| Elusive Archives: Material Culture in Formation | https://www.arthistory.udel.edu/Arth Bookshelf/Elusive-Archives-Cover-201x300.jpg | | Elusive Archives: Material Culture in Formation | Isenstadt, Sandy | Martin Brückner | University of Delaware Press | Newark, DE | 2021 | https://udpress.udel.edu/book-title/elusive-archives/ | <p>Taking cues from a wide variety of objects and their unusual circumstances, the essays that comprise Elusive Archives raise a common question: how do we study material culture when the objects of study are transient, evanescent, dispersed, or subjective, and as ethereal as distant memories? Such things would resist descriptive conventions and definitive value, scholarly or otherwise. Certainly, they would fall outside the taxonomic protocols that institutions, such as museums and archives, rely on to channel their acquisitions into meaningful collections.<br></p><p>What holds these disparate things together here are the questions the authors in this volume ask of them. Placed into relief through carefully calibrated inquiry, objects that appear incongruent, inscrutable, or otherwise indistinct suddenly cohere. Simply put, each essay in its own way creates by means of its method a provisional collection of things, an elusive archive. Scattered matter then becomes fixed, however momentarily, within each author’s analytical framework rather than within the walls of an archive’s reading room or arrayed in so many cases along a museum corridor.</p><p>With contingency itself underpinning them, the essays reverse the usual direction of scholarly inquiry by following the ways in which objects may be identified, gathered, arranged, conceptualized, and even displayed rather than by “discovering” artifacts in an ordered archive and then asking how they came to be there. The authors’ prevailing focus on ephemerality rather than durability and preservation comes together to create a material culture vista outside the traditional bounds of learning about the past.</p><p>Given the diversity of objects under study here and their innumerable sites of discovery, the essays themselves are varied not only in their subject matter but also in their narrative format and conceptual reach. As such, Elusive Archives offers readers numerous points of entry, making it easy to navigate for a quick reference or, if read straight through, building bit by bit toward a new approach to thinking about how material culture challenges the way we write history today.<br></p> | | |
| Modelwork: The Material Culture of Making and Knowing | https://www.arthistory.udel.edu/Arth Bookshelf/modelwork.jpg | | Modelwork: The Material Culture of Making and Knowing | Isenstadt, Sandy | Martin Brückner. Sarah Wasserman | University of Minnesota Press | Minnesota | 2021 | https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/modelwork | <p><strong>How making models allows us to recall what was and to discover what still might be</strong></p><p><strong></strong>In this wide-ranging volume, scholars from diverse fields examine the interrelationships between a model’s material foundations and the otherwise invisible things it gestures toward, underscoring the pivotal role of models in understanding and shaping the world around us. Whether in the form of reproductions, interpretive processes, or constitutive tools, models may bridge the gap between the tangible and the abstract.</p> | | |
| Electric Light: An Architectural History | https://www.arthistory.udel.edu/Arth Bookshelf/isenstadt-electric-light.jpg | | Electric Light: An Architectural History | Isenstadt, Sandy | | MIT Press | Cambridge, MA | 2018 | http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electric-light | <p>In this book, Sandy Isenstadt examines electric light as a form of
architecture--as a new, uniquely modern kind of building material. Electric
light was more than just a novel way of brightening a room or illuminating a
streetscape; it brought with it new ways of perceiving and experiencing space
itself. If modernity can be characterized by rapid, incessant change, and
modernism as the creative response to such change, Isenstadt argues, then
electricity--instantaneous, malleable, ubiquitous, evanescent--is modernity's
medium. Isenstadt shows how the introduction of electric lighting at the end of
the nineteenth century created new architectural spaces that altered and
sometimes eclipsed previously existing spaces. He constructs an architectural
history of these new spaces through five examples, ranging from the tangible
miracle of the light switch to the immaterial and borderless gloom of the
wartime blackout. He describes what it means when an ordinary person can play
God by flipping a switch; when the roving cone of automobile headlights places
driver and passenger at the vertex of a luminous cavity; when lighting in
factories is seen to enhance productivity; when Times Square became an emblem
of illuminated commercial speech; and when the absence of electric light in a
blackout produced a new type of space. In this book, the first sustained
examination of the spatial effects of electric lighting, Isenstadt reconceives
modernism in architecture to account for the new perceptual conditions and
visual habits that followed widespread electrification.<br></p> | | |
| Cities of Light: Two Centuries of Urban Illumination | https://www.arthistory.udel.edu/Arth Bookshelf/isenstadt-cities-light.jpg | | Cities of Light: Two Centuries of Urban Illumination | Isenstadt, Sandy | Margaret Maile Petty, and Dietrich Neumann, eds. | Routledge | New York | 2015 | https://www.routledge.com/Cities-of-Light-Two-Centuries-of-Urban-Illumination/Isenstadt-Maile-Petty-Neumann/p/book/9781138813922 | <p>
<em>Cities of Light</em> is the first global overview of modern urban illumination, a development that allows human wakefulness to colonize the night, doubling the hours available for purposeful and industrious activities. Urban lighting is undergoing a revolution due to recent developments in lighting technology, and increased focus on sustainability and human-scaled environments.
