58 min listen
Caitlin DeSilvey, “Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving” (U Minnesota Press, 2017)
Caitlin DeSilvey, “Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving” (U Minnesota Press, 2017)
ratings:
Length:
52 minutes
Released:
May 4, 2018
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
In Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), geographer Caitlin DeSilvey offers a set of alternatives to those who would assign a misplaced solidity to historic buildings and landscapes in order then to “preserve” or “conserve” them. DeSilvey reimagines processes of material decay, which always intermingle natural and cultural landscapes, as more animate, eventful, productive, and worthy of affirmation than prevailing practice would have it. Her narrative wends through Montana, Vermont, Germany’s Ruhr Valley, and numerous English sites, each of them rendered at close range, in lithe, sometimes experimental prose. Through these encounters, and with a remarkably light touch, she thinks in a key recognizable alongside, but never subservient to, many strands of recent geographic thought on the force or vitality of nonhuman matter. Curated Decay is an ethical intervention, too, posing difficult questions about vulnerability, rights, care, repair, maintenance, and how we might better respond to environments as they weather and fragment. Just this week, happily, the book was just awarded the Historic Preservation Book Prize by the Center for Historic Preservation at the University of Mary Washington. It will satisfy a wide and curious readership across diverse domains of theory and practice, and because the lines of questioning it opens are not easily closed down, it will stoke debate for some time to come.
Peter Ekman teaches in the departments of geography at Sonoma State University and the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2016, and is at work on two book projects on the cultural and historical geography of urban America across the long twentieth century. He can be reached at psrekman@berkeley.edu.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture
Peter Ekman teaches in the departments of geography at Sonoma State University and the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2016, and is at work on two book projects on the cultural and historical geography of urban America across the long twentieth century. He can be reached at psrekman@berkeley.edu.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture
Released:
May 4, 2018
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery, “Consumption and the Country House” (Oxford UP, 2016): During the 18th century English country houses served an important function in their society as stages for the display of the status and power of the landed aristocracy. As Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery demonstrate in Consumption and the Country House(O... by New Books in Architecture