Glorious Visions
Glorious Visions

Author: Helene Furján

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2011-05-05

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1136786740

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Strongly interdisciplinary in its scope, this book situates Soane’s house-museum within the broader context of early nineteenth-century British aesthetics, theories of taste, and cultural currents, viewing it as a cultural and artistic product as well as an architectural and museological one.

Cultures of Collecting
Cultures of Collecting

Author: Roger Cardinal

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2004-09-02

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 186189421X

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This book traces the psychology, history and theory of the compulsion to collect, focusing not just on the normative collections of the Western canon, but also on collections that reflect a fascination with the "Other" and the marginal – the ephemeral, exotic, or just plain curious. There are essays on the Neoclassical architect Sir John Soane, Sigmund Freud and Kurt Schwitters, one of the masters of collage. Others examine imperialist encounters with remote cultures – the consquitadors in America in the sixteenth century, and the British in the Pacific in the eighteenth – and the more recent collectors of popular culture, be they of Swatch watches, Elvis Presley memorabilia or of packaging and advertising. With essays by Jean Baudrillard, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Nicholas Thomas, Mieke Bal, John Forrester, John Windsor, Naomi Schor, Susan Stewart, Anthony Alan Shelton, John Elsner, Roger Cardinal and an interview with Robert Opie.

Weather Architecture
Weather Architecture

Author: Jonathan Hill

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-06-17

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1135746044

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Weather Architecture further extends Jonathan Hill’s investigation of authorship by recognising the creativity of the weather. At a time when environmental awareness is of growing relevance, the overriding aim is to understand a history of architecture as a history of weather and thus to consider the weather as an architectural author that affects design, construction and use in a creative dialogue with other authors such as the architect and user. Environmental discussions in architecture tend to focus on the practical or the poetic but here they are considered together. Rather than investigate architecture’s relations to the weather in isolation, they are integrated into a wider discussion of cultural and social influences on architecture. The analysis of weather’s effects on the design and experience of specific buildings and gardens is interwoven with a historical survey of changing attitudes to the weather in the arts, sciences and society, leading to a critical re-evaluation of contemporary responses to climate change.