Why are houses interesting?

Urban History ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 338-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER BORSAY
Keyword(s):  
Architectural History ◽  
Architectural Discourse ◽  
Architectural Form ◽  
Conservation Movement ◽  
Built Form ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Small House ◽  
Aesthetic Consideration ◽  
The One ◽  
Human Usage

Shortly into his path-breaking study of The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London, Peter Guillery remarks that ‘houses are principally interesting because people live in them’ (p. 10). To urban historians the observation might seem unexceptional, even banal. To many architectural historians his comment would be incomprehensible. Therein lies the difficulty for the urban historian with a concern for housing, public buildings and planning. There is a wealth of serious academic studies of architecture, but the majority are written in a language which can seem arcane to the uninitiated and address an agenda which appears little interested in those who inhabited the buildings. At the heart of the problem lies the requirement to treat the built form primarily as a work of art, so that what is studied has to justify itself as an object worthy of aesthetic consideration, and has to relate to an established stylistic canon and chronology. Judged in this light, considerations of user and usage are largely irrelevant, and can appear an invitation to slip into the sort of popular architectural discourse, common in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, in which dwellings are valued primarily for the celebrities and anecdotes associated with them. People are germane only to the extent that they designed buildings, as architects, or commissioned them, as patrons of the arts. Among the two most influential figures in developing and in particular disseminating the art-history perspective on architecture in twentieth-century Britain were Nikolaus Pevsner and John Summerson. Today their presence is felt not only in the world of scholarship, where it has not gone unchallenged, but also and more importantly in popular perceptions of architecture, as mediated through guide literature, the amenity societies (like the National Trust, the Georgian Group and the Victorian Society) and the conservation movement. It is an influence which has been ambivalent. On the one hand, it has led to a far deeper popular understanding and appreciation of architectural form and its history, and has saved many fine buildings. On the other hand, it is has led to a dissociation of form and human usage, a devaluation of structures and traditions not defined as canonic and a blindness to the subjective and ideological nature of architectural history itself.

The language of typology

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-156
Author(s):  
Robert Grover ◽  
Stephen Emmitt ◽  
Alex Copping
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Architectural Discourse ◽  
Architectural Form ◽  
Built Form ◽  
The Creation

The concept of typology has recurred in architectural discourse since the term’s conception in the early nineteenth century. To describe an architectural object usually involves an act of typifying; a generalisation of built form to common characteristics. Both the analysis of architecture and its creation require this abstraction, which offers the potential to form types and expose initially unapparent relationships. Typology’s Enlightenment origins sought to link architecture to a natural order, but its terminology has subsequently been adopted in modernist rejections of mass culture and Neo-Rationalist pursuits of continua and meaning. Despite widespread use of the term, the role typology plays in the process of design remains unclear. Attempts to link its academic origins to the creation of architectural form (notably by Gottfried Semper in the nineteenth century, and Guilio Carlo Argan and Aldo Rossi in the twentieth century) have done little to synthesise the two and merely succeeded in alienating it from practice.

Mendelssohn’s Critique of Lessing’s Laocoon

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Beiser
Keyword(s):  
Moses Mendelssohn ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The One

Frederick Beiser’s chapter demonstrates the palpable impact of Moses Mendelssohn on Lessing’s Laocoon. Mendelssohn composed his own treatise about the differences between the arts in 1757, paying particular attention to hybrid artistic forms that combined ‘natural’ and ‘arbitrary’ signs through their fusion of ‘successive’ and ‘instantaneous’ elements. In his comments on an early draft of Laocoon, Mendelssohn reminded Lessing that poetry—due to the arbitrariness of its signs—could also successfully express objects that coexist with one another rather than consecutive actions in time. Of all Mendelssohn’s comments on Laocoon, Beiser argues, this was the one that most troubled Lessing as he tried to develop a system for understanding ancient ‘poetry’ and ‘painting’.

scholarly journals Attention Modulated Multiple Object Tracking with Motion Enhancement and Dual Correlation

Symmetry ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yifeng Wang ◽  
Zhijiang Zhang ◽  
Ning Zhang ◽  
Dan Zeng
Keyword(s):  
Object Tracking ◽  
Multiple Object Tracking ◽  
Tracking Accuracy ◽  
Feature Maps ◽  
Backbone Networks ◽  
Multiple Object ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Training Stage ◽  
The One ◽  
Baseline State

