scholarly journals Reflections on The American Renaissance 1876–1917 exhibition

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Richard Guy Wilson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Cultural Developments

ABSTRACT This article considers the origins, both scholarly and personal, of The American Renaissance 1876–1917 exhibition (1979) and the accompanying book catalogue, setting them in the context of architectural and cultural developments in the United States from the 1940s to the 1970s. It traces how the exhibition came about, what it was trying to achieve and how it was received, both at the time and subsequently. It shows that the exhibition was not conceived as an attack on modernism as such or as a work of architectural conservatism. Rather, it was an attempt to rescue from obscurity an entire chapter of American architectural history that had been excluded by the modernising narratives of Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Vincent Scully and others, and to reassess what this architecture might contribute to the present.

The American Art of Memory

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 70-98
Author(s):  
John Michael Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Interior Space

Abstract This article provides a genealogy of the architectural figuration of human cognition from the ancient world to Renaissance Europe and, finally, to the American Renaissance where it came to possess a striking cultural and literary potency. The first section pursues the two-fold task of elucidating this archetypal trope for consciousness, both its ancient moorings and its eventual transmission into Europe. The second section shows that three of the most prominent writers of the American Renaissance—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—engaged this mystically inspired architectonic symbolism, employing far older techno-cultural suppositions about interior space. I thereby offer an account of the intellectual and spiritual heritage upon which Romantic writers in the United States drew to articulate cognitive interiority. These Romantics did more than value creativity in contradistinction to Enlightenment rationalism; they were acknowledging themselves as recipients of the ancient belief in cosmogenesis as self-transformation.

scholarly journals The Gilded Interior: French Style and American Renaissance

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Laura C. Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
Decorative Arts ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Interior Decoration ◽  
Architectural Tradition

ABSTRACT In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, New York was seized by a passion for things French in interior decoration. The influx of French eighteenth-century decorative arts from London and Paris exerted a powerful influence over the imaginations of a new millionaire class, while the emergence of the professional dealer-decorator established channels for the incorporation of these materials into the luxury residence. While these interiors were developed in collaboration with leading US architects such as Richard Morris Hunt and George B. Post, they also posed a subtle challenge to the discourse of intellectualism developed on architects’ behalf. Governed by issues of taste and commerce as well as by artistic judgement, these French interiors presented a compelling vision of aristocratic stature that was at once in keeping, and in conflict, with the aspirations of an American Renaissance. This article considers the role of eighteenth-century French-style interiors in the articulation of a ‘civilised’ architectural tradition in the United States during the so-called Gilded Age. Focusing on the private mansion, it reconsiders the notion of the American Renaissance as a principally academic movement by calling attention to the ways in which it also responded to the requirements of the elite class as well as the commercial marketplace.

Nightmare Envy and Other Stories

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Blaustein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
The United States ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

Nightmare Envy and Other Stories is a study of Americanist writing and institutions in the twentieth century. Four chapters trace four routes through an “Americanist century.” The first is the hidden history of American Studies in the United States, Europe, and Japan. The second is the strange career of “national character” in anthropology. The third is a contest between military occupation and cultural diplomacy in Europe. The fourth is the emergence and fate of the “American Renaissance,” as the scholar and literary critic F. O. Matthiessen carried a canon of radical literature across the Iron Curtain. Drawing on American and European archives, the book weaves cultural, intellectual, and diplomatic history with portraits of Matthiessen, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, David Riesman, Alfred Kazin, and Ralph Ellison. It excavates the history of the Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization, where displaced persons, former Nazis, budding Communists, and glad-handing Americans met on the common ground of American culture. Many of our modern myths of the United States and Europe were formed in this moment. Some saw the United States assume the mantle of cultural redeemer. Others saw a stereotypical America, rich in civilization but poor in culture, overtake a stereotypical Europe, rich in culture and equally rich in disaster. Others found keys to their own contexts in American books, reading Moby-Dick in the ruins. Nightmare Envy and Other Stories chronicles American encounters with European disaster, European encounters with American fiction, and the chasms over which culture had to reach.

scholarly journals Foreign Objects: Architectural History in the Age of Globalization

