Download or read book Visual Planning and the Picturesque written by Nikolaus Pevsner and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2010 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A previously unpublished work by Nikolaus Pevsner, much of which was published as journal articles in the Architectural Review in the 1940s and 1950s during Pevsner's term as editor.
Download or read book Niche Tactics written by Caroline O'Donnell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-10 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Niche Tactics aligns architecture's relationship with site with its ecological analogue: the relationship between an organism and its environment. Bracketed between texts on giraffe morphology, ecological perception, ugliness, and hopeful monsters, architectural case studies investigate historical moments when relationships between architecture and site were productively intertwined, from the anomalous city designs of Francesco de Marchi in the sixteenth century to Le Corbusier’s near eradication of context in his Plan Voisin in the twentieth century to the more recent contextualist movements. Extensively illustrated with 140 drawings and photographs, Niche Tactics considers how attention to site might create a generative language for architecture today.
Download or read book Shaping the Surface written by Stephen Kite and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-11-17 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shaping the Surface explores the history of modern British architecture through the lens of surface, materiality and decoration. Picking up on a trait that art historian Nikolaus Pevsner first identified as a 'national mania for beautiful surface quality', this book makes a new contribution to architectural history and visual culture in its detailed examination of the surfaces of British architecture from the middle of the 19th century up to the turn of the 21st century. Tracing this continuing sensibility to surface all the way through to the modern era, it explores how and why surface and materiality have featured so heavily in recent architectural tradition, examining the history of British architecture through a selection of key cultural moments and movements from Romanticism and the Arts and Crafts, to Brutalism, High-Tech, Post-Modernism, Neo-Vernacular, and the New Materiality. Embedded within the narrative is the question of whether such national characters can exist in architecture at all – and indeed the extent to which it is possible to identify a British architectural consciousness in an architectural tradition characterised by its continuous importation of theories, ideas, materials and people from around the globe. Shaping the Surface provides a deep critique and meditation on the importance of surface and materiality for architects, designers, and historians everywhere - in Britain and beyond - while it also serves as a thematic introduction to modern British architectural history, with in-depth readings of the works of many key British architects, artists, and critics from Ruskin and William Morris to Alison and Peter Smithson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Rogers and Caruso St John.
Download or read book The Picturesque written by John Macarthur and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-07 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fresh and authoritative account John Macarthur presents the eighteenth century idea of the picturesque – when it was a risky term concerned with a refined taste for everyday things, such as the hovels of the labouring poor – in the light of its reception and effects in modern culture. In a series of linked essays Macarthur shows: what the concept of picture does in the picturesque and how this relates to modern theories of the image how the distaste that might be felt today at the sentimentality of the picturesque was already at play in the eighteenth century how visual values such as ‘irregularity’ become the basis of modern architectural planning; how the concept of appropriating a view moves from landscape design into urban design why movement is fundamental to picturing the stillness of buildings, cities and landscapes. Drawing on examples from architecture, art and broader culture, John Macarthur's account of this key topic in cultural history, makes engaging reading for all those studying architecture, art history, cultural history or visual studies.
Download or read book Non Design written by Anthony Fontenot and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-07-09 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthony Fontenot’s staggeringly ambitious book uncovers the surprisingly libertarian heart of the most influential British and American architectural and urbanist discourses of the postwar period, expressed as a critique of central design and a support of spontaneous order. Non-Design illuminates the unexpected philosophical common ground between enemies of state support, most prominently the economist Friedrich Hayek, and numerous notable postwar architects and urbanists like Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Reyner Banham, and Jane Jacobs. These thinkers espoused a distinctive concept of "non-design,"characterized by a rejection of conscious design and an embrace of various phenomenon that emerge without intention or deliberate human guidance. This diffuse and complex body of theories discarded many of the cultural presuppositions of the time, shunning the traditions of modern design in favor of the wisdom, freedom, and self-organizing capacity of the market. Fontenot reveals the little-known commonalities between the aesthetic deregulation sought by ostensibly liberal thinkers and Hayek’s more controversial conception of state power, detailing what this unexplored affinity means for our conceptions of political liberalism. Non-Design thoroughly recasts conventional views of postwar architecture and urbanism, as well as liberal and libertarian philosophies.
Download or read book Cut and Paste Urban Landscape written by Mira Engler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-11 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the post-war era, the emerging consumer economy radically changed both the discourse and practice of architecture. It was a time where architecture became a mainstream commodity whose products sold through mass media; a time in which Thomas Gordon Cullen came to be one of Britain’s best-known twentieth-century architectural draftsmen. Despite Cullen’s wide acclaim, there has been little research into his life and work; particularly his printed images and his methods of operation. This book examines Cullen’s drawings and book design and also looks into his process of image making to help explain his considerable popularity and influence which continues to this day. It presents the lessons Cullen had to offer in today’s design culture and practice and looks into the post-war consumerist design strategies that are still used today.
