scholarly journals All Roof, No Wall: Peter Boston, A-Frames and the Primitive Hut in Twentieth-Century British Architecture, c. 1890–1970

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 ◽  
pp. 237-269
Author(s):  
Elizabeth McKellar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Arts And Crafts ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Building Culture ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
British Architecture ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Modern House

AbstractA very particular type of modern house in Britain — A-frames of the 1950s and 1960s — emerged from a much longer history of British and Scandinavian-German primitivism centred on the cruck-frame. This article focuses on a small number of architect-designed examples and introduces one of the main proponents of the type, Peter Boston (1918–99). The tension between the A-frame's familiarity as a universal dwelling type and its adoption as a signifier of modernity is a central theme. In the British twentieth-century context, the ‘modern’ included a strong vernacular element, and the new A-frames, which formed part of the ‘timber revival’ of the 1950s and 1960s, were informed by a long-standing interest in the history of cruck-framed construction from the Arts and Crafts onwards, which in turn was part of a wider pan-north European building culture.

Frontiers of Visibility

Transfers ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franziska Torma
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
History Of ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Popular Images ◽  
Cinematic Technology

This article deals with the history of underwater film and the role that increased mobility plays in the exploration of nature. Drawing on research on the exploration of the ocean, it analyzes the production of popular images of the sea. The entry of humans into the depths of the oceans in the twentieth century did not revitalize myths of mermaids but rather retold oceanic myths in a modern fashion. Three stages stand out in this evolution of diving mobility. In the 1920s and 1930s, scenes of divers walking under water were the dominant motif. From the 1940s to the 1960s, use of autonomous diving equipment led to a modern incarnation of the “mermen“ myth. From the 1950s to the 1970s, cinematic technology was able to create visions of entire oceanic ecosystems. Underwater films contributed to the period of machine-age exploration in a very particular way: they made virtual voyages of the ocean possible and thus helped to shape the current understanding of the oceans as part of Planet Earth.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lincoln Center

The Conclusion briefly examines the current state of the New York City Ballet under the auspices of industrial billionaire David H. Koch at Lincoln Center. In so doing, it to introduces a series of questions, warranting still more exploration, about the rapid and profound evolution of the structure, funding, and role of the arts in America through the course of the twentieth century. It revisits the historiographical problem that drives Making Ballet American: the narrative that George Balanchine was the sole creative genius who finally created an “American” ballet. In contrast to that hagiography, the Conclusion reiterates the book’s major contribution: illuminating the historical construction of our received idea of American neoclassical ballet within a specific set of social, political, and cultural circumstances. The Conclusion stresses that the history of American neoclassicism must be seen as a complex narrative involving several authors and discourses and crossing national and disciplinary borders: a history in which Balanchine was not the driving force, but rather the outcome.

Coda

2020 ◽  
pp. 734-743
Author(s):  
Laura U. Marks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Grassroots Politics ◽  
International Solidarity ◽  
Guerrilla Movements ◽  
History Of ◽  
Armed Resistance ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Arabic Speaking

In the twentieth-century Arabic-speaking world, communism animated anticolonial revolutions, workers’ organizations, guerrilla movements, and international solidarity. The communist dream was cut short by Arab governments, deals with global superpowers, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and historical bad luck. But recently a remarkable number of Arab filmmakers have turned their attention to the history of the radical Left. Filmmakers from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco have been urgently seeking models for grassroots politics in the labor movements, communist parties, and secular armed resistance of earlier generations. This coda explores two strata of communist audiovisual praxis: the radical cinema that supported labor movements and guerrilla actions from the 1950s to the 1980s, and recent films that draw on that earlier movement. The coda argues that the Arab audiovisual archive holds flashes of communism that have been neither fulfilled nor entirely extinguished. The new films release their unspent energy into the present, diagnosing earlier failures of Arab communism and making plans for new forms of solidarity.

C. H. B. Quennell (1872–1935): Architecture, History and the Quest for the Modern

2007 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 211-246
Author(s):  
Elizabeth McKellar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Strong Interest ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Architecture ◽  
Building Conservation ◽  
Architecture History

Charles Quennell embodied many of the possibilities and contradictions of British architecture in the first decades of the twentieth century. He is a little-known figure today, but one who deserves further consideration, not only for his own remarkably interesting and varied career but also because of the light he sheds on some of the less explored aspects of architecture in the 1895–1935 period. Throughout his life he combined a strong interest in history with a search for efficiency and design appropriate for the modern world. Both of these preoccupations were widespread among his generation although, apart from a few notable exceptions, rarely can they be found combined to as great a degree as in Quennell. For example, in 1914 he was a keen exponent of standardization and at work on large romantic houses in Hampstead Garden Suburb. By 1918 he had designed what have been called the first modern houses in the country and had just published the first of the bestselling books in the series co-authored with his wife, A History of Everyday Things in England. In 1930 he was writing a contemporary tract The Good New Days and he built a neo-Palladian villa. He has been little studied to date, the main accounts being Alastair Service’s of his work in Hampstead, a Masters thesis by Nick Collins focused on issues of building conservation, and Graham Thurgood’s article on his 1920s work in Essex.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kendra Taira Field
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Great Migration ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Image Fit ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Back To Africa