The one-shot multiple object tracking (MOT) framework has drawn more and more attention in the MOT research community due to its advantage in inference speed. However, the tracking accuracy of current one-shot approaches could lead to an inferior performance compared with their two-stage counterparts. The reasons are two-fold: one is that motion information is often neglected due to the single-image input. The other is that detection and re-identification (ReID) are two different tasks with different focuses. Joining detection and re-identification at the training stage could lead to a suboptimal performance. To alleviate the above limitations, we propose a one-shot network named Motion and Correlation-Multiple Object Tracking (MAC-MOT). MAC-MOT introduces a motion enhance attention module (MEA) and a dual correlation attention module (DCA). MEA performs differences on adjacent feature maps which enhances the motion-related features while suppressing irrelevant information. The DCA module focuses on decoupling the detection task and re-identification task to strike a balance and reduce the competition between these two tasks. Moreover, symmetry is a core design idea in our proposed framework which is reflected in Siamese-based deep learning backbone networks, the input of dual stream images, as well as a dual correlation attention module. Our proposed approach is evaluated on the popular multiple object tracking benchmarks MOT16 and MOT17. We demonstrate that the proposed MAC-MOT can achieve a better performance than the baseline state of the arts (SOTAs).

Pyongyang Modern: Architecture of Multiplicity in Postwar North Korea

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-296
Author(s):  
Cheehyung Harrison Kim
Keyword(s):  
North Korea ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
Modern Architecture ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Substantial Part ◽  
Work Culture ◽  
Architectural Form ◽  
Postwar Reconstruction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Architectural Development

Abstract This article explores North Korea’s postwar reconstruction through the variegated features of architectural development in Pyongyang. The rebirth of Pyongyang as the center of both state authority and work culture is distinctly represented by architecture. In this setting, architecture as theory and practice was divided into two contiguous and interconnected types: monumental structures symbolizing the utopian vision of the state and vernacular structures instrumental to the regime of production in which the apartment was an exemplary form. The author makes three claims: first, Pyongyang’s monumental and vernacular architectural forms each embody both utopian and utilitarian features; second, the multiplicity of meaning exhibited in each architectural form is connected to the transnational process of bureaucratic expansion and industrial developmentalism; and third, North Korea’s postwar architectural history is a lens through which state socialism of the twentieth century can be better understood—not as an exceptional moment but as a constituent of globalized modernity, a historical formation dependent on the collusive expansion of state power and industrial capitalism. A substantial part of this article is a discussion of the methods and sources relevant to writing an architectural history of North Korea.

scholarly journals SEMI-AUTOMATED DETECTION OF SURFACE DEGRADATION ON BRIDGES BASED ON A LEVEL SET METHOD

2015 ◽  
Vol XL-3/W3 ◽  
pp. 15-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Masiero ◽  
A. Guarnieri ◽  
F. Pirotti ◽  
A. Vettore
Keyword(s):  
Laser Scanning ◽  
Automated Analysis ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Monitoring Cost ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Skilled Personnel ◽  
Monitoring Procedure ◽  
Monitoring Effort ◽  
The One ◽  
Human Usage

Due to the effect of climate factors, natural phenomena and human usage, buildings and infrastructures are subject of progressive degradation. The deterioration of these structures has to be monitored in order to avoid hazards for human beings and for the natural environment in their neighborhood. Hence, on the one hand, monitoring such infrastructures is of primarily importance. On the other hand, unfortunately, nowadays this monitoring effort is mostly done by expert and skilled personnel, which follow the overall data acquisition, analysis and result reporting process, making the whole monitoring procedure quite expensive for the public (and private, as well) agencies. <br><br> This paper proposes the use of a partially user–assisted procedure in order to reduce the monitoring cost and to make the obtained result less subjective as well. The developed method relies on the use of images acquired with standard cameras by even inexperienced personnel. The deterioration on the infrastructure surface is detected by image segmentation based on a level sets method. The results of the semi-automated analysis procedure are remapped on a 3D model of the infrastructure obtained by means of a terrestrial laser scanning acquisition. <br><br> The proposed method has been successfully tested on a portion of a road bridge in Perarolo di Cadore (BL), Italy.

scholarly journals THE FUNCTIONS AND SYMBOLISM OF CHINESE MINARETS: A CASE STUDY OF THE HUAISHENG GUANGTA

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 68-76
Author(s):  
Hamada Muhammed Hagras
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Society ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Religious Minority ◽  
Architectural Form ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
Religious Symbolism ◽  
The One ◽  
And Function ◽  
The City

The Huisheng mosque in Guangzhou is one of China's oldest mosques; its initial construction dates back to 627. The minaret of the mosque is one of the surviving earliest examples of Islamic architecture in China. The Chinese minarets were built with a form of a wooden low-rise Chinese pavilion. In the case of Guangta, it was built by brick directly on the street with such a great height. The unique architectural form of Guangta raises many questions about its location, architecture, and function. The study traces the historical texts of the minaret to clarify its historical functions. It attempts to understand the minaret's meanings, the hidden symbolism, and its historical roles to serve the Muslim community as a religious minority in the city, on the one hand, as well as its cultural contributions on the other hand. There are several methods to achieve its objectives: the historical, the descriptive, and the comparative analytical approach. These approaches proved that the minaret played many roles associated with its form and architecture. In addition to its religious functions, it is entrusted to inform Muslims at prayer times. The minaret was also used as a control tower if the Muslim community in the city was exposed to external or internal threats and served as a lighthouse to facilitate Muslim maritime trade. Further, it carried a religious symbolism as it was a symbol of Islam itself within the local Chinese society that was not ruled by Muslims. 

