Author: Charles Rice
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262048337
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 218
Book Description
How the rise of the large-scale atrium space in the 1970s and ’80s changed the way buildings could be designed, constructed, regulated, and occupied. In the 1970s, a void opened at the heart of architecture. In hotels, offices, public buildings, and commercial centers, the atrium emerged globally to challenge the modernist legacies of form and function, altering the pattern and experience of cities. While often appearing at vast scale and to striking effect, the atrium also became omnipresent and mundane. In this lively critique, Charles Rice charts the atrium’s appearance in the 1970s and its development through the 1980s, as it accompanied profound shifts in the discipline and practice of architecture. During this period, architectural practice especially in the United States and United Kingdom was changing rapidly, due in part to the manifold effects of deregulation. All aspects of the way buildings were designed, developed, regulated, built, managed, and occupied were being reshaped. A practice guided by the progressive tenets of modernism was being turned into a professional service fully integrated within neoliberal social and economic imperatives. As Rice shows, the atrium gives this story a distinct spatial and material figure, one that offers an inside view of architecture in transformation.
Demolishing Whitehall
Author: Adam Sharr
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351945254
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 502
Book Description
This book is about a lost world, albeit one less than 50 years old. It is the story of a grand plan to demolish most of Whitehall, London’s historic government district, and replace it with a ziggurat-section megastructure built in concrete. In 1965 the architect Leslie Martin submitted a proposal to Charles Pannell, Minister of Public Building and Works in Harold Wilson’s Labour government, for the wholesale reconstruction of London’s ’Government Centre’. Still reeling from war damage, its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century palaces stood as the patched-up headquarters of an imperial bureaucracy which had once dominated the globe. Martin’s plan - by no means modest in conception, scope or scale - proposed their replacement with a complex that would span the roads into Parliament Square, reframing the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. The project was not executed in the manner envisaged by Martin and his associates, although a surprising number of its proposals were implemented. But the un-built architecture is examined here for its insights into a distinctive moment in British history, when a purposeful technological future seemed not just possible but imminent, apparently sweeping away an anachronistic Edwardian establishment to be replaced with a new meritocracy forged in the ’white heat of technology’. The Whitehall plan had implications well beyond its specific site. It was imagined by its architects as a scientific investigation into ideal building forms for the future, an important development in their project to unify science and art. For the political actors, it represented a tussle between government departments, between those who believed that Britain needed to discard much of its Victorian and Edwardian decoration in the name of ’professionalization’ and those who sought to preserve its ornate finery. Demolishing Whitehall investigates these tensions between ideas of technology and history, science and art, socialism and el
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351945254
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 502
Book Description
This book is about a lost world, albeit one less than 50 years old. It is the story of a grand plan to demolish most of Whitehall, London’s historic government district, and replace it with a ziggurat-section megastructure built in concrete. In 1965 the architect Leslie Martin submitted a proposal to Charles Pannell, Minister of Public Building and Works in Harold Wilson’s Labour government, for the wholesale reconstruction of London’s ’Government Centre’. Still reeling from war damage, its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century palaces stood as the patched-up headquarters of an imperial bureaucracy which had once dominated the globe. Martin’s plan - by no means modest in conception, scope or scale - proposed their replacement with a complex that would span the roads into Parliament Square, reframing the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. The project was not executed in the manner envisaged by Martin and his associates, although a surprising number of its proposals were implemented. But the un-built architecture is examined here for its insights into a distinctive moment in British history, when a purposeful technological future seemed not just possible but imminent, apparently sweeping away an anachronistic Edwardian establishment to be replaced with a new meritocracy forged in the ’white heat of technology’. The Whitehall plan had implications well beyond its specific site. It was imagined by its architects as a scientific investigation into ideal building forms for the future, an important development in their project to unify science and art. For the political actors, it represented a tussle between government departments, between those who believed that Britain needed to discard much of its Victorian and Edwardian decoration in the name of ’professionalization’ and those who sought to preserve its ornate finery. Demolishing Whitehall investigates these tensions between ideas of technology and history, science and art, socialism and el