“Grandpa went back to Africa with Garvey,” my grandmother recalled. I carried this precious refrain into the archives with me. In Garvey’s place, I found Chief Sam, in the black and Indian borderlands of Oklahoma. While the Great Migration had largely displaced the preceding history of black rural emigration at the nadir, so had Garveyism displaced descendants’ memories of the Chief Sam movement. Meanwhile, scholars portrayed the movement as the product of a single charismatic charlatan and his nameless, faceless followers. Relying almost exclusively on U.S. sources and the memories of those “left behind” in an economically depressed and politically repressed Jim Crow Oklahoma, the only book-length study of the movement, written in the 1950s, argued that the Chief Sam movement illustrated “the desperate hopes of an utterly desperate group of people.” The image fit easily with twentieth-century American tropes of black victimhood and criminality....

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
William Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Caribbean Region ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Historical Past

V.S. Naipaul is one of the most internationally acclaimed twentieth-century writers from the Caribbean region. Yet it is usually assumed that he was neither much influenced by the Caribbean literary and intellectual tradition, nor very influential upon it. This chapter argues that these assumptions are wrong. It situates Naipaul’s life and work within the political, social, and intellectual history of the twentieth-century Caribbean. Naipaul’s work formed part of a larger historical debate about the sociology of slavery in the Caribbean, the specificity of Caribbean colonial experience, and the influence of that historical past on Caribbean life, culture, and politics after independence. The chapter closes with a reading of Naipaul’s late, retrospective book about Trinidad, A Way in the World.

NEWCOMB COLLEGE POTTERY, ARTS AND CRAFTS, AND THE NEW SOUTH

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-144
Author(s):  
Meghan Freeman
Keyword(s):  
New South ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Arts And Crafts ◽  
Deep South ◽  
Arts And Crafts Movement ◽  
Old South ◽  
Women's College ◽  
Educational Experiment ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of

In the history of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, New Orleans's Newcomb College Pottery (founded in 1894) is often singled out as distinctive by virtue of its genesis as an experimental educational venture, all the more remarkable for emerging out of a small women's college located in the Deep South. Scholarship on NCP frequently rehearses the regionalist character of its diverse handicrafts and its adherence to the central tenets of Arts and Crafts. This article explores how Newcomb College Pottery was neither so strictly regionalist nor so pure an embodiment of the Arts and Crafts spirit as is often averred. Situating Newcomb College Pottery within contemporary cultural debates concerning the formation of a “New South,” I demonstrate how the architects and advocates of Newcomb, inspired by the 1884 Cotton Centennial, sought to craft a largely aspirational identity that marketed NCP as a model industry that heralded commercial and cultural development in the region. It was only later, I argue, as the Pottery developed from an educational experiment into a widely known and respected handicraft enterprise, that it embraced the anti-industrial rhetoric that animated the broader Arts and Crafts movement and adopted the more sentimental form of regionalism that traded on romantic evocations of the Old South, in repudiation of the socially and economically progressive energies that gave it birth.

scholarly journals Vulgar Modernism: J. M. Richards, Modernism and the Vernacular in British Architecture

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 229-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Architecture ◽  
The World ◽  
Architectural Review ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
British Architecture ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Reyner Banham

In 1946 J. M. Richards, editor of theArchitectural Review (AR)and self-proclaimed champion of modernism, published a book entitledThe Castles on the Ground(Fig. 1). This book, written while working for the Ministry of Information (Mol) in Cairo during the war, was a study of British suburban architecture and contained long, romantic descriptions of the suburban house and garden. Richards described the suburb as a place in which ‘everything is in its place’ and where ‘the abruptness, the barbarities of the world are far away’. For this reasonThe Castles on the Groundis most often remembered as a retreat from pre-war modernism, into nostalgia for mock-Tudor houses and privet hedges. The writer and critic Reyner Banham, who worked with Richards at the AR in the 1950s, described the book as a ‘blank betrayal of everything that Modern Architecture was supposed to stand for’. More recently, however, it has been rediscovered and reassessed for its contribution to mid-twentieth-century debates about the relationship between modern architects and the British public. These reassessments get closer to Richards’s original aim for the book. He was not concerned with the style of suburban architecture for its own sake, but with the question of why the style was so popular and what it meant for the role of modern architects in Britain and their relationship to the ‘man in the street’.

