If there is a feature of the Central European Neolithic period that deserves increased attention of researchers and all those with interest in prehistory, it is circular architecture of the dimensions of many tens of metres, from which only negative imprints of the ditches and imprints of posts in the form of postholes or narrow trenches are preserved to this day. The reason is that it offers quite a different insight into the skills and interpersonal relationships of ancient societies that lived in Europe in the first half of the fifth millennium BC. The authors of the book ask whether these structures, most often termed rondels, can be regarded as ‘architecture of power’ – the first clear evidence of thought-out power strategies of some individuals or their groups. Using anthropological terms – were they skilful and exceptional entrepreneurs with an ad hoc status (such as Big Men) living in egalitarian/segmented communities, or rather powerful Chiefs living in rank and hereditary based societies/chiefdoms?In the introduction, the book points out the difficulties that necessarily arise when cultural (social) anthropology and archaeology join forces in an attempt to generalise information about kinship and socio-political relationships, in an effort to project them into the world of archaic societies that are only known from material culture in the archaeological record. After summing up various hypotheses, the authors use selected sites, results and often only recently processed terrain research projects to summarise more information about the settlements and burials in order to present the important period in which an attempt at accumulation of power took place, perhaps not the first but definitely not the last in European prehistory.Besides other methods used in archaeology to evaluate the archaeological record, the book devotes an important chapter to the radiocarbon dating method, which may – with a critical assessment of the outcomes of dating of carefully selected samples – bring fundamental information not only about dating itself but also about the limits of archaeological sources.Welcome to the world of rondel builders, from whom we are separated by nearly 280 generations of people!

Bright, vibrant, intriguing, and unique, chromatic homes are speckled across the world's landscape. These historic houses and buildings are saturated with colors -- often highlighting decorative woodwork and architecture -- to enhance, revive, and regenerate various neighborhoods and communities.John I. "Hans" Gilderbloom explores and celebrates the appeal of these captivating houses in Chromatic Homes: The Joy of Color in Historic Places. Highlighted in gorgeous detail are the relevance of the homes' styles and colors as well as their history -- many believed to have been around for decades in American cities such as Louisville, Cincinnati, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Miami, and around for centuries in far-flung places such as Havana, Cuba, Venice, Italy, and Moscow, Russia. Gilderbloom reveals how renewing and updating historic homes has the ability to transform and galvanize a community, and these houses serve as creative havens for artists, writers, and musicians: author Alice Walker wrote The Color Purple in one of the most famous chromatic homes in San Francisco, and Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in a spectacular "painted lady" in Hartford, Connecticut.Filled with 182 engaging and eye-catching photos of homes all across the nation and the world, Chromatic Homes perfectly illustrates how the simple act of painting an ornate structure in bright or bold colors can inspire, empower, sustain and enlighten an entire community.

Modern hygienic urbanism originated in the airy boulevards, public parks, and sewer system that transformed the Parisian cityscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet these well-known developments in public health built on a previous moment of anxiety about the hygiene of modern city dwellers. Amid fears of national decline that accompanied the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, efforts to modernize Paris between 1800 and 1850 focused not on grand and comprehensive structural reforms, but rather on improving the bodily and mental fitness of the individual citizen. These forgotten efforts to renew and reform the physical and moral health of the urban subject found expression in the built environment of the city—in the gymnasiums, swimming pools, and green spaces of private and public institutions, from the pedagogical to the recreational. Sun-Young Park reveals how these anxieties about health and social order, which manifested in emerging ideals of the body, created a uniquely spatial and urban experience of modernity in the postrevolutionary capital, one profoundly impacted by hygiene, mobility, productivity, leisure, spectacle, and technology.

Intertwining is an international, interdisciplinary journal dedicated to understanding the experience and making of architecture. It includes the voices of science alongside those of the arts - as both ways of knowing are critical to the multidimensional nature of our inquiry."We want to move beyond thinking of architecture as an object. Architecture is not separate from us - it is not something to be judged merely by its formal properties, its satisfaction of programmatic concerns or its performance in terms of technical parameters. We are not dismissing the importance of these factors but wish to enrich them, to understand and articulate how architecture can capture and express unseen layers of meaning and purpose. We want to think of architecture as a verb, a mover, a shaper, an active agent in human flourishing. In order to appreciate the potential power of architecture we want to explore the experience of architecture, and the intimately related experience of making architecture. Turning our attention to experience requires that we listen to and consider knowledge from a full array of disciplines. Experience is multi-dimensional, multi-directional, irreducible. Experience always supercedes, flows over any boundary that attempts to circumscribe it."Contributors: Alessandro Gattara, Sarah Robinson, Davide Ruzzon, Juhani Pallasmaa, Barbara Lamprecht, Kevin Kelley Rooney, Olafur Eliasson, Harry Francis Mallgrave, Colin Ellard, Susan Magsamen, Raymond Richard Neutra, Sarah Robinson, Elnaz Ghazi.

