Author: Elain Harwood
Publisher: Batsford Books
ISBN: 1849947570
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 475
Book Description
Leading expert and passionate advocate of modern British architecture Elain Harwood gives the best overview of British architecture from 1938 to 1963 – mid-century buildings. Growing in popularity and with an increasing understanding of their importance as a background to our lives, the buildings range from the Royal Festival Hall, Newcastle City Hall and to Deal Pier and Douglas ferry terminal, from prefabs and ice cream parlours to Coventry Cathedral and the Golden Lane Estate. The author writes in non-technical, layman's language about the design, architecture and also the influence of these buildings on the lives of our towns and cities. The author has arranged the huge variety of buildings into: Houses and Flats: Churches and Public Buildings; Offices; Shops; Showrooms and Cafes; Hotels and Public Houses; Cinemas, Theatres and Concert Halls; Industrial Buildings and Transport. There is an insightful introduction that places these buildings in the context of 20th-century architecture generally and globally. All fantastically photographed to make this a must have for anyone interested in our built heritage. Postwar Britain architects often saw architecture as a powerful means to improve the quality of our lives after the shadow of war. This is the fascinating story of what they built to meet that challenge. Cover illustration by Paul Catherall
Mid-Century Britain
Author: Elain Harwood
Publisher: Batsford Books
ISBN: 1849947570
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 475
Book Description
Leading expert and passionate advocate of modern British architecture Elain Harwood gives the best overview of British architecture from 1938 to 1963 – mid-century buildings. Growing in popularity and with an increasing understanding of their importance as a background to our lives, the buildings range from the Royal Festival Hall, Newcastle City Hall and to Deal Pier and Douglas ferry terminal, from prefabs and ice cream parlours to Coventry Cathedral and the Golden Lane Estate. The author writes in non-technical, layman's language about the design, architecture and also the influence of these buildings on the lives of our towns and cities. The author has arranged the huge variety of buildings into: Houses and Flats: Churches and Public Buildings; Offices; Shops; Showrooms and Cafes; Hotels and Public Houses; Cinemas, Theatres and Concert Halls; Industrial Buildings and Transport. There is an insightful introduction that places these buildings in the context of 20th-century architecture generally and globally. All fantastically photographed to make this a must have for anyone interested in our built heritage. Postwar Britain architects often saw architecture as a powerful means to improve the quality of our lives after the shadow of war. This is the fascinating story of what they built to meet that challenge. Cover illustration by Paul Catherall
Publisher: Batsford Books
ISBN: 1849947570
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 475
Book Description
Leading expert and passionate advocate of modern British architecture Elain Harwood gives the best overview of British architecture from 1938 to 1963 – mid-century buildings. Growing in popularity and with an increasing understanding of their importance as a background to our lives, the buildings range from the Royal Festival Hall, Newcastle City Hall and to Deal Pier and Douglas ferry terminal, from prefabs and ice cream parlours to Coventry Cathedral and the Golden Lane Estate. The author writes in non-technical, layman's language about the design, architecture and also the influence of these buildings on the lives of our towns and cities. The author has arranged the huge variety of buildings into: Houses and Flats: Churches and Public Buildings; Offices; Shops; Showrooms and Cafes; Hotels and Public Houses; Cinemas, Theatres and Concert Halls; Industrial Buildings and Transport. There is an insightful introduction that places these buildings in the context of 20th-century architecture generally and globally. All fantastically photographed to make this a must have for anyone interested in our built heritage. Postwar Britain architects often saw architecture as a powerful means to improve the quality of our lives after the shadow of war. This is the fascinating story of what they built to meet that challenge. Cover illustration by Paul Catherall
Sandfuture
Author: Justin Beal
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262367181
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
An account of the life and work of the architect Minoru Yamasaki that leads the author to consider how (and for whom) architectural history is written. Sandfuture is a book about the life of the architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986), who remains on the margins of history despite the enormous influence of his work on American architecture and society. That Yamasaki’s most famous projects—the Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis and the original World Trade Center in New York—were both destroyed on national television, thirty years apart, makes his relative obscurity all the more remarkable. Sandfuture is also a book about an artist interrogating art and architecture’s role in culture as New York changes drastically after a decade bracketed by terrorism and natural disaster. From the central thread of Yamasaki’s life, Sandfuture spirals outward to include reflections on a wide range of subjects, from the figure of the architect in literature and film and transformations in the contemporary art market to the perils of sick buildings and the broader social and political implications of how, and for whom, cities are built. The result is at once sophisticated in its understanding of material culture and novelistic in its telling of a good story.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262367181
