What is the place of materiality – the expression or condition of physical substance – in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in virtual forms? In "Surface", cultural critic and theori...

"Building Histories" offers innovative accounts of five medieval monuments in Delhi – the Red Fort, Rasul Numa Dargah, Jama Masjid, Purana Qila, and the Qutb complex – tracing their modern lives from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Mrinali...

Juan Jose Lahuerta's "Columns of Smoke" series offers bold new readings of modernity and its key figures while redefining the connections between architecture, ornamentation, and the portrayal of both in print media. The third volume focuses on the S...

The typical town springs up around a natural resource – a river, an ocean, an exceptionally deep harbor – or in proximity to a larger, already thriving town. Not so with "new towns", which are created by decree rather than out of necessity and are of...

City and regional planners talk constantly about the things of the world – from highway interchanges and retention ponds to zoning documents and conference rooms – yet most seem to have a poor understanding of the materiality of the world in which th...

In 1927, while a student of architecture at the Moscow Vhutemas, Georgii Krutikov presented a vision for a flying city. More than just a flight of architectural fancy, Krutikov's flying city was a utopian dream, a plan to solve the seemingly intracta...

In his Columns of Smoke series, Juan Jose Lahuerta takes on the enormously ambitious task of re-reading modernity, offering us fresh ways of looking at it while drawing new links between the ideas of architecture and ornamentation, with a special foc...

A historian of medieval art and architecture with a rich appreciation of literary studies, Stephen Murray brings all those fields to bear in presenting a new way of understanding the great Gothic churches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: as r...

Santiago Cirugeda is an atypical architect placed on the verge of political activism and art. Far from a theorist, Cirugeda tests and implements his ideas directly on the ground. Over the past fifteen years, he has developed his work through meticulo...

Post-independence, a generation of Indian women entered career fields such as architecture and design that had previously been closed to them. These educated professionals emerged as a pronounced political force – becoming important patrons of art, a...