Search

The hypnotic repetition of passages between white containers in the refugee camp in Eleonas, in Athens, heightens the temporality experienced by the refugees in the camp – a sense of life in temporary suspension or perpetual deferment. Passage Variations uses eight images taken from a film that documents the passageways in the camp and their variation owed to human inhabitation. The stills are accompanied by a textual collage of immigrants’ testimonies, literary excerpts on the subject of migration and some instances in the history of the area as a notional edge of the city. The linear, arduous and open-ended migrant journey is contrasted to the monotonous and closed spatial experience of the camp. The essay that follows reflects on these accounts and negotiates the temporal and geographical distance between them – a newly found space of tolerance amid reconciled fragments of histories, experience and collective memory.

This paper explores Lorenzo Ghiberti’s approach to perspective in early fifteenth century Florence, demonstrating the manner in which his treatment of light, vision, colour and gesture where closely inter-twined in the representation and perception of space. The investigation argues that Ghiberti’s artistic practice directly influenced his theoretical understanding of perspective (revealed in his unfinished 3rd Commentary), which constitutes a rather different approach compared to Alberti’s codification of costruzione legittima. The paper highlights interesting parallels between Ghiberti’s luminous treatment and Nicholas Cusanus’ model of communing geometric space in perspective (De vision Dei), demonstrated in the spatial and iconographic features of the Gates of Paradise which are examined in the context of the rituals of baptism and the processions/ceremonies associated with Florence Baptistery.

The experience of the consumerist environment in contemporary society is so pervasive and intrusive in our daily lives (through mass advertising, internet shopping and the corporatisation of civic spaces) that it is difficult to appreciate its peculiarly and uniquely modern characteristics. What distinguishes these from earlier forms of commercial activity and transaction, whether in the ancient or early modern worlds, is the manner in which consumerism today creates conditions of amnesia – situations of individual and collective forgetfulness – which are reinforced by the insularity and placelessness of its built form. In this paper I attempt to demonstrate how this phenomenon is manifested spatially through the development of the modern shopping mall and commercial street. The creation of large retail zones in cities and out-of-town mega-complexes for mass consumerism invokes a certain pathological behavior among the general public. This is revealed in the innate ‘passivity’ of modern consumerism – its tendency to be experienced as a form of ‘therapy’ in urban and suburban life - in contrast to the participatory involvement of consumers/shoppers in the civic and religious spaces of pre-modern marketplaces. In summary, the paper examines consumerism through the history of markets, with specific focus on how they have served various social and cultural functions, from Renaissance fairs (located in the heart of cities) to the contemporary out-of-town shopping mall.

This substantial co-authored chapter examines the influence of early 20th century debates on Humanism on developments in architecture and spectacle in Fascist Italy. During a time when eminent philosophers and historians of Renaissance culture were engaged in disputes about the meaning and philosophical value of Renaissance Humanism, parallel architectural developments were taking place (specially in Italy) on the inter-relationships between modernism and classicism. These alliances were subject to much disagreement among architectural pundits (both practitioners and academics) that also drew heavily on the legacy of humanism; perceived by some as a distinctly Italian intellectual and creative movement. The chapter focuses on a number of key disputes in both Germany and Italy during the interwar period (specifically between Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile and Martin Heidegger and Ernesto Grassi) that provided the basis of a fertile intellectual milieu for articulating arguments about the role of humanism in architectural creativity. Among the many architects discussed, Giuseppe Terragni, Gustavo Giovannoni and Giovanni Michelucci are the main sources, each presenting very different notions of 'Romanitas' during the period of Fascism.

Using the idea that architectural representation is best understood as a participatory act, this chapter aims to re-contextualise the continuity of 'communicative' or 'poetic' thought in relation to architectural discourse from antiquity to the quattrocento by tracing themes that were also evident in the medieval world.

