English Architecture Public & Private


Book Description

This book brings together twenty-four original essays by colleagues, pupils and friends of Kerry Downes. The essays range from the late middle ages to the twentieth century but are concentrated on the period to the study of which Kerry Downes has contributed so much: that of Wren, Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor. Taken together these essays display the different approaches taken by architectural historians and the rich variety of English architecture.







Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830


Book Description

Between 1700 and 1830, men and women in the English-speaking territories framing the Atlantic gained unprecedented access to material things. The British Atlantic was an empire of goods, held together not just by political authority and a common language, but by a shared material culture nourished by constant flows of commodities. Diets expanded to include exotic luxuries such as tea and sugar, the fruits of mercantile and colonial expansion. Homes were furnished with novel goods, like clocks and earthenware teapots, the products of British industrial ingenuity. This groundbreaking book compares these developments in Britain and North America, bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to consider basic questions about women, men, and objects in these regions. In asking who did the shopping, how things were used, and why they became the subject of political dispute, the essays show the profound significance of everyday objects in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.




Public and Private Spaces of the City


Book Description

The relationship between public and private spheres is one of the key concerns of the modern society. This book investigates this relationship, especially as manifested in the urban space with its social and psychological significance. Through theoretical and historical examination, it explores how and why the space of human socities is subdivided into public and private sections. It starts with the private, interior space of the mind and moves step by step, through the body, home, neighborhood and the city, outwards to the most public, impersonal spaces, exploring the nature of each realm and their complex, interdependent realtionships. A stimulating and thought provoking book for any architect, architectural historian, urban planner or designer.




Brutalism


Book Description

The term 'Brutalism' is used to describe a form of architecture that appeared, mainly in Europe, from around 1945-75. Uncomprimisingly modern, this trend in architecture was both striking and arresting and, perhaps like no other style before or since, aroused extremes of emotion and debate. Some regarded Brutalist buildings as monstrous soulless structures of concrete, steel and glass, whereas others saw the genre as a logical progression, having its own grace and balance. In this revised second edition, Alexander Clement continues the debate of Brutalism in post-war Britain to the modern day, studying a number of key buildings and developments in the fields of civic, educational, commercial, leisure, private and ecclesiastical architecture. With new and improved illustrations, fresh case studies and profiles of the most influential architects, this new edition affords greater attention to iconic buildings and structures. Now that the age of Brutalism is a generation behind us, it is possible to view the movement with a degree of rational reappraisal, study how the style evolved and gauge its effect on Britain's urban landscape. This book will be of interest to architecture students, design students and anyone interested in post-war architecture. Fully illustrated with 160 colour and 4 black & white photographs.




Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser


Book Description

Jennifer C. Vaught illustrates how architectural rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser provides a bridge between the human body and mind and the nonhuman world of stone and timber. The recurring figure of the body as a besieged castle in Shakespeare’s drama and Spenser’s allegory reveals that their works are mutually based on medieval architectural allegories exemplified by the morality play The Castle of Perseverance. Intertextual and analogous connections between the generically hybrid works of Shakespeare and Spenser demonstrate how they conceived of individuals not in isolation from the physical environment but in profound relation to it. This book approaches the interlacing of identity and place in terms of ecocriticism, posthumanism, cognitive theory, and Cicero’s art of memory. Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser examines figures of the permeable body as a fortified, yet vulnerable structure in Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, tragedies, romances, and Sonnets and in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Complaints.




Skolnick Architecture + Design Partnership


Book Description

- First monograph from the award-winning New York-based architectural firm- Foreword by the Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic Paul GoldbergerSkolnick Architecture + Design Partnership: Public/Private presents the first monograph from the award-winning New York-based architectural firm. Covering over 40 years of work, the book - presented in a unique double-sided, two-cover format - exhibits projects in both the public and private sectors. Included in the public section is a sprawling center for entrepreneurial education, a science center built in an old turbine hall, a sky-lit synagogue, two colorful and bright public libraries, and a children's museum inspired by Leonardo da Vinci. The private side features a serenely spatial six-story townhouse, a sublimely linear beach house, a residence and matching studios for two painters, and luxurious twin villas in Anguilla. With text by principal architect Lee Skolnick, and a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic Paul Goldberger; each chapter provides valuable insight into the extensive planning and highly intellectual process that goes into each project. Skolnick Architecture + Design Partnership: Public/Private celebrates the accomplishments of a firm still operating at the top of their game.




Architectural Involutions


Book Description

Winner of the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars Taking the reader on an inward journey from façades to closets, from physical to psychic space, Architectural Involutions offers an alternative genealogy of theater by revealing how innovations in architectural writing and practice transformed an early modern sense of interiority. The book launches from a matrix of related “platforms”—a term that in early modern usage denoted scaffolds, stages, and draftsmen’s sketches—to situate Alberti, Shakespeare, Jonson, and others within a landscape of spatial and visual change. As the English house underwent a process of inward folding, replacing a logic of central assembly with one of dissemination, the subject who negotiated this new scenography became a flashpoint of conflict in both domestic and theatrical arenas. Combining theory with archival findings, Mimi Yiu reveals an emergent desire to perform subjectivity, to unfold an interior face to an admiring public. Highly praised for its lucid writing, comprehensive supplementary material, and engaging tone, Architectural Involutions was the winner of the 2016 MLA Prize for Independent Scholars.




The Builder


Book Description