Atrium
Author: Charles Rice
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262048337
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 218
Book Description
How the rise of the large-scale atrium space in the 1970s and ’80s changed the way buildings could be designed, constructed, regulated, and occupied. In the 1970s, a void opened at the heart of architecture. In hotels, offices, public buildings, and commercial centers, the atrium emerged globally to challenge the modernist legacies of form and function, altering the pattern and experience of cities. While often appearing at vast scale and to striking effect, the atrium also became omnipresent and mundane. In this lively critique, Charles Rice charts the atrium’s appearance in the 1970s and its development through the 1980s, as it accompanied profound shifts in the discipline and practice of architecture. During this period, architectural practice especially in the United States and United Kingdom was changing rapidly, due in part to the manifold effects of deregulation. All aspects of the way buildings were designed, developed, regulated, built, managed, and occupied were being reshaped. A practice guided by the progressive tenets of modernism was being turned into a professional service fully integrated within neoliberal social and economic imperatives. As Rice shows, the atrium gives this story a distinct spatial and material figure, one that offers an inside view of architecture in transformation.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262048337
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 218
Book Description
How the rise of the large-scale atrium space in the 1970s and ’80s changed the way buildings could be designed, constructed, regulated, and occupied. In the 1970s, a void opened at the heart of architecture. In hotels, offices, public buildings, and commercial centers, the atrium emerged globally to challenge the modernist legacies of form and function, altering the pattern and experience of cities. While often appearing at vast scale and to striking effect, the atrium also became omnipresent and mundane. In this lively critique, Charles Rice charts the atrium’s appearance in the 1970s and its development through the 1980s, as it accompanied profound shifts in the discipline and practice of architecture. During this period, architectural practice especially in the United States and United Kingdom was changing rapidly, due in part to the manifold effects of deregulation. All aspects of the way buildings were designed, developed, regulated, built, managed, and occupied were being reshaped. A practice guided by the progressive tenets of modernism was being turned into a professional service fully integrated within neoliberal social and economic imperatives. As Rice shows, the atrium gives this story a distinct spatial and material figure, one that offers an inside view of architecture in transformation.
Afterlives of Abandoned Work
Author: Matthew Harle
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 1501339427
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Book Description
Afterlives of Abandoned Work considers the relevance of unfinished projects to literary history and criticism, looking beyond famous posthumous work to investigate the abandoned everyday, from scrapped plans and rejected ideas to half-written novels or unfinished artistic works. It traces how the reading of abandoned creative endeavor-whether arriving in the form of a rejection letter, a disagreement with a collaborator, or the simple act of walking away from one's desk-can change the way we think about cultural production, the creative process, and the intellectual construction of everyday life. Over five distinct journeys through a variety of archives, from major research libraries to the unique collections of individual enthusiasts, Matthew Harle draws surprising connections between literary studies, media studies, and visual arts, exploring unfinished projects from Thomas Pynchon, Muriel Spark, B.S. Johnson, Harold Pinter, and others. Rooted in literary criticism, Afterlives of Abandoned Work reads unbuilt buildings, unfilmed screenplays, and unpublished novels and radio sketches as forms of text that can help us consider the enduring fragmentation and anecdotal construction of cultural form, as well as expand literary criticism's approach to the archive.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 1501339427
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Book Description
Afterlives of Abandoned Work considers the relevance of unfinished projects to literary history and criticism, looking beyond famous posthumous work to investigate the abandoned everyday, from scrapped plans and rejected ideas to half-written novels or unfinished artistic works. It traces how the reading of abandoned creative endeavor-whether arriving in the form of a rejection letter, a disagreement with a collaborator, or the simple act of walking away from one's desk-can change the way we think about cultural production, the creative process, and the intellectual construction of everyday life. Over five distinct journeys through a variety of archives, from major research libraries to the unique collections of individual enthusiasts, Matthew Harle draws surprising connections between literary studies, media studies, and visual arts, exploring unfinished projects from Thomas Pynchon, Muriel Spark, B.S. Johnson, Harold Pinter, and others. Rooted in literary criticism, Afterlives of Abandoned Work reads unbuilt buildings, unfilmed screenplays, and unpublished novels and radio sketches as forms of text that can help us consider the enduring fragmentation and anecdotal construction of cultural form, as well as expand literary criticism's approach to the archive.
