Introduction

Author(s):  
Ashley Maher

While the city has been at the center of literary modernist studies through such influential formulations as Raymond Williams’s “metropolitan forms of perception,” the influence of architectural modernism has received comparatively little attention. Far from a lagging branch of the modern movement, architecture and design instigated one of the defining divides in British literary modernism, between Vorticism and Bloomsbury. At a time when Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier were just starting their careers, Wyndham Lewis and Roger Fry formulated rival utopias, to be achieved through an architecture and design-driven mass modernism. These debates culminated in D. H. Lawrence’s end-of-life call to “Pull down my native village to the last brick” and use modernist planning to “[m]ake a new England.” The conflation of creation and violent destruction initially inspired members of the Auden Group but ultimately caused many mid-century authors to become wary of uniting aesthetic revolution with political revolution.

Author(s):  
Ashley Maher

Reconstructing Modernism establishes for the first time the centrality of modernist buildings and architectural periodicals to British mid-century literature. Drawing upon a wealth of previously unexplored architectural criticism by British authors, this book reveals how arguments about architecture led to innovations in literature, as well as to redesigns in the concept of modernism itself. While the city has long been a focus of literary modernist studies, architectural modernism has never had its due. Scholars usually characterize architectural modernism as a parallel modernism or even an incompatible modernism to literature. Giving special attention to dystopian classics Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, this study argues that sustained attention to modern architecture shaped mid-century authors’ political and aesthetic commitments. After many writers deemed modernist architects to be agents for communism and other collectivist movements, they squared themselves—and literary modernist detachment and aesthetic autonomy—against the seemingly tyrannical utopianism of modern architecture; literary aesthetic qualities were reclaimed as political qualities. In this way, Reconstructing Modernism redraws the boundaries of literary modernist studies: rather than simply adding to its canon, it argues that the responsibility for defining literary modernism for the mid-century public was shared by an incredible variety of authors—Edwardians, modernists, satirists, and even anti-modernists.


2020 ◽  
Vol 94 (3) ◽  
pp. 631-636
Author(s):  
Noam Maggor

Mark Peterson's The City-State of Boston is a formidable work of history—prodigiously researched, lucidly written, immense in scope, and yet scrupulously detailed. A meticulous history of New England over more than two centuries, the book argues that Boston and its hinterland emerged as a city-state, a “self-governing republic” that was committed first and foremost to its own regional autonomy (p. 6). Rather than as a British colonial outpost or the birthplace of the American Revolution—the site of a nationalist struggle for independence—the book recovers Boston's long-lost tradition as a “polity in its own right,” a fervently independent hub of Atlantic trade whose true identity placed it in tension with the overtures of both the British Empire and, later, the American nation-state (p. 631).


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jack J. Jiang

<p>Cycling is a memory of the past for most of us, the lack of support from the authorities on the cycling infrastructure made it difficult to attract people to cycle in the city. Urban sprawl, traffic congestion, car dependency, environmental pollution and public health concerns have pressured cities around the world to consider reintegrating cycling into the urban environment.  Design as a research method was utilised to investigate the effectiveness of design methodology and workflow for cycling infrastructure from an architecture and design perspective. Using Wellington City as a design case study, this research aimed to improve the legibility, usability and the image of cycling as a mode of transport in the city. To achieve this, a customisable graphical design framework and branding strategies were developed to structure and organise the design components within cycling infrastructure. The findings from the iterative design processes were visualised through the appropriate architectural and presentation conventions.  This research provided an unique architectural perspectives on the issues of cycling infrastructure; the results would support the transportation advisers and urban planners to further the development and integration of cycling, as a viable mode of transport, within the city.</p>


2005 ◽  
Vol 17 (41) ◽  
pp. 251-264
Author(s):  
Gilbert Cestre

The present study is one of the unpublished research projects which are known to have been conducted in New England and in Eastern Canada under the guidance of the late Richard J. LOUGEE, long-time professor of Geomorphology at Clark University. Over a number of years, this writer has worked in close relationship with Lougee and much evidence in the field was studied together. It is believed that here has been recorded a most detailed work of surveying, and this undoubtedly accounts for the somewhat exceptional results that will be presented. The area selected for this study (about 80% of it is woodland) is located in the highlands of Central Massachusetts in Worcester County, about twenty miles (32 kilo-meters) northwest of the city of Worcester. It consists of the valley of the Otter River draining north, and of a small portion of the East Branch of the Ware River draining south. Since completion of this study, parts of the low area which held the ancient glacial lakes have been flooded to become water reservoirs. That proglacial lakes, though temporary they may have been, once submerged much of the area under study, is shown by an abundance of deltas, kames, eskers and deltaic kames terraces. It is believed that all of these were built under water in such lakes. Other features, such as kettle-holes and glacial outlets, especially ice-marginal channels cut diagonally down the slope, have also been studied. By plotting on a profile of the most characteristic elevations (often carefully surveyed), it is possible to find the water planes of ancient proglacial lakes. To this must be added experiments conducted in a sedimentation tank as also measurements of both the imbrication of cobbles in eskers and the « smoothness indexes » of such stones and pebbles, using A. Cailleux' methods. Thus were obtained results which tend to show that : 1- the area under study probably was in a deep interlobate space created between the Connecticut Valley lobe to the west and the Boston Basin lobe to the east ; 2— ice-marginal channels are an indication of the existence of a thick, fast-retreating ice border ; 3- an isostatic balance restored itself by sometimes quick and strong adjustments of the crust of the earth ; 4— an early upwarping, made up of various zones of tilting articulated on hinge lines, has been referred to as Hubbard Uplift and is the earliest known in the post-Glacial history of New England.


