Conceptual Debts: Modern Architecture and Neo-Thomism in Postwar America

This article analyzes the formative role of medieval theology and aesthetics in the development of postwar American architecture by focusing on the architectural theory and practice of Mies van der Rohe and Jean Labatut, both of whom became actively interested in Neo-Thomism from the late 1940s. More specifically, a closer look at their reliance on the work of Jacques Maritain, the preeminent promotor of Neo-Thomism, sheds light on the transmission and circulation of old and new concepts within twentieth-century architectural theory. By revealing how Maritain’s ideas helped to codify the latter and thus exposed the premodern ideas at the heart of modern architecture, I argue that modernist aesthetics should be re-evaluated with regards to its definition of “the new” and its emphasis on the breakdown or mutation of premodern frames of reference.     

五桂楼藏书及其建筑特色

浙江余姚玉桂楼有“浙东第二藏书楼”之称,本文主要介绍了五桂楼的藏书历史,而五桂楼独特的建筑风格又为研究浙东地区清代古建筑提供了珍贵的实物资料。     

Building Bundles,Building Memories: Processes of Remembering in Adena-Hopewell Societies of Eastern North America

Over the past 20 years, archaeologists have grown increasingly interested in exploring the relationships between humans and things. In part, this focus on materiality has been fueled by the integration of modern philosophical perspectives and considerations of non-Western ontologies and the New Materialisms. In North America, much emphasis has been placed on exploring the relational aspects of American Indian ontologies in the past and present. In this article, I build upon these perspectives by integrating memory as an important infrastructure through which these relationships are cast and maintained. I refer to these memory-based practices as processes of remembering. I argue that identifying these discursive memory processes provides an opportunity to refine how we understand objects like bundles and the social process of bundling—one way archaeologists have framed complex human/thing relationships. I use an Adena-Hopewell burial mound from the Middle Woodland period in Eastern North America (ca. 200 BCE–CE 500) as a case study to illustrate how societies during this era were, at least in part, organized and sustained through the rituals involved in revising bundles of ancestors, objects, and memories of human action. I argue that bundling assemblages of the past managed social dissonance by stabilizing or transforming perceptions of kinship in social coalitions.