After years of assimilation and acculturation, many Native Americans have both the means and strength to assert their unique identity among mainstream America. They have devised various channels for accomplishing this, such as language classes and continuing traditional practices, often using resources offered through State, Federal or Tribal Historic Preservation programs. Constructions of contemporary traditional architecture can be another of these tools used to promote this cultural renaissance. As a field that defines itself on the basis of cultural conservation, Historic Preservation principles claim to support these endeavors; however, because they do not meet the age criteria for "historic structures," such buildings are often left out of the preservation matrix. By examining the Achfa-hammi plankhouse of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, this thesis will address the building's impact on cultural revitalization and explore the disconnect that exists between Historic Preservation policies and new constructions of tribal architectures.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Auburn University, 2007. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographic references.

Not available / text

During the 1950s, Venezuela embarked in an architectural venture marked by aesthetic, programmatic, and technological explorations. Politically framed by the international tension of the Cold War, this period was distinguished by multiple commercial exchanges between Venezuela and the United States, specially based on the oil industry. Many cultural aspects of the Venezuelan life, including its urban and architectural production, changed because of this interrelationship. Yet the conventional view is that architecture in Venezuela was torn between the repetition of U.S. models and the purest creativity of its local designers. Based on periodical publications of that time, and methodologically framed by the contemporary notion of transculturation and Gianni Vattimo’s weak though, this research demonstrates that modern architecture in Venezuela, produced by both locals and Americans, went beyond a unilateral center-periphery influence, and ended up being the hyperrealization (intensified version) of U.S. ideals. In this sense, the research analyzes an aspect not studied yet in depth: the connection between the long-term geographical profile of Venezuela and a unique geopolitical situation, as the basis for an outstanding architecture. The dissertation examines how the Edificio Creole in Caracas, designed by American architect Lathrop Douglass for Standard Oil, and completed in 1955, was not the subsequent version but the advanced prototype of the Esso office buildings both in Louisiana and New Jersey. It shows as well how the Electricity Building in Caracas (1955), also designed by Douglass, and whose authorship has remained unknown until now, represented a unique opportunity both to explore the insertion of an “horizontal skyscraper” in downtown, and to reveal a complex network of professional and political relations. By examining Higuerote Beach Resort, a vacation and residential complex located near Caracas, the dissertation also demonstrates how American magazines were used by Venezuelans as the basis for an architecture that became original without the inspiration of a genius designer. Finally, this research analyzes the production of a supernatural architecture through the Helicoid Shopping Center in Caracas (designed by Arquitectura y Urbanismo C.A. in 1955), one of the most paradigmatic examples of modern Venezuelan creativity, and probably the utmost realization of the American Utopia. / text

Native American societies in the Yazoo Basin during the Mississippian Period (ca. 1000 – 1700 A.D.) extensively built platform mounds often associated with “elite” or “sacred” areas, and exotic or energy expensive artifacts. Excessive energy expenditure, or “waste” behaviors, may be explained with costly signaling and bet-hedging, hypotheses stemming from evolutionary theory. I argue that costly signaling may best explain the waste evident in hierarchical and agricultural Mississippian Period societies of the Mississippi Valley. Consequently, I feel that differing levels of energy expenditure may be evident from the remains of perishable construction excavated from mound summits and off-mound contexts. During that time, wattle and daub was a common method of wall construction in the Yazoo Basin, leaving abundant evidence at Mississippian sites. By studying imprints from preserved daub fragments, the use of specific construction methods can be compared between mound and non-mound contexts and relative energy expenditure assessed.

