The Art History and Architecture Collection is a vital resource for academic libraries, offering extensive insights into various themes such as art movements, single-artist studies, decolonising art, gender and masculinity, citizenship, architecture and design. This collection aims to broaden the scope of art history, addressing a diverse range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.
The collection encompasses theories and histories of materiality, exploring the intricate relationship between making and thinking, fashion and culture, production and consumption, textiles and industry.
| Key series |
| Rethinking Art’s Histories |
| Studies in Design and Material Culture |
| Collection year | Titles |
| 2025 titles | 17 |
| 2023/4 titles | 28 |
| 2013-2022 titles | 74 |
| Total collection | 128 |
| Keywords |
| Singleartist studies |
| Subcultures |
| Design |
| Architecture |
| Citizenship |
| Surrealism |
| Art movements |
| Decolonising art |
| Queer art |
| Gender – masculinity |
| Modernism |
| Postmodernism |
| Thema subject categories |
| Architecture |
| Avant-garde |
| Ceramics, mosaics and glass: artworks |
| Colonialism and imperialism |
| History of art |
| Material culture |
| Performance art |
| Theory of art |
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Art history and architecture collection
The collection concludes with a dialogue with the feminist artist Elaine Reichek and two of the book’s editors, Michael Green and Chloë Julius, in which Reichek offers reflections on her 2020 exhibition, Between the Needle and the Book. The conversation uses this exhibition as a springboard to discuss the artistic and etymological kinship between craft and text, particularly textiles and literature, in Reichek’s practice. This conversation provides a wide-ranging account of an artist who reimagines poetry and prose in the very fabric of mixed media ‘sewn paintings’ and, in so doing, synthesises literature and art in ways that compel further inquiries into the disciplinary autonomy of each.
This essay deals with the persistence of Gothic citations in Julian-Jakob Kneer’s recent work. Ever since its emergence in late medieval society, the tradition of the Gothic has represented a specific modern paradox. Although a steady definition of the Gothic throughout its 800-year history is nearly impossible, the ubiquity of neo-Gothic in artist practices such as in Kneer’s requires us to revisit this tradition and the problems expressed by its persistent return. The Gothic now appears as a hollow citation of a backward-looking tradition, esoteric and subcultural, even kitsch and cliché; but paradoxically, it has an appeal in our time, it is modern, precisely in its apparent rejection of modernity. The persistence of the Gothic suggests that art is still haunted by the concerns and anxieties that are largely modern (or modernist) in its consciousness of crisis and transformation, even after postmodernism rejected such ‘master’ narratives for the subaltern. The Gothic revival in Germany of the 21st century, exemplified by Kneer’s practice, expresses a particular form of coolly detached Romanticism, and suggests how Romanticism is a persistent component of a modern sensibility, which is a by-product of the antagonism between the individual and society. Despite postmodernism’s rejection of such notions, this tradition has not dissipated or been overcome, it has merely been repressed. As long as modernity remains an incomplete project, the Gothic will not lose its grip on art.
London’s Royal Festival Hall is a building that draws on a long tradition of thinking and experimenting with architecture as both a musical and a scientific instrument. Very many of these experiments were founded on observations in existing buildings with different acoustic characteristics or implemented on an ad hoc basis. The Introduction to this book establishes a context to those experiments and those concepts. At the core of the book is an exploration of how they were expressed and explored though architecture. Other books have taken a wider historical sweep or examined the topic of acoustics in terms of intersectional studies within the discipline of architecture. This book, while it centres upon architecture, takes its essence from exchanges in that era that were interdisciplinary rather than intersectional. In interrogating the interdisciplinarity which was inherent to architectural acoustics in the first half of the twentieth century, it demonstrates how music, engineering, physics, metaphysics, revivalism, religion, and even occultism – in varying degrees of flagrancy or latency – were all pressed into dialogue with architecture.
‘It is language that has trapped her, meanings that have excluded her’, Lis Rhodes writes in the essay that accompanies her experimental film Light Reading (1978). Like other feminists working during the 1970s, Rhodes understood the gendered power relations that pervade the English language, as well as their capacity to mute a female subject. Was it possible to construct a signifying practice – either visual or linguistic – that could accommodate a female subject? Rhodes’s thinking on this matter can be traced to Gertrude Stein, whose poem ‘Sonatina Followed by Another’ is quoted at length in Light Reading. Accompanied by collages of black-and-white photographs and illegible typeset letters, the narrator ventriloquises Stein, repeatedly quoting her without attribution, so that the narration seems to issue from a polyvocal chorus rather than a unitary speaker. Considering Light Reading alongside critiques of language made in the 1970s, this essay suggests that language provided fertile ground for artists and filmmakers to reassess the relationship between gender and the visual field. It argues that Stein’s anti-patriarchal, dialogic mode of writing offered Rhodes a new way to articulate female subjecthood.
The design competition for the League of Nations building in Geneva was a complex affair. A number of architectural historians have described the intricacies of the organisation of the competition and the questions raised over its ultimate implementation. The international dialogue on acoustics that took place after the competition was decided and once a ‘final’ design had been proposed, however, has received very little scholarly attention. In an extension of the focus on acoustics for diplomacy which was introduced in Chapter 3 with the work for the Assembly Chamber at Delhi, this chapter explores the manner in which acoustics for speech was a topic of substantial scrutiny and significance in the post-World War I legislative and diplomatic setting, and a critical architectural concern positioned at the nexus of science, industry, politics, and international transfers of knowledge. It also explores the changing public perception of acoustics from ‘scientific novelty’ to public health concern, examining both the social responses to this and the responses within organised acoustic research. This chapter also discusses the use of polemic and social movements in highlighting the effects of inadequate sound insulation in domestic construction and the increasing consequence of noise as a form of environmental pollution in the inter-war years.