Download or read book Seeing from Above written by Mark Dorrian and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-10-03 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The view from above, or the 'bird's-eye' view, has become so ingrained in contemporary visual culture that it is now hard to imagine our world without it. It has risen to pre-eminence as a way of seeing, but important questions about its effects and meanings remain unexplored. More powerfully than any other visual modality, this image of 'everywhere' supports our idea of a world-view, yet it is one that continues to be transformed as technologies are invented and refined. This innovative volume, edited by Mark Dorrian and Frederic Pousin, offers an unprecedented range of discussions on the aerial view, covering topics from sixteenth-century Roman maps to the Luftwaffe's aerial survey of Warsaw to Google Earth. Underpinned by a cross-disciplinary approach that draws together diverse and previously isolated material, this volume examines the politics and poetics of the aerial view in relation to architecture, art, film, literature, photography and urbanism and explores its role in areas such as aesthetics and epistemology. Structured through a series of detailed case studies, this book builds into a cultural history of the aerial imagination.
Download or read book Street Furniture Design written by Eleanor Herring and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eleanor Herring's unique study of street furniture in post-war Britain considers how objects which are now familiar parts of our urban environment were designed to populate public spaces. Herring explores the design of lampposts, post boxes, parking meters, and signage in the context of a government backed by various bodies keen to propagate 'good' modern design, in a Britain whose towns and cities had been laid waste by bombing and the privations of war. She also considers the innate conservatism of local communities and councils, wary of a standardised street design imposed from above. She traces how the design of street furniture became the site of a fierce struggle which exposed deep-seated anxieties about class, taste and power. Herring's original research draws on archival material and on interviews with leading figures in urban design, including graphic designer Margaret Calvert and industrial designer Kenneth Grange.
Download or read book The Baroque in Architectural Culture 1880 1980 written by Andrew Leach and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his landmark volume Space, Time and Architecture, Sigfried Giedion paired images of two iconic spirals: Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International and Borromini’s dome for Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza. The values shared between the baroque age and the modern were thus encapsulated on a single page spread. As Giedion put it, writing of Sant’Ivo, Borromini accomplished 'the movement of the whole pattern [...] from the ground to the lantern, without entirely ending even there.' And yet he merely 'groped' towards that which could 'be completely effected' in modern architecture-achieving 'the transition between inner and outer space.' The intellectual debt of modern architecture to modernist historians who were ostensibly preoccupied with the art and architecture of earlier epochs is now widely acknowledged. This volume extends this work by contributing to the dual projects of the intellectual history of modern architecture and the history of architectural historiography. It considers the varied ways that historians of art and architecture have historicized modern architecture through its interaction with the baroque: a term of contested historical and conceptual significance that has often seemed to shadow a greater contest over the historicity of modernism. Presenting research by an international community of scholars, this book explores through a series of cross sections the traffic of ideas between practice and history that has shaped modern architecture and the academic discipline of architectural history across the long twentieth century. The editors use the historiography of the baroque as a lens through which to follow the path of modern ideas that draw authority from history. In doing so, the volume defines a role for the baroque in the history of architectural historiography and in the history of modern architectural culture.
Download or read book Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change written by Mary Corbin Sies and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-07-19 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the history of planning, the design of an entire community prior to its construction is among the oldest traditions. Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change explores the twenty-first-century fortunes of planned communities around the world. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, the editors and contributors examine what happened to planned communities after their glory days had passed and they became vulnerable to pressures of growth, change, and even decline. Beginning with Robert Owen's industrial village in Scotland and concluding with Robert Davis's neotraditional resort haven in Florida, this book documents the effort to translate optimal design into sustaining a common life that works for changing circumstances and new generations of residents. Basing their approach on historical research and practical, on-the-ground considerations, the essayists argue that preservation efforts succeed best when they build upon foundational planning principles, address landscape, architecture, and social engineering together, and respect the spirit of place. Presenting twenty-three case studies located in six continents, each contributor considers how to preserve the spirit of the community and its key design elements, and the ways in which those elements can be adapted to contemporary circumstances and changing demographics. Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change espouses strategies to achieve critical resilience and emphasizes the vital connection between heritage preservation, equitable sharing of the benefits of living in these carefully designed places, and sustainable development. Communities: Bat'ovany-Partizánske, Cité Frugès, Colonel Light Gardens, Den-en Chôfu, Garbatella, Greenbelt, Hampstead Garden Suburb, Jardim América, Letchworth Garden City, Menteng, New Lanark, Pacaembú, Radburn, Riverside, Römerstadt, Sabaudia, Seaside, Soweto, Sunnyside Gardens, Tapiola, The Uplands, Welwyn Garden City, Wythenshawe. Contributors: Arnold R. Alanen, Carlos Roberto Monteiro de Andrade, Sandra Annunziata, Robert Freestone, Christine Garnaut, Isabelle Gournay, Michael Hebbert, Susan R. Henderson, James Hopkins, Steven W. Hurtt, Alena Kubova-Gauché, Jean-François Lejeune, Maria Cristina a Silva Leme, Larry McCann, Mervyn Miller, John Minnery, Angel David Nieves, John J. Pittari, Jr., Gilles Ragot, David Schuyler, Mary Corbin Sies, Christopher Silver, André Sorensen, R. Bruce Stephenson, Shun-ichi J. Watanabe.
