban estates. In much of the Global South apartments came to predominate in formal housing (as opposed to informal, often self-built, housing in slums). In rich countries where the state did not discourage private housing, by contrast, including the United States, apartments were reserved mostly for low-income households or, in the private sector, younger and older adults without children at home. In the era of global economic liberalization, the apartment became yet more ubiquitous. In the rapidly urbanizing Global South, the majority of formal housing came to be in apartments. In the Global North, the dispersal of industry allowed city centers to transform into boutique neighborhoods for growing numbers of white-collar workers. All over, acceptance of the apartment led to a proliferation of high-rise forms. This article is largely organized chronologically and geographically, with emphasis on housing cultures, social housing in the Global North, and private housing in the United States. Entries mostly focus on the apartment as a type or as a larger phenomenon. Detailed design studies, surveys of particular architects whose oeuvre includes apartments, and broader place histories that engage the apartment have mostly been excluded.

Architecture of South Asia

‘South Asia’ is a term used for the Indian subcontinent after its rearrangement into several independent nations in the mid-20th century. It includes the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Most of these countries have roots in common, shared history and culture, and very frequently, they have been part of the same empires—for example under the Mauryas, or the Mughals. The region is home to several faiths, the birthplace of the Indic religions of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism. In addition, the region has a long-standing presence of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, and Zoroastrianism. The entire region has rich architectural traditions, with various geographical and cultural zones employing their own regional idioms of construction while also participating in much larger aspirational architectural styles. Exploring a span from the Indus Valley civilization in the Bronze Age (3rd and 2nd millennia bce) to the modernism of new nations in the 20th century, there are several works that center on the architectural history of South Asia. While there are some journals that are dedicated to the architectural and art history of South Asia, there are others that include architectural history of South Asia significantly though the publication might have a slightly different focus. Most monographs are dedicated to specific periods, geographies, and themes. Because of the identity politics of the modern nations in South Asia, most architectural themes after 1947 (when the British left South Asia) are usually limited to each single nation, often not relating that nation’s architecture to that of neighboring countries. However, books before 1947 tend to use ‘India’ as a generic civilizational term for the entire South Asian region, and not just the nation state of India. This bibliography deliberately leaves out several kinds of publications such as archaeological reports, volumes in which architecture is only one of the many cultural facets, common textbooks that are usually introductory surveys of both architecture and art, and monographs that are narrowly focused on period and place.

Colonial and Modern Architecture in India

In the colonial period, the term India was used in the traditional sense to describe the whole of South Asia from Afghanistan to Burma, and after 1947, the national boundaries of the nation of India were precisely defined. Of course, several colonial powers had held territories of what eventually became the Republic of India. Here we are concerned with colonial powers from the early modern period onward, which are all European, mainly the British, the French, and the Portuguese. They all shaped the architecture of the region, and their contributions are no less important than the indigenous architectural styles that had evolved over many more centuries. Eventually, in the 20th century, international movements such as Art Deco and Modernism came to India. The professionalization of architecture and the rise of Indian architects dominate the narrative of modern architecture in the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st.

