The MIT Press has launched 'MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies,' a robust digital collection of classic and previously out-of-print architecture and urban studies books, on their digital book platform.
The collection features texts like Constantinos A. Doxiadis's Architectural Space in Ancient Greece, Jean Gottman's Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States, and Architecture in the Scandinavian Countries by Marian C. Donnelly. And the major figures and movements that have shaped the modern built world are well represented by books like Donald Leslie Johnson's Frank Lloyd Wright vs. America: The 1930s, Gilbert Herbert's The Dream of the Factory-Made House by Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann, and Moshe Safdie's Beyond Habitat.
The collection was funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Humanities Open Book Program, which they co-sponsored with the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Many of these foundational texts were published before the advent of ebooks and remained undigitized because of complex design requirements and the prohibitive cost of image permissions. Now, with funding from the Mellon Foundation and the efforts of an open-access-savvy digitization team, the MIT Press was able to not only secure image permissions, but also to solicit fresh prefaces that bring new insights to bear on many of these classic texts.
Many of the titles will also be made available on the open access platform PubPub where readers will be able to interact with and annotate the works with contemporary context and related readings.
"The books in this collection are drawn from an absolutely formative period in the discourse of architectural and urban history and theory," commented Timothy Hyde, Associate Professor, MIT Department of Architecture "These are essential publications to have available again, as they represent to some degree the founding of an independent discipline."
more: mitpress.mit.edu (148)