Atlantic Unbound

Reviews / Votes

Atlantic Unbound is a remarkable book with a number of singular achievements. Using Haiti as a hub around which Caribbean, North American, and European cultural and political developments can be arrayed and analyzed is logical, innovative, and entirely necessary. The specific figures who are brought into the spotlight, along with their architectural endeavors, powerfully illuminate these Atlantic World places and the connections between them. Every single chapter is enlivened with unique and powerful insights, at times pulled from archives and at times drawn from the visual analysis of buildings, their remains, and/or their representations. -- Nathaniel Robert Walker, Catholic University of America Atlantic Unbound powerfully reframes neoclassical architecture, showing how it both embodies and exposes the many contradictions at the heart of Enlightenment. Peter Minosh's illuminating case studies, all haunted in different ways by the Haitian Revolution, slowly unravel myths of universal harmony, sovereignty, and reason to reveal their structural dependence on the violent repressions of race and enslavement. -- Meredith Martin, New York University Asking readers to critically reexamine relationships between modernity, democracy, politics, race, and architecture, Atlantic Unbound is an important contribution to architectural history. It invites a rethinking not only of the temporal period under study, but also how we understand subsequent architecture of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Indeed, this book will inspire a much-needed revaluation of canonical buildings as well as bring attention to understudied structures. -- Erica Morawski, Pratt Institute