Waterloo Sunrise
Author: John Davis
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691223793
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 600
Book Description
"This is an urban history of London during the pivotal years of the 1960s and 1970s, when the metropolis was transformed from an industrial city that the Victorians might have recognised to an embryonic modern 'world city.' Previous work on London in these years has tended to focus upon the 1960s -in particular the 'Swinging London' phenomenon. Mary Quant, Carnaby Street and the King's Road, Chelsea, all appear in these pages, but it is argued that the 'swinging moment' of the mid-sixties was a passing symptom of a much broader transformation from an industrial to a service-based city, and it is that transformation which this book examines. London is too complex and diverse a city to be comprehended in a simple linear narrative; this book adopts instead an innovative approach to urban history, by which London life and London's transformation are examined through a number of case studies looking at specific themes and areas of the city. Consumerism and the 'experience economy', home ownership and gentrification, deindustrialisation and deprivation, racial tension and unemployment, the attrition of public services and the steady loss of confidence in public agencies - national and local - emerge as overarching themes from the individual case studies in this book. Their combined effect, it is argued, was to prepare the ground for the Britain that Margaret Thatcher is usually held to have created after 1979 - without Thatcher herself having anything to do it"--
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691223793
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 600
Book Description
"This is an urban history of London during the pivotal years of the 1960s and 1970s, when the metropolis was transformed from an industrial city that the Victorians might have recognised to an embryonic modern 'world city.' Previous work on London in these years has tended to focus upon the 1960s -in particular the 'Swinging London' phenomenon. Mary Quant, Carnaby Street and the King's Road, Chelsea, all appear in these pages, but it is argued that the 'swinging moment' of the mid-sixties was a passing symptom of a much broader transformation from an industrial to a service-based city, and it is that transformation which this book examines. London is too complex and diverse a city to be comprehended in a simple linear narrative; this book adopts instead an innovative approach to urban history, by which London life and London's transformation are examined through a number of case studies looking at specific themes and areas of the city. Consumerism and the 'experience economy', home ownership and gentrification, deindustrialisation and deprivation, racial tension and unemployment, the attrition of public services and the steady loss of confidence in public agencies - national and local - emerge as overarching themes from the individual case studies in this book. Their combined effect, it is argued, was to prepare the ground for the Britain that Margaret Thatcher is usually held to have created after 1979 - without Thatcher herself having anything to do it"--
Formulations
Author: Andrew Witt
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262543001
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Book Description
An investigation of mathematics as it was drawn, encoded, imagined, and interpreted by architects on the eve of digitization in the mid-twentieth century. In Formulations, Andrew Witt examines the visual, methodological, and cultural intersections between architecture and mathematics. The linkages Witt explores involve not the mystic transcendence of numbers invoked throughout architectural history, but rather architecture’s encounters with a range of calculational systems—techniques that architects inventively retooled for design. Witt offers a catalog of mid-twentieth-century practices of mathematical drawing and calculation in design that preceded and anticipated digitization as well as an account of the formal compendia that became a cultural currency shared between modern mathematicians and modern architects. Witt presents a series of extensively illustrated “biographies of method”—episodes that chart the myriad ways in which mathematics, particularly the mathematical notion of modeling and drawing, was spliced into the creative practice of design. These include early drawing machines that mechanized curvature; the incorporation of geometric maquettes—“theorems made flesh”—into the toolbox of design; the virtualization of buildings and landscapes through surveyed triangulation and photogrammetry; formal and functional topology; stereoscopic drawing; the economic implications of cubic matrices; and a strange synthesis of the technological, mineral, and biological: crystallographic design. Trained in both architecture and mathematics, Witt uses mathematics as a lens through which to understand the relationship between architecture and a much broader set of sciences and visual techniques. Through an intercultural exchange with other disciplines, he argues, architecture adapted not only the shapes and surfaces of mathematics but also its values and epistemic ideals.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262543001
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Book Description
An investigation of mathematics as it was drawn, encoded, imagined, and interpreted by architects on the eve of digitization in the mid-twentieth century. In Formulations, Andrew Witt examines the visual, methodological, and cultural intersections between architecture and mathematics. The linkages Witt explores involve not the mystic transcendence of numbers invoked throughout architectural history, but rather architecture’s encounters with a range of calculational systems—techniques that architects inventively retooled for design. Witt offers a catalog of mid-twentieth-century practices of mathematical drawing and calculation in design that preceded and anticipated digitization as well as an account of the formal compendia that became a cultural currency shared between modern mathematicians and modern architects. Witt presents a series of extensively illustrated “biographies of method”—episodes that chart the myriad ways in which mathematics, particularly the mathematical notion of modeling and drawing, was spliced into the creative practice of design. These include early drawing machines that mechanized curvature; the incorporation of geometric maquettes—“theorems made flesh”—into the toolbox of design; the virtualization of buildings and landscapes through surveyed triangulation and photogrammetry; formal and functional topology; stereoscopic drawing; the economic implications of cubic matrices; and a strange synthesis of the technological, mineral, and biological: crystallographic design. Trained in both architecture and mathematics, Witt uses mathematics as a lens through which to understand the relationship between architecture and a much broader set of sciences and visual techniques. Through an intercultural exchange with other disciplines, he argues, architecture adapted not only the shapes and surfaces of mathematics but also its values and epistemic ideals.