<em>Cities of Light </em>is expansive in coverage, spanning two centuries and touching on developments on six continents, without diluting its central focus on architectural and urban lighting. Covering history, geography, theory, and speculation in urban lighting, readers will have numerous points of entry into the book, finding it easy to navigate for a quick reference and or a coherent narrative if read straight through. With chapters written by respected scholars and highly-regarded contemporary practitioners, this book will delight students and practitioners of architectural and urban history, area and cultural studies, and lighting design professionals and the institutional and municipal authorities they serve.<br></p> | | |
| The Modern American House: Spaciousness and Middle-Class Identity | https://www.arthistory.udel.edu/Arth Bookshelf/isenstadt-american-house.jpg | | The Modern American House: Spaciousness and Middle-Class Identity | Isenstadt, Sandy | | Cambridge University Press | Cambridge | 2014 | http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/arts-theatre-culture/architecture/modern-american-house-spaciousness-and-middle-class-identity | <p>Sandy Isenstadt examines how architects, interior designers, and
landscape designers worked to enhance spatial perception in middle class houses
visually. The desire for spaciousness reached its highest pitch where it was
most lacking, in the small, single-family houses that came to be the
cornerstone of middle class life in the nineteenth century. In direct conflict
with actual dimensions, spaciousness was linked to a tension unique to the
middle class - between spatial aspirations and financial limitations. Although
rarely addressed in a sustained fashion by theorists, practitioners, or the
inhabitants of houses themselves, Isenstadt argues that spaciousness was
central to the development of modern American domestic architecture, with
explicit strategies for perceiving space being pivotal to modern house design.
Through professional endorsement, concern for visual space found its way into
discussion of real estate and law.<br></p> | | |
| Modernism and the Middle East: Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century | https://www.arthistory.udel.edu/Arth Bookshelf/isenstadt-middle-east.jpg | | Modernism and the Middle East: Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century | Isenstadt, Sandy | and Kishwar Rizvi, eds. | University of Washington Press | Seattle | 2008 | https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295987941/modernism-and-the-middle-east/ | <p>This provocative collection of essays is the first book-length treatment of the development of modern architecture in the Middle East. Ranging from Jerusalem at the turn of the twentieth century to Libya under Italian colonial rule, postwar Turkey, and on to present-day Iraq, the essays cohere around the historical encounter between the politics of nation-building and architectural modernism's new materials, methods, and motives.<br></p><p>Architecture, as physical infrastructure and as symbolic expression, provides an exceptional window onto the powerful forces that shaped the modern Middle East and that continue to dominate it today. Experts in this volume demonstrate the political dimensions of both creating the built environment and, subsequently, inhabiting it. In revealing the tensions between achieving both international relevance and regional meaning, Modernism in the Middle East affords a dynamic view of the ongoing confrontations of deep traditions with rapid modernization. Political and cultural historians, as well as architects and urban planners, will find fresh material here on a range of diverse practices.<br></p> | | |