Author(s):  
Yolanda Martínez Domingo ◽  
Josefina González Cubero

Resumen: El "hameau" vertical de Le Corbusier es un prototipo de alojamiento colectivo, desarrollado como alternativa plástica a la "Unité d'habitation de grandeur conforme", quizás su obra más sintética. La torre residencial se concreta a partir de las teorías urbanas de la regla de las 7V, a través de la impronta de una de las formas elementales: el volumen cilíndrico, manteniendo prácticamente inalteradas capacidad, forma y dimensiones en cualquiera de los entornos urbanos donde se inserta, los proyectos no construidos de su última etapa para Europa. Lejos de ser un modelo genuino es deudor de otras construcciones previas, los albergues para las colonias infantiles italianas, promovidas por la fábrica FIAT en los años 30, y algunos experimentos residenciales del arquitecto francés Auguste Bossu, erigidos también por esos años en la ciudad de Saint-Étienne. El artículo traza las relaciones entre estas construcciones y las aldeas cilíndricas para solteros, analizando las particularidades de su estructura formal y la dinámica de su organización interna, para comprobar cómo son adoptadas por Le Corbusier en la constitución de la identidad de un nuevo tipo de vivienda colectiva que permanece todavía a la sombra de sus proyectos más reconocidos. Abstract: The vertical "hameau" of Le Corbusier is a prototype of collective housing, developed as a plastic alternative to “Unité d’habitation de grandeur conforme", perhaps his most synthetic work. The residential tower is generated from urban doctrine of 7V theory through the shape of one of the elementary forms: the cylindrical volume. The towers keep capacity, shape and dimensions unchanged in any urban environments where they are inserted: the unbuilt urban projects in his last stage in Europe. Far from being a genuine type, is based in other previous constructions; the children's summer camps sponsored by the Fiat factory in the 30s, and some residential experiments by French architect Auguste Bossu erected by those years in the city of Saint-Etienne. The article describes the relationship between these structures and the cylindrical villages for singles and analyzes the peculiarities of their formal structure and the dynamic of their internal organization in order to check how those constructions were adapted by Le Corbusier for the constitution of a new collective type dwelling which still remains in the shadow of his most famous projects.  Palabras clave: Le Corbusier; hameaux verticaux; comuna cilíndrica; torre residencial. Keywords: Le Corbusier; hameaux verticaux; cylindrical commune; residential tower. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/LC2015.2015.778


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 192-203
Author(s):  
Sofia Permiakova

Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees is a modernist ‘curiosity’ which remained largely unknown due to the peculiar conditions of its original publication. In recent years, however, it has regained its place within the field of modernist studies due to the efforts of Julia Briggs and Sandeep Parmar. Instead of approaching the poem through established categories of urban representation, such as flânerie, urban phantasmagoria or the urban palimpsest, this article focuses on Paris, then in the midst of the 1919 Peace Conference, as a liminal space and site of Bakhtinian carnival. This framework advances an understanding of the poem as a complete and complex work of art. The article argues that the peculiar structure and formal organization of the poem, and its relation to the reality of Paris in 1919 and beyond, turns the poem into a liminal space of its own, thus doubling the city it speaks of.


Author(s):  
Cara L. Lewis

This book traces how intermedial experiments shape modernist texts from 1900 to 1950. Considering literature alongside painting, sculpture, photography, and film, the book examines how these arts inflect narrative movement, contribute to plot events, and configure poetry and memoir. As forms and formal theories cross from one artistic realm to another and back again, modernism shows its obsession with form—and even at times becomes a formalism itself—but as the book states, that form is far more dynamic than we have given it credit for. Form fulfills such various functions that we cannot characterize it as a mere container for content or matter, nor can we consign it to ignominy opposite historicism or political commitment. As a structure or scheme that enables action, form in modernism can be plastic, protean, or even fragile, and works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein demonstrate the range of form's operations. Revising three major formal paradigms—spatial form, pure form, and formlessness—and recasting the history of modernist form, the book proposes an understanding of form as a verbal category, as a kind of doing. It thus opens new possibilities for conversation between modernist studies and formalist studies and simultaneously promotes a capacious rethinking of the convergence between literary modernism and creative work in other media.


Author(s):  
Victoria L. Evans

After describing one of Peter Greenaway's recent efforts to move beyond the limits of the cinema, Evans proposes that Douglas Sirk had already begun to dissolve the boundaries the medium by assimilating elements of avant-garde art, architecture and design into his mise-en-scène. She goes on to assert that Sirk's importation of a high art aesthetic into the low genre of melodrama echoed the widespread European Modernist preoccupation with the creation of a synergistic Gesamtkunstwerk or "total art work" during the period in which he intellectually came of age. Finally, the director's tendency to create "pictures" of the external landscape that the characters (and the viewer) are obliged to contemplate through the window frame is interpreted in the light of the theories of Le Corbusier.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 179-246
Author(s):  
Emma Hart ◽  
Robert J. Allison ◽  
Paul P. Musselwhite ◽  
Daniel K. Richter ◽  
Mark Peterson

Abstract In his book Mark Peterson presents an innovative perspective on the development of Boston and its New England hinterland as an early modern city-state. His purpose was to tell the story of Boston in its own right, shedding US national history as the dominant interpretative framework. The four reviewers pick up various strands, focusing, among others, on the validity of the city-state concept, especially as Boston did not become an incorporated city until 1822, criticize what one of them sees as an attempt to return New England to the center of early American historiography, and assess whether the city-state model can be applied elsewhere in early America and in the Atlantic World. In his response, Peterson argues that his aim was not to propose a city-state paradigm for comparative purposes, but rather to employ the city-state concept as the best way to explain Boston’s historical trajectory over two centuries, and to highlight the contingency of US history.


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