Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Architecture, Domestic – Great Britain – History'

This thesis attempts to account for the appearance, persistence, and eventual decline of an architectural motif, derived from ancient pagan temples, widely used as the principal feature on an increasing variety of building types in Britain, during the period 1630 to 1850. The thesis seeks to do this by defining both the word 'portico' and the architectural forms to which, historically, it was applied, and by examining the religious, political, social, and stylistic contexts in which the portico, as a metaphor for the temple, was utilized. The rationalization within the Vitruvian-Christian tradition of the ancient temple's pagan connotations; the portico's intrinsic capacity to symbolize virtue, distinction, and authority; the changing perceptions of the idea of the temple; and the different nature and sources of both the authority and the architectural style which the portico expressed, are investigated. Architecturally, the portico expressed grandeur, centrality, and an entry; it controlled, defined, and gave focus to urban space. Introduced to Britain by Inigo Jones, and based on classical Roman and Palladian models but with Salomonic overtones, the portico initially symbolized Stuart dynastic claims to divine kingship. As political and economic power shifted to an aristocratic oligarchy, the temple that was Britain, Rome's heir, symbolized a church and state united, and the secular virtues of the Augustan age. Palladio's fusion of Roman temple and villa provided the model for the oligarchy's power base, the porticoed country house. Archaeology and politics combined, first to project mercantile opulence through imperial Roman-inspired neo-classicism, then the more fundamental qualities of the Greek temple. The Pantheon gave way to the Parthenon; the temple of private wealth to the imagined temple of democracy. After epitomizing the characteristic early nineteenth-century public style, the too-pagan Greek portico succumbed - as did the classical ideal - in the anarchy of styles, to the Gothic.

This thesis serves to highlight the significance of food and diet in the servant problem narrative of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain and the role of food in master-servant relationships as a source of conflict. The study also shows how attitudes towards servant labor, wages, and perquisites resulted in food-related theft. Employers customarily provided regular meals, food, drink, or board wages and tea money to their domestic servants in addition to an annual salary, yet food and meals often resulted in contention as evidenced by contemporary criticism and increased calls for legislative wage regulation. Differing expectations of wage components, including food and other perquisites, resulted in ongoing conflict between masters and servants. Existing historical scholarship on the relationship between British domestic servants and their masters or mistresses in context of the servant problem often tends to place focus on themes of gender and sexuality. Considering the role of food as a fundamental necessity in the lives of servants provides a new approach to understanding the servant problem and reveals sources of mistrust and resentment in the master-servant relationship.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, while many towns and cities grew at a remarkable rate, interest in architectural design, planning, and the quality of urban landscapes also increased. By the close of the century a number of associations had been established that were concerned with promoting the care of ancient buildings, the protection of open spaces, or the quality of future urban growth. During the twentieth century associational activity concerned with the quality of urban space has proliferated. Many, if not most, towns and cities in Britain have an organized body dedicated to campaigning and acting for the interests of local identity, development and heritage. Sometimes these are called Preservation Trusts (as in St Andrews or Cambridge), sometimes they are simply named after the city to which they belong (The London Society or The Warwick Society), most commonly they are known as Civic Societies. Regardless of name, they share key objectives: the promotion of high standards in planning and architecture; the preservation of historically or aesthetically significant buildings; the education of the public in the history, geography, and architecture of the local environment. In the early twentieth century these organizations provided a focus for discussions about the nature of urban space and approaches to shaping the development of towns and cities. They brought together a range of individuals, including planners, architects, reformers, academics, artists and politicians, who shared a concern for the landscape of Britain’s cities. Through their discussions and activities emerged an approach to urban development that emphasised socio-scientific methods and ideas in combination with an argument about the affective bonds that connect individuals to a place. The approach was often called civics and the agenda pressed forward by civic associations and their members forms the focus for this study. This work explores the continuities between philanthropic experiment in the later nineteenth century and the civic movement of the twentieth century by demonstrating the connections between earlier and later activities, and emphasising the continued involvement of a number of key individuals and families. It makes a contribution to understanding professional development in the fields of planning, architecture and urban studies. Key figures in the history of British planning, such as Patrick Abercrombie, Raymond Unwin and George Pepler, formed their early professional networks through civic groups, while architects including Charles Reilly and Aston Webb developed their collaborations through their involvement with the civic movement. Furthermore, individuals whose role in British urban sociology, most notably Patrick Geddes, has influenced the ways in which we study our urban areas first promoted their ideas and methods through the network of civic associations that developed over the course of early twentieth century. Through the analysis this thesis draws in theoretically informed questions. Firstly these relate to the role of voluntary associations and networks in structuring the development of professions, circulating their bodies of specialist knowledge and securing wider participation in urban policy. Secondly, the thesis considers the manner in which spaces come to hold the meaning and memories of particular groups, the significance and power of representations of place and the emerging tradition of spatial history that privileges the micro-processes through which places are created and sustained.