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Salomon ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South America ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreign Objects ◽  
Relevant Case

This paper addresses the theme of global and disglobal networks via the lens of architectural history, pedagogy and historiography. Specifically, it will argue that as currently defined in the United States the teaching of global architectural history is in danger of 1) losing its focus on architectural objects, and 2) of repeating the very gentrifying effects associated with globalization that it seeks to overcome. In what follows I will propose a mode of architectural history that avoids these traps by focusing first on architectural forms and types. Clorinda Testa’s design of the Bank of London and South America in Buenos Aires, Argentina will be used to test this theory. Before examining that object, we must first examine the historiographical context that makes it a relevant case study.

scholarly journals New Zealand Architects Abroad

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Michael Dudding
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Detailed Knowledge ◽  
University Archives ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
Mies Van Der Rohe ◽  
Shed Light

<p>This thesis is an oral history based investigation of four recently graduated architects (Bill Alington, Maurice Smith, Bill Toomath and Harry Turbott) who individually left New Zealand to pursue postgraduate qualifications at United States universities in the immediate postwar period. Guided interviews were conducted to allow the architects to talk about these experiences within the broader context of their careers. The interviews probed their motivations for travelling and studying in the United States. Where possible archival material was also sought (Fulbright applications, university archives) for comparison with the spoken narratives.   Although motivated by the search of modernity and the chance to meet the master architects of the period (Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Wright) what all gained was an increase in the confidence of their own abilities as architects (or as a landscape architect in the case of Turbott who switched his focus while in the United States). This increase in confidence partly came from realising that their architectural heroes were ordinary people. Although searching for modernity, their encounters with the canon of architectural history also had a profound effect. This detailed knowledge of what these four subjects felt about architecture, architectural education, and their experiences of studying, working, and touring abroad has helped to shed light on the development of and influences on postwar architecture in New Zealand.   The series of oral history interviews that were recorded during this project not only form the basis of the research material for this thesis, but are, in their own right, a significant contribution to the knowledge and understanding of New Zealand’s postwar architectural history.</p>

The Russia-NATO mistrust: Ethnophobia and the double expansion to contain “the Russian Bear”

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrei P. Tsygankov
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Cultural Developments

This paper argues that Russian-Western mistrust persists due to historical and cultural developments with roots in the ColdWar. The post-ColdWar imbalance of power served to exacerbate the problem. The United States emerged as the world’s superpower acting on perceived fears of Russia, whereas Russia’s undermined capabilities dictated a defensive, rather than a hegemonic response. The paper analyzes the decision to expand NATO by excluding Russia from the process. It also asks why the process suddenly stopped in 2008. What changed the West’s mind about the expansion was not a revised perception of Russia, but rather concern with its growing power and assertiveness as revealed by the Kremlin’s use of force during the Caucasus’ war.

scholarly journals New Zealand Architects Abroad

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Michael Dudding
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Detailed Knowledge ◽  
University Archives ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
Mies Van Der Rohe ◽  
Shed Light

<p>This thesis is an oral history based investigation of four recently graduated architects (Bill Alington, Maurice Smith, Bill Toomath and Harry Turbott) who individually left New Zealand to pursue postgraduate qualifications at United States universities in the immediate postwar period. Guided interviews were conducted to allow the architects to talk about these experiences within the broader context of their careers. The interviews probed their motivations for travelling and studying in the United States. Where possible archival material was also sought (Fulbright applications, university archives) for comparison with the spoken narratives.   Although motivated by the search of modernity and the chance to meet the master architects of the period (Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Wright) what all gained was an increase in the confidence of their own abilities as architects (or as a landscape architect in the case of Turbott who switched his focus while in the United States). This increase in confidence partly came from realising that their architectural heroes were ordinary people. Although searching for modernity, their encounters with the canon of architectural history also had a profound effect. This detailed knowledge of what these four subjects felt about architecture, architectural education, and their experiences of studying, working, and touring abroad has helped to shed light on the development of and influences on postwar architecture in New Zealand.   The series of oral history interviews that were recorded during this project not only form the basis of the research material for this thesis, but are, in their own right, a significant contribution to the knowledge and understanding of New Zealand’s postwar architectural history.</p>

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