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A groundbreaking text on the history of the use of patents in architecture.

Although patents existed in Renaissance Italy and even in Confucian thought, it was not until the middle third of the nineteenth century that architects embraced the practice of patenting in significant numbers. Patents could ensure, as they did for architects' engineering brethren, the economic and cultural benefits afforded by exclusive intellectual property rights. But patent culture was never directly translatable to the field of architecture, which tended to negotiate issues of technological innovation in the context of the more abstract issues of artistic influence and formal expression. In Prior Art, scholar Peter Christensen offers the first full-scale monographic treatment of this complex relationship between art and invention.

Christensen's method, a site-oriented approach steeped in multinational and multilingual archival work, is geared toward unifying fractured global histories of architectural patents through the distinct union of architectural, cultural, and legal history. Prior Art offers a record of the marriage of intellectual property and architectural invention-a momentous, understudied, and still underutilized aspect of architectural culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-and the ways in which it influenced how buildings are conceived, designed, engineered, constructed, and promoted.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Introduction(1)
• 1 The Home(25)
• 2 The Studio(67)
• 3 The Corporate Lab(125)
• 4 The Repository(167)
• 5 The Patent Office(217)
• 6 The Courtroom(255)
• 7 The Commons(287)
• Coda(319)
• Acknowledgments(321)
• Notes(323)
• Bibliography(345)
• Image Credits(373)
• Index(375)

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CHOICE Review

The topic of architecture and patents is particularly timely as architects continue to design and build increasingly complex structures that draw on the skills of various contributors. Architecture has long been seen as a creative endeavor not so easily pinned down to a formula or mechanism. However, Christensen (Univ. of Rochester) uses the patent specifically to better understand three key features of intellectual property in architecture: creativity, novelty, and property. He organizes the book around several sites: the home, the studio, the corporate lab, the repository, the courtroom, and the commons. Readers will find an impressive array of individuals, materials, and institutions represented, including Sarah Guppy, Alvar Aalto, Santiago Calatrava, Guastavino tiles, Tyvek wrap, BASF colors, and the South Kensington Museum. The author deftly grounds the issues with concrete examples, such as the copycat Eiffel Tower in China, Saunders's "Self-Serving Grocery Stores," or Hardoy's "butterfly chair." The scope of this book will attract a broad range of readers in not only the design disciplines and education but also engineering, history of science, and intellectual property law. It is written accessibly with a clear command of the existing literature. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers. --Marie Frank, University of Massachusetts Lowell

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Peter H. Christensen is the Arthur Satz Professor of the Humanities, the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Director of the Humanities Center, and Associate Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Rochester. he is the author of Germany and the Ottoman Railway Network and Precious Metal.