SAH Publication Awards

2022 RECIPIENT:

Ünver Rüstem 
Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul
Princeton University Press, 2019

The Society of Architectural Historians confers the 2022 Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award for the best book published by a North American scholar to Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul. Taking as his topic an architectural style widely dismissed as a derivative decorative language used by a fading power, Ünver Rüstem recasts the late baroque style associated with the resurgence of the sultanic mosque in Istanbul as a potent means of expressing cultural and political relationships between the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe.

Ottoman Baroque illuminates a critical moment in the architectural and urban history of one of the world’s great cities and is a major contribution to research on the meanings and mechanisms of the Baroque internationally. The book engagingly encourages scholars across the discipline to take eclectic ornamentation seriously. In his meticulous analysis of buildings and local contexts in relation to broad stylistic tendencies, Rüstem powerfully challenges conventional notions of “westernization” in architectural history and offers a model of interpreting architectural innovation across borders and within dynamic conditions. 

Award Committee:
Kathryn O'Rourke, Chair
Anthony Alofsin
Mrinalini Rajagopalan

Renegades: Bruce Goff and the American School of Architecture advances the thesis that as chairman of the School of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma during the postwar decades, Bruce Goff created a distinct and influential approach to design that reverberated throughout the next half-century of American architecture. The catalogue, which accompanies an exhibition held at the University of Oklahoma’s Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in spring 2020, argues that the pedagogy Goff and his colleagues promoted, as well as the projects that they and their students went on to construct, constitutes an “American School” of architecture, rooted in a specific time and place, and decidedly anti-East Coast in its outlook. Handsomely produced, the catalogue introduces the reader to a range of student work and built projects, with a series of linked thematic essays that situate Goff and his associates within the history of American architecture.

Award Committee:
Carolyn Yerkes, Chair
Laura Moretti
Bryan Clark Green

Drawing on underexplored archival sources, Stratigakos' book provides an outstanding textual and visual history of Nazi New Order through both infrastructural and architectural projects in Nazi-occupied Norway. This original research eloquently expands the historical and architectural knowledge on Nazi expansionism and the “Nazification” of towns in Norway and their vision for a postwar Germanic empire, a topic neglected in recent literature. Providing a captivating investigation of wartime environments and urban lives, Stratigakos offers new insights into the ways the Nazi regime deployed architecture as a vital tool in their larger geo-political project. 

Award Committee:
Mohammad Gharipour, Chair
Benjamin Flowers
Samia Henni

Schwenkel’s book makes a great contribution to interdisciplinary and transnational urban and architectural histories by studying complex relationships between East German and Vietnamese socialist architecture, policies, tensions, and solidarities. Its stories and methodologies offer fascinating examples of the spatialities and temporalities of “building socialism” in postcolonial and postwar contexts. This brilliant account offers a novel contribution in both subject and method, one that should inspire the next generation of urban historians to consider how to enlarge the scope of inquiry of urban space and design to include previously overlooked regions and modes of inquiry. 

Award Committee:
Mohammad Gharipour, Chair
Benjamin Flowers
Samia Henni

Seeing Trees is a remarkable lesson in how much one can learn from street trees. A study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century New York and Berlin as two model cities for the advancement and propagation of urban forestry, it challenges the traditional dichotomy between humans and nature in densely built metropolitan settings. Owing to Sonja Dümpelmann’s meticulous research, the changing meaning of trees and strategies of their planting and management become a fresh lens for addressing the complex urban dynamic dominated by concerns with public health, issues of local identity, and questions of race and gender. As her narrative straddles environmental, landscape, and urban histories, it deftly interweaves social, political, and intellectual contexts, from the discourse of nativism to the Civil Rights Movement and Cold War politics. This innovative approach to urban ecology offers a powerful model of historical scholarship that situates the theory and practice of city greening among the ongoing efforts to combat climate change.

Award Committee:
Anatole Tchikine, Chair
Yael Allweil
C. J. Alvarez