Architecture of Sicily and Magna Graecia

Between the second half of the 8th and the beginning of the 6th century bce, the Greeks expanded toward the West by settling at numerous sites in Sicily, southern Italy (the area of Greek colonization in this region being defined as Magna Graecia), and the south of France and Spain. The terms traditionally used to describe this process and its results, “colony” and “colonization,” are still convenient labels. However, both definitions are misleading given their strong “statist” associations, which are not appropriate for the settlement processes of the Archaic period, processes that were due more to the initiative of single individuals or groups than to city-states, and ultimately led to the foundation of new city-states independent from their mother cities. This expansion toward the West marks an important moment in the history of Greek architecture. New territories and foundations became available for the development of land division, urbanism, and construction. Moreover, within a few generations after their foundation, the successful settlements developed a particular interest in monumental building, which was critical, from the Archaic all the way down to the Hellenistic period, in asserting not only the wealth and power of these communities living away from home, but also in constructing and reinforcing their cultural identity. This process led to major construction and significant experimentation and innovation, first, in association with sacred architecture, in the 6th and 5th centuries bce and later in the field of military architecture, when in the 4th and 3rd centuries bce and before the advent of Rome in the latter century, the Greeks came under particular pressure from Carthage in Sicily and indigenous populations in southern Italy. Finally, not only did the Western Greeks play a critical role in the transmission of Greek architecture to the other populations of pre-Roman Italy, but also they had a significant effect on the development of Roman, particularly Republican, architecture. During the 18th and early 19th centuries, monumental architecture at critical sites, such as Poseidonia/Paestum and Acragas, played a major role in the rediscovery of ancient Greek architecture in Europe, particularly before the systematic development of archaeological research in Greece and Asia Minor. This renewed interest in monumental, particularly Doric temple architecture led to the first systematic excavations at ancient sites in both southern Italy and Sicily, starting in the early 19th century. These excavations were mainly focused on sacred architecture and its design, and only in the second half of the 20th century did the interest of scholars start to shift toward political, domestic, and military architecture. As well, only in recent years has interest in sacred architecture moved from a focus on design to a larger archaeological and anthropological approach. Site conservation has played a major role since the rediscovery of monumental architecture, including in the anastylosis or partial reconstruction of buildings, especially temples, at critical sites like Acragas and Selinus between the late 18th century and the mid-20th century. Today, in the age of mass tourism, site conservation and site management have become particularly critical issues, especially with respect to the presentation and preservation of architecture.

Kenzo Tange

Kenzo Tange (Tange Kenzō, b. 1913–d. 2005) was arguably the most prominent Japanese architect in the 20th century. His long career had been tied to the changing trajectory of the nation, making him an important cultural figure to study in modern Japan. Inspired by Le Corbusier since his youth, Tange followed modernism throughout his career with strong faith in its rational order, technological power, and universalizing values, yet he always tried to incorporate them with a Japanese identity and aesthetics. The triumphs in two open design competitions sponsored by the wartime militarist government lifted him to the national stage at a young age but have remained controversial since. He emerged again as the leader during the country’s postwar resurrection and economic takeoff and designed a series of national projects, including the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, the Tokyo City Hall, and the National Olympic Gymnasiums, and led the team in the planning and design for the 1970 World Expositions in Osaka. Japan’s continuing growth of economic power in the 1970s through 1990s sent him all over the world with large-scale designs in Macedonia, Italy, Singapore, Middle East, Africa, and the United States, among other nations. Tange was also an influential urbanist, an aspect that has in the early 21st century drawn greater interest of scholarship. His seminal work of city design was the 1960 Plan for Tokyo, which articulated a spectacular though incremental expansion of a linear megastructure cross the Tokyo Bay to carry a new city of five million to decentralize the overcrowded metropolis and basically influenced all his ensuing attempts of inventing inclusive urban frameworks for the transforming postindustrial cities. This endeavor was shared by the architects of Metabolism, who launched the avant-garde movement that Tange helped flourish in the 1960s. Tange’s collaborations with artists, critics, and photographers, as well as his constant engagement in global intellectual exchanges, also generated rich outcomes and served his aspiration for Japan’s cultural identity and international influence, manifest in his coauthored accounts on the Katsura Villa and Ise Shrine, respectively, as well as in Expo ’70. As an accomplished educator, Tange taught for most of his career at the University of Tokyo. His architectural laboratory there and the Department of Urban Engineering that he cofounded have trained generations of Japanese architectural and urban thinkers and practitioners. The author would like to thank Professor Yatsuka Hajime in Tokyo and Yihan Yin of University of Pennsylvania for their inputs to this article.

Historicism

In its most general sense, historicism refers to a new historical consciousness emerging in late-18th- and early-19th-century Europe. This novel “historical-mindedness,” as the cultural historian Stephen Bann has called it, sprung from a recognition that human knowledge and human making are historically conditioned and must be understood within particular historical contexts. Historicism inspired new interest in the origin and development of cultural phenomena, not least art and architecture. When used in relation to architecture, historicism usually refers to the 19th-century notion that architecture is a historically dynamic and relative phenomenon, changing with time and circumstance. This in contrast to 18th-century classicism which tended to uphold the classical tradition as a universal ideal and a timeless standard. Historicism in architecture often entails Revivals of various kinds, i.e., the reference to or use of historical styles and motifs. The term is related to concepts such as eclecticism, revivalism, and relativism. In architectural history, an early anticipation of a historicist way of thinking is Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity (1764). While still idealizing Greek art, Winckelmann also analyzed Egyptian, Etruscan, Phoenician, and Persian art and architecture, paying close attention to the historical conditions in which each of these cultures emerged. This new attentiveness to the relationship between cultural conditions and artistic expression lies at the heart of historicism, as does the related idea that architecture has the capacity to represent an epoch or a nation, forming a veritable index of cultural development. There is a strong organicist aspect to historicism, i.e., a tendency to think about cultural phenomena as organic wholes that evolve according to laws.