Calendar of State Papers
Author: Great Britain. Public Record Office
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 776
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 776
Book Description
After the Armistice
Author: Michael J. K. Walsh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000389979
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267
Book Description
A century after the Armistice and the associated peace agreements that formally ended the Great War, many issues pertaining to the UK and its empire are yet to be satisfactorily resolved. Accordingly, this volume presents a multi-disciplinary approach to better understanding the post-Armistice Empire across a broad spectrum of disciplines, geographies and chronologies. Through the lens of diplomatic, social, cultural, historical and economic analysis, the chapters engage with the histories of Lagos and Tonga, Cyprus and China, as well as more obvious geographies of empire such as Ireland, India and Australia. Though globally diverse, and encompassing much of the post-Armistice century, the studies are nevertheless united by three common themes: the interrogation of that transitionary ‘moment’ after the Armistice that lingered well beyond the final Treaty of Lausanne in 1924; the utilisation of new research methods and avenues of enquiry to compliment extant debates concerning the legacies of colonialism and nationalism; and the common leitmotif of the British Empire in all its political and cultural complexity. The centenary of the Armistice offers a timely occasion on which to present these studies.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000389979
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267
Book Description
A century after the Armistice and the associated peace agreements that formally ended the Great War, many issues pertaining to the UK and its empire are yet to be satisfactorily resolved. Accordingly, this volume presents a multi-disciplinary approach to better understanding the post-Armistice Empire across a broad spectrum of disciplines, geographies and chronologies. Through the lens of diplomatic, social, cultural, historical and economic analysis, the chapters engage with the histories of Lagos and Tonga, Cyprus and China, as well as more obvious geographies of empire such as Ireland, India and Australia. Though globally diverse, and encompassing much of the post-Armistice century, the studies are nevertheless united by three common themes: the interrogation of that transitionary ‘moment’ after the Armistice that lingered well beyond the final Treaty of Lausanne in 1924; the utilisation of new research methods and avenues of enquiry to compliment extant debates concerning the legacies of colonialism and nationalism; and the common leitmotif of the British Empire in all its political and cultural complexity. The centenary of the Armistice offers a timely occasion on which to present these studies.
Inventing the Built Environment
Author: Juliana Yat Shun Kei
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040047270
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 182
Book Description
Why and how was the term ‘built environment’ first introduced? Inventing the Built Environment retrieves the origin of this ubiquitous term. The articulation of the ‘built environment,’ Kei demonstrates, coincided with the redefinition of education, research, and professional practices in architecture and town planning in 1960s Britain. Concentrating on the half-decade during which the term permeated the architectural and planning professions, this book recalls a time when the ‘built environment’ was conceived as a part of the British government’s effort in national economic planning. Inventing the Built Environment unpacks the proposal for a Research Council for the Built Environment to mobilise architecture and town planning for political economy. How a relatively small group of architects, planners, politicians, and researchers transposed scientific thoughts from biology, economics, and computation into the ‘built environment’ will be considered, too. Kei highlights the assumptions about and classification of the population that were made when inventing the ‘built environment.’ The architectural and biosocial implications of the making and remaking of this architectural-environmental notion, in Britain and beyond, will be revealed through the works of pre-eminent architect-planners including Richard Llewelyn-Davies and William Holford. At a time when environmental concerns again take the front seat of architectural and planning debates, this book offers, for scholars and students, an alternative lens to reflect on the assumptions and bias that can be embedded in our architectural lexicons.
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040047270
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 182
Book Description
Why and how was the term ‘built environment’ first introduced? Inventing the Built Environment retrieves the origin of this ubiquitous term. The articulation of the ‘built environment,’ Kei demonstrates, coincided with the redefinition of education, research, and professional practices in architecture and town planning in 1960s Britain. Concentrating on the half-decade during which the term permeated the architectural and planning professions, this book recalls a time when the ‘built environment’ was conceived as a part of the British government’s effort in national economic planning. Inventing the Built Environment unpacks the proposal for a Research Council for the Built Environment to mobilise architecture and town planning for political economy. How a relatively small group of architects, planners, politicians, and researchers transposed scientific thoughts from biology, economics, and computation into the ‘built environment’ will be considered, too. Kei highlights the assumptions about and classification of the population that were made when inventing the ‘built environment.’ The architectural and biosocial implications of the making and remaking of this architectural-environmental notion, in Britain and beyond, will be revealed through the works of pre-eminent architect-planners including Richard Llewelyn-Davies and William Holford. At a time when environmental concerns again take the front seat of architectural and planning debates, this book offers, for scholars and students, an alternative lens to reflect on the assumptions and bias that can be embedded in our architectural lexicons.
