Anti Ugly

Since 2004 Gavin Stamp, one of Britain’s most eminent and readable architectural historians, has written a monthly column for Apollo, the esteemed architecture and fine art magazine. The subject is simply whatever in design or architecture happens to take his fancy. It might be the splendid reopening of the magnificent Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station, or the dilapidation of a little-known church in Eastbourne, the much-lamented demise of the original Routemaster bus, or the colossal majesty of the airship sheds that housed the R.101.

Since 2004 Gavin Stamp, one of Britain’s most eminent and readable architectural historians, has written a monthly column for Apollo, the esteemed architecture and fine art magazine. The subject is simply whatever in design or architecture happens to take his fancy. It might be