Robert and James Adam, Architects of the Age of Enlightenment

Robert and James Adam, Architects of the Age of Enlightenment
Author: Ariyuki Kondo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317322509

During the second half of the eighteenth century British architecture moved away from the dominant school of classicism in favour of a more creative freedom of expression. At the forefront of this change were architect brothers Robert and James Adam. Kondo’s work places them within the context of eighteenth-century intellectual thought.

Politics and the English Country House, 1688–1800

Politics and the English Country House, 1688–1800
Author: Joan Coutu
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2023-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0228014972

Politics has always been at the heart of the English country house, in its design and construction, as well as in the activities and experiences of those who lived in and visited these places. As Britain moved from an agrarian to an imperial economy over the course of the eighteenth century, the home mirrored the social change experienced in the public sphere. This collection focuses on the relationship between the country house and the mutable nature of British politics in the eighteenth century. Essays explore the country house as a stage for politicking, a vehicle for political advancement, a symbol of party allegiance or political values, and a setting for appropriate lifestyles. Initially the exclusive purview of the landed aristocracy, politics increasingly came to be played out in the open, augmented by the emergence of career politicians – usually untitled members of the patriciate – and men of new money, much of it created on Caribbean plantations or in the employ of the East India Company. Politics and the English Country House, 1688–1800 reveals how, during this period of profound change, the country house remained a constant. The country house was the definitive tangible manifestation of social standing and, for the political class, owning one became almost an imperative. In its consideration of the country house as lived and spatial experience, as an aesthetic and symbolic object, and as an economic engine, this book offers a new perspective on the complexity of political meaning embedded in the eighteenth-century country house – and on ourselves as active recipients and interpreters of its various narratives, more than two centuries later.

Who Built Scotland

Who Built Scotland
Author: Alexander McCall Smith
Publisher:
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2018-09-13
Genre:
ISBN: 9781849172721

Experience a new history of Scotland told through its places. Writers Kathleen Jamie, Alexander McCall Smith, Alistair Moffat, James Robertson and James Crawford pick twenty-five buildings to tell the story of the nation.Travelling across the country, from abandoned islands and lonely glens to the heart of our modern cities, these five authors seek out the diverse narrative of the Scottish people. Follow Kathleen Jamie as she searches for the traces of our first family hearths in the Cairngorms and makes a midsummer journey to Shetland to meet the unlikely new inhabitants of an Iron Age broch. Tour the wondrous and macabre Surgeons' Hall with Alexander McCall Smith, or walk with him over sacred ground to Iona's ancient Abbey. Join Alistair Moffat as he discovers a lost whisky village in the wilds of Strathconon, and climbs up through the vertiginous layers of history in Edinburgh Castle. Accompany James Robertson as he goes from the standing stones of Callanish to the humble cottage of Hugh MacDiarmid - via the engineering colossus of the Forth Rail Bridge. And journey with James Crawford from a packed crowd in Hampden Park, to an off-the-grid eco-bothy on the Isle of Eigg.Who Built Scotland is a landmark exploration of Scotland's social, political and cultural histories. Moving from Neolithic families, exiled hermits and ambitious royal dynasties to highland shieling girls, peasant poets, Enlightenment philosophers and iconoclastic artists, it places our people, our ideas and our passions at the heart of our architecture and archaeology. This is the remarkable story how we have shaped our buildings and how our buildings, in turn, have shaped us.

Thomas White (c. 1736–1811)

Thomas White (c. 1736–1811)
Author: Deborah Turnbull
Publisher: Windgather Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2021-12-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1914427017

This volume aims to restore the reputation of Thomas White, who in his time was as well respected as his fellow landscape designers Lancelot 'Capability' Brown and Humphry Repton. By the end of his career, he had produced designs for at least 32 sites across northern England and over 60 in Scotland. These include nationally important designed landscapes in Yorkshire such as Harewood House, Sledmere Hall, Burton Constable Hall, Newby Hall, Mulgrave Castle as well as Raby Castle in Durham, Belle Isle in Cumbria, and Brocklesby Hall in Lincolnshire. He has a vital role in the story of how northern English designed landscapes evolved in the 18th century. The book focuses on White's known commissions in England and sheds further light on the work of other designers such as Brown and Repton, who worked on many of the same sites. White set up as an independent designer in 1765, having worked for Brown from 1759, and his style developed over the next thirty years. Never merely a 'follower of Brown', as he is often erroneously described, his designs for plantations in particular were much admired and influenced the later, more informal styles of the picturesque movement. The improvement plans he produced for his clients demonstrate his surveying and artistic skills. These plans were working documents but at the same time works of art in their own right. Over 60 of his beautifully-executed colored plans survive, which is a testament to the value his clients placed on them. This book makes available for the first time over 90% of the known plans and surveys by White for England. Also included are plans by White's contemporaries, together with later maps, estate surveys, and contemporary illustrations to understand which parts of improvement plans were implemented.

Power and Virtue

Power and Virtue
Author: Shiqiao Li
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2024-11-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1040278108

This is the first full-length study on the connections between English architecture and intellectual change between 1660 and 1730. As new ideas developed in post-Restoration England across the realms of politics, culture, academia and morality, so too did architectural expression of these ideas. Power and Virtue articulately engages English architecture with notions of power and virtue in terms of empirical knowledge on the one hand and humanism and virtuosi on the other. Aimed at an academic readership in history and theory of architecture and the history of English architecture, this unique study will also interest those studying the ideas of material culture.

Ancient Lives

Ancient Lives
Author: Fraser Hunter
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Scotland
ISBN: 9789088903755

Ancient Lives provides new perspectives on objects, people and place in early Scotland and beyond.This scholarly and accessible volume provides a show-case of new information and new perspectives on material culture linked, but not limited to, Scotland.