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
Maria Fusco’s hybrid text ‘ECZEMA!’ interweaves theory and extracts from the script of a screenplay exploring the author’s lived experience of the chronic skin disease eczema – of ‘being in co-occupation with ECZEMA’ – as a means to reconsider the effects of interdisciplinary, critical writing. Fusco proposes the scratch as a compulsion for critique, and for writing in an interdisciplinary way (that picks, bleeds, oozes – that violently exposes the inside of things).
In studies of early modern fashion and jewellery, pearls are usually discussed in relation to rulers, merchants and other elite members of society. The immense cost of pearls naturally imposed limitations on by whom they could be purchased, and sumptuary laws aimed to regulate the consumption of pearls ‘real or false’. Therefore, it has long been assumed that people of the lower social orders neither owned nor wore pearls. This chapter refutes that belief. I show that Italian gardeners, shoemakers and dyers owned pearls despite social, economic and legal restrictions. This is evidenced in a collection of household inventories from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian cities gathered as part of the Refashioning the Renaissance project. These documents alongside other archival, printed and visual sources also indicate some of the ways that working people were able to purchase pearls and indicate why they were so sought after. Records from auctions and pawnshops show that masons, kitchen servants and horseshoe makers bought, sold and pledged pearls in a range of qualities and prices. Sumptuary legislation is also suggestive of the great desire for pearls across the social spectrum, for both their monetary and social significance. As the laws from some Italian cities show, pearls were useful for marking out women of different economic, geographic and marital conditions, as well as the pure from the impure. The acquisition and wearing of pearls were therefore part of the economic, social and marital strategies that the non-elite – and their social betters – played out through dress.
Alice Butler’s essay is a sensuously unfolding love letter in which she explores the textiles-filled autoeroticism of Francesca Woodman’s late photographic ‘attempts’ to reimagine the caress – as perverse desire, pleasure, discipline, and genre – as a form of feminist essay. Butler gets as close as possible to her subject matter, writing Woodman’s photographic praxis from the intimate vantage point of the sisterly: of one who is beside.
This chapter investigates how artisans and small shopkeepers dressed in early modern Denmark. It focuses especially on garments that ordinary artisan men and women wore in their professional lives – when they performed physical labour, worked in workshops and engaged with customers at the shops or marketplace. The chapter argues that clothing had a range of functions for artisans in daily life and throughout their career. While garments had to be practical and durable for work, fashioning a respectable, clean and well-groomed appearance based on the latest clothing fashions promoted a successful professional image and made accomplishments visible in public in the local society.
The closing chapter literally and metaphorically encircles the city, exploring the history of the ring road and its role in shaping the modern city. Indicative of the prioritisation of motor-borne transport and of the pseudo-scientific approach to planning, the mathematically engineered planning of the ring road is shown to be in conflict with the prevailing patterns of land ownership – a legacy of the mercantile classes and laissez-faire approach to the growth of the Victorian city. A ring road was first proposed in the 1930s as a solution to the problems of congestion attributed to the radial development of Manchester as a market town. Its route was prescribed in the 1945 Plan and redefined in 1968 in conjunction with the publication of the 1967 Development Map. None of these specific routes came to be, but sections were partially realised. The death knell for the ring road came with the oil crisis, economic downturn and the restructuring of local government between 1972 and 1974. At a public inquiry, in a David and Goliath situation, two members of the fledgling Victorian Society made a convincing case for the preservation of textile warehouses that were threatened with demolition to make way for a dual carriageway section of the ring road. The planning inspector found in the Society’s favour. This combined with the economic and political upheaval put pay to closing the ring and plans were stymied for more than a decade afterwards. The ring road was eventually completed in 2006.
