No comments about Networked Cultures.

No comments about The Living Stones of Cairo.

No comments about The Traditional Architecture of Mexico.

1 comments about Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture.

1. Kwinter's analysis is extraordinary. His method is fairly eclectic, however, as some would issue this as a detraction, he compensates by having a wonderful writing style and a copious amount of mastery of the concepts that he addresses. I have read several treatises on architecture from 'philosophers'(i.e., Foucault, the Sitiuationists, et al.), but what is novel here is a designer explaining the epistemological frame of reference in the edifice, or engendering from it. Furthermore, it is completely amazing to think of the ostensibly disparate entities of Futurist architecture, quantum mechanics and relativity and Kafka as all burgeoning within the same epochal stuctures. I did find it odd that the author did not address Lefevbre's space/time tomes and rhythmanalysis. Kwinter is worth reading, and I think this book will be written about for years to come.

No comments about The New Spirit: Modern Architecture in Vancouver, 1938-1963.

5 comments about Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilizations.

1. This was the first (and perhaps only book) to discuss the discoveries of mounds that are older than the acclaimed Poverty Point. He discusses Watson Brake and Frenchman's Bend which are over 5,000 years old.



2. In reference to the review below (honestly, just an ignorant rant), the full title of this book is HIDDEN CITIES : THE DISCOVERY AND LOSS OF ANCIENT NORTH AMERICAN CIVILIZATIONS and the book makes no promise, starting right there on the cover, to be an archeology book on the Mound-builder civilizations. In fact, go try to find a good archeology book on these lost civilizations. I dare you. The operative word here is "good" (I've reviewed one entry that was written at a 12-year-old level, was full of juvenile speculation, and truly deserved one star).
   
   This is a phenomenal, well-written, meticulously researched book that details the history of a non-history--ignorance that is present till this day. While I'm steeped in acquaintances who allege they know every little dribble about "Native Americans," few have any knowledge whatsoever of the civilizations of North America that existed right up to the earliest European discoveries. Dawning awareness of these recently vanished civilizations influenced early government policies, got a lot of significant people thinking about who these "savages" they were encountering truly were, and forced others to ask hard questions about history. This book covers this epiphany brilliantly. This is important--essential even--material for any understanding of the relationship of Native Americans and European settlers. And it's out of print!
   
   Honestly, I don't think any of this suits the current white intellectual romanticized notions of tribal peoples in North America very well and that's why so little interest has been shown in the Mound-builders. These guys worked metal, lived in cities, had complex governments, and possibly were the prime shakers and movers on this continent which makes the tribal people we love so well something of remnants, or even a side-show. Their soldiers even wore metal body armor--hardly the happy image we want and need of natives living in harmony with nature. It perhaps even explains the dignity and sophistication of many of the Eastern Native Americans (rhetorical skills alone were alleged to be phenomenal). It makes sense out of a Tecumseh who's Big Picture view never seemed to be that of a hunter/gatherer.
   
   I've tried to research the Mound-builders and the best info I've come across was in 100-year-old editions of Scientific American. This was big news among archaeologists in 1890 and Sci-Am published mountains of illustrations of sophisticated Mound-builder artifacts. One sees these and immediately senses distant linkages to Aztec culture. Amazing that one has to dig through musty old magazines to see these!
   
   Native American studies has become so completely politicized and romanticized in the last decades that truth and knowledge aren't even issues any more. Awareness of the existence of the Mound-builders assists no modern agenda; it's inconvenient stuff in fact, much as awareness of the complex dynamics of African culture(s)during the slave-trading years muddies the much-loved victim/oppressor duality. Politically correct thinking, which has always had a strongly adolescent cast, requires its "victims" to utterly helpless, kind-hearted, and blameless angels and its "oppressors" to be evil, brutal, uncaring, demons.
   
   Sadly, a lot of older, and truly excellent, work on the native people of this continent is lost (like this book now) or derided. Most young people today can even imagine that someone 50 or 75 years ago could have written anything about other cultures that wasn't horrid. Heck, I know a graduate of one of the best women's schools in the country who recently was stunned to learn that a white male nearly 100 years ago (Woodrow Wilson)was actually pushing for the creation of an international organization to promote world peace! I assume she thinks that Eleanor Roosevelt started the UN. We're going to pay hard someday for all this institutionalized ignorance.