In December 1951 a large-scale acoustic experiment in St Paul’s Cathedral made headline news when a series of pistol shots was fired from the pulpit. Some fifty years previously, Westminster Cathedral was also the focus of public interest in acoustics when the London Times advertised a ‘tuning concert’, the third in a series of large-scale experiments on the still uncompleted cathedral’s acoustic properties. In the interim, a number of musical and architectural experiments were undertaken in an array of different buildings. From a disused munitions factory in North London to Abbey Road Studios in St John’s Wood and the League of Nations in Geneva, these experiments were fundamental in conceptualising and refining contemporary approaches to acoustics and the ‘tuning’ of buildings. This book is about those experiments and those concepts. It is an exploration of how they evolved and how they combined, how they were shaped by different voices and perspectives, how they were tested or responded to different circumstances, how they were expressed and explored though architecture. It contextualises acoustic experiments as a narrative of people, buildings, and ideas that took shape through shifting social, political, scientific, and artistic circumstances.
In 1941, in the midst of the Blitz, the director of Britain’s Building Research Station (BRS) received a letter from Basil Cameron, chair of the London Symphony Orchestral Society. London’s Queen’s Hall had been destroyed by an incendiary bomb just ten days earlier. Orchestral music was expected to relocate to the Royal Albert Hall, where the acoustics were known to be capricious. Cameron’s letter contained an impassioned plea to address the problematic acoustics as a matter of urgency in order to ‘ensure the continuance of orchestral music in London’. Significantly, the request was granted, despite the fact that government work related to the acoustics of buildings was officially in hiatus at the time, having been suspended for the duration of the war. Three further exceptions were permitted with respect to the wartime suspension of work in architectural acoustics – at St Paul’s Cathedral, Gloucester Cathedral, and the Royal Exchange – all on the grounds that the work was experimental and would meet a societal need. This chapter examines the social and cultural significance attached to those architectural ‘exceptions’. The recognition given to the acoustic condition was significant, and so too was the approach to intervening in that condition. While optimising resources and experimenting with what was available, mutability of the acoustic context was explored in all four buildings. This chapter takes these buildings as a lens through which to examine the conceptualisation of architecture as both a musical and a scientific instrument, and the broader implications of that approach for philosophies of design subsequent to the war.
The Prologue, focusing on 1951, opens with two high-profile acoustic experiments undertaken in London that year. The first – conducted at night in the interior of St Paul’s Cathedral – involved pistol fire from the pulpit and made the international news. The second was the inauguration and architectural ‘tuning’ of Royal Festival Hall that took place earlier that same year. Beginning with this architectural manifestation of acoustic experiments in the immediate post-war era, and their national as well as international reception, the Prologue establishes a context for exploring the path of development and intertwining of disciplines that led up to that point. It introduces some of the book’s core themes: articulating the concept of designing for musical tone that came most prominently to public attention in the design and inauguration of Royal Festival Hall; introducing the role of the press in catalysing acoustic work in architecture throughout the previous half-century; and aligning objective with subjective modes of design, as well as exploring how both formal and informal modes of enquiry pushed one another forward. Ultimately the Prologue establishes the book as a narrative of people and buildings.
Chapter 2 focuses on people, interactions, and transfers of knowledge. It interrogates changing perceptions of the role of science in architecture in the early twentieth century, as well as the tentative beginnings of both acoustic consultancy and the incorporation of ‘science as applied to building’ into the architectural curriculum in 1912. With reference to the personal papers of key figures, it outlines how a nexus of interdisciplinary networks was initially established and demonstrates the specific circumstances of the architect Hope Bagenal’s engagement with the physicist Wallace Clement Sabine at Harvard, as well as with the musicians Edward Dent and Richard Terry at Cambridge and Westminster Cathedral respectively. It also outlines the role of the Westminster Cathedral experiments in promoting scientific and design-based developments in architectural acoustics, and establishes the initial dissemination and uptake of Sabine’s work across the Atlantic. This chapter engages with changing attitudes to terminology and concepts of reverberation in contrast to the previous century, and it demonstrates how concepts of – and experiments in – musical tone were central to developments in architecture and in science. Finally, the chapter explores how chance encounters and the soundscapes of World War I furthered the trajectories outlined above, catalysing a new direction in architecture and applied design. In so doing, it maps a trajectory of thought and interdisciplinary collaboration that took shape under the most unlikely of circumstances.
As a visual artist, Romare Bearden constantly drew upon literature. From his colourful, semi-abstract paintings based on Homer’s Iliad and Federico García Lorca’s Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias in the 1940s, to his Afro-centric revamping of Homer’s Odyssey as a collage series in 1977, he experimented incessantly with the possibilities of literary references through visual media. But while Bearden’s work abounds with titular and pictorial references to literature, it rarely includes textual citations. One exception is an untitled collage from his unfinished Paris Blues project, made in collaboration with photographer Sam Shaw and novelist Albert Murray in the early 1980s. Across the collage runs an array of proper names and place names associated with early twentieth-century Paris: ‘Atget’, ‘Baudelaire’, ‘Colette’, ‘Left Bank’, ‘Matisse’, and many others appear in handwritten letters surrounding the collaged image of its musical protagonists, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Textual citations accompany some of these names, including fragments of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and Apollinaire’s Alcools. This essay examines the collage in dialogue with Bearden’s wider oeuvre, arguing that its knowing manipulation of visual, musical, and literary languages poses generative challenges for thinking about the labyrinthine interactions of art, music, and literature during the twentieth century – what Toni Morrison called their ‘abrupt stops and unexpected liquidity’.