The Style of Walter Frye and an anonymous mass in Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, manuscript 5557

1992 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 191-221
Author(s):  
Andrew Kirkman
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The One ◽  
Duke Of Burgundy

The Brussels manuscript 5557 is one of the most important sources of the later fifteenth century. Not only is it the one northern manuscript from the period to have survived largely intact, but it was apparently compiled for the chapel of no less a magnate than Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Presiding over one of the most opulent courts of Europe, Charles was more than just a great patron of the arts: he was an active composer himself. The sophisticated taste of his establishment is reflected in the extraordinary quality of the music in the Brussels manuscript: great masses by Dufay and Regis rub shoulders with most of the surviving motets of Charles's great employee, Antoine Busnoys, while the original nucleus of the manuscript boasts a clutch of English masses rivalled only by that in Trent 93/90.

Built Objects

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglass Bailey ◽  
Lesley McFadyen
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Architectural Form ◽  
The Past ◽  
Neolithic Europe ◽  
Two Bodies ◽  
European Architecture

This article presents two bodies of work, both of which take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of buildings from Neolithic Europe. The first connects archaeology to theories in architectural history, while the second creates links between archaeology and art. This article works through four ideas about architecture which the article offers as disconnected propositions. There is no easy narrative for this article, just as there is none for the living built environment of the past or the present. This article proposes that archaeologists step away from accepted and comfortable knowledge of architectural form and interpretation. The aim of this article is to work through four case studies from our work on prehistoric European architecture. The case studies illuminate four propositions, which are offered as provocations for further work on architecture by archaeologists but also by anthropologists and other social scientists and humanities scholars whose work engages architecture concludes this article.

Hugh of St Victor, Dominicus Gundissalinus and the Place of the Mechanical Arts in Medieval Architectures of Knowledge

2021 ◽  
Vol 153 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-318
Author(s):  
Alexander Fidora ◽  
Nicola Polloni
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The One ◽  
Mechanical Arts

This contribution engages with the problematic position of the mechanical arts within medieval systems of knowledge. Superseding the secondary position assigned to the mechanical arts in the Early Middle Ages, the solutions proposed by Hugh of St Victor and Gundissalinus were highly influential during the thirteenth century. While Hugh’s integration of the mechanical arts into his system of knowledge betrays their still ancillary position as regards consideration of the liberal arts, Gundissalinus’s theory proposes two main novelties. On the one hand, he sets the mechanical arts alongside alchemy and the arts of prognostication and magic. On the other, however, using the theory put forward by Avicenna, he subordinates these “natural sciences” to natural philosophy itself, thereby establishing a broader architecture of knowledge hierarchically ordered. Our contribution examines the implications of such developments and their reception afforded at Paris during the thirteenth century, emphasising the relevance that the solutions offered by Gundissalinus enjoyed in terms of the ensuing discussions concerning the structure of human knowledge.

Conclusion: between image, act, body and language

2018 ◽  
pp. 136-141
Author(s):  
Sruti Bala
Keyword(s):  
Social Impact ◽  
The Other ◽  
Participatory Art ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Participatory Practice ◽  
The One ◽  
Historical Legacies

I have argued throughout this study that participatory art practices need to be understood in conjunction with the anxieties and contradictions that accompany them. Whether or not this is a formally constitutive characteristic worthy of naming as a genre is, in my view, less important than finding ways to account for and be responsive to the questions it poses. This is the place that this study departed from, yet oddly, it also the place it finds itself arriving at. For if this study has inquired into some of the conditions for and articulations of participation in the arts, it has also turned out to be an investigation of the ways in which participation is already circumscribed by the questions we ask of it, such as the social impact of participatory art, or its specific aesthetic features. The frictions in this endeavour will have become apparent to the perceptive reader: on the one hand I attempt to identify commonalities and systematic coherences in a field named as participatory art, and on the other hand I seek to analyse it in terms of its deviations from, and incommensurability with, a systematic narrative, in the emphasis of unruly, subtle, non-formalizable modes of participation. I treat participatory art as an inherited category, looking at its diverse, specific operations, or disciplinary routes and historical legacies. At the same time, I try to alter the terms of received wisdom by extrapolating principles and observations from the confines of one disciplinary arena into another. I search for ways in which affiliation to a given type of participatory practice might be described, only to find that formal coherences are perforated by aspects that exceed those same terms of affiliation. The analysis of participatory art and the conceptualization of participation in and through art thereby become intertwined in complex ways....

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