Download or read book Pevsner The BBC Years written by Stephen Games and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pevsner: The BBC Years gives the first full account of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s engagement with the BBC at a time when both were the dominant institutions in their own fields -- Pevsner as the most persuasive figure in architecture and art history, the BBC as the country's sole broadcaster. A German emigré, Pevsner was not at first trusted to speak on the air, and was only invited to appear at the very end of the war, in spite of his growing eminence in academia and publishing. With the arrival of the Third Programme in 1946, however, he quickly became a broadcasting celebrity, and one whom senior BBC figures regarded as essential and novel listening. Pevsner: The BBC Years looks at the sudden rise in Pevsner’s standing at the BBC, at what he was admired for, and at the circumstances surrounding his being commissioned, in the mid-1950s, to give the first series of Reith Lectures on an arts subject -- the relationship between visual expression and national identity. The book explains the roles played by Geoffrey Grigson, Basil Taylor, Anna Kallin and Leonie Cohn in advancing Pevsner's BBC career, analyses the literary character of his broadcasting, and considers the function of his talks as an extension of European belletrism. It also demonstrates the significance of his concurrent editorship of the King Penguin series of books. In addition, Pevsner: The BBC Years documents the unravelling of Pevsner's reputation. It shows how he was caught between changing fashions in media culture and damaged by doubts about the safety of his ideas, both within the BBC and, externally, among British conservatives who found him too radical and American radicals who found him too conservative. In Pevsner: The BBC Years, correspondence from the BBC’s archives provides a case study of scholarly thought being exposed to independent scrutiny -- a process with lessons for today.
Download or read book The Festival of Britain written by Harriet Atkinson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Festival of Britain in 1951 transformed the way people saw their war-ravaged nation. Giving Britons an intimate experience of contemporary design and modern building, it helped them accept a landscape under reconstruction, and brought hope of a better world to come. Drawing on previously unseen sketches and plans, photographs and interviews, The Festival of Britain: A Land and Its People travels beyond the Festival's spectacular centrepiece at London's South Bank, to show how the Festival made the whole country an exhibition ground with events to which hundreds of the country's greatest architects, artists and designers contributed. It explores exhibitions in Poplar, Battersea and South Kensington in London; Belfast, Glasgow and Wales; a touring show carried on four lorries and another aboard an ex-aircraft carrier. It reveals how all these exhibitions and also plays, poetry, art and films commissioned for the Festival had a single focus: to unite 'the land and people of Britain'.
Download or read book Getty Research Journal No 2 written by Thomas W. Gaehtgens and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2010-04-05 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the second volume in the annual publication that showcases the work of the Getty Research Institute. This annual publication showcases work by scholars and staff associated with the Getty Research Institute and the other programs of the prestigious J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Journal offers peer reviewed essays that focus on an object or aspect of the Getty's extensive archival, rare book, and artistic holdings or that relate to the annual research themes of the Research Institute and the Getty Villa. It also presents a selection of short, dynamic pieces about new acquisitions, scholarly activities, and ongoing projects at the Getty.