Public spaces have long been the object of countless studies. Yet, most of these have focused almost exclusively on the metropolitan setting, while neglecting the nature and function of public spaces in rural areas. This volume addresses precisely this gap, drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s theories in order to propose an alternative vision of public spaces – one which is centered on the local rhythms of rural areas and on their peculiar complexities. Rural public spaces can present all features of a Lefebvrian abstract space, in a way that is akin to that of cities. However, at the same time, their specific ‘otherness’ allows them to offer communal and organic responses to the pressure of global challenges, in a way that is largely precluded to cities.

Reducing Boundaries offers a new perspective on an often under researched topic: what is the upper and middle classes perception of their own security? While human sciences have mainly focused on poor and low-middle classes evicted from urban space, Reducing Boundaries explores the strategies that the most privileged classes enact in order to preserved their own (real or perceived) security. In the context of an interdisciplinary framework of analysis and through a series of case studies (from Porto Alegre, to Brussels, to Venice), class-specific security measures and policies are considered both in themselves, and in terms of their impact of the urban fabric of cities and on the lives of the different social groups involved. This book crowns a four-year international project funded by the European Research Agency.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, drastic social and political changes, technological innovations, and exposure to non-Western cultures affected Germany's built environment in profound ways. The economic challenges of Germany's colonial project forced architects designing for the colonies to abandon a centuries-long, highly ornamental architectural style in favor of structural technologies and building materials that catered to the local contexts of its remote colonies, such as prefabricated systems. As German architects gathered information about the regions under their influence in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific—during expeditions, at international exhibitions, and from colonial entrepreneurs and officials—they published their findings in books and articles and organized lectures and exhibits that stimulated progressive architectural thinking and shaped the emerging modern language of architecture within Germany itself.  Offering in-depth interpretations across the fields of architectural history and postcolonial studies, Itohan Osayimwese considers the effects of colonialism, travel, and globalization on the development of modern architecture in Germany from the 1850s until the 1930s. Since architectural developments in nineteenth-century Germany are typically understood as crucial to the evolution of architecture worldwide in the twentieth century, this book globalizes the history of modern architecture at its founding moment.

In 1995, in Chicago, Mary Jacob curated “Culture in action”, an experience of participatory Public Art which left a mark on the contemporary artistic research and criticism. Over the last twenty years, this “new genre of public art” (Lacy 1995) has developed. In these “dialogical” and “connective” aesthetics (Kester 1999, Gablik 1992), public artists have involved citizens in creative performances that aim to modify citizens’ perceptions of the places where they live, to create new relations within and toward the territory, and to transform (often temporarily) the physical spaces. The book moves from the first outcomes of a two-year interdisciplinary research programme on the Italian contemporary Public Art, funded by the Sardinia Region (Italy). Moving beyond the traditional ladders of formal citizen participation to territory governance, the research investigates how public artists have involved citizens in creative performances that aim to modify citizens’ perceptions of the places where they live, to create new relations within and toward the territory, and to transform (often temporarily) the physical spaces. A book particularly useful to international students who have strong interests in the ongoing debates on political participation and communication from a multidisciplinary perspective, Performative Citizenship is the product of extensive teaching experience in the field of political participation and communication, and stems from continuous comparisons between students of sociology, cultural and media studies, political sciences, arts, architecture, and urban planning.

Peter Eisenman (Yale School of Architecture, New Haven, Eisenman Architects, New York, USA) discusses with architects and philosophers: Jörg H. Gleiter (Germany), Kim Förster (Switzerland), Preston Scott Cohen (USA), Emmanuel Petit (USA), Mario Carpo (USA), Sarah M. Whiting (USA), Manuel Orazi (Italy), John McMorrough (USA), Gabriele Mastrigli (Italy), Panayotis Pangalos (Greece), Cynthia Davidson (USA), Ingeborg M. Rocker (USA), Alejandro Zaera-Polo (USA), Djordje Stojanović (Serbia), Greg Lynn (USA) performing on the stage for two days in Belgrade.

Rise of the Modern Hospital is a focused examination of hospital design in the United States from the 1870s through the 1940s. This understudied period witnessed profound changes in hospitals as they shifted from last charitable resorts for the sick poor to premier locations of cutting-edge medical treatment for all classes, and from low-rise decentralized facilities to high-rise centralized structures. Jeanne Kisacky reveals the changing role of the hospital within the city, the competing claims of doctors and architects for expertise in hospital design, and the influence of new medical theories and practices on established traditions. She traces the dilemma designers faced between creating an environment that could function as a therapy in and of itself and an environment that was essentially a tool for the facilitation of increasingly technologically assisted medical procedures. Heavily illustrated with floor plans, drawings, and photographs, this book considers the hospital building as both a cultural artifact, revelatory of external medical and social change, and a cultural determinant, actively shaping what could and did take place within hospitals.