A presente pesquisa busca contribuir à compreensão do processo de constituição de debates na cultura arquitetônico-urbanística, atentando, em específico, ao aspecto da migração e adaptação de determinadas discussões de seus contextos originais para outros, à fusão e à agregação de novos significados que ocorre neste deslocamento. Para tanto, enfoca-se o V Seminário de Arquitetura Latino-americana (SAL), realizado em Santiago do Chile, em 1991. O objetivo geral é demonstrar, através do estudo da conjuntura que permitiu a realização do V SAL, a existência de uma hibridação entre os debates relativos a uma possível identidade latino-americana e à revisão do movimento moderno a partir do vocabulário tipo-morfologia entre meados dos anos 1980 e início dos anos 1990. Dissonante com o que foi habitualmente escrito e divulgado sobre os debates produzidos no interior destes seminários no período entre 1985 e 1995, no V SAL - cujo tema fora \"Nuestro Espacio Público: Propuestas Morfológicas\" - não teve seu debate pautado em questões referentes à \"modernidade apropriada\" ou à interação entre \"o espírito do tempo e o do lugar\". A tese embasa-se através de três hipóteses complementares. A primeira hipótese é que V SAL não foi uma ruptura, nem mesmo uma cesura dentro da história dos Seminários de Arquitetura Latino-americana; mas sim a assunção pública e o ápice de um debate sobre a cidade latino-americana e sua morfologia que esteve latente desde os primeiros eventos e foi majoritariamente omitido pela crítica. A segunda hipótese é que a realização do V SAL não se explica somente pela história própria dos Seminários de Arquitetura Latino-Americana; pelo contrário, este evento se insere uma série de traduções culturais do debate tipo-morfológico que buscaram vínculos latino-americanos como forma de garantir sua legitimação - e para qual parte de seus organizadores contribuiu ativamente. A terceira e última hipótese é que estes encontros e traduções culturais distintos não foram inócuos, através deles permitiram-se hibridações de conceitos e recombinações de significados nos debates originais e a construção de representações comuns sobre a morfologia de uma \"cidade latino-americana\" e a forma de se intervir nela, cujos vestígios transparecem nos debates dos SAL. Dois eixos de análises organizam o conjunto de métodos empregados e se manifestam na estrutura da tese: um insere o V SAL dentro da trajetória dos Seminários de Arquitetura Latino-americana; outro busca, a partir deste referencial, desconstruir as redes de profissionais e as traduções culturais que permitem compreender a realização do evento de Santiago do Chile. / This research has as the purpose to contribute to understanding the process of setting up debates in architectural-urban culture, noting in particular the aspect of migration and adaptation of certain ideas from their original contexts to other ones, the fusion and the addition of new meanings that occurs among these displacements. Therefore, we focus in the V Seminar of Latin-American Architecture (SAL), which had place in Santiago, Chile, in 1991. Our goal is to demonstrate, by studying the circumstances that allowed the realization of SAL V, the existence of hybridization between the debate about a possible Latin American identity and the revision of the Modern Movement by applying the type-morphology vocabulary, between mid-1980s and early 1990s. Dissonant with what was usually written and published about the debate that took place in those seminars between 1985 and 1995, the V SAL - whose theme was \"Our Public Space: Morphological proposal\" - has not discussed the \"appropriated modernity\" neither \"the interaction between the spirit of the time and spirit of the place\". The thesis relies on three complementary hypotheses. The first one is that the V SAL was not a break, nor even a gap in the history of the Seminars of Latin-American Architecture: it was the assumption and the summit of a public debate about the Latin-American city and its morphology that was underlying since the first seminar and was largely omitted by critics. The second hypothesis is that the realization of the V SAL cannot be explained only by the history of the SAL itself: on the contrary, this event is part of a series of cultural translations of the type-morphological debate that used to seek Latin-American bonds in order to ensure its legitimacy - in which part of V SAL\'s organizers had actively contributed. The third and final hypothesis is that these meetings and cultural translations were not innocuous: they allowed the construction of hybrid concepts, as well as new meanings in common representations about the urban form of the \"Latin American city\" and about how should be interventions in it, whose traces are apparent in the debates in SAL. Two axes of analysis organize the set of methods employed in the structure of the thesis: one inserts the V SAL within the path of seminars Latin American Architecture; the other searches, from this reference, to deconstruct professional networks and translations cultural that enable understanding the event of Santiago de Chile.

