Recherche

Titre:
The town house in Georgian London

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$72.95
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
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.

Titre:
Behind closed doors: at home in Georgian England

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$49.95
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
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.

Titre:
Household gods; the British and their possessions

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$28.95
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
At what point did the British develop their mania for interiors, wallpaper, furniture, and decoration? Why have the middle classes developed so passionate an attachment to the contents of their homes? This book offers surprising answers to these questions, uncovering the roots of today's consumer society and investigating the forces that shape consumer desires. Exploring a wealth of unusual records and archives, Deborah Cohen locates the source of modern consumerism and materialism in early nineteenth-century religious fervor. Over the course of the Victorian era, consumerism shed the taint of sin to become the pre-eminent means of expressing individuality. The book ranges from musty antique shops to luxurious emporia, from suburban semi-detached houses to elegant city villas, from husbands fretting about mantelpieces to women appropriating home decoration as a feminist cause. It uncovers a society of consumers whose identities have become entwined with the things they put in their houses.

Titre:
Rice's architectural primer

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$32.00
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
A beautifully packaged, idiosyncratic introduction to British building styles, by the acclaimed illustrator and architectural enthusiast Matthew Rice. Covering the grammar and vocabulary of British buildings and the evolution of styles from Norman castles to Norman Foster, the aim is to enable the reader to recognise, understand and date any British building. As Matthew Rice says, ‘Once you can speak any language, conversation can begin, but without it communications can only be brief and brutish. The same is the case with Architecture: an inability to describe the component parts of a building leaves one tongue-tied and unable to begin to discuss what is or is not exciting, dull or peculiar about it.’ With this book in your hand, pocket or car, buildings will break down beguilingly into their component parts, ready for inspection and discussion. There will be no more references to that curly bit on top of the thing with the square protrusions. Ungainly and inept descriptions will be a thing of the past and, fluent in the world of volutes, hood moulds, lobed architraves and bucrania, you will be able to leave a cathedral or country house with as much to talk about as a film or play.

Titre:
Dirty old London: the victorian fight against filth

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$36.00
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
In Victorian London, filth was everywhere: horse traffic filled the streets with dung, household rubbish went uncollected, cesspools brimmed with "night soil," graveyards teemed with rotting corpses, the air itself was choked with smoke. In this intimately visceral book, Lee Jackson guides us through the underbelly of the Victorian metropolis, introducing us to the men and women who struggled to stem a rising tide of pollution and dirt, and the forces that opposed them.

Titre:
Rice's church primer

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$27.00
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
Rice's Church Primer explains the language of architecture in churches, from the restrained Norman style of William the Conqueror to the gilded excesses of the Baroque. The primer begins with an explanation of the basic 'Grammar' of churches: elevation, plan, fronts, vaults and towers. This allows the reader to easily understand what follows. Next comes the 'Vocabulary' of styles in chronological order, from ancient Saxon churches to modern cathedrals. Each period covers component parts like doors, windows, towers, pews, panelling and pulpits. Finally, there is a map pinpointing some of the best churches around the country.

Titre:
Victorian prism : refractions of the crystal palace

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$66.50
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
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.

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

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$81.50
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
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.

Titre:
Town: prints and drawings of Britain before 1800

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$74.95
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
Many provincial towns in Britain grew dramatically in size and importance in the eighteenth century. Ports such as Glasgow and Liverpool greatly expanded, while industrial centers such as Birmingham and Manchester flourished. Market towns outside London developed as commercial centers or as specialty destinations: visitors could find spa treatments in Bath, horse racing in Newmarket, and naval services in Portsmouth. Containing more than one hundred images of country towns in England, Wales, and Scotland, this book draws on the extensive Gough collection in the Bodleian Library. Contemporary prints and drawings provide a powerful visual record of the development of the town in this period, and finely drawn prospects and maps—made with greater accuracy than ever before—reveal their early development. This book also includes perceptive observations from the journals and letters of collector Richard Gough (1735–1809), who traveled throughout the country on the cusp of the industrial age.

Titre:
The country house library

Actions:

• Acheter ce livre

Prix:
$74.95
(disponible sur commande)

Résumé:
Beginning with new evidence that cites the presence of books in Roman villas and concluding with present day vicissitudes of collecting, this illustrated book presents a complete survey of British and Irish country house libraries. Replete with anecdotes about owners and librarians, the book features information on acquisition bordering on obsession, the process of designing library architecture, and the care (and neglect) of collections. The author also disputes the notion that these libraries were merely for show, arguing that many of them were profoundly scholarly, assembled with meticulous care, and frequently used for intellectual pursuits.