"A shed is the shortest line between need and shelter," writes Howard Mansfield. Drawing on material from his recent book Dwelling in Possibility, Mansfield explores the different types of sheds found around New England and beyond: covered bridges, barns, worksheds, "worship sheds" (meeting houses), extended farmhouses, bob houses for ice fishing. In lyrical style and supported by photographs by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey, Mansfield shows the connection between the design of these structures and their roles in our lives. "Sheds are like our lives - not the grandest building or the most graceful. Sheds are ordinary - and in that they are exalted."Anyone who has ever traveled the back roads of America will enjoy this beautifully photographed exploration of simple, useful structures.

Castles and the Anglo-Norman World draws together a series of 20 papers by 26 French and English specialists in the field of Anglo-Norman studies. It includes summaries of current knowledge and new research into important Norman castles in England and Normandy, drawing on information from recent excavations. Sections consider the evolution of Anglo-Norman castles, the architecture and archaeology of Norman monuments, Romanesque architecture and artefacts, the Bayeux Tapestry and the presentation of historic sites to the public. These studies are presented together with a consideration of the 12th century cross-Channel Norman Empire, which provides a broader context. This work is the result of a conference held at Norwich Castle in 2012, which was part of a collaboration between professionals in the fields of archaeology, architecture, museums and heritage, under the banner of the Norman Connections Project.

A hypertextual guide to an uncharted Milan, the liveliest, expressed through features far from the media’s limelight. The Milan of places where independent and underground culture is produced, where new ways of life and socializing are experimented on a daily basis, with participation and dissemination of knowledge.A guide capable of, firstly, disassembling the numerous components of the urban framework to then give useful tips for an upstream, erratic journey full of surprise and emotion. 
 A topography of author itineraries between psyche and territory, narrative itineraries written by the best pens of Milan in a fun game of clues, links and chance, but also of new correlations in which the readers can become protagonists.The project, to which a multitude of researchers, artists, academics and professionals will take part, wants to contribute to the growth and enrichment of a different Milan, different from the one portrayed by the official signage.
 In addition, the Guide – with its website of interactive maps – allows all the realities involved to “trespass” their reference fields and interact with the other reported experiences.

Megalithic monuments are among the most striking remains of the Neolithic period of northern and western Europe and are scattered across landscapes from Pomerania to Portugal. Antiquarians and archaeologists early recognised the family resemblance of the different groups of tombs, attributing them to maritime peoples moving along the western seaways. More recent research sees them rather as the product of established early farming communities in their individual regions. Yet the diversity of the tombs, their chronologies and their varied cultural contexts complicates any straightforward understanding of their origins and distribution. Megalithic Architectures provides new insight by focusing on the construction and design of European megalithic tombs – on the tomb as an architectural project. It shows how much is to be learned from detailed attention to the stages and the techniques through which tombs were built, modified and enlarged, and often intentionally dismantled or decommissioned. The large slabs that were employed, often unshaped, may suggest an opportunistic approach by the Neolithic builders, but this was clearly far from the case. Each building project was unique, and detailed study of individual sites exposes the way in which tombs were built as architectural, social and symbolic undertakings. Alongside the manner in which the materials were used, it reveals a store of knowledge that sometimes differed considerably from one structure to another, even between contemporary monuments within a single region. The volume brings together regional specialists from Scandinavia, Germany, Britain, France, Belgium and Iberia to offer a series of uniquely authoritative studies. Results of recent fieldwork are fully incorporated and much of the material is published here for the first time in English. It provides an invaluable overview of the current state of research on European megalithic tombs.

Building Modern Turkey offers a critical account of how the built environment mediated Turkey's transition from a pluralistic (multiethnic and multireligious) empire into a modern, homogenized nation-state following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. Zeynep Kezer argues that the deliberate dismantling of ethnic and religious enclaves and the spatial practices that ensued were as integral to conjuring up a sense of national unity and facilitating the operations of a modern nation-state as were the creation of a new capital, Ankara, and other sites and services that embodied a new modern way of life. The book breaks new ground by examining both the creative and destructive forces at play in the making of modern Turkey and by addressing the overwhelming frictions during this profound transformation and their long-term consequences. By considering spatial transformations at different scales—from the experience of the individual self in space to that of international geopolitical disputes—Kezer also illuminates the concrete and performative dimensions of fortifying a political ideology, one that instills in the population a sense of membership in and allegiance to the nation above all competing loyalties and ensures its longevity.

The British Museum citole is a unique example of medieval craftsmanship and is one of very few surviving instruments from the Middle Ages. This new publication includes selected papers from the first international symposium on the British Museum citole, held in November 2010 to highlight recent new research, conservation work and scientific findings related to the British Museum citole. Highly illustrated to reflect the visual richness of this beautiful instrument, The British Museum Citole: New Perspectives features a wide range of academic approaches to the subject, drawing together experts from the fields of history, art history, music, organology, conservation and science and performance practice.