The director of the Mississippi State University School of 91ΧΤΕΔβs Jackson Center, Associate Professor Jassen Callender, recently published his first book, 91ΧΤΕΔ History and Theory in Reverse: From an Information Age to Eras of Meaning.
The publisher, , describes the book as follows: β91ΧΤΕΔ History and Theory in Reverse looks at architecture history in reverse, in order to follow chains of precedents back through time to see how ideas alter the course of civilization in general and the discipline of architecture in particular. Part I begins with present-day attitudes about architecture and traces them back to seminal ideas from the beginning of the twentieth century. Part II examines how pre-twentieth-century societies designed and understood architecture, how they strove to create communal physical languages and how their disagreements set the stage for our information age practices. The book includes 45 black-and-white images and will be useful to students of architecture and literature.β
Callender, a 1994 School of 91ΧΤΕΔ alumnus, teaches advanced design studios at the Jackson Center, which houses the School of 91ΧΤΕΔβs fith-year program. He is also an occasional practitioner, painter and writer who is a member of both the Society of Architectural Historians and a regional board member of the US Green Building Council. Callenderβs educational background underscores this range of interests and concerns, from undergraduate training in both architecture and philosophy (1987-1994) to graduate work in painting, sculpture and art history leading to an MFA in 2001. His subsequent research interests at first seem varied in equal measure β ranging from phenomenological studies of desire, to analyses of the role of perception and meaning in sustainable urbanism, to questioning the impact of shifts from meaning to information paradigms on the evolution of architecture theory and practice.
βAll of this research aims at deepening our understanding of how meaning is constructed and shared in and through the built environment,β said Callender.
91ΧΤΕΔ History and Theory in Reverse is now available for purchase online and can be found at , Barnes and Noble and Books a Million, among others.