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
An account of the life and work of the architect Minoru Yamasaki that leads the author to consider how (and for whom) architectural history is written. Sandfuture is a book about the life of the architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986), who remains on the margins of history despite the enormous influence of his work on American architecture and society. That Yamasaki’s most famous projects—the Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis and the original World Trade Center in New York—were both destroyed on national television, thirty years apart, makes his relative obscurity all the more remarkable. Sandfuture is also a book about an artist interrogating art and architecture’s role in culture as New York changes drastically after a decade bracketed by terrorism and natural disaster. From the central thread of Yamasaki’s life, Sandfuture spirals outward to include reflections on a wide range of subjects, from the figure of the architect in literature and film and transformations in the contemporary art market to the perils of sick buildings and the broader social and political implications of how, and for whom, cities are built. The result is at once sophisticated in its understanding of material culture and novelistic in its telling of a good story.
Red Britain
Author: Matthew Taunton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192549936
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Book Description
Red Britain sets out a provocative rethinking of the cultural politics of mid-century Britain by drawing attention to the extent, diversity, and longevity of the cultural effects of the Russian Revolution. Drawing on new archival research and historical scholarship, this book explores the conceptual, discursive, and formal reverberations of the Bolshevik Revolution in British literature and culture. It provides new insight into canonical writers including Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Dorothy Richardson, H.G Wells, and Raymond Williams, as well bringing to attention a cast of less-studied writers, intellectuals, journalists, and visitors to the Soviet Union. Red Britain shows that the cultural resonances of the Russian Revolution are more far-reaching and various than has previously been acknowledged. Each of the five chapters takes as its subject one particular problem or debate, and investigates the ways in which it was politicised as a result of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent development of the Soviet state. The chapters focus on the idea of the future; numbers and arithmetic; law and justice; debates around agriculture and landowning; and finally orality, literacy, and religion. In all of these spheres, Red Britain shows how the medievalist, romantic, oral, pastoral, anarchic, and ethical emphases of English socialism clashed with, and were sometimes overwritten by, futurist, utilitarian, literate, urban, statist, and economistic ideas associated with the Bolshevik Revolution.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192549936
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Book Description
Red Britain sets out a provocative rethinking of the cultural politics of mid-century Britain by drawing attention to the extent, diversity, and longevity of the cultural effects of the Russian Revolution. Drawing on new archival research and historical scholarship, this book explores the conceptual, discursive, and formal reverberations of the Bolshevik Revolution in British literature and culture. It provides new insight into canonical writers including Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Dorothy Richardson, H.G Wells, and Raymond Williams, as well bringing to attention a cast of less-studied writers, intellectuals, journalists, and visitors to the Soviet Union. Red Britain shows that the cultural resonances of the Russian Revolution are more far-reaching and various than has previously been acknowledged. Each of the five chapters takes as its subject one particular problem or debate, and investigates the ways in which it was politicised as a result of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent development of the Soviet state. The chapters focus on the idea of the future; numbers and arithmetic; law and justice; debates around agriculture and landowning; and finally orality, literacy, and religion. In all of these spheres, Red Britain shows how the medievalist, romantic, oral, pastoral, anarchic, and ethical emphases of English socialism clashed with, and were sometimes overwritten by, futurist, utilitarian, literate, urban, statist, and economistic ideas associated with the Bolshevik Revolution.
