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In the eighteenth century, geology discovered the unfathomable depths of time and the sciences sought to place every organism on a timeline. Just as the earth acquired a history, architecture and art found ways of locating themselves in a perspective that vanishes in the anthropocene, urging fresh inquiry into artistic perception.
An illuminating look at a fundamental yet understudied aspect of Italian Renaissance painting The Italian Renaissance picture is renowned for its depiction of the human figure, from the dramatic foreshortening of the body to create depth to the subtle blending of tones and colors to achieve greater naturalism. Yet these techniques rely on a powerful compositional element that often goes overlooked. Groundwork provides the first in-depth examination of the complex relationship between figure and ground in Renaissance painting. “Ground” can refer to the preparation of a work’s surface, the fictive floor or plane, or the background on which figuration occurs. In laying the material founda...
Fractal analysis is a method for measuring, analysing and comparing the formal or geometric properties of complex objects. In this book it is used to investigate eighty-five buildings that have been designed by some of the twentieth-century’s most respected and celebrated architects. Including designs by Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Venturi, Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier and Kazuyo Sejima amongst others, this book uses mathematics to analyse arguments and theories about some of the world’s most famous designs. Starting with 625 reconstructed architectural plans and elevations, and including more than 200 specially prepared views of famous buildings, this book presents the results of the largest mathematical study ever undertaken into architectural design and the largest single application of fractal analysis presented in any field. The data derived from this study is used to test three overarching hypotheses about social, stylistic and personal trends in design, along with five celebrated arguments about twentieth-century architecture. Through this process the book offers a unique mathematical insight into the history and theory of design.
This groundbreaking study examines the intricate relationship between the rise of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie and the emergence of modern architecture, exploring this connection through major intellectual and theoretical works while also analyzing their tangible manifestations in buildings and architectural projects. Contrary to received narratives that describe the birth of modern architecture as primarily an aesthetic movement, Ornament and Class argues that the social and political maturation of the European bourgeoisie as a distinct-yet-heterogeneous group influenced modern attitudes toward architecture at every level. Bringing architecture into conversation with recent histories ...
The first English-language overview of the contributions to Renaissance architectural culture of northern Italian architect Vincenzo Scamozzi (1548-1616), this book introduces Anglophone architects and historians to a little-known figure from a period that is recognized as one of the most productive and influential in the Western architectural tradition. Ann Marie Borys presents Vincenzo Scamozzi as a traveler and an observer, the first Western architect to respond to the changing shape of the world in the Age of Discovery. Pointing out his familiarity with the expansion of knowledge in both natural history and geography, she highlights that his truly unique contribution was to make geography and cartography central to the knowledge of the architect. In so doing, she argues that he articulated the first fully realized theory of place. Showing how geographic thinking influences his output, Borys demonstrates that although Scamozzi's work was conceived within an established tradition, it was also influenced by major cultural changes occurring in the late 16th century.
The first title in a new series aimed at sharing best practices in the conservation of modern heritage. This timely volume brings together fourteen case studies that address the challenges of conserving the twentieth century’s most ubiquitous building material—concrete. Following a meeting of international heritage conservation professionals in 2013, the need for recent, thorough, and well-vetted case studies on conserving twentieth-century heritage became clear. Concrete: Case Studies in Conservation Practice answers that need and kicks off a new series, Conserving Modern Heritage, aimed at sharing best practices. The projects selected represent a range of building typologies, building ...
The London architectural firm Wilkinson Eyre Architects, founded in 1983, has been drawing attention since the 1990s with its wealth of innovative and imaginative designs - notably its spectacular and structurally ambitious bridges. The best-known and most highly acclaimed are the Gateshead Millennium Bridge (2001) and the Floral Street Bridge (2003). The firm has won many prizes, including the RIBA Stirling Prize twice. It has also demonstrated the increasingly international scope of its activities by entering the competitions for the Guangzhou West Tower in China and the Tensegrity Bridge in Washington DC, USA. This book offers detailed documentation of some 15 structures and projects, with special attention paid to the context of each design. The projects presented include the Stirling Prize-winning Magna Centre in Rotherham, UK; the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea, UK; the Guangzhou West Tower in China; and the Gatwick Airbridge, UK, among others.
Photography of art has served as a basis for the reconstruction of works of art and as a vehicle for the dissemination and reinterpretation of art. This book provides the first definitive treatment of the subject, with essays from noted authorities in the fields of art history, architecture, and photography. The essays explore the many meanings of photography as documentation for the art historian, inspiration for the artist, and as a means of critical interpretation of works of art. Art History Through the Camera's Lens will be important reading for students, historians, librarians, and curators of the visual arts.
In this issue of Engramma: Giulia Zanon’s Zooming Mnemosyne deals with the use of details in Warburg’s Bilderatlas, Monica Centanni’s Collateral effects of the “visibile parlare” (Dante, Pg. X, v. 95) reconstructs the hypothesis of a visual model for the legend of Trajan’s Justice, according to Warburg intuition about it; this contribution is connected of the paper by Filippo Perfetti’s Dante, Botticelli, and Trajan. An Open Note where the author investigates how Botticelli could have come to know that the bas-relief of the Arch of Constantine liberatori urbis was related to an episode in Trajan's life”. The focus of this issue is then extended to Warburg's cultural environme...