scholarly journals Is the Dance Still in the Music? Chaconne Compositions from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lyndon Keith McEwing
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Before And After ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of

<p>This thesis looks at the relationship of dance to the music with which it is performed, and how consideration of the dance component in the music, whether literal or implied, can influence and even inspire a musical performance today. As a contemporary point of reference, the introduction briefly describes Douglas Lilburn's Chaconne (1946) for piano, and the composer's inspiration of walking the west coast of New Zealand's South Island. After describing the history of the chaconne - its Spanish introduction to Europe as a peasant dance, to Italy and the commedia dell'arte, to France where it was adopted by the court, and then the rest of Europe - chapter one discusses the general inter-relationship of dance and music. The arts of dance and music were considered equal in Europe prior to the eighteenth century. Continuing with defining the term "dance music," the chapter then considers other Baroque dance-types, illustrating how the chaconne is representative of the genre. It further defines the chaconne as describing a journey, thus providing a basis for a comparison of chaconnes written through the centuries and around the world. The chaconne's role, and dance generally, in the theatre of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is discussed in chapter two. The fifteen extant Baroque dances for which notations are available are discussed in chapter three, with four of them being analysed in detail using seventeenth-century rhetorical theories of Bary and Lamy, as defined and applied in twentieth-century analyses of Baroque dance by Ranum, Maher, and Schwartz. Three chaconne dances for the commedia dell'arte character, Harlequin are also discussed. Chapter four looks at the music of the chaconne, analyses the corresponding music for the four dances studied in chapter three, and then considers the interaction between these dance and music examples. Chapter five concludes with a discussion of modern performance practices for dance and music, and the current contrasting trends of careful consideration being given to performance of Baroque music, but the general lack of equivalent sensitivity to any dance that is deemed "old." A study of two contrasting recordings of Lilburn's Chaconne follows: one dance-spirited, the other with an intellectual approach. A similarly detailed examination of Jose Limon's choreography Chaconne (1942) demonstrates a careful consideration of the music on a par with the Baroque dances discussed. Several appendices are included. After a brief introduction, Beauchamp-Feuillet Notation and How to Read It, fifteen notated Baroque-chaconnes in this notation schema are included, with a brief description preceding each one. This is followed by a selective list of twentieth-century choreographies either titled chaconne or to chaconne music, and selective lists of chaconne music, separated into before and after 1800. In addition to the written thesis, live performance of the noble dance Chacone of Amadis and the grotesque Chacoon for a Harlequin was undertaken as an integral part of the study. A DVD recording of this event is included with this volume.</p>

Aisthēsis

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Vichnar ◽  
Louis Armand
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Technological Condition ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Artistic Activity ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Political Imaginary ◽  
And Function

Etymologically and conceptually linked with sense perception (as opposed to, in the Platonic tradition, noēsis or intellection) in ancient, medieval, and early-modern thought, aisthēsis formed part of theorizing not only questions surrounding beauty and art, but also perception, epistemology, and even ontology (in, for instance, the work of Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas). During the Enlightenment and its project of subdivision and categorization of the “humanities,” aisthēsis became subsumed, in the work of Alexander Baumgarten, by “aesthetics,” the study of beauty in the narrower sense. However, by the beginning of the 20th century and the Marxist/Freudian/Saussurean revolution in humanist inquiry and the “avant-garde” revolution in the arts, aisthēsis resumed its place and function as a central node in a vast network of concerns: for the Marxists, the history of aisthēsis follows the pattern of social development of progressive mastery over nature by humankind, described as a process of rationalization (the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory); in psychoanalysis and phenomenology, artistic activity is regarded as the “sublimated” expression of socially objectionable energies, taking place in a world conceived of as indefinite and open multiplicity (John Dewey, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, et al.); in poststructuralist theory, the image not simply “acquires” a politico-aesthetic function by way of an act of judgement, but rather accedes in its very technological condition to a political imaginary, to an aesthetics as such (Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, et al.). In the second half of the 20th century, with the progressive technologization of society, aisthēsis formed the backbone of media studies, which examines how technological innovation overthrows a settled political and aesthetic order, with special attention paid to the effects of electronic media and the hypertext: non-linearity, repetitiveness, discontinuity, intuition (e.g., Marshall McLuhan and Jay David Bolter). At the dawn of the 21st century, in the aesthetico-mimetic doubling of the mediasphere, from teletext and satellite TV to the World Wide Web and GPS, a critical, ecological mode of thinking aisthēsis assumes the ideal function of an “avant-gardism” in affecting the structure of how things come to mean, how meaning is virtualized, and how the virtual is lived.

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