Architecture of Monasteries

The idea of withdrawal from secular society was central to the notions of monasticism and monastic architecture. The word derives from μόνος (mónos, Greek for ‘alone’). Christian monasticism made its first traceable appearances at the end of the 3rd century in Egypt and Palestine, though we know little of its architecture at this early stage. The eremitic ideal of the solitary saint retained its appeal, but was soon complemented by cenobitic monasticism where likeminded male or female ascetics joined together in communities that built architecture that was used in common. Monasticism as a religious form of life is found in Buddhism, Islam, and other traditions, though this essay will emphasize the medieval West, where monasteries were popular beginning in the 5th century. The various orders or congregations formulated differing architectural responses to their needs. The 9th-century Plan of Saint Gall, for example, represents an ideal meant to inspire emulation. Some monasteries were designed only for their resident populations of monks or nuns, while others might accommodate lay brothers or sisters, serfs, parish communities, visiting pilgrims, or dignitaries. A number of cathedrals across Europe were in fact monastic, following most often the Augustinian rule. The cenobitic monastery typically provided spaces for worship (church), sleeping (dormitory), dining (refectory), and meeting (chapter house) for the resident community, as well as buildings for reception and accommodation of visitors and other more functional structures (stables, storage barns, forges, mills, etc.). Monastic communities varied in size and might be very small or quite large. Some were found near or within urban locations, while others commanded large agricultural lands, including dependent parishes and granges. A survey of monastic architecture must therefore include industrial and hydraulic structures such as mills and dams, storage structures such as barns, dependent priory and farm buildings, and buildings for the care of the sick and infirm. Bibliography on monastic architecture is often divided regionally, and often focuses upon the church rather than the entire complex. Scholarship has privileged the architecture of certain orders—Cluniac Benedictines, Cistercians, and Franciscans, for example—over the more than five hundred monastic orders and congregations that once existed during the European Middle Ages. Archival research, architectural analysis, and archaeology are all contributing to a broader picture of the range and diversity of monastic architecture for male, female, and double houses. Traditional approaches to medieval architecture and its decoration have been primarily formalist, anchoring stylistic observations upon church records read as building documents in order to establish chronologies. While this approach remains important, new approaches such as stone-for-stone recording, C-14 dating of lime mortar and plaster, and dendrochronology, as well as the scientific study of painted layers and 3D modeling, are reshaping the history of medieval buildings. Together with archaeological analysis, early-21st-century work is examining the longer and more complicated cultural biographies of buildings and sites. This more integrated approach has recognized that architecture is not merely a reflection of monastic reform, but rather plays a strategic role in shaping it.