3. There was a thriving and highly sophisticated civilization in North America long before europeans arrived. Astonishingly, this fact has slowly become mainstream only very recently. Evidence of this civilization presents itself everywhere in the form of earthen architecture, or mounds, scattered throughout North America. Some of these mounds were tufts of earth that easily fell to the plow. Others rose to awe-inspiring monumental heights. And these mounds weren't mere transitory stations for nomads. They provided the centers of massive metropolises that supported thousands of people. So these mounds represent more than piles of dirt (as some may want to blithely excuse them); they represent the earliest known North American Cities. Most mainstream North American history has ignored these structures and the societies that inhabited them. And many of the mounds have fallen prey to urban development projects and "progress". Nearly 90% of the structures recorded by early european settlers have completely disappeared.
   
   Roger Kennedy takes on this hefty subject in this book written in 1994. The title is "Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization" but the book contains far more information than that. The title actually misleads quite a bit. And the book's argument doesn't present itself in a straightforward linear manner, either. It takes considerable effort, and a large vocabulary, to glean the book's main purpose and salient points. Regardless, this book still presents a good overview for the subject of ancient america because that history gets interwoven with early european-american history.
   
   Following an introductory chapter that discusses some of the greatest monuments of pre-european North American civilization (such as the 5000 year old Watson's Brake, the 3000 year old Poverty Point, the relatively recent metropolis of Cahokia, and the massive society that existed in the fertile Ohio and Mississippi river valleys), the book moves directly into the views of eminent europeans such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson on the overwhelming structural evidence of the civilization that preceded them in North America. Those interested in mounds and "hidden cities" might lose interest here. From this point on earthen architure only appears here and there interspersed by numerous digressions on the various people who witnessed the mounds from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Those interested in general history will find much to savor here, but the book remains difficult to follow nonetheless. In the end, the book examines more of european prejudice against the people (collectively referred to as "Hopewell" and "Adena") who supposedly made the mounds than the mounds and cities themselves.
   
   One of the main faults of the book is that it takes on too much in a mere three-hundred pages. Not only does it discuss the lost cities of North America, but it attempts to examine all of the following: the lives of various people (mostly early european settlers) in relation to earthen architecture; the attitudes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Gallatin, and others on the subject of slavery; the views of the same people towards Native Americans contemporaneous to their time; the followers of each "school" of thought: the Gallatins and the Jeffersonians; the history and purpose of George Washington's hereditary society called "The Cincinatti"; the dichotomy in Thomas Jefferson's writings and actions concerning slavery (Kennedy wrote an entire book on this subject called "Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause"); brief biographies of the early archeologists that assisted Jefferson in the compilation of "the first Indian museum" at Monticello; Jefferson's construction of Monticello and the mound-based design of his Poplar Forest estate; a history of seventeenth to nineteenth century european prejudice (that includes the Mexican War); the attempts of europeans to "explain away" the mounds as mere trifles of "the savage mind"; and an exploratory analysis of the purpose begind the mounds. All of that (and more) in three-hundred pages. Of course it all relates, but the text meanders to such a degree that the connections easily get lost and the associations between transitions from episode to episode blur somewhat after three or four chapters.
   
   Regardless of its difficulties, the book offers up a treasure trove of information for those willing to undertake the effort. The most poignant point it makes concerns the fragility of civilizations. There exists evidence of a massive North American die off sometime in the sixteenth century. Approximately eighty percent of the population succumbed to some disaster (disease, resource depletion, social upheaval, climate change - no one knows for sure). Much of the preceding civilzation disappeared before europeans arrived en masse. They subsequently abandoned the grand monuments built by their ancestors. And these same people (says the evidence) had a sophisticated grasp of astronomy, mathematics (geometry), and argriculture. They lived off the land the best way they knew how, but their civilization still collapsed. Kennedy suggests that there is a lesson in this for all civilizations, and that we ignore the ancient and medieval history of North America at our peril.
   
   So take up this book with caution. It contains loads of useful and fascinating information. But that information only comes with work. Readers will learn not only about "hidden cities" but about some of the foundations of the settlement that ultimately became the United States of America.