This research focuses on domestic religion: those activities through which everyday devotion and the worship of God were performed. It encompasses both the daily communal practices of family religion (prayer, psalm singing, catechising and sermon repetition) and the personal devotions of individuals (prayer, mediation and self-examination) in domestic space. It also considers the extraordinary religious practices of preparation for communion, days of fasting and humiliation, and the experience of sickness and death. The textuality of domestic religion is highlighted in a chapter on reading and writing. The published prescriptive advice is related to the reality of lived experience as revealed through the archives of seventeenth century families, most significantly those of the Harleys of Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire. Domestic religion was a highly complex contiguous cycle of enmeshed interrelated practices. The links were not only between domestic practices but also with public worship. A related theme challenges the supposed interiority of Protestant, and more particularly Puritan, piety, as it highlights the sociable nature of domestic religion. Domestic religion provides a useful lens throughout to explore consensus and division in seventeenth century religious politics and culture. The domestic religion was vital in the construction and projection of family identity.

Current regulatory and other policy trends in housing refurbishment relating to low-carbon performance standards tend to involve complex technologies and systems as well as innovative solutions to achieve 80% emissions reduction in line with the UK national target for 2050. Indicators of domestic energy performance tend to assume ideal performance of materials, complex systems and services, and that they are installed to high standards and under specific conditions, as well as rational occupant behaviour and interactions. Previous studies exploring the influence of socio-technical factors on the UK's domestic energy use highlight that one of the main reasons for under-performance of individual projects is the lack of understanding of how people interact with domestic technology. Considering this, and given that there is still little evidence on deep refurbishments that implement low-carbon 'whole house' approaches in the UK, this research explored occupants' interaction with heating and ventilation measures as these were designed, installed and operated. The main concern was to identify the type of interactions that occur between occupants (social housing tenants) and building systems (mainly low-carbon heating and ventilation systems), and how that influences actual energy use. Using a sample of 26 social housing properties involved in the Retrofit for the Future competition in the UK, the study employed an socio-technical mixed methods approach, in which qualitative and quantitative empirical data were explored together, cross-checking occupants' 'doings' and 'sayings'. A combination of theories was used to analyse the complex interrelated factors involved in users' interaction with building systems. The analysis identifies key factors that affect significantly occupants' everyday practices and their interactions with the new measures: thermal comfort and pastexperiences with measures and controls; knowledge and skills (of both occupants and those involved in the project); design of the technical interventions (systems/measures) and quality of their installation. The findings from this research showed that active measures (such as intelligent and conventional heating controls, MVHR boosters, etc.) fostered direct interaction with active users when there were no design or installation faults. On the contrary, low-carbon measures that are designed and installed to be passive (such as MVHR systems operation) tend, in practice, to involve indirect interactions with active users. The research findings provide an insight into the 'in-use' factors, demonstrating to policy makers and implementers of mass refurbishment programmes the need for a framework where critical combinations of different measures and design solutions are targeted on specific house types, locations and households, in order to achieve maximum savings. Higher standards in installation of the new measures and improved quality control are also found to be a key part of refurbishment policies.

Conceived inside a chronological frame, which starts in 1948, the year the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London founded, and ends in 1963, when Gillo Dorfles wrote a crucial essay on industrial design, concluding more than a decade of discussions, the thesis aims to examine some artistic and cultural phenomena identified in Italy and Great Britain, and seen as the acknowledgement or as the reaction to modernity. Topics and fields taken in consideration within the thesis are technology, science (fact and fiction), vision of the future, the relationship between arts and the awareness of industrial design as a new discipline. All these aspects, that might seems unusual in relationship with visual arts, are perceived as the expression of a second phase of Modernism. The British personalities included in the thesis are Reyner Banham, Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, John McHale, Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson, all members of the Independent Group. With the presence of architects, visual artists, photographers, critics and, in a broader sense, designers, the group encompassed a variety of popular interests, with the inclusion of mass‐produced goods. The Italian figures presented in the thesis – Gillo Dorfles, Bruno Munari, Ettore Sottsass and Giuseppe Pinot‐Gallizio – focused on industrial design objects, viewed as a new artistic branch, to promote, to plan or to question. Other recurring figures analysed in the thesis are Max Bill, Asger Jorn and Tomás Maldonado, who give international connections to the themes and British and Italian personalities examined. In order to provide a wider understanding of the 1950s and their crucial function in the story of post‐war Europe, the thesis aims to emphasise the role played at different level by British and Italian visual artists, designers and critics, and explain the reasons that, in the following decade, would push Italy in its industrial miracle and Great Britain at the peak for its popular culture, pop music and fashion creativity.

