D. Medina Lasansky – författare

An essay collection exploring the board game’s relationship to the built environment, revealing the unexpected ways that play reflects perceptions of space.Board games harness the creation of entirely new worlds. From the medieval warlord to the modern urban planner, players are permitted to inhabit a staggering variety of roles and are prompted to incorporate preexisting notions of placemaking into their decisions. To what extent do board games represent the social context of their production? How might they reinforce or subvert normative ideas of community and fulfillment? In Playing Place, Chad Randl and D. Medina Lasansky have curated a collection of thirty-seven fascinating essays, supplemented by a rich trove of photo illustrations, that unpack these questions with breadth and care.Although board games are often recreational objects, their mythologies and infrastructure do not exist in a vacuum—rather, they echo and reproduce prevalent cultural landscapes. This thesis forms the throughline of pieces reflecting on subjects as diverse as the rigidly gendered fantasies of classic mass-market games; the imperial convictions embedded in games that position player-protagonists as conquerors establishing dominion over their “discoveries”; and even the uncanny prescience of games that have players responding to a global pandemic. Representing a thrilling convergence of historiography, architectural history, and media studies scholarship, Playing Place suggests not only that tabletop games should be taken seriously but also that the medium itself is uniquely capable of facilitating our critical consideration of structures that are often taken for granted.

Mussolini’s bold claims upon the monuments and rhetoric of ancient Rome have been the subject of a number of recent books. D. Medina Lasansky shows us a much less familiar side of the cultural politics of Italian Fascism, tracing its wide-ranging efforts to adapt the nation’s medieval and Renaissance heritage to satisfy the regime’s programs of national regeneration. Anyone acquainted with the beauties of Tuscany will be surprised to learn that architects, planners, and administrators working within Fascist programs fabricated much of what today’s tourists admire as authentic. Public squares, town halls, palaces, gardens, and civic rituals (including the famed Palio of Siena) were all “restored” to suit a vision of the past shaped by Fascist notions of virile power, social order, and national achievement in the arts. Ultimately, Lasansky forces readers to question long-standing assumptions about the Renaissance even as she expands the parameters of what constitutes Fascist culture. The arguments in The Renaissance Perfected are based in fresh archival evidence and a rich collection of illustrations, many reproduced for the first time, ranging from photographs and architectural drawings to tourist posters and film stills. Lasansky’s groundbreaking book will be essential reading for students of medieval, Renaissance, and twentieth-century Italy as well as all those concerned with visual culture, architectural preservation, heritage studies, and tourism studies.

How have architecture and design been represented in popular culture? How do these fictional reflections feed back into and influence ‘the real world’? Archi.Pop: Architecture and Design in Popular Culture offers the first contemporary critical overview of this diverse and intriguing relationship in cultural forms including television, cinema, iconic buildings and everyday interiors, music and magazines.Bringing the study of architecture and culture firmly to the contemporary world, Archi.Pop offers a unique critical investigation into how this dynamic relationship has shaped the way we live and the way we interact with the constructed world around us.

The past two centuries have witnessed an increase in the commodification of tourist sites across the world. Everything from historical monuments to exotic holiday destinations has been redesigned and packaged for mass consumption. As a result, the histories of specific sites have been re-conceptualized. Some have been preserved and celebrated, while others have been left to decay. In this process, buildings, cities and entire countries have been remapped by tourism initiatives to serve political, cultural, economic and scholarly goals. Considering these profound transformations, Architecture and Tourism examines the reciprocal relationship between the modern practice of tourism and the built environment. It shows how photography, film and souvenirs have been deployed to help mediate and mythologize specific sites. It also explores how tourist itineraries, behavior and literature are institutionalized for popular consumption in order to support larger cultural objectives.Drawing on case studies in Cuba, Ghana, Greece, France, Italy, Libya, Mauritius, Spain and the United States, Architecture and Tourism explores the touristic experience, representation and meaning of place within distinct cultural contexts. From the former sites of the slave trade on the Ghanaian coast to the urban renewal of Old Havana, from the honeymoon resorts in the Poconos to the postmodern spectacle of Bilbao, from the world's fairs of the 1930s to the colonialist encounters in Italian Libya, each chapter provides a provocative insight into the practice of tourism and the conception of place.