4. If you want to read about politics, but a book on politics. If you want tread about hidden cities/ mound builders buy another book. Too much political wandering throught the 1700's and 1800's and too little about hidden cities.



5. Here we have yet another piece of history that's been ritually ignored by the arbiters of society and which desperately needs to be taught in American history classes. People nowadays know little about history anyway, but the material in Kennedy's book is one of the first lessons they should learn (One of the central themes of his book--the denial of marginalized people's beliefs and achievements--is also found in Howard Zinn's classic, A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES). While I agree that he could have gone deeper into the actual culture and practices of the people who built Cahokia, Poverty Point, Moundville, and Etowah, he did a first-class job of rendering the conflicts at the highest level over whether we were a solely European (Anglo-Saxon) or multicultural civilization. I sincerely hope that at this point we've decided to choose the latter.

No comments about Architecture Tours L.a. Guidebook: Pasadena.

No comments about The Architecture of Wine.

No comments about La Alhambra/ The Alhambra.

2 comments about Sketches from Japan.

1. Every fan of drawing, everyone who has ever traveled with a sketchbook will enjoy this little collection of his travel sketches from Japan, and this will delight those already acquainted with the ravishing beauty of Francis Ching's architectural drawings. Ching's other books are analytical drawings, showing architectural detail and forms with a controlled, disciplined line that architects know as the Ching style - contour drawings with a hierarchy of line emphasizing the outlines of figures. Ching's freehand sketches are a remarkably free riff on the drawing approach seen in his other work, as if he finally took his tie off and improvised a solo.
   
   These are predominantly contour drawings. Tone is used for contrast of focus, or emphasis of a figure to its ground, but tone is rarely used to define a volume. The control of line is extraordinary, and the variety of marks interesting. But the power of the drawings often comes from his orchestration of many contrasting textures, shapes, and details.
   
   Ching has remarkable control of representing a detail and describing its place as a part of a whole: there is always clarity in the disorder, even showing the exuberant chaos of telephone and power lines criss scrossing over the busy street. One can almost feel the mist, smell the sounds and hear the bustling noise on the street. The crowds of people are convincing, and he has no fear of quickly sketching a whole cluster of motorcycles. Looking at Ching's drawings feels like taking lessons in vitality, in visual selection, and in how a talented draughtsman really requires an editing, selective eye.
   
   The drawings are unfortunately interrupted by a graphic drawing analysis of the Centennial Hall of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. There's nothing particularly wrong with the analysis but it is nowhere near as compelling as the drawings, and also this sort of formal drawing analysis is covered well in Ching's other works. This analysis breaks the tone of the rest of the books, and it's a relief when the analysis ends and the exploration of Japan's urban life begins again.



2. There is a long tradition among artists and writers of maintaining a journal to record observations and impressions. Many writers use journals to write informally, often spontaneously, to describe real or imagined people, places, and events. Artists and naturalists as well fill sketchbooks with both words and images to help focus their observations. Frank Ching, the author of this sketchbook, not only records the optical reality of what is seen; he uses these drawings as a means of gaining understanding, insight, and perhaps even inspiration. His drawings stimulate the mind to think and can even make visible aspects that cannot be seen by the naked eye, or captured on film by a camera.

   Frank Ching made most of the drawings in this sketchbook in or around O-okayama, a town southwest of downtown Tokyo, where the Tokyo Institute of Technology is located. The subject matter ranges from street scenes to traditional construction details, from temples and their sacred precincts to stimulating juxtapositions of old and new. He has successfully captured the sights, sounds and even smells of vibrant metropolis Tokyo, enabling the reader to feel the humid heat of the day or the cool rainy mist that fell as he drew. In addition, there are scenes sketched during the author's brief excursion to Kyoto and the mountain village of Takayama

   All the drawings were executed in a pure contour-line technique with a fountain pen and black ink. There is a crispness and finality to an inkline that is both daunting and exciting. The process not only fostered the careful observation of details; it also required seeing how they fit into the larger framework and pattern of shapes, and noting which details could be omitted. The shape and extent of the white spaces are as important to a composition as what is delineated.

   Francis D.K. Ching (1943- ) completed a month in the spring of 1990 as a visiting scholar at the Tokyo Institute of Technology which he spent producing this sketchbook.