Furniture history is often considered a niche subject removed from the main discipline of art history, and one that has little to do with the output of painters, sculptors and architects. This thesis, however, connects the key intellectual, artistic and architectural debates surfacing in 'the arts' between 1740 and 1840 with the design of British furniture. Despite the expanding corpus of scholarly monographs and articles dealing with individual cabinet-makers, furniture making in geographic areas and periods of time, little attention has been paid to exploring Gothic furniture made between 1740 and 1840. Indeed, no body of research on 'mainstream' Gothic furniture made at this time has been published. No sustained attempt has been made to trace its stylistic evolution, establish stylistic phases, or to place this development within the context of contemporary architectural practice and historiography — except for the study of A.W.N. Pugin's 'Reformed Gothic'. Neither have furniture historians been willing to explore the aesthetic's connection with the intellectual and sentimental position of 'the Gothic' in the period. This thesis addresses these shortcomings and is the first to bridge the historiographic, cultural and architectural concerns of the time with the stylistic, constructional and material characteristics of Gothic furniture. It argues that it, like architecture, was charged with social and political meanings that included national identity in the eighteenth century — around a century before Charles Barry and A.W.N. Pugin designed the Palace of Westminster and prominently associated the Gothic legacy with Britishness.

Collecting recipes was an established tradition that continued in elite English households throughout the eighteenth century. This thesis is on medical recipes and advice, and it addresses the evolution of recipe collecting from the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. It investigates elite domestic medicine within a cultural history of medicine framework and uses social and material history approaches to reveal why elites continued to collect medical recipes, given the commercialisation of medicine. This thesis contends that the meaning of domestic medicine must be understood within a wider context of elite healthcare in order to appreciate how the recipe collecting tradition evolved alongside cultural shifts, and shifts within the medical economy. My re-appraisal of the meaning of domestic medicine gives elite healthcare a clearer role within the narrative of the social history of medicine. Elite healthcare was about choice. Wealthy individuals had economic agency in consumerism, and recipe compilers interacted with new sources of information and products; recipe books are evidence of this consumer engagement. In addition to being household objects, recipe books had cultural significance as heirlooms, and as objects of literacy, authority, and creativity. A crucial reason for the continuation of the recipe collecting tradition was due to its continued engagement with cultural attitudes towards social obligation, knowledge exchange, taste, and sociability as an intellectual pursuit. Positioning the household as an important space of creativity, experiment, and innovation, this thesis reinforces domestic medicine as an important part of the interconnected histories of science and medicine. This thesis moreover contributes to the social history of eighteenth-century England by demonstrating the central role domestic medicine had in elite healthcare, and reveals the elite reception of the commercialisation of medicine from a consumer perspective through an investigation of personal records of intellectual pastimes and patient experiences.

This thesis examines science's role in the construction of Britain's new Houses of Parliament between 1834 and 1860. Architecturally the Gothic Palace embodies Victorian notions of the medieval and romanticized perceptions of English history. Yet in the mid-nineteenth century, the building not only reflected, but was involved in, the very latest scientific knowledge. This included chemistry, optics, geology, horology, and architecture as a science itself. Science was chosen, performed, trusted, displayed, contested, and debated through the physical space of government. Parliament was a place where science was done. Not only was knowledge imported to guide architectural construction, but it was actively produced within the walls of Britain's new legislature. I argue that this attention to science was not coincidental. Rather, it was a crucial demonstration of the changing relationship between science and politics. Science was increasingly asserted to be a powerful form of knowledge, and to an institution struggling to secure authority in the uncertainty of reformed British politics, it appeared a valuable resource for credibility. Contextualizing the use of science at Parliament in the political instability of the 1830s and 1840s emphasizes how the use of new knowledge was a potent practice of constructing political authority.

Ce travail s’intéresse au problème de la relativisation de l’expression architecturale liée à la remise en question, durant le XVIIe siècle, de l’origine divine et de la valeur des canons proportionnels qui sous-tendent la tradition classique. Emblématique de la Querelle qui opposa Claude Perrault et François Blondel au sein de l’Académie royale de Paris, ce problème recevra une formulation privilégiée dans la tradition théorique anglaise qui se caractérise par la volonté de préserver une forme d’objectivité à l’expression formelle tout en cherchant à y intégrer la valeur subjective de l’usage. A travers l’étude de textes esthétiques et de théories d’architecture produits en Angleterre durant le XVIIIe siècle et le début du XIXe siècle, nous avons cherché à identifier les différentes solutions proposées par les théoriciens pour parvenir à concilier le sujet et l’objet dans la forme architecturale et ainsi aboutir à une expression qui autorise l’appropriation individuelle tout en satisfaisant à l’impératif du consensus.
Doctorat en Histoire, art et archéologie
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished