Florentine New Towns

Florentine New Towns PDF Author: David Friedman
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Florentine New Towns is an original and comprehensive study of an important episode in late Medieval urbanism.

Florentine New Towns

Florentine New Towns PDF Author: David Friedman
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Florentine New Towns is an original and comprehensive study of an important episode in late Medieval urbanism.

City and Cosmos

City and Cosmos PDF Author: Keith D. Lilley
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1861897545
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
In City and Cosmos, Keith D. Lilley argues that the medieval mind considered the city truly a microcosm: much more than a collection of houses, a city also represented a scaled-down version of the very order and organization of the cosmos. Drawing upon a wide variety of sources, including original accounts, visual art, science, literature, and architectural history, City and Cosmos offers an innovative interpretation of how medieval Christians infused their urban surroundings with meaning. Lilley combines both visual and textual evidence to demonstrate how the city carried Christian cosmological meaning and symbolism, sharing common spatial forms and functional ordering. City and Cosmos will not only appeal to a diverse range of scholars studying medieval history, archaeology, philosophy, and theology; but it will also find a broad audience in architecture, urban planning, and art history. With more of the world’s population inhabiting cities than ever before, this original perspective on urban order and culture will prove increasingly valuable to anyone wishing to better understand the role of the city in society.

Time, Space, and Order

Time, Space, and Order PDF Author: Christian Frost
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039119431
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The city of Salisbury was built together with the cathedral in the early part of the thirteenth century, shortly after the Fourth Lateran Council in Rome and the signing of Magna Carta in England. This book describes how the bishop and his chapter took advantage of this extraordinary opportunity. The author argues that the political turmoil which affected the development of Old Sarum was replaced at Salisbury by a sacramental vision superimposing ideas of movement and time over a static, partly geometric order. The most significant occasions used by the clergy to reveal this tension were the Rogation processions around Ascension Day which seem to have left an imprint on the layout of the city. The study goes on to suggest that participation in the processions - inside the cathedral and the city - brought past, present and future together in one experience which linked normal time with the foundation of Salisbury as well as the hope associated with the Second Coming. This observation not only offers new insights into the concerns of urban Christianity in the first half of the thirteenth century but also points to an alternative way of looking at gothic architecture based around movement.

The Later Medieval City

The Later Medieval City PDF Author: David Nicholas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317901878
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
The Later Medieval City, 1300-1500, the second part of David Nicholas's ambitious two-volume study of cities and city life in the Middle Ages, fully lives up to its splendid precursor, The Growth of the Medieval City. (Like that volume it is fully self-sufficient, though many readers will want to use the two as a continuum.) This book covers a much shorter period than the first. That traced the rise of the medieval European city system from late Antiquity to the early fourteenth century; this offers a portrait of the fully developed late medieval city in all its richness and complexity. David Nicholas begins with the economic and demographic realignments of the last two medieval centuries. These fostered urban growth, raising living standards and increasing demand for a growing range of urban manufactures. The hunger for imports and a shortage of coin led to sophisticated credit mechanisms that could only function through large cities. But, if these changes brought new opportunities to the wealthy, they also created a growing problem of urban poverty: violence became endemic in the later medieval city. Moreover, although more rebellions were sparked by taxes than by class conflict, class divisions were deepening. Most cities came to be governed by councils chosen from guild-members, and most guilds were dominated by merchants. The landowning elite that had dominated the early medieval cities of the first volume still retained its prestige, but its wealth was outstripped by the richer merchants; while craftsmen, who had little political influence, were further disadvantaged as access to the guilds became more restricted. The later medieval cities developed permanent bureaucracies providing a huge range of public services, and they were paid for by sophisticated systems of taxation and public borrowing. The survival of their fuller, richer records allow us not only to apply a more statistical approach, but also to get much closer, to the splendours and squalors of everyday city-life than was possible in the earlier volume. The book concludes with a set of vibrant chapters on women and children and religious minorities in the city, on education and culture, and on the tenor of ordinary urban existence. Like its predecessor, this book is massively, and vividly, documented. Its approach is interdisciplinary and comparative, and its examples and case studies are drawn from across Europe: from France, England, Germany, the Low Countries, Iberia and Italy, with briefer reviews of the urban experience elsewhere from Baltic to Balkans. The result is the most wide-ranging and up-to-date study of its multifaceted subject. It is a formidable achievement.

The Noisy Renaissance

The Noisy Renaissance PDF Author: Niall Atkinson
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271077832
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
From the strictly regimented church bells to the freewheeling chatter of civic life, Renaissance Florence was a city built not just of stone but of sound as well. An evocative alternative to the dominant visual understanding of urban spaces, The Noisy Renaissance examines the premodern city as an acoustic phenomenon in which citizens used sound to navigate space and society. Analyzing a range of documentary and literary evidence, art and architectural historian Niall Atkinson creates an “acoustic topography” of Florence. The dissemination of official messages, the rhythm of prayer, and the murmur of rumor and gossip combined to form a soundscape that became a foundation in the creation and maintenance of the urban community just as much as the city’s physical buildings. Sound in this space triggered a wide variety of social behaviors and spatial relations: hierarchical, personal, communal, political, domestic, sexual, spiritual, and religious. By exploring these rarely studied soundscapes, Atkinson shows Florence to be both an exceptional and an exemplary case study of urban conditions in the early modern period.