This dissertation comparatively analyzes the architectural and visual histories of two black churches as examples of the material contribution of African Americans to the nation’s built environment. As cultural repositories, Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) (1881-1886), Washington, D.C., and the Shrine of the Black Madonna #1, Pan African Orthodox Christian Church (1925/1957), Detroit, MI, are two sites that represent distinct forms of Black Nationalism. The history of Metropolitan AME uncovers aspects of late nineteenth century Classical Black Nationalism cultural practice. The Shrine of the Black Madonna #1 reflects the revisionist agenda of the Black Cultural Nationalist Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The objective of this study is to expand through a cultural lens the growing body of scholarship that seeks to excavate under-recognized African-American visual and architectural traditions. This study contrasts different modes of claiming space for cultural affirmation: construction and real estate acquisition. Chapter one offers a rationale for the artifactual interrogation of African American churches and outlines the interdisciplinary methodologies employed in the case studies. In chapter two, Metropolitan A.M.E. Church’s architectural history presents an instance of an African American community using popular architectural and artistic styles in an associative manner to articulate racial advancement. Chapter three documents the aesthetic legacy of Metropolitan A.M.E. Church by considering the sanctuary’s stained glass window program, mural commissions executed by two rarely-discussed African American artists, donated art objects and the circulation of images of the religious site. Chapter four explores the Shrine of the Black Madonna #1’s 1957 purchase of a 1925 Colonial Revival ecclesiastical structure. This assessment contextualizes the lived interventions of a radical congregation to understand how shifts in material and visual patterns expressed cultural identity. Chapter five critically explores the aesthetic history of the Shrine of the Black Madonna #1 that begins with the Black Madonna and Child (1967) chancel mural by Glanton V. Dowdell. As the conclusion indicates, African American churches contain visible but hidden histories that expand African American art by introducing new iconographic considerations and revealing new art communities.

Collegiate Gothic architecture can be found on many American campuses, yet its beginnings in nineteenth-century United States are something of a mystery. As the nation’s colleges and universities grew more innovative in their modernized curricula and research, strangely, their architecture became more anachronistic with Collegiate Gothic being the most popular. Around the greens of their campuses, Americans built quadrangles of crenellated buildings and monumental gate towers with stained-glass windows, gargoyles, pointed arches, turrets, and spires, thus transforming their collegiate grounds into likenesses of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Why medievalizing buildings came to represent the archetypal college experience has confounded many educators, scientists, and industrialists, who wondered why some of America’s most revolutionary institutions built libraries and academic halls in a style that seemed to oppose everything that was modern. Scholarship has not fully addressed the reasons why Collegiate Gothic buildings came to occupy so many American college campuses. Authors have not regarded the style in its own right, having its own history within the nineteenth-century’s dynamic developments in higher education, religion, politics, urban planning, and architecture. My dissertation evaluates these relationships by addressing the Collegiate Gothic’s first one hundred years on American campuses from 1806 to 1906.

