Chinoiserie, a decorative style inspired by the art of the Far East, gripped Britain from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. Despite taking its name from the French word for ‘Chinese’, the style also incorporated influences from other Asian countries, helping to shape the period’s popular fantasy of the ‘exotic Orient’. Wealthy consumers jostled to obtain imported wallpaper, lacquered cabinets and hand-painted porcelain, while domestic manufacturers such as Royal Worcester and...
Russian architect and draughtsman Sergei Tchoban has always striven to understand the laws which govern the development of cities such as his native St Petersburg and the great prototypes in whose image it was created. But is it possible to preserve such cities' outstanding quality today? Can we pursue this quality now, at the current stage of development of architecture? This catalogue poses these central questions. It accompanies an exhibition of Tchoban's work at the Istituto Centrale per la...
Magnificent Entertainments (Studies in British Art)
by Melanie Doderer-Winkler
A thoroughly original study of ephemeral architecture and design, Magnificent Entertainments examines the spectacular displays created for large-scale public and private celebrations in the Georgian period. The book focuses on a number of specific occasions - including elegant country fêtes, lavish galas, royal events and historical commemorations - that employed elaborate decorative measures to outshine all other attractions and diversions. It explores the role of leading architects Robert Adam...
Finding San Carlino (Architecture) (Routledge Research in Architectural History)
Francesco Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (San Carlino) is a curious artifact that continues to inspire hypotheses and geometric analyses attempting to explain its form, meaning, and symbolism. These analyses intend to reconstruct an ideality of the church through tracing its design evolution. However, several parts and aspects of the church correspond neither with these reconstructions nor with Borromini's drawings. These incongruities bring into question the very role of geometry in...
In this pioneering study of the water infrastructure of Renaissance Rome, urban historian Katherine Rinne offers a new understanding of how technological and scientific developments in aqueduct and fountain architecture helped turn a medieval backwater into the preeminent city of early modern Europe. Supported by the author's extensive topographical research, this book presents a unified vision of the city that links improvements to public and private water systems with political, religious, and...
With its selection as the court of the Spanish Habsburgs, Madrid became the de facto capital of a global empire, a place from which momentous decisions were made whose implications were felt in all corners of a vast domain. By the seventeenth century, however, political theory produced in the Monarquia Hispanica dealt primarily with the concept of decline. In this book, Jesus Escobar argues that the buildings of Madrid tell a different story about the final years of the Habsburg dynasty. Madrid...
Unprecedented in scope - like its companion volume on the High Renaissance, Mannerism - this sixth volume in the Architecture in Context series traces the development of architecture and decoration in the 17th and early 18th centuries - particularly the transformation of rationalist Classical ideals into the emotive, highly theatrical style known as Baroque and the further development away from architectonic principles to the free-ranging decorative style known as Rococo. It begins with an outl...
In "When All of Rome Was Under Construction," architectural historian Dorothy Metzger Habel considers the politics and processes involved in building the city of Rome during the baroque period. Like many historians of the period, Habel previously focused on the grand schemes of patronage; now, however, she reconstructs the role of the "public voice" in the creation of the city. She presents the case that Rome's built environment did not merely reflect the vision of patrons and architects who sim...
In the eighteenth century the grounds of most large country estates boasted a bathing house or plunge pool. Built in all shapes and sizes, sometimes just for one person and occasionally for large groups, their design often reflected the classical style of their era. In addition to supposed health benefits, they provided an escape from the constraints and formality of life, and became a destination for walks, drives and alfresco entertainment. Mid-century, doctors began to promote salt-water bath...
This book offers the first systematic analysis of the cultural and religious appropriation of Andalusian architecture by Spanish historians during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To date this process of Christian appropriation has generally been discussed as a phenomenon of architectural hybridisation. However, this was a period in which the construction of a Spanish national identity became a key focus of historical discourse. As a result, cultural hybridity encountered partial opposit...
An elegant volume dedicated to the most exclusive villas and homes in southern Sicily's Val di Noto region, perfect for those who love to daydream about traveling to unusual, stunning places. Val di Noto is a magnificent land of architectural interest, renowned for its beautiful landscapes and recognized as a UNESCO world heritage site since 2002. This book presents a refined selection of the extraordinary mansions of the area, many of which were rebuilt in the late Baroque style in the early d...
Baroque Architecture:1600-1750
by Frederique Lemerle and Yves Pauwels
"Nothing represents the glorious and fraught history of France quite like the Palace of Versailles. Made famous by the absolutist king Louis XIV, Versailles became legendary for the splendor of its revels-but then, after the Revolution of 1789, it fell into disrepute as a reminder of royal excess and abuse of power. Subsequent French governments struggled with how to handle the opulent palace and grounds-should the site be memorialized, trivialized, rehabilitated, or even destroyed outright? Dra...
Carmontelle’s landmark publication, Garden at Monceau, beautifully reproduced to show the Parisian garden’s artistic and cultural importance before the French Revolution. Originally published in 1779, Garden at Monceau is a richly illustrated presentation of the garden Louis Carrogis, known as Carmontelle, designed on the eve of the French Revolution for Louis-Philippe-Joseph d’Orléans, duc de Chartres. With its array of architectural follies intended to surprise and amaze the visitor, the gar...
This innovative study reappraises the Edwardian Baroque movement in British architecture, placing it in its wider cultural, political, and imperial contexts The Edwardian Baroque was the closest British architecture ever came to achieving an "imperial" style. With the aim of articulating British global power and prestige, it adorned civic and commercial structures both in Britain and in the wider British world, especially in the "white settler" Dominions of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and...
The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome (Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies, #6)
by Heather Hyde Minor
Beginning in the 1730s, Heather Minor tells us, Rome "began to resemble one huge construction site," with a series of ambitious and expensive new building campaigns that transformed the face and substance of the city. From renovations of the Santa Maria Maggiore and San Giovanni in Laterano and the restoration of the Arch of Constantine to the creation of the Capitoline Museum and the establishment of the papacy's Calcografia, the push for reform not only renewed papal and Church identity but al...
The most recent innovation brought to theater technology by the eminent theater designer George C. Izenour is a "trans-sondant" curtain, mimicking a wall, which allows halls visually to metamorphose into small or large performance spaces while retaining optimum acoustic quality in both guises. A full set of drawings and photographs of the first trans-sondant structure, in the Vern Riffe Center for the Arts (1995), is one of the new features in the second edition of this incomparable reference gu...
A case study in the renowned architect's thought and practice, showcasing the museum that was his last great design This book analyzes the form and function of the final building designed by Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974): the Yale Center for British Art. As the Center's first director, author Jules David Prown was instrumental in Kahn's selection as the new building's architect in 1969. He was present throughout the processes of planning and construction until the year of Kahn's death, three years...