This is the first comprehensive study of the reception of classical architecture in different regions of the world. Exploring the impact of colonialism, trade, slavery, religious missions, political ideology and intellectual/artistic exchange, the authors demonstrate how classical principles and ideas were disseminated and received across the globe. By addressing a number of contentious issues, highlighted in some historical surveys of architecture, the chapters presented in this volume question long-held assumptions about the notion of a universally accepted ‘classical tradition’ and its broadly Euro-centric perspective. Featuring thirty-two chapters written by international scholars from China, Europe, Turkey, North America, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand, the book is divided into four sections: 1) Transmission and re-conceptualisation of classical architecture; 2) Classical influence through colonialism, political ideology and religious conversion; 3) Historiographical surveys of geographical regions; and 4) Visual and textual discourses. This fourfold arrangement of chapters provides a coherent structure to accommodate different perspectives of classical reception across the world, and their geographical, ethnographic, ideological, symbolic, social and cultural contexts. Essays cover a wide geography and include studies in Italy, France, England, Scotland, the Nordic countries, Greece, Austria, Portugal, Romania, Germany, Poland, India, Singapore, China, the USA, Mexico, Brazil, New Zealand and Australia. Other essays in the volume focus on thematic issues or topics pertaining to classical architecture, such as ornament, spolia, humanism, nature, moderation, decorum, heresy and taste.\ud \ud An essential reference guide, The Routledge Handbook on the Reception of Classical Architecture makes a major contribution to the study of architectural history in a new global context.

The theme of this issue of Architecture and Culture is “Architecture, Festival and the City.” Our aim has been to posit and to explore the relationship between festivals and their settings, in order to ask what constitutes festival in the contemporary city - what allows a traditional festival to endure, and how can a new festival become meaningful?

This chapter uses the emergence, evolution, and persistence of the Calcio Storico football match in Florence as a means to discuss the manifestation of festive order in relation to historic architectural settings. Although this particular competition emerged alongside the retreat of feudal and communal power in the thirteenth century, it continues to be fought between the historic districts of the city and because it continues reveal the conflict, violence, and disorder that often exists at the heart of democratic, agonistic institutions, and it retains some relevance to contemporary Florentine civic life.\ud \ud Over time the game has often been adapted and co-opted to reflect the representational requirements necessary for the ruling order but in this process of change many aspects of the game have remained resistant to political manipulation. Consequently, the fact that an event such as the Calcio Storico still retains much of its original iconography is an important reference point for understanding both the idea of festival in Florence as well as, more broadly, the relationships that can exist between festival, architecture, and civic order.

By the time Giles Slade’s book “Made to Break” appeared a decade ago to recount the story of planned obsolescence in the United States in the twentieth century, the consolidated narration saw it as an industrial practice that spontaneously emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, first as an adaptation to the purchasing needs of the newly urbanised masses, and then as a method of industrial competition. The logical consequence of the consolidated narrative on planned obsolescence would want the design of short-lasting products to be intrinsic to free-market economies and laissez-faire economic policies. Yet, the very assumption that planned obsolescence is a strategy integral to product development in capitalism offers an interesting paradox. If products manufactured in a free-market environment are designed to be short-living, the logical consequence would be that products manufactured in collectivist or planned economies should be longer- lasting, because they were free from the strictures of for-profit-only modes of production and marketing. Or were they? The twentieth century has accidentally provided several laboratories that grant us the opportunity to look for an answer to this paradox. The one perspective presented here is offered by the case of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where during the 1970s a lively debate on lifespan and patina took place among designers, theorists, and readers around the question how long things should last.

This book chapter examines the early developments of perspective in 15th century Florence, arguing that the conception of pictorial space in the Early Renaissance both drew upon late Medieval notions of luminary space and anticipated the 'geometrisation' of space in Modernity. The paper demonstrates this intermediate position (at once reflective and anticipatory) through an examination of the ideas of Nicolas Cusanus, Filippo Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti and Leon Battista Alberti, all of whom presented different 'models' of perspective in the light of their own artistic predilections and architectural interests. A shared view however of the role and significance of perspective at this time concerns its capacity to redefine pictorially the civic and religious dimensions of the actual city. This is demonstrated in both Brunelleschi's perspective 'experiments' and Ghiberti's composition and spatial articulation of the 'Gates of Paradise' for Florence Baptistery. In the final section of the paper, I examine a photograph by Le Corbusier in which I demonstrate how his visual recording of his studio (articulated in a drawing by Peter Carl) applies similar methods of luminary and geometric relationships found in Renaissance pictorial space.