Download or read book Nikolaus Pevsner written by Susie Harries and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-08-18 with total page 884 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born Nikolai Pewsner into a Russian-Jewish family in Leipzig in 1902, Nikolaus Pevsner was a dedicated scholar who pursued a promising career as an academic in Dresden and Göttingen. When, in 1933 Jews were no longer permitted to teach in German universities, he lost his job and looked for employment in England. Here, over a long and amazingly industrious career, he made himself an authority on the exploration and enjoyment of English art and architecture, so much so that his magisterial county-by-county series of 46 books on The Buildings of England (first published 1951 - 74) is usually referred to simply as 'Pevsner'. As a critic, academic and champion of Modernism, Pevsner became a central figure in the architectural consensus that accompanied post-war reconstruction; as a 'general practitioner' of architectural history, he covered an astonishing range, from Gothic cathedrals and Georgian coffee houses to the Festival of Britain and Brutalist tower blocks. Susie Harries explores the truth about Nikolaus Pevsner's reported sympathies with elements of Nazi ideology, his internment in England as an enemy alien and his sometimes painful assimilation into his country of exile. His Heftchen - secret diaries he kept from the age of 14 for another sixty years - reveal hidden aspirations and anxieties, as do his numerous letters (he wrote to his wife, Lola, every day that they were apart).Harries is the first biographer to have read Pevsner's private papers and, through them, to have seen into the workings of his mind.Her definitive biography is not only rich in context and far-ranging, but is also brought to life by quotations from Pevsner himself. He was born a Jew but converted to Lutheranism; trained in the rigour of German scholarship, he became an Everyman in his copious commissions, publications, broadcasts and lectures on art, architecture, design, education, town planning, social housing, conservation, Mannerism, the Bauhaus, the Victorians, Zeitgeist, Englishness and how a nation's character may, or must, be reflected in its art. His life - as an outsider yet an insider at the heart of English art history - illuminates both the predicament and the prowess of the continental émigrés who did so much to shape British culture after 1945.
Download or read book Alternative Visions of Post War Reconstruction written by John Pendlebury and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-19 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of post Second World War reconstruction has recently become an important field of research around the world; Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction is a provocative work that questions the orthodoxies of twentieth century design history. This book provides a key critical statement on mid-twentieth century urban design and city planning, focused principally upon the period between the start of the Second World War to the mid-sixties. The various figures and currents covered here represent a largely overlooked field within the history of 20th century urbanism. In this period while certain modernist practices assumed an institutional role for post-war reconstruction and flourished into the mainstream, such practices also faced opposition and criticism leading to the production of alternative visions and strategies. Spanning from a historically-informed modernism to the increasing presence of urban conservation the contributors examine these alternative approaches to the city and its architecture.
Download or read book The City in the City written by Amy Thomas and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-12-26 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the dramatic transformation of London’s financial district after 1945, viewed at four spatial scales: city, street, facade, interior. In The City in the City, Amy Thomas offers the first in-depth architectural and urban history of London’s financial district, the City of London, from the period of rebuilding after World War II to the explosive climax of financial deregulation in the 1980s and its long aftermath. Thomas examines abstract financial ideas, political ideology, and invisible markets as concrete realities; working on four spatial scales—city, street, facade, and interior—the book explores the grand plans, hidden alleys, neo-Georgian elevations, and sweaty dealing floors that have made the financial center work. Moving from politics to sociology, institutions to bodies, development plans to office desks, Thomas unravels the rich entanglements between the structure of the UK’s financial system and the structure of the environment in which it operates. Despite its physical and political centrality, this period of the City’s architectural history occupies an academic lacuna. Longstanding prejudices about developer-led architecture and the real estate industry have obscured the postwar City’s relevance. The book shows how, as currents of local government reform, nation-building, and globalization swept across Britain, the City became an ideological battleground for debates between politicians and financial institutions, real estate developers and architects, preservationists and so-called “proactive” planners throughout the latter half of the century. The City of London is a place steeped in rich cultural and architectural heritage of immense national significance, yet it is also a highly privileged citadel at the core of global financial networks. The City in the City is both a critique and a celebration of this unique and complex place.
Download or read book Getty Research Journal No 4 written by Thomas W. Gaehtgens and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Getty Research Journal showcases the remarkable original research underway at the Getty. Articles explore the rich collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum and Research Institute, as well as the Research Institute's research projects and annual theme of its scholar program. Shorter texts highlight new acquisitions and discoveries in the collections, and focus on the diverse tools for scholarship being developed at the Research Institute. This issue includes essays by Scott Allan, Adriano Amendola, Valérie Bajou, Alessia Frassani, Alden R. Gordon, Natilee Harren, Sigrid Hofer, Christopher R. Lakey, Vimalin Rujivacharakul, and David Saunders; the short texts examine a Nuremberg festival book, translations of a seventeenth-century rhyming inventory, the print innovations of Maria Sibylla Merian, Karl Schneider's Sears designs, Clement Greenberg's copy of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the Marcia Tucker papers, a mail art project by William Pope.L, the L.A. Art Girls' reinvention of Allan Kaprow's Fluids, and Jennifer Bornstein's investigations into the archives of women performance artists.