Ecole des Beaux-Arts

The term “École des Beaux-Arts” refers to a French arts institution and the building that housed it; the name also refers to its Curriculum and Pedagogy, and the impact of both on the teaching and practice of architecture—in its day and to the early 21st century. Originating in the royal academies established in the 17th century, the École des Beaux-Arts evolved through multiple iterations over the course of two centuries. Its architecture section, the focus of this bibliography, dates to 1671, the year of the founding of the Académie Royale d’Architecture. It was temporarily suppressed during the French Revolution (1793), resumed in altered form under the aegis of the Institut National in 1795, and definitively reestablished under Louis XVIII, who granted it permanent quarters on the Rue Bonaparte in 1816 and formally articulated its new mandate and structure in 1819. A major reform was attempted amid pitched debate in 1863 and a decree of 1903 decentralized the architectural education it purveyed by establishing a system of Écoles Régionales d’Architecture. The architecture section of the Paris École was ultimately dissolved by ministerial decree on 6 December 1968 in the wake of the revolutions in May of that year. The ensuing reorganization of architectural education created autonomous but coordinated unités pédagogiques, which are now gathered under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture and Communication, under the rubric École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture (ENSA). Today’s École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA) at the Rue Bonaparte location is devoted to the nonarchitectural fine arts. Originally housed in an old regime convent reclaimed in the 1790s by arts aficionados to hold spolia of the Revolution, the École compound was expanded by one of its star progeny, Félix Duban, in the 1830s and became the center of an arts neighborhood, heartbeat of artistic production later in the century. The instructional core of the school, the so-called système des Beaux-Arts, featured an atelier structure, with students clustered in studios run by influential patrons; and a competition-based model of practice, with all exercises culminating in multiphased contests pitting students against one another for coveted prizes. The ultimate prize, the annual Grand Prix de Rome, won the laureate several years residency at the Villa Medici, headquarters of the French Academy in Rome. The Beaux-Arts education bore a distinctive relationship to drawing, to history, and to design values exemplified in antiquity. The stylistic impact of its architectural taste in France took a variety of forms, from a revivified classicism to eclectic recombinations of historical precedent and protomodern experimentations in space and light. In the United States, “Beaux-Arts” style came to be characterized by the sumptuous civic creations of a flush late-19th-century Gilded Age and, in the 20th century, by its opposition to modernism. The École’s most profound and wide-ranging influence lies in the particularities of its approach to the teaching of design—at once rigorously systematic and flexibly adaptable to circumstance.

Shakers

Arriving in the colony of New York in 1774 from England, Ann Lee and her eight followers set about creating a model communal society in what would become the United States. Officially known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, the Shakers believed in Christ’s imminent return. Their support of pacifism, near equality between the sexes that allowed women to take on leadership roles, and perfectionism set them apart from most Americans. Within a decade, they had begun creating a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth through their worship, work ethic, and construction of orderly villages with buildings and furniture meant to reinforce religious belief and shape and control behavior. From humble beginnings, the sect created a total of twenty-two communities beginning in the 1780s, spreading from Maine to Indiana and as far south as Georgia and Florida, though these latter two sites and the one in Indiana were short lived. During periods of religious revivalism in the United States in the late 18th and early19th centuries, the Shakers attracted hundreds of converts who gave up their worldly possessions to live celibate, communal lives. After a peak population of over three thousand in the1840s, the Shakers have dwindled to just three members inhabiting the only surviving living community of Sabbathday Lake, near New Gloucester, Maine. The Shakers’ demographic and economic success over several decades left a legacy of buildings at numerous locations throughout the eastern United States. Some of these villages have become museum sites, most notably Hancock, Massachusetts; Mount Lebanon, New York; Canterbury, New Hampshire; and Pleasant Hill and South Union, both in Kentucky. Other Shaker buildings remain as private residences and parts of retirement communities and state prisons. In many ways, Shaker architecture reflects contemporary regional vernacular building practices, such as the closely spaced anchor bents in the framing of the earliest meetinghouses in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, and eastern New York State, and the rather grand masonry structures of the dwelling houses and trustees’ offices in Kentucky. The linear arrangement of buildings, their large size, and separate entrances for men and women distinguished Shaker buildings from those of the outside world, though stylistically they appeared much like non-Shaker buildings. The Shakers organized building interiors to use space efficiently with many built-in cabinets and drawers, installed pegboards on walls for storage and to help keep floors clear for cleaning, and included separate staircases to demarcate men’s and women’s areas. The buildings, especially the meetinghouses and dwelling houses, reminded Shakers of their commitment to their faith and to their distinctive way of living and encouraged them to “put their hands to work and their hearts to God,” a saying attributed to Ann Lee. Nevertheless, the Shakers were not immune from influences from the outside world. They needed to interact with outsiders to encourage the economic success of their villages and to attract converts. As their population shrank in the latter half of the 19th century, they turned increasingly to hired help to assist with building construction and other aspects of daily life. The Shakers also embraced stylistic changes in architecture and furniture; their buildings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries reflect these influences with added ornamentation inside and out, as well as embellished furnishings either made by the Shakers or purchased from non-Shaker furniture makers. Rather than undercut any appreciation of the simple style for which the Shakers are best known, these changes show the group as always practical and responsive to changes in mainstream society.