Architects of Poverty

Architects of Poverty
Author: Moeletsi Mbeki
Publisher: Picador USA
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009
Genre: Africa
ISBN: 9781770101616

Of an estimated 1 billion people in the world who are trapped in a cycle of grinding poverty and despair, a disproportionate number live in sub-Saharan Africa. In this innovative and challenging account, Moeletsi Mbeki analyses the plight of Africa and concludes that the fault lies not with the mass of its people but with its rulers - the political elites who contrive to keep their fellow citizens poor while enriching themselves. Concentrating mainly on South Africa, his country of birth, and Zimbabwe, his home when he was in exile, Mbeki tells a tale of lost opportunities and extinguished hopes. Yet Mbeki is no Afro-pessimist. Along with his candid expose of the problems, he offers some suggestions about what needs to be done to break the stranglehold of the African elites on political power, and to set sub-Saharan Africa once more on the road to development.

Architecture for the Poor

Architecture for the Poor
Author: Hassan Fathy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2010-02-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226239144

Architecture for the Poor describes Hassan Fathy's plan for building the village of New Gourna, near Luxor, Egypt, without the use of more modern and expensive materials such as steel and concrete. Using mud bricks, the native technique that Fathy learned in Nubia, and such traditional Egyptian architectural designs as enclosed courtyards and vaulted roofing, Fathy worked with the villagers to tailor his designs to their needs. He taught them how to work with the bricks, supervised the erection of the buildings, and encouraged the revival of such ancient crafts as claustra (lattice designs in the mudwork) to adorn the buildings.

A Manifesto for Social Change

A Manifesto for Social Change
Author: Moeletsi Mbeki
Publisher: Pan Macmillan South africa
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2016-05-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1770104984

A Manifesto for Social Change is the third of a three-volume series that started seven years ago investigating the causes of our country’s – and the continent’s – development obstacles. Architects of Poverty (2009) set out to explain what role African elites played in creating and promoting their fellow Africans’ misery. Advocates for Change (2011) showed that there were short-term to medium-term solutions to many of Africa’s and South Africa’s problems, if only the powers that be would take note. And now, more than 22 years after the advent of democracy in South Africa, we have A Manifesto for Social Change, the conclusion in the trilogy.

Of Greater Dignity than Riches

Of Greater Dignity than Riches
Author: Farhan Karim
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-04-09
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780822965695

Extreme poverty, which intensified in India during colonial rule, peaked in the 1920s—after decades of imperialist exploitation, famine, and disease—a time when architects, engineers, and city authorities proposed a new type of housing for India’s urban poor and industrial workers. As Farhan Karim argues, economic scarcity became a central inspiration for architectural modernism in the subcontinent. As India moved from colonial rule to independence, the Indian government, business entities, international NGOs, and intergovernmental agencies took major initiatives to modernize housing conditions and the domestic environment of the state’s low-income population. Of Greater Dignity than Riches traces multiple international origins of austerity as an essential ingredient of postcolonial development. By prescribing model villages, communities, and ideal houses for the working class, this project of austerity eventually reduced poverty into a stylized architectural representation. In this rich and original study, Karim explains the postwar and postcolonial history of low-cost housing as an intertwined process of global transferences of knowledge, Cold War cultural politics, postcolonial nationalism, and the politics of economic development.

Why We Build

Why We Build
Author: Rowan Moore
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2013-08-20
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0062277596

In an era of brash, expensive, provocative new buildings, a prominent critic argues that emotions—such as hope, power, sex, and our changing relationship to the idea of home—are the most powerful force behind architecture, yesterday and (especially) today. We are living in the most dramatic period in architectural history in more than half a century: a time when cityscapes are being redrawn on a yearly basis, architects are testing the very idea of what a building is, and whole cities are being invented overnight in exotic locales or here in the United States. Now, in a bold and wide-ranging new work, Rowan Moore—former director of the Architecture Foundation, now the architecture critic for The Observer—explores the reasons behind these changes in our built environment, and how they in turn are changing the way we live in the world. Taking as his starting point dramatic examples such as the High Line in New York City and the outrageous island experiment of Dubai, Moore then reaches far and wide: back in time to explore the Covent Garden brothels of eighteenth-century London and the fetishistic minimalism of Adolf Loos; across the world to assess a software magnate’s grandiose mansion in Atlanta and Daniel Libeskind’s failed design for the World Trade Center site; and finally to the deeply naturalistic work of Lina Bo Bardi, whom he celebrates as the most underrated architect of the modern era.