History of Urban Form Before the Industrial Revolution

History of Urban Form Before the Industrial Revolution PDF Author: A.E.J. Morris
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317885147
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
Provides an international history of urban development, from its origins to the industrial revolution. This well established book maintains the high standard of information found in the previous two editions, describing the physical results of some 5000 years of urban activity. It explains and develops the concept of 'unplanned' cities that grow organically, in contrast with 'planned' cities that were shaped in response to urban form determinants. Spread throughout the texts are copious illustrations from a wealth of sources, including cartographic urban records, aerial and other photographs, original drawings and the author's numerous analytical line drawings.

Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age

Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110223899
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 769

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Book Description
Although the city as a central entity did not simply disappear with the Fall of the Roman Empire, the development of urban space at least since the twelfth century played a major role in the history of medieval and early modern mentality within a social-economic and religious framework. Whereas some poets projected urban space as a new utopia, others simply reflected the new significance of the urban environment as a stage where their characters operate very successfully. As today, the premodern city was the locus where different social groups and classes got together, sometimes peacefully, sometimes in hostile terms. The historical development of the relationship between Christians and Jews, for instance, was deeply determined by the living conditions within a city. By the late Middle Ages, nobility and bourgeoisie began to intermingle within the urban space, which set the stage for dramatic and far-reaching changes in the social and economic make-up of society. Legal-historical aspects also find as much consideration as practical questions concerning water supply and sewer systems. Moreover, the early modern city within the Ottoman and Middle Eastern world likewise finds consideration. Finally, as some contributors observe, the urban space provided considerable opportunities for women to carve out a niche for themselves in economic terms.

The Italian City Republics

The Italian City Republics PDF Author: Daniel Philip Waley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317864468
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Daniel Waley and Trevor Dean illustrate how, from the eleventh century onwards, many dozens of Italian towns achieved independence as political entities, unhindered by any centralising power. Until the fourteenth century, when the regimes of individual ‘tyrants’ took over in most towns, these communes were the scene of a precocious, and very well-documented, experiment in republican self-government. Focusing on the typical medium-sized towns rather than the better-known cities, the authors draw on a rich variety of contemporary material (both documentary and literary) to portray the world of the communes, illustrating the patriotism and public spirit as well as the equally characteristic factional strife which was to tear them apart. Discussion of the artistic and social lives of the inhabitants shows how these towns were the seed-bed of the cultural achievements of the early Renaissance. In this fourth edition, Trevor Dean has expanded the book’s treatment of religion, women, housing, architecture and art, to take account of recent trends in the abundant historiography of these topics. A new selection of illuminating images has been included, and the bibliography brought up to date. Both students and the general reader interested in Italian history, literature and art will find this accessible book a rewarding and fascinating read.

The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard PDF Author: Abraham Akkerman
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487501269
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Ebenezer Howard, an Englishman, and Jane Jacobs, a naturalized Canadian, personify the twentieth century's opposing outlooks on cities. Howard had envisaged small towns, newly built from scratch, fashioned on single family homes with small gardens. Jacobs embraced existing inner-city neighbourhoods emphasizing the verve of the living street. From Howard's idea, the American Dream of garden suburbs had emerged, yet his conceptualization of a modern city received criticism for being uniform and alienated from the rest of the city. Similarly, at the turn of the new century, Jacobs' inner-city neighbourhoods came to be recognized as the result of commodification, vacillating between poverty and newly discovered hubs of urban authenticity. Presenting Howard and Jacobs within a psychocultural context, The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard addresses our urban crisis in the recognition that "city form" is a gendered, allegorical medium expressing femininity and masculinity within two founding features of the built environment: void and volume. Both founding contrasts bring tensions, but also the opportunities of fusion between pairs of urban polarities: human scale against superscale, gait against speed, and spontaneity against surveillance. Jacobs and Howard, in their respective attitudes, have come to embrace the two ancient archetypes, the Garden and the Citadel, leaving it to future generations to blend their two contrarian stances.

Ancient Origins of the Mexican Plaza

Ancient Origins of the Mexican Plaza PDF Author: Logan Wagner
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 029274983X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The plaza has been a defining feature of Mexican urban architecture and culture for at least 4,000 years. Ancient Mesoamericans conducted most of their communal life in outdoor public spaces, and today the plaza is still the public living room in every Mexican neighborhood, town, and city—the place where friends meet, news is shared, and personal and communal rituals and celebrations happen. The site of a community’s most important architecture—church, government buildings, and marketplace—the plaza is both sacred and secular space and thus the very heart of the community. This extensively illustrated book traces the evolution of the Mexican plaza from Mesoamerican sacred space to modern public gathering place. The authors led teams of volunteers who measured and documented nearly one hundred traditional Mexican town centers. The resulting plans reveal the layers of Mesoamerican and European history that underlie the contemporary plaza. The authors describe how Mesoamericans designed their ceremonial centers as embodiments of creation myths—the plaza as the primordial sea from which the earth emerged. They discuss how Europeans, even though they sought to eradicate native culture, actually preserved it as they overlaid the Mesoamerican sacred plaza with the Renaissance urban concept of an orthogonal grid with a central open space. The authors also show how the plaza’s historic, architectural, social, and economic qualities can contribute to mainstream urban design and architecture today.