This book investigates how fashion developed among ordinary Europeans in the early modern period and transformed the ‘look’ and experience of fashion – visually and materially – at popular levels of society. Combining evidence from visual, written and material evidence with material hands-on experimentation and historical reconstruction, it explores what were the key elements of fashion among ordinary artisan families, such as among barbers, bakers, shoemakers, innkeepers and booksellers, shedding new light on popular taste and the dissemination, transformation and adaptation of fashion in Europe in 1500-1650. The book shows that the growing range of new fashion -sensitive innovations, such as ribbons, knitted stockings, imitation pearls, new light silks and mixed imitation fabrics provided a new dynamic ability for men and women way below the nobility to experiment with fashion, making desired and rare objects accessible across social classes. Yet, everyday artisan fashion was not limited to cheap substitutes. By strategically placing fine accessories, exquisite jewellery and ornamental ribbons and trimmings in the most prominent areas, even individuals of modest means such as blacksmiths, gardeners or rural women were able to actively engage in fashion and incorporate prestigious and fashionable elements such as silk, fur, silver buttons, gold, pearls and lace into their dress. This creative and innovative approach to fashion, during a time when the traditional hierarchy of clothing to display social status, based on financial value of textiles, became questioned, highlights the complexity of how dress functioned in the early modern period.
This book is about an exciting time in the development of European cities – from the 1950s to the 1970s – when capital flowed, energy was cheap and abundant, citizens were more mobile than ever before, and a new optimism was embodied in popular culture. The experiences of the Second World War provided the spatial, technological and governmental foundations for the modernisation of Britain. New technologies were born of war and regional political structures were also a product of conflict. Certain British cities were the testing ground for new ideas in planning and architecture, amidst new statutory contexts and a raft of policy implemented to order the built environment. This title focuses acutely on these networks and tracks the relationships between central and local government and their influence on buildings, public space and infrastructure. It uses the planning and architecture of Manchester as a case through which to reveal shifts in politics, economics and culture in the post-war period. It is part urban history, part planning history and part architectural history. For the first time, it uncovers the complex forces acting upon the production of space in the renewal cities of the 1960s and the close and direct relations between state legislation, planning policy definition and architectural production. Backgrounded by the global meta-narratives of the Cold War, decolonisation and the rise of consumer capitalism, the major empirical chapters show how international forces also impacted and influenced the development of cities.
Nell Osborne explores the “difficult” but fascinating legacy of experimental British writer Anna Kavan. Osborne traces the pathologisation often attributed to Kavan’s experimental tendencies as well as the affective disturbance that her re-enactment of gendered and sexual violence frequently prompt for the reader. Osborne makes a case for the theatricality and ambivalence of Kavan’s audacious oeuvre. Dwelling on wounded repetition in Kavan’s final novel Ice (1967), this essay explores how violent repetition becomes a strategy that enacts tonal ambivalence even as it indexes structural violence.
This chapter aims to understand the contribution of a normally forgotten segment in early modern clothes and clothing production: ribbon manufacturing. It investigates how, since the late Renaissance, trimmings and ribbons have become fashionable garments, showing a fantastical variety of patterns and products reflecting highly market segmentation. Looking at the intrinsic materiality of ribbons, the chapter also investigates the evolution of markets for ribbons, the imitation and marketing strategies as well as technology and work organisation. Beyond their apparent simplicity, ribbons became agents of fashion changes and early forms of capitalism.
Chapter 1 describes the morphology of Manchester. The earliest modern planning of the city was in the 1830s. This chapter discusses the history of the city’s planning, with particular reference to the 1930s, the 1945 Plan and the work of the City Planning Department in the 1960s. Using analyses of drawings and reports, the relationship between successive planning visons and the eventual urban scene is explored. The reports of various politicians, officers and departments are contextualised amidst statutory government legislation. Also explored are the position of Manchester as a regional capital, what is meant by the term ‘region’ and how regions are governed. Thus, the power, exercised by the structures of the state, and the planning, undertaken by agents of the state, are used to explain the shape of the city. The work of the Planning Department in the 1960s identified six comprehensive development areas in the city centre and its fringes; three of these form the case studies for Chapters 3, 4 and 5 (University Precinct, Central Station and Market Place). The CDA designation was coordinated with highways planning and much of the central area vision for multi-level development was intrinsically bound with the city centre ring road (Chapter 6). Chapter 1 builds on the morphological image of the city presented in the introduction and shows how it was spatialised by a young and vibrant planning department. In so doing, the proceeding four chapters are presented as correlated and the case study sites shown in their geographic relationship to one another.