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This study reassesses modern architecture and town planning in mid-twentieth-century England, highlighting ideas and debates that were in circulation as modernist ideals gradually took root. The book reveals an architectural culture that was serious, active, and visionary, with impact that extended into the postwar years. Through close studies of specific works and writings, the author acknowledges the importance of the international context of modern architecture as it intersected with the variety of narratives that defined English modernism, such as national identity, the New Empiricism, and the picturesque, taking into account the large community of émigré architects who settled in Engl...
The 21st century has seen a surge of interest in English art of the interwar years. Women artists, such as Winifred Knights, Frances Hodgkins and Evelyn Dunbar, have come to the fore, while familiar names Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and Stanley Spencer have reached new audiences. High-profile exhibitions have attracted recordbreaking visitor numbers and challenged received opinion. In The Real and the Romantic, Frances Spalding, one of Britains leading art historians and critics, takes a fresh and timely look at this rich period in English art. The devastation of the First World War left the art world decentred and directionless. This book is about its recovery. Spalding explores how exciting ...
The first detailed study of the major programme of theatre-building in Britain between the 1950s and the 1980s, Modern Playhouses draws on a vast range of archival material to present the history of post-war theatre buildings as a history of ideas relating not only to performance but also to culture, citizenship, and the modern city.
Visioning Technologies brings together a collection of texts from leading theorists to examine how architecture has been, and is, reframed and restructured by the visual and theoretical frameworks introduced by different ‘technologies of sight’ – understood to include orthographic projection, perspective drawing, telescopic devices, photography, film and computer visualization, amongst others. Each chapter deals with its own area and historical period of expertise, organized sequentially to mark out and analyse the historical evolution of how architecture has been transformed by technologically induced shifts in human perception from the 15th century until today. This book underlines the way in which architectural forms and design processes have developed historically in conjunction with the systems of sight we manufacture technologically and suggests this continues today. Paradoxically, it is premised on the argument that these technological systems tend, in their initial formulations, to obtain ever greater realism in our visualizations of the physical world.
11 Post- tradition in Japanese culture -- Heritage -- 12 Industrial architecture -- 13 Landscape architecture -- 14 Middle- class housing -- Memory -- 15 Cultural institutions -- 16 Architectural photography -- Conservation -- 17 Laws and regulations -- 18 Technology -- Economy -- 19 Economic analysis -- Index of places -- Index of names
Barbed-Wire Matinee -- Five Shots -- Fire and Crystal -- The Rescuers -- Sunset Train -- The Basement and the Judge -- Spy Fever -- Nightmare Mill -- The Misted Isle -- The University of Barbed Wire -- The Vigil -- The Suicide Consultancy -- Into the Crucible -- The First Goodbyes -- Love and Paranoia -- The Heiress -- Art and Justice -- Home for Christmas? -- The Isle of Forgotten Men -- A Spy Cornered -- Return to the Mill -- The Final Trial.
Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew were pioneers of Modern Architecture in Britain and its former colonies from the late 1920s through to the early 1970s. As a barometer of twentieth century architecture, their work traces the major cultural developments of that century from the development of modernism, its spread into the late-colonial arena and finally, to its re-evaluation that resulted in a more expressive, formalist approach in the post-war era. This book thoroughly examines Fry and Drew's highly influential 'Tropical Architecture' in West Africa and India, whilst also discussing their British work, such as their post World War II projects for the Festival of Britain, Harlow New Town, Pilkington Brothers’ Headquarters and Coychurch Crematorium. It highlights the collaborative nature of Fry and Drew's work, including schemes undertaken with Elizabeth Denby, Walter Gropius, Denys Lasdun, Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier. Positioning their architecture, writing and educational endeavours within a wider context, this book illustrates the significant artistic and cultural contributions made by Fry and Drew throughout their lengthy careers.
Designs on Democracy examines a pivotal period in the formation of the modern profession of architecture in Britain. It shows how architects sought to meet the newly articulated demands of a mass democracy in the wake of the First World War. It does so by providing a vivid picture of architectural culture in interwar London, the Imperial metropolis, drawing on histories of design, practice, professionalism, and representation. Most accounts of this period tend to deal exclusively with the emergence of Modernism; this study takes a different approach, encompassing a much broader perspective on the liberal professional consensus that held sway, including architecture's mainstream and its so-ca...
Design Strategies for Reimagining the City is situated between projective geometry, optical science and architectural design. It draws together seemingly unrelated fields in a series of new digital design tools and techniques underpinned by tested prototypes. The book reveals how the relationship between architectural design and the ubiquitous urban camera can be used to question established structures of control and ownership inherent within the visual model of the Western canon. Using key moments from the broad trajectory of historical and contemporary representational mechanisms and techniques, it describes the image’s impact on city form from the inception of linear perspective geometr...
An essential examination of how emigration and resettlement defined modernism In the fraught years leading up to World War II, many modern artists and architects emigrated from continental Europe to the United States and Britain. The experience of exile infused their modernist ideas with new urgency and forced them to use certain materials in place of others, modify existing works, and reconsider their approach to design itself. In Objects in Exile, Robin Schuldenfrei reveals how the process of migration was crucial to the development of modernism, charting how modern art and architecture was shaped by the need to constantly face—and transcend—the materiality of things. Taking readers fr...