Peter Moro and Partners
Author: Alistair Fair
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1800855591
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Book Description
Peter Moro is the forgotten co-designer of the Royal Festival Hall. A German émigré who had worked with Berthold Lubetkin’s famed practice, Tecton, in the 1930s, Moro was drafted in to help realise the Festival Hall in just two short years, in time for the Festival of Britain in 1951. With a team of his former students, he created many of the interiors we see today. For Moro, the Festival Hall was a stepping-stone to a career designing many of Britain’s finest post-war theatres, particularly Nottingham Playhouse, Plymouth Theatre Royal, and the renovated Bristol Old Vic. He and his colleagues also designed some exceptional one-off houses, as well as exhibitions, university buildings, schools, and council housing, collaborating with leading talents such as the designer Robin Day. Based on detailed archival research and with stunning new photography, this is the first book devoted to the work of Peter Moro and his colleagues in architectural practice. Ranging from the 1930s to the 1980s, it explores Moro’s belief in a rigorous modern architecture which was both functionally sound and aesthetically rich. It sheds new light on this important body of work, and enriches our understanding of the experience and diversity of modernism in Britain.
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1800855591
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Book Description
Peter Moro is the forgotten co-designer of the Royal Festival Hall. A German émigré who had worked with Berthold Lubetkin’s famed practice, Tecton, in the 1930s, Moro was drafted in to help realise the Festival Hall in just two short years, in time for the Festival of Britain in 1951. With a team of his former students, he created many of the interiors we see today. For Moro, the Festival Hall was a stepping-stone to a career designing many of Britain’s finest post-war theatres, particularly Nottingham Playhouse, Plymouth Theatre Royal, and the renovated Bristol Old Vic. He and his colleagues also designed some exceptional one-off houses, as well as exhibitions, university buildings, schools, and council housing, collaborating with leading talents such as the designer Robin Day. Based on detailed archival research and with stunning new photography, this is the first book devoted to the work of Peter Moro and his colleagues in architectural practice. Ranging from the 1930s to the 1980s, it explores Moro’s belief in a rigorous modern architecture which was both functionally sound and aesthetically rich. It sheds new light on this important body of work, and enriches our understanding of the experience and diversity of modernism in Britain.
Boom Cities
Author: Otto Saumarez Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192573470
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Book Description
Boom Cities is the first published history of the profound transformations of British city centres in the 1960s. It has often been said that urban planners did more damage to Britain's cities than even the Luftwaffe had managed, and this study details the rise and fall of modernist urban planning, revealing its origins and the dissolution of the cross-party consensus, before the ideological smearing that has ever since characterized the high-rise towers, dizzying ring roads, and concrete precincts that were left behind. The rebuilding of British city centres during the 1960s drastically affected the built form of urban Britain, including places ranging from traditional cathedral cities through to the decaying towns of the industrial revolution. Boom Cities uncovers both the planning philosophy, and the political, cultural, and legislative background that created the conditions for these processes to occur across the country. Boom Cities reveals the role of architect-planners in these transformations. The volume also provides an unconventional account of the end of modernist approaches to the built environment, showing it from the perspective of planning and policy elites, rather than through the emergence of public opposition to planning.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192573470
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Book Description
Boom Cities is the first published history of the profound transformations of British city centres in the 1960s. It has often been said that urban planners did more damage to Britain's cities than even the Luftwaffe had managed, and this study details the rise and fall of modernist urban planning, revealing its origins and the dissolution of the cross-party consensus, before the ideological smearing that has ever since characterized the high-rise towers, dizzying ring roads, and concrete precincts that were left behind. The rebuilding of British city centres during the 1960s drastically affected the built form of urban Britain, including places ranging from traditional cathedral cities through to the decaying towns of the industrial revolution. Boom Cities uncovers both the planning philosophy, and the political, cultural, and legislative background that created the conditions for these processes to occur across the country. Boom Cities reveals the role of architect-planners in these transformations. The volume also provides an unconventional account of the end of modernist approaches to the built environment, showing it from the perspective of planning and policy elites, rather than through the emergence of public opposition to planning.