Launching the War on Poverty

Launching the War on Poverty
Author: Michael L. Gillette
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2010-07-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199779864

Head Start, Job Corps, Foster Grandparents, College Work-Study, VISTA, Community Action, and the Legal Services Corporation are familiar programs, but their tumultuous beginning has been largely forgotten. Conceived amid the daring idealism of the 1960s, these programs originated as weapons in Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, an offensive spearheaded by a controversial new government agency. Within months, the Office of Economic Opportunity created an array of unconventional initiatives that empowered the poor, challenged the established order, and ultimately transformed the nation's attitudes toward poverty. In Launching the War on Poverty, historian Michael L. Gillette weaves together oral history interviews with the architects of the Great Society's boldest experiment. Forty-nine former poverty warriors, including Sargent Shriver, Adam Yarmolinsky, and Lawrence F. O'Brien, recount this inside story of unprecedented governmental innovation. The interviews capture the excitement and heady optimism of Americans in the 1960s along with their conflicts and disillusionment. This new edition of Launching the War on Poverty adds the voice of Lyndon Johnson to the story with excerpts from his recently-released White House telephone conversations. In these colorful and brutally candid conversations, LBJ exercises his full arsenal of presidential powers, political leverage, and legendary persuasiveness to win one of his most difficult legislative battles. The second edition also documents how the OEO's offspring survived their volatile origins to become broadly supported features of domestic policy.

Radical Cities

Radical Cities
Author: Justin McGuirk
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2015-10-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1781688680

What makes the city of the future? How do you heal a divided city? In Radical Cities, Justin McGuirk travels across Latin America in search of the activist architects, maverick politicians and alternative communities already answering these questions. From Brazil to Venezuela, and from Mexico to Argentina, McGuirk discovers the people and ideas shaping the way cities are evolving. Ever since the mid twentieth century, when the dream of modernist utopia went to Latin America to die, the continent has been a testing ground for exciting new conceptions of the city. An architect in Chile has designed a form of social housing where only half of the house is built, allowing the owners to adapt the rest; Medellín, formerly the world’s murder capital, has been transformed with innovative public architecture; squatters in Caracas have taken over the forty-five-story Torre David skyscraper; and Rio is on a mission to incorporate its favelas into the rest of the city. Here, in the most urbanised continent on the planet, extreme cities have bred extreme conditions, from vast housing estates to sprawling slums. But after decades of social and political failure, a new generation has revitalised architecture and urban design in order to address persistent poverty and inequality. Together, these activists, pragmatists and social idealists are performing bold experiments that the rest of the world may learn from. Radical Cities is a colorful journey through Latin America—a crucible of architectural and urban innovation.

Louis Kahn

Louis Kahn
Author: Carter Wiseman
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2020-11-10
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0813947502

The man who envisioned and realized such landmark buildings as the Salk Institute, the Kimbell Art Museum, and the National Assembly complex in Bangladesh, Louis Kahn was born in what is now Estonia, immigrated to America, and became one of the towering figures in his adopted country’s built world. His works are unmistakable in their elegance, monolithic power, and architectural honesty. Written by Carter Wiseman, one of Kahn’s most respected commentators, this book offers a succinct, accessible examination of the life and work of one of America’s greatest architects. It traces the influence of his immigrant origins, his upbringing in poverty, his education, the impact of the Great Depression, and the arrival of Modernism on his life and work. Finally, it provides insight into why, as the legacy of many of his contemporaries has receded in importance, Kahn’s has remained so durably influential. Louis Kahn: A Life in Architecture provides the best concise introduction available to this singular life and achievement.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Living Space

Frank Lloyd Wright's Living Space
Author: Gail Satler
Publisher:
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2000-04
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780875805863

This sociological analysis of Wright's architecture examines the interaction between people and the spaces they create. Satler shows how Wright explored a new architectural dimension, the space in which we live. Focusing on the Larkin Building (1904) and Unity Temple (1907), works that Wright considered important but that have received little attention, Satler delineates the social nature of space. She provides an analytic framework through which to understand Wright's buildings and his writings, revealing how the history of such works and cultural landscapes offer a basis for making social, political, and spatial choices about the future. Wright's specific architectural works provide a framework for constructing social histories of places and people because his designs represent a natural way to build and to live within a larger social landscape. This original study will appeal to sociologists, architects, urban and architectural historians, urban planners and anthropologists, and those interested in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Architecture of Change

The Architecture of Change
Author: Jerilou Hammett
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2013-11-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 082635386X

The Architecture of Change: Building a Better World is a collection of articles that demonstrates the power of the human spirit to transform the environments in which we live. This inspiring book profiles people who refused to accept that things couldn’t change, who saw the possibility of making something better, and didn’t esitate to act. Breaking down the stereotypes surrounding “socially engaged architecture,” this book shows who can actually impact the lives of communities. Like Bernard Rudofsky’s seminal Architecture Without Architects, it explores communal architecture produced not by specialists but by people, drawing on their common lives and experiences, who have a unique insight into their particular needs and environments. These unsung heroes are teachers and artists, immigrants and activists, grandmothers in the projects, students and planners, architects and residents of some of our poorest places. Running through their stories is a constant theme of social justice as an underlying principle of the built environment. This book is about opening one’s eyes to new ways of interpreting the world, and how to go about changing it.