A presente pesquisa busca contribuir à compreensão do processo de constituição de debates na cultura arquitetônico-urbanística, atentando, em específico, ao aspecto da migração e adaptação de determinadas discussões de seus contextos originais para outros, à fusão e à agregação de novos significados que ocorre neste deslocamento. Para tanto, enfoca-se o V Seminário de Arquitetura Latino-americana (SAL), realizado em Santiago do Chile, em 1991. O objetivo geral é demonstrar, através do estudo da conjuntura que permitiu a realização do V SAL, a existência de uma hibridação entre os debates relativos a uma possível identidade latino-americana e à revisão do movimento moderno a partir do vocabulário tipo-morfologia entre meados dos anos 1980 e início dos anos 1990. Dissonante com o que foi habitualmente escrito e divulgado sobre os debates produzidos no interior destes seminários no período entre 1985 e 1995, no V SAL - cujo tema fora \"Nuestro Espacio Público: Propuestas Morfológicas\" - não teve seu debate pautado em questões referentes à \"modernidade apropriada\" ou à interação entre \"o espírito do tempo e o do lugar\". A tese embasa-se através de três hipóteses complementares. A primeira hipótese é que V SAL não foi uma ruptura, nem mesmo uma cesura dentro da história dos Seminários de Arquitetura Latino-americana; mas sim a assunção pública e o ápice de um debate sobre a cidade latino-americana e sua morfologia que esteve latente desde os primeiros eventos e foi majoritariamente omitido pela crítica. A segunda hipótese é que a realização do V SAL não se explica somente pela história própria dos Seminários de Arquitetura Latino-Americana; pelo contrário, este evento se insere uma série de traduções culturais do debate tipo-morfológico que buscaram vínculos latino-americanos como forma de garantir sua legitimação - e para qual parte de seus organizadores contribuiu ativamente. A terceira e última hipótese é que estes encontros e traduções culturais distintos não foram inócuos, através deles permitiram-se hibridações de conceitos e recombinações de significados nos debates originais e a construção de representações comuns sobre a morfologia de uma \"cidade latino-americana\" e a forma de se intervir nela, cujos vestígios transparecem nos debates dos SAL. Dois eixos de análises organizam o conjunto de métodos empregados e se manifestam na estrutura da tese: um insere o V SAL dentro da trajetória dos Seminários de Arquitetura Latino-americana; outro busca, a partir deste referencial, desconstruir as redes de profissionais e as traduções culturais que permitem compreender a realização do evento de Santiago do Chile. / This research has as the purpose to contribute to understanding the process of setting up debates in architectural-urban culture, noting in particular the aspect of migration and adaptation of certain ideas from their original contexts to other ones, the fusion and the addition of new meanings that occurs among these displacements. Therefore, we focus in the V Seminar of Latin-American Architecture (SAL), which had place in Santiago, Chile, in 1991. Our goal is to demonstrate, by studying the circumstances that allowed the realization of SAL V, the existence of hybridization between the debate about a possible Latin American identity and the revision of the Modern Movement by applying the type-morphology vocabulary, between mid-1980s and early 1990s. Dissonant with what was usually written and published about the debate that took place in those seminars between 1985 and 1995, the V SAL - whose theme was \"Our Public Space: Morphological proposal\" - has not discussed the \"appropriated modernity\" neither \"the interaction between the spirit of the time and spirit of the place\". The thesis relies on three complementary hypotheses. The first one is that the V SAL was not a break, nor even a gap in the history of the Seminars of Latin-American Architecture: it was the assumption and the summit of a public debate about the Latin-American city and its morphology that was underlying since the first seminar and was largely omitted by critics. The second hypothesis is that the realization of the V SAL cannot be explained only by the history of the SAL itself: on the contrary, this event is part of a series of cultural translations of the type-morphological debate that used to seek Latin-American bonds in order to ensure its legitimacy - in which part of V SAL\'s organizers had actively contributed. The third and final hypothesis is that these meetings and cultural translations were not innocuous: they allowed the construction of hybrid concepts, as well as new meanings in common representations about the urban form of the \"Latin American city\" and about how should be interventions in it, whose traces are apparent in the debates in SAL. Two axes of analysis organize the set of methods employed in the structure of the thesis: one inserts the V SAL within the path of seminars Latin American Architecture; the other searches, from this reference, to deconstruct professional networks and translations cultural that enable understanding the event of Santiago de Chile.

Sweet Briar House is one of the best documented sites in Virginia, with sources ranging from architectural drawings and extensive archives to original furnishings. Sweet Briar House was purchased by Elijah Fletcher, a prominent figure in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1830. Thirty years later it passed into the possession of his daughter Indiana Fletcher Williams, and remained her home until her death in 1900. In her will, Williams left instructions for the founding of Sweet Briar Institute, an educational institution for women that exists today as Sweet Briar College. This dissertation examines Sweet Briar House in three distinct phases, while advancing three theses. The first thesis proposes that the double portico motif introduced by Palladio at the Villa Cornaro in the sixteenth century became the fundamental motif of Palladianism in Virginia architecture, generating a line of offspring that proliferated in the eighteenth century and beyond. The Palladian plantation (Sweet Briar House I, c. 1800) featured this double portico. In 1851, following the return of the Fletcher children from an extended Grand Tour of Europe, the house was remodeled as an Italianate villa (Sweet Briar House II, 1851-52). The second thesis advances the contention that by renovating their Palladian house into an asymmetrical Italianate villa, the Fletcher family implemented an ideal solution between the balanced façade that characterized the Palladian Sweet Briar House I and the fashion for the Picturesque that dominated American building in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1876, the Williams family traveled to the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where visitors were presented with an unimaginable array of artistic possibilities from countless eras and nations, exactly the conditions that the Aesthetic Movement needed to flourish in America. The third thesis maintains that the Williams family’s decision to transform Sweet Briar House into an Aesthetic Movement retreat was inspired by their reaction to the Centennial, and in particular by their appreciation for the Japanese objects presented there.