Since the late 1870s when the first legal moves were made to protect Britain’s built heritage many buildings and monuments have been set aside for special treatment. The system, devised to monitor and assess eligibility for this protection determines a hierarchy of value but is limited by the fact that it places buildings from radically different eras in one classification system. Using the example of Caruso St John’s recent work to the Tate Britain Gallery in London, this chapter questions the current rules that determine the way architectural heritage is protected and adapted, suggesting that more flexibility should be afforded to architectural work undertaken on existing listed structures.

'How can anything ever present itself truly to us since its synthesis is never completed? How could I gain the experience of the world, as I would of an individual actuating his own existence, since none of the views or perceptions I have of it can exhaust it and the horizons remain forever open?' (M. Merleau-Ponty, 'Phénoménologie de la Perception (Paris, 1945, pp.381). \ud \ud Merleau-Ponty’s meditation on incompleteness provides an important reference in this investigation of the unfinished in building. His argument that it is impossible to gain a complete ‘picture’ of the world, on account of the inexhaustibility of our perceptions and experiences, prompts us to question the assumption of architecture’s 'closure', with respect to its creative processes and its experiential presence. The transformations of the city are perhaps the most visible and pervasive demonstration of this condition, with their multiple systems of management and control. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty's argument in a series of investigations of built examples from the both historic and modern settings, I argue that the unfinished in architecture is a crucial 'barometer' of the life of cities, serving as a material expression of continuity and collective memory. At the same time, I demonstrate how unfinished work has enriched the creative imagination of architects by offering found situations for urban and cultural renewal ('renovatio urbis').

This paper examines a dispute between Martin Heidegger and his former student Emmanuel Levinas concerning the nature and meaning of mitsein ('being with'), a neologism that forms a key element in Heidegger's phenomenology ('Being and Time'). I argue that the dispute provides a useful theoretical framework for rethinking the ethical dimensions of space, in the way mitsein serves as a 'receptacle' for collective being. The paper first unpacks the meaning(s) of the term in Heidegger's philosophy, and then examines the dispute in question in which Levinas accuses Heidegger of not developing an ethical underpinning to being-with; specifically with regard to fellow human beings. This 'shortcoming' opens up a field of study about the spatial dimensions between 'face-to-face' and 'side-by-side' relationships in architecture, highlighted by an examination of historical examples, most notably a poetry competition on the subject of friendship ('Certame Coronario') held in Florence Cathedral in the early 15th century. The concluding part of the paper argues that the decline in the meaning and purpose of civic and religious space in the contemporary world (the basis of collective participation in previous ages), requires us to rethink fundamentally the architectural contexts of social interaction, where questions of mitsein can be re-evaluated. A guiding reference in this investigation is Richard Sennett's book 'Together: The Rituals, Pleasures & Politics of Cooperation', that similarly argues that social bonds need to be strengthened in an age of increasing fragmentation and insularity, and that architecture is central to this 'recovery'.

This chapter is concerned with alterations to the cathedral and city of Lincoln undertaken during the episcopate of Bishop Grosseteste (1235-1253) compared to the development of the city and cathedral of Salisbury begun under bishop Richard Poore (1217-1228, and bishop of Durham 1229-1237), and how these modifications may relate to Grosseteste’s written oeuvre as well as the processional, liturgical and administrative innovations of the period.