Effeminate Years
Author: Declan Kavanagh
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611488257
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269
Book Description
Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain investigates the gendered, eroticized, and xenophobic ways in which the controversies in the 1760s surrounding the political figure John Wilkes (1725-97) legitimated some men as political subjects, while forcefully excluding others on the basis of their perceived effeminacy or foreignness. However, this book is not a literary analysis of the Wilkes affair in the 1760s, nor is it a linear account of Wilkes’s political career. Instead, Effeminate Years examines the cultural crisis of effeminacy that made Wilkes’s politicking so appealing. The central theoretical problem that this study addresses is the argument about what is and is not political: where does individual autonomy begin and end? Addressing this question, Kavanagh traces the shaping influence of the discourse of effeminacy in the literature that was generated by Wilkes’s legal and sexual scandals, while, at the same time, he also reads Wilkes’s spectacular drumming up of support as a timely exploitation of the broader cultural crisis of effeminacy during the mid century in Britain. The book begins with the scandals and agitations surrounding Wilkes, and ends with readings of Edmund Burke’s (1729-1797) earliest political writings, which envisage political community—a vision, that Kavanagh argues, is influenced by Wilkes and the effeminate years of the 1760s. Throughout, Kavanagh shows how interlocutors in the political and cultural debates of the mid-eighteenth-century period in Britain, such as Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) and Arthur Murphy (1727-1805), attempt to resolve the problem of effeminate excess. In part, the resolution for Wilkes and Charles Churchill (1731-1764) was to shunt effeminacy onto the sexually non-normative. On the other hand, Burke, in his aesthetic theorization of the beautiful privileges the socially constitutive affects of feeling effeminate. Through an analysis of poetry, fiction, social and economic pamphlets, aesthetic treatises, journalism and correspondences, placed within the latest queer historiography, Kavanagh demonstrates that the mid-century effeminacy crisis served to re-conceive male heterosexuality as the very mark of political legitimacy. Overall, Effeminate Years explores the development of modern ideas of masculinity and the political subject, which are still the basis of debate and argument in our own time.
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611488257
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269
Book Description
Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain investigates the gendered, eroticized, and xenophobic ways in which the controversies in the 1760s surrounding the political figure John Wilkes (1725-97) legitimated some men as political subjects, while forcefully excluding others on the basis of their perceived effeminacy or foreignness. However, this book is not a literary analysis of the Wilkes affair in the 1760s, nor is it a linear account of Wilkes’s political career. Instead, Effeminate Years examines the cultural crisis of effeminacy that made Wilkes’s politicking so appealing. The central theoretical problem that this study addresses is the argument about what is and is not political: where does individual autonomy begin and end? Addressing this question, Kavanagh traces the shaping influence of the discourse of effeminacy in the literature that was generated by Wilkes’s legal and sexual scandals, while, at the same time, he also reads Wilkes’s spectacular drumming up of support as a timely exploitation of the broader cultural crisis of effeminacy during the mid century in Britain. The book begins with the scandals and agitations surrounding Wilkes, and ends with readings of Edmund Burke’s (1729-1797) earliest political writings, which envisage political community—a vision, that Kavanagh argues, is influenced by Wilkes and the effeminate years of the 1760s. Throughout, Kavanagh shows how interlocutors in the political and cultural debates of the mid-eighteenth-century period in Britain, such as Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) and Arthur Murphy (1727-1805), attempt to resolve the problem of effeminate excess. In part, the resolution for Wilkes and Charles Churchill (1731-1764) was to shunt effeminacy onto the sexually non-normative. On the other hand, Burke, in his aesthetic theorization of the beautiful privileges the socially constitutive affects of feeling effeminate. Through an analysis of poetry, fiction, social and economic pamphlets, aesthetic treatises, journalism and correspondences, placed within the latest queer historiography, Kavanagh demonstrates that the mid-century effeminacy crisis served to re-conceive male heterosexuality as the very mark of political legitimacy. Overall, Effeminate Years explores the development of modern ideas of masculinity and the political subject, which are still the basis of debate and argument in our own time.
Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature
Author: Megan Faragher
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192898973
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
Whereas modernist writers lauded the consecrated realm of subjective interiority, mid-century writers were engrossed by the materialization of the collective mind. An obsession with group thinking was fuelled by the establishment of academic sociology and the ubiquitous infiltration of public opinion research into a bevy of cultural and governmental institutions. As authors witnessed the materialization of the once-opaque realm of public consciousness for the first time, their writings imagined the potentialities of such technologies for the body politic. Polling opened new horizons for mass politics. Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature traces this most crucial period of group psychology's evolution--the mid-century--when psychography, a term originating in Victorian spiritualism, transformed into a scientific praxis. The imbrication of British writers within a growing institutionalized public opinion infrastructure bolstered an aesthetic turn towards collectivity and an interest in the political ramifications of meta-psychological discourse. Examining works by H.G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh, Val Gielgud, Olaf Stapledon, Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison, Celia Fremlin, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Elizabeth Bowen, this book utilizes extensive archival research to trace the embeddedness of writers within public opinion institutions, providing a fresh explanation for the new material turn so often associated with interwar writing.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192898973
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
Whereas modernist writers lauded the consecrated realm of subjective interiority, mid-century writers were engrossed by the materialization of the collective mind. An obsession with group thinking was fuelled by the establishment of academic sociology and the ubiquitous infiltration of public opinion research into a bevy of cultural and governmental institutions. As authors witnessed the materialization of the once-opaque realm of public consciousness for the first time, their writings imagined the potentialities of such technologies for the body politic. Polling opened new horizons for mass politics. Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature traces this most crucial period of group psychology's evolution--the mid-century--when psychography, a term originating in Victorian spiritualism, transformed into a scientific praxis. The imbrication of British writers within a growing institutionalized public opinion infrastructure bolstered an aesthetic turn towards collectivity and an interest in the political ramifications of meta-psychological discourse. Examining works by H.G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh, Val Gielgud, Olaf Stapledon, Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison, Celia Fremlin, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Elizabeth Bowen, this book utilizes extensive archival research to trace the embeddedness of writers within public opinion institutions, providing a fresh explanation for the new material turn so often associated with interwar writing.
Classic Modern
Author: Deborah Dietsch
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0684867443
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 216
Book Description
There is no hotter style today than the cooler than cool work of modern designers and architects from the 1940s and 50s. Endlessly inventive and emminently livable, mid-century modernism has an optimism and confidence born of postwar abundance, and a spirited elegance that appeals powerfully fifty years later. In CLASSIC MODERN, design expert Deborah Dietsch introduces readers to the basic tenets of modern design and explains how the simple yet inspired forms typical of this style were so readily disseminated into mainstream American culture. Filled throughout with enticing examples of mid-century pieces from such timeless designers as Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, Arne Jacobsen, and George Nelson, this beautiful book recaptures the excitement of the period's brilliant designs.
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0684867443
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 216
Book Description
There is no hotter style today than the cooler than cool work of modern designers and architects from the 1940s and 50s. Endlessly inventive and emminently livable, mid-century modernism has an optimism and confidence born of postwar abundance, and a spirited elegance that appeals powerfully fifty years later. In CLASSIC MODERN, design expert Deborah Dietsch introduces readers to the basic tenets of modern design and explains how the simple yet inspired forms typical of this style were so readily disseminated into mainstream American culture. Filled throughout with enticing examples of mid-century pieces from such timeless designers as Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, Arne Jacobsen, and George Nelson, this beautiful book recaptures the excitement of the period's brilliant designs.
20th Century Britain
Author: Francesca Carneval
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317868374
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 403
Book Description
Written by leading international scholars, Twentieth Century Britain investigates key moments, themes and identities in the past century. Engaging with cutting-edge research and debate, the essays in the volume combine discussion of the major issues currently preoccupying historians of the twentieth century with clear guidance on new directions in the theories and methodologies of modern British social, cultural and economic history. Divided into three, the first section of the book addresses key concepts historians use to think about the century, notably, class, gender and national identity. Organised chronologically, the book then explores topical thematic issues, such as multicultural Britain, religion and citizenship. Representing changes in the field, some chapters represent more recent fields of historical inquiry, such as modernity and sexuality.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317868374
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 403
Book Description
Written by leading international scholars, Twentieth Century Britain investigates key moments, themes and identities in the past century. Engaging with cutting-edge research and debate, the essays in the volume combine discussion of the major issues currently preoccupying historians of the twentieth century with clear guidance on new directions in the theories and methodologies of modern British social, cultural and economic history. Divided into three, the first section of the book addresses key concepts historians use to think about the century, notably, class, gender and national identity. Organised chronologically, the book then explores topical thematic issues, such as multicultural Britain, religion and citizenship. Representing changes in the field, some chapters represent more recent fields of historical inquiry, such as modernity and sexuality.
