The Importance of Place: Values and Building Practices in the Historic Urban Landscape

The Importance of Place: Values and Building Practices in the Historic Urban Landscape

How do we value historic urban landscape in order to intervene within it as designers? This is the central question posed in this volume, and is tackled by its 16 essays which investigate different facets of value as bases of building and design practices on a range of spatial scales and brought about by a variety of historical circumstances. While the modernist metanarrative of universalism propagated functionalism and, through it, biological and psychological motives of design activity, contemporary building practices are based on more complex and diverse patterns of values that range from cultural to market-driven. Researched, reconstructed and critically assessed, the different case studies brought together here reveal the many possible shades of the ‘importance of place’ with which architects, urban planners and city officials work today in the Southern European context. Marked in recent decades by social and political transition and economic hardship, the reality of this region’s cities caused repeated revisions of value-systems in all spheres of public life, making it, thus, a particularly intriguing context to observe in these terms. In this sense, these essays will be of interest to university scholars in architecture, art history, urbanism and planning, in addition to practicing designers and public officials who encounter problems of value-definitions in their everyday working tasks related to the shaping and management of contemporary urban space. Amir Pai, PhD, is Professor of History of Architecture at the University of Sarajevo. He has served as Head of the Architectural Department in the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture (IRCICA), Istanbul, since 1993, and served as the leading consultant for the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Geneva, from 1995 to 2006. He has won six architectural awards, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1986, and is a member of National Commission to Preserve National Monuments of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He has authored and co-authored 21 books and 47 articles, is and co-editor of the Journal of Cultural Management and Sustainable Development. Borut Juvanec, PhD, is an architect and Full Professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Ljubljana. His research focuses on the theory of architecture, vernacular architecture and anthropology. His publications include Stone upon Stone (2005), Kozolec Hayrack (2007), Chozos de Extremadura, joya en piedra (2008), and Dictionary of Vernacular Architecture (with D. Zupancic, 2014), amongst others. José Luis Moro is an architect, and Professor of Conceptual Design and Construction at both the Faculty of Architecture and the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the University of Stuttgart. His teaching and research focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to architectural design work. He has ran his own architecture practice since 1991.