The papers presented in this book originate from an international symposium, “Architecture as Cosmology: Lincoln Cathedral and Bishop Robert Grosseteste (1235–53),” hosted by Lincoln Cathedral on the 21st and 22nd January 2012, and funded by the Paul Mellon Education Programme and the Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design at the University of Lincoln. Supported by the Bishop and Chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral, the symposium (and subsequent published work) constitute the culmination of a more extended research project begun by Nicholas Temple in 2003 and published in his Disclosing Horizons: Architecture, Perspective and Redemptive Space (Routledge, 2007), and further developed by John Hendrix in his two books, Robert Grosseteste: Philosophy of Intellect and Vision (Academia Verlag, 2010) and Architecture as Cosmology: Lincoln Cathedral and English Gothic Architecture (Peter Lang Publishing, 2011). The papers in this volume develop, or challenge, the arguments presented in these earlier publications and research projects, by examining relationships between the scientific and cosmological ideas of Robert Grosseteste and the design and symbolism of Lincoln Cathedral. The central area of contention, in the chapters of this edited volume, is whether the cathedral (famous for its rose windows and innovative Gothic design) actually influenced the cosmological theories of its bishop, in particular his highly original theories of light and geometry. Contributors to the volume include many eminent historians and architectural theorists (who also presented papers at the international symposium), such as Professor Cecilia Panti (authority on Grosseteste and Medieval optics, and Professor Dalibor Vesely (renowned architectural theorist and philosopher) and Professor Christian Frost (noted authority of Salisbury Cathedral).

This paper examines the concept of 'centre' in the design and symbolism of the new St Peter's Basilica, executed by Donato Bramante in the early 16th century. Drawing upon theological and philosophical notions of centre in late Medieval and Renaissance culture (specifically Nicolas Cusanus), the study argues that Bramante's drawings for the project reveal a particular understanding of centre, and its constellations of sub-centres, that broadly follow Platonic cosmological principles highlighted in the Timaeus. The paper considers how this understanding of space was also communicated in the iconography of the frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican Palace, executed by Raphael at the same time as Bramante's design for the new basilica, in which Bramante is also credited as the author of the perspective construction.

The study of ritual in architecture has recently attracted renewed interest by anthropologists and architectural historians. This attention, no doubt, has been partly a response to a growing recognition of the importance of ritualized space in deepening our knowledge of cultural practices and belief structures. Important questions inevitably arise from such enquiries about the role architecture has played historically in shaping, even defining, ritual itineraries. Perhaps the most familiar question is the following: to what extent can architecture be understood as ‘frozen ritual’? Or to put it another way, when certain religious or civic ceremonies are no longer performed, but their architectural and iconographic legacies remain, can these physical and visual references serve as repositories of the earlier rituals, which can in turn be made legible in some way? The question could be likened to an analogous argument that certain period instruments preserve their own musical traditions and heritage, even when that music is no longer performed. \ud \ud In this study I do not aim to address this question directly but rather to examine a broader related issue concerning what knowledge and understanding we can gain from examples of the past when considering the question of ritual space today. My reliance here on a comparative method of investigation, to elicit the key aspects of ritual space, draws inspiration from Lindsay Jones’s seminal study of ritual in sacred architecture. The intention of this hermeneutical enquiry is to draw upon examples from the period of Early Christianity to explore the idea of a syncretic ‘morphological pattern’ of ritual architecture, not, however, in the sense of the stylistic or formal characteristics of a building, but rather in the inter-relationships between spaces and the actions that take place within them. As Jones states, in the context of sacred architecture, a hermeneutical understanding of ritual space must ‘of necessity, be constituted (or problematized) in terms of what I term ritual-architectural events rather than in terms of static constructional entities’.

Certain sectors of the heritage and tourist industry argue that cities with art historical significance should be re-categorized as ‘museum cities’ because visitors intent on acquiring particular limited ‘consumer’ experiences outnumber the local population. Using the Feast Day of San Giovanni in Florence, Italy, as a focus this article questions this assumption. By evaluating the form of the fest day events and their relationship to the urban landscape, some of the historical conditions that have shaped the city are revealed. These conditions, understood as civic praxis, are accessible to everyone (to different degrees) and suggest Florence is anything but a museum.