War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland
Author: Stephen Conway
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199253757
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357
Book Description
The middle of the 18th century was a period of continuous warfare as Britain, and therefore Ireland, was involved in conflict with Spain and France. This text explores the impact of these wars and the consequences for the economy, society, politics, religious divisions, and attitudes to empire.
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199253757
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357
Book Description
The middle of the 18th century was a period of continuous warfare as Britain, and therefore Ireland, was involved in conflict with Spain and France. This text explores the impact of these wars and the consequences for the economy, society, politics, religious divisions, and attitudes to empire.
Building the British Atlantic World
Author: Daniel Maudlin
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469626837
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Book Description
Spanning the North Atlantic rim from Canada to Scotland, and from the Caribbean to the coast of West Africa, the British Atlantic world is deeply interconnected across its regions. In this groundbreaking study, thirteen leading scholars explore the idea of transatlanticism--or a shared "Atlantic world" experience--through the lens of architecture, built spaces, and landscapes in the British Atlantic from the seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. Examining town planning, churches, forts, merchants' stores, state houses, and farm houses, this collection shows how the powerful visual language of architecture and design allowed the people of this era to maintain common cultural experiences across different landscapes while still forming their individuality. By studying the interplay between physical construction and social themes that include identity, gender, taste, domesticity, politics, and race, the authors interpret material culture in a way that particularly emphasizes the people who built, occupied, and used the spaces and reflects the complex cultural exchanges between Britain and the New World.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469626837
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Book Description
Spanning the North Atlantic rim from Canada to Scotland, and from the Caribbean to the coast of West Africa, the British Atlantic world is deeply interconnected across its regions. In this groundbreaking study, thirteen leading scholars explore the idea of transatlanticism--or a shared "Atlantic world" experience--through the lens of architecture, built spaces, and landscapes in the British Atlantic from the seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. Examining town planning, churches, forts, merchants' stores, state houses, and farm houses, this collection shows how the powerful visual language of architecture and design allowed the people of this era to maintain common cultural experiences across different landscapes while still forming their individuality. By studying the interplay between physical construction and social themes that include identity, gender, taste, domesticity, politics, and race, the authors interpret material culture in a way that particularly emphasizes the people who built, occupied, and used the spaces and reflects the complex cultural exchanges between Britain and the New World.
Midcentury Suspension
Author: Claire Seiler
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231550944
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Book Description
How did literary artists confront the middle of a century already defined by two global wars and newly faced with a nuclear future? Midcentury Suspension argues that a sense of suspension—a feeling of being between beginnings and endings, recent horrors and opaque horizons—shaped transatlantic literary forms and cultural expression in this singular moment. Rooted in extensive archival research in literary, print, and public cultures of the Anglophone North Atlantic, Claire Seiler’s account of midcentury suspension ranges across key works of the late 1940s and early 1950s by authors such as W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Bowen, Ralph Ellison, and Frank O’Hara. Seiler reveals how these writers cultivated modes of suspension that spoke to the felt texture of life at midcentury. Running counter to the tendency to frame midcentury literature in the terms of modernism or of our contemporary, Midcentury Suspension reorients twentieth-century literary study around the epoch’s fraught middle.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231550944
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Book Description
How did literary artists confront the middle of a century already defined by two global wars and newly faced with a nuclear future? Midcentury Suspension argues that a sense of suspension—a feeling of being between beginnings and endings, recent horrors and opaque horizons—shaped transatlantic literary forms and cultural expression in this singular moment. Rooted in extensive archival research in literary, print, and public cultures of the Anglophone North Atlantic, Claire Seiler’s account of midcentury suspension ranges across key works of the late 1940s and early 1950s by authors such as W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Bowen, Ralph Ellison, and Frank O’Hara. Seiler reveals how these writers cultivated modes of suspension that spoke to the felt texture of life at midcentury. Running counter to the tendency to frame midcentury literature in the terms of modernism or of our contemporary, Midcentury Suspension reorients twentieth-century literary study around the epoch’s fraught middle.