New Books in Architecture

• Noise and Information in the Office

  Ever wonder who’s to blame for the noise and distraction of the open office? Our guest has answers. Joseph L. Clarke is a historian of art and architecture and an associate professor at the University of Toronto. His 2021 book Echo’s Chambers: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space won a 2022 CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Title. It’s a fascinating history of how architects have conceived of and manipulated the relationship between sound and space. His most recent publication is “Too Much Information: Noise and Communication in an Open Office.”  In this episode we’ll talk about media theorist Marshall McLuhan and his architecturally inspired theory of acoustic space, which went on to have its own influence in the field of architecture. We’ll also dive deep into the history of the open plan office, the theories of acoustic communication that inspired it, the sonic disaster it became, and the new media technologies that were invented in response. If you’ve ever been driven to distraction by noise in a cubicle farm or open office and wondered how such a space came to be, this episode’s got answers! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

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• Tupur Chatterjee, "Projecting Desire: Media Architectures and Moviegoing in Urban India" (NYU Press, 2025)

  Since the late 1990s, the multiplex in India has emerged as a dominant site of media exhibition, almost always embedded within the shopping mall. This spatial pairing has transformed the experience of moviegoing, making it impossible to inhabit one space without also passing through the other. The rise of the mall-multiplex signals a broader shift in the spectatorial imagination: away from cinema halls built for the subaltern male viewer, toward environments curated for the aspiring, mobile, and consuming middle-class woman. Projecting Desire: Media Architectures and Moviegoing in Urban India (NYU Press, 2025) tells the story of this infrastructural and cultural transformation as it unfolded across media industries, architectural design, urban planning, and popular cinema. Tracing the multiplex’s evolution in post-liberalization India, Tupur Chatterjee reveals how this new built form not only reconfigured cinematic space, but also reshaped the aesthetics, publics, and gendered politics of the contemporary Indian city. Rather than narrating a linear history of technological replacement, the book situates the multiplex within a longer genealogy of postcolonial urban design—one marked by caste- and class-based anxieties around visibility, safety, and leisure. It argues that the architectural mediation of cinema is central to how desire, modernity, and risk are organised in India’s media cities. Drawing on industrial and organisational ethnography, in-depth interviews, participant observation, discourse and textual analysis, and archival research, Projecting Desire maps the multiplex as a space where film, infrastructure, and aspiration intersect. In doing so, it offers a critical framework for understanding how gendered publics are produced through the infrastructures of cinematic experience in the Global South. Dr Tupur Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor in Global Film and Media in the School of English, Drama, and Film at University College Dublin. Her research spans global media industries, feminist media studies, urban spatial politics, and the material life of media technologies. Her work has been published in journals like Television and New Media, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, South Asian Popular Culture, and Porn Studies among others.  Dr Priyam Sinha is a recipient of the Humboldt Research Award and is based at Humboldt University in Berlin. She earned her PhD from the National University of Singapore. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical media industry studies, disability studies, gender studies, affect studies, production culture studies, and anthropology of the body. So far, her articles have been published in Media, Culture and Society; Communication, Culture and Critique; South Asian Diaspora, among others. More information on her research can be found on her website www.priyamsinha.com. She can also be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

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• Brutalism

  In this episode of High Theory Nasser Mufti talks with us about Brutalism. A twentieth century architectural style featuring imposing structures made of a lot of concrete, brutalist structures tend to provoke strong reactions. People either love it or they hate it – you never get a middling conversation about brutalism. Often used for government buildings, university libraries, and hospitals, Nasser suggests it represents the architecture of the state itself, massive bureaucratic structures in which we get lost, but also perhaps, nostalgia for a state that actually takes care of its citizens. Before we recorded the episode, Nasser sent me this article about the Brutalist campus at the University of Illinois where he works, which is full of beautiful black and white images. In the episode he refers to a line in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), which describes Chesney Wold as “seamed by time.” And he reminds us that verb form “decolonizing” is quite new, even Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986) only uses the gerund in the title. The neologism “decolonizing” is distinct from the world historical project of decolonization and the historiographic method of decolonial analysis that comes from Latin American studies. Nasser Mufti is an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where his research and teaching focuses on nineteenth century British and postcolonial literature and theory. He is especially interested in literary approaches to the study of nationalism. His first book, Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture (Northwestern University Press, 2018) argues that narratives of civil war energized and animated nineteenth-century British imperialism and decolonization in the twentieth century. You can read it online, open access, which is pretty damn cool! He is working on two new projects, the first, tentatively titled Britain’s Nineteenth Century, 1963-4, looks at how anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers from the Anglophone world turned to nineteenth century British literature and culture as a way to think decolonization. The second, titled “Colonia Moralia,” examines the dialectics of postcolonial Enlightenment through comparative readings of T.W. Adorno and V.S. Naipaul. The image for this episode is a photograph of Boston City Hall, a Brutalist building mentioned in the episode. The black and white photograph shows an interior courtyard of the building, a large concrete structure with many windows, located at One City Hall Square, Boston, Suffolk County, MA. It comes from the US Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

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  18:32
• Roland Mayer, "The Ruins of Rome: A Cultural History" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

  The beguiling ruins of Rome have a long history of allure. They first engaged the attention of later mediaeval tourists, just as they do today. The interest of travellers was captured in the Renaissance by artists, architects, topographers, antiquarians, archaeologists and writers. Once the ruins were seen to appeal to visitors, and to matter for their aesthetic quality, their protection and attractive presentation became imperative. Rome's ruins were the first to be the object of preservation orders, and novel measures were devised for their conservation in innovative archaeological parks. The city's remains provided models for souvenirs; paintings of them decorated the walls of eighteenth-century English country houses; and picturesque sham Roman ruins sprang up in landscape gardens across Europe. Writers responded in various ways to their emotional appeal.  Roland Mayer's The Ruins of Rome: A Cultural History (Cambridge UP, 2025) will delight all those interested in the remarkable survival and preservation of a unique urban environment. ROLAND MAYER is Emeritus Professor of Classics at King's College London. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

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• Mary Anne Hunting and Kevin D. Murphy, "Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism" (Princeton UP, 2025)

  In the decades preceding World War II, professional architecture schools enrolled increasing numbers of women, but career success did not come easily. Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Dr. Mary Anne Hunting and Dr. Kevin D. Murphy tells the stories of the resilient and resourceful women who surmounted barriers of sexism, racism, and classism to take on crucial roles in the establishment and growth of Modernism across the United States. Dr. Hunting and Dr. Murphy describe how the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture in Massachusetts evolved for the professional education of women between 1916 and 1942. While alumnae such as Eleanor Agnes Raymond, Victorine du Pont Homsey, and Sarah Pillsbury Harkness achieved some notoriety, others like Elizabeth-Ann Campbell Knapp and Louisa Vaughan Conrad have been largely absent from histories of Modernism. Dr. Hunting and Dr. Murphy describe how these innovative practitioners capitalized on social, educational, and professional ties to achieve success and used architecture to address social concerns, including how modernist ideas could engage with community and the environment. Some joined women-led architectural firms while others partnered with men or contributed to Modernism as retailers of household furnishings, writers and educators, photographers and designers, or fine artists. With stunning illustrations, Women Architects at Work offers new histories of recognized figures while recovering the stories of previously unsung women, all of whom contributed to the modernization of American architecture and design. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

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