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Title:
Cottages ornés : the charms of the simple life

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Summary:
Tracing the history of cottages ornés (ornamental cottages), this copiously illustrated volume offers an engaging survey of an often-overlooked architectural genre. An invention of mid-18th-century England, these cottages were designed to facilitate a more informal way of living and were built in different guises that range from royal and imperial cottages to the working-class lodges that still dot the English countryside. Analyzing cottage designs by some of the leading architects of late-Georgian England—including Robert Adam, John Soane, and John Nash—Roger White explores the aesthetic values that made the form so appealing. As he follows the development of cottages ornés from the Celtic fringes to the Continent and the British colonies, White reveals the significant impact of the genre on social, cultural, and political history and examines the influence of cottage design on the architectural developments of the Victorian period and even the 20th century.

Title:
Pablo Bronstein: Pseudo-Georgian London

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$29.95
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In this volume, Pablo Bronstein (born 1977) explores, in drawings and writing, the style that has come to dominate architectural development in London over the past 30 years, the pseudo-Georgian style characterized by its economy and its eccentric quotation of architectural history.

Title:
The long weekend: life in the English country house 1918-1939

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As WWI drew to a close, change reverberated through the halls of England’s country homes. As the sun set slowly on the British Empire, the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a thousand stately homes. In The Long Weekend, historian Adrian Tinniswood introduces us to the tumultuous, scandalous and glamourous history of English country houses during the years between World Wars. As estate taxes and other challenges forced many of these venerable houses onto the market, new sectors of British and American society were seduced by the dream of owning a home in the English countryside. Drawing on thousands of memoirs, letters, and diaries, as well as the eye-witness testimonies of belted earls and bibulous butlers, Tinniswood brings the stately homes of England to life as never before, opening the door to a world by turns opulent and ordinary, noble and vicious, and forever wrapped in myth. We are drawn into the intrigues of legendary families such as the Astors, the Churchills and the Devonshires as they hosted hunting parties and balls that attracted the likes of Charlie Chaplin, T.E. Lawrence, and royals such as Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. We waltz through aristocratic soirées, and watch as the upper crust struggle to fend off rising taxes and underbred outsiders, property speculators and poultry farmers. We gain insight into the guilt and the gingerbread, and see how the image of the country house was carefully protected by its occupants above and below stairs.

Title:
Houses: An architectural guide

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An enthusiast’s guide to exploring historic houses of England, this informative book also enables readers to discover more about the history of their own houses. Users can learn to interpret domestic architecture, identify period styles, uncover the origins of a building, and understand why rooms are arranged in particular sequences, why window and chimney designs change through history, or why staircases are presented in a certain fashion. Color photography and informative line drawings illustrate the explanations and provide a rich visual history of domestic architecture from the earliest surviving dwellings to the most avant-garde developments.

Title:
Londres: la biographie

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Summary:
Retrace les deux mille ans d'histoire de la ville de Londres, des premiers peuplements de Charing Cross au carnaval de Notting Hill, à partir d'une importante documentation, de témoignages et d'oeuvres d'art. Par une structure thématique, l'auteur aborde tous les visages de Londres : ses marchands, ses vagabonds, ses enfants, ses nuits... et rend accessible l'esprit de la ville.

Title:
Victorian prism : refractions of the crystal palace

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From the moment it opened on the first of May in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London, the Great Exhibition of 1851 was one of the defining events of the Victorian period. It stood not only as a visible symbol of British industrial and technological progress but as a figure for modernity—a figure that has often been thought to convey one coherent message and vision of culture and society. This volume examines the place occupied both materially and discursively by the Crystal Palace and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century exhibitions in the struggle to understand what it means to be modern. Initiated in part by a number of conferences held in 2001 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Crystal Palace, Victorian Prism provides new perspectives to historians, literary critics, art historians, and others interested in how a large glass building in a London park could refract meaning from Caracas to Calcutta. In its investigations of the ways of knowing and shaping the world that emerged during the planning and execution of this first "world's fair," Victorian Prism not only restores the multiplicity of experiences and other determining factors to our picture of the Great Exhibition; it makes reevaluation of the exhibition and its legacies the occasion for reevaluating modernity itself in its broadest sense—as the cultures, potentialities, and liabilities of the Enlightenment. With essays by a number of leading scholars in their fields, the collection as a whole focuses on how these exhibitions, in attempting to define the cultures of their day, incorporated a range of conflicting ideologies and agendas. In doing so, it offers a richer, more complex understanding of the experience of modernity than we have previously acknowledged. The volume also addresses the ways in which the cultural processes and tendencies brought together in these exhibitions have been refracted down to the present, thus informing and complicating our own relationship to both modernity and postmodernity.

Title:
When buildings speak : architecture as language in the Habsburg empire and its aftermath, 1867 - 1933

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Covering a wide range of buildings - from national theaters to crematoria, apartment buildings to warehouses, and sanatoria to postal savings banks - Anthony Alofsin proposes a new way of interpreting this language. He calls on viewers to read buildings in two ways: through their formal elements, on the one hand; and through their political, social, and cultural contexts, on the other. By looking through Alofsin’s eyes, readers can see how myriad nations sought to express their autonomy by tapping into the limitless possibilities of art and architectural styles.

Title:
Building romanticism : literature and architecture in Nineteenth-Century Britain

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$70.00
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Summary:
Focusing on the correspondence between the period's built environments and its literary pursuits, Building Romanticism argues that at this turbulent moment in British history a number of politically charged and aesthetically resonant architectural spaces, both real and imagined, negotiated intense anxieties about shifting notions of gender and sexuality, increased class mobility, the individual's uncertain place in history, challenges to the British national character and to the project of nation building, and the very form and function of art itself.

Title:
The town house in Georgian London

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$72.95
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Summary:
Stepping away from conventional analyses of materials or style and into the previously unexplored world of the house owner, this book takes a fresh look at both the social, as well as the architectural, importance of the 18th-century London town house. Drawing on rich and entertaining evidence—both documentary and anecdotal—Rachel Stewart explores why, and how, so many people pursued life in the city. She not only discusses some of the major architects of the day and their most famous buildings, but she also uncovers what occupants of town houses thought about their property; why and how they chose or built their houses; how they paid for them, used them, decorated them, and disposed of them; and what uses it had for them beyond simple accommodation.

Title:
Behind closed doors: at home in Georgian England

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$49.95
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Summary:
Amanda Vickery unlocks the homes of Georgian England to examine the lives of the people who lived there. Vickery makes ingenious use of upholsterer’s ledgers, burglary trials, and other unusual sources to reveal the roles of house and home in economic survival, social success, and political representation during the long eighteenth century. Through the spread of formal visiting, the proliferation of affordable ornamental furnishings, the commercial celebration of feminine artistry at home, and the currency of the language of taste, even modest homes turned into arenas of social campaign and exhibition.