Cartoons & Coronets
Cartoons & Coronets

Author: James Knox

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780711229334

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Osbert Lancaster was one of the most famous artistic personalities of his generation. National fame sprang from his invention of the pocket cartoon, which first appeared in 1939 in Beaverbrook's Daily Express. Over the next forty years, he created a cast of characters, headed by the straight talking Countess, Maudie Littlehampton, which, every day, kept the nation chuckling.Osbert's witty depictions of architectural styles, such as Stockbrokers' Tudor and Curzon Street Baroque brought him to prominence in the 1930s. After the war, he became one of the leading theatre and opera designers. He was also a brilliant illustrator working with friends and contemporaries such as Anthony Powell, John Piper and Nancy Mitford.This beautifully illustrated book covers the full range of his work and will be a revelation to those discovering his art and humour for the first time.Publication will coincide with a centenary exhibition, curated by James Knox, at the Wallace Collection in London.

Making Dystopia
Making Dystopia

Author: James Stevens Curl

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-08-23

Total Pages: 539

ISBN-13: 0191068160

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In Making Dystopia, distinguished architectural historian James Stevens Curl tells the story of the advent of architectural Modernism in the aftermath of the First World War, its protagonists, and its astonishing, almost global acceptance after 1945. He argues forcefully that the triumph of architectural Modernism in the second half of the twentieth century led to massive destruction, the creation of alien urban landscapes, and a huge waste of resources. Moreover, the coming of Modernism was not an inevitable, seamless evolution, as many have insisted, but a massive, unparalled disruption that demanded a clean slate and the elimination of all ornament, decoration, and choice. Tracing the effects of the Modernist revolution in architecture to the present, Stevens Curl argues that, with each passing year, so-called 'iconic' architecture by supposed 'star' architects has become more and more bizarre, unsettling, and expensive, ignoring established contexts and proving to be stratospherically remote from the aspirations and needs of humanity. In the elite world of contemporary architecture, form increasingly follows finance, and in a society in which the 'haves' have more and more, and the 'have-nots' are ever more marginalized, he warns that contemporary architecture continues to stack up huge potential problems for the future, as housing costs spiral out of control, resources are squandered on architectural bling, and society fractures. This courageous, passionate, deeply researched, and profoundly argued book should be read by everyone concerned with what is around us. Its combative critique of the entire Modernist architectural project and its apologists will be highly controversial to many. But it contains salutary warnings that we ignore at our peril. And it asks awkward questions to which answers are long overdue.

Laughing at Architecture
Laughing at Architecture

Author: Michela Rosso

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-11-29

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1350022764

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In a media-saturated world, humour stands out as a form of social communication that is especially effective in re-appropriating and questioning architectural and urban culture. Whether illuminating the ambivalences of metropolitan life or exposing the shock of modernisation, cartoons, caricature, and parody have long been potent agents of architectural criticism, protest and opposition. In a novel contribution to the field of architectural history, this book outlines a survey of visual and textual humour as applied to architecture, its artefacts and leading professionals. Employing a wide variety of visual and literary sources (prints, the illustrated press, advertisements, theatrical representations, cinema and TV), thirteen essays explore an array of historical subjects concerning the critical reception of projects, buildings and cities through the means of caricature and parody. Subjects range from 1750 to the present, and from Europe and the USA to contemporary China. From William Hogarth and George Cruikshank to Osbert Lancaster, Adolf Loos' satire, and Saul Steinberg's celebrated cartoons of New York City, graphic and descriptive humour is shown to be an enormously fruitful, yet largely unexplored terrain of investigation for the architectural and urban historian.

Gardening Notes from a Late Bloomer
Gardening Notes from a Late Bloomer

Author: C. Hastings

Publisher:

Published: 2018-04

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781910258989

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""I'm not dead yet, writes Clare Hastings to her daughter, Calypso, who will one day inherit Clare's beloved cottage garden in the Berkshire Downs. In fact I woke up this morning feeling quite chipper. I glanced out of the window and thought about you. And felt a frisson of panic. What if I were to be struck down before elevenses on the B4009? I realised that I needed to leave you a handbook about the garden. For you the countryside is a pathway from the car ark to the door, to be completed on the run. But I'm not giving up." The daughter of writer and gardener Anne Scott-James, Clare too was a latecomer to gardening, daunted by Latin names and nervous around plants. Then she realised she wasn't and never would be a 'proper plantsman' and that it didn't matter. Since then she has explored the joys of gardening, finding that a garden is just like life. There are moments when you want to divorce it and other times you can sit alongside it forever. Clare acknowledges that most - though not all - of what she has learned about gardening came from her mother. In Gardening Letters to my Daughter, published in 1990, Anne imparted some of her vast knowledge of gardening to Clare, who occasionally contributed a response. Now, after many years' experience of her own cottage garden, Clare shares her gardening life notes with Calypso. This is a delightful book, full of insight and humour, as well as practical information for newcomers to gardening. A gift for garden lovers young and old." -- Provided by publisher.

Oxford Freemasons
Oxford Freemasons

Author: Joe Mordaunt Crook

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781851244676

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Over the past 200 years, many thousands of undergraduates have been initiated into membership of Apollo - the Masonic lodge of the University of Oxford. These have included such diverse figures as Oscar Wilde, Osbert Lancaster, Samuel Reynolds Hole, Cecil Rhodes, Edward, Prince of Wales and his brother Leopold, Charles Canning, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Godfrey Elton and Roger Makins.Drawing on archives held in the Bodleian Library, this book is the first serious attempt to set the story of Apollo in the context of Oxford life and learning as well as its wider social and political diaspora. From the devastating numbers lost in the First and Second World Wars, as well as those decorated for bravery, to the significant number of Olympians who were members of the lodge, it also charts the lodge's charitable work, its changes of location, social events and adaptation to twenty-first-century life in Oxford.Illustrated with archival material, portraits and Masonic treasures, this is history in a minor key, but a minor narrative with major implications, documenting the remarkable numbers of Oxford freemasons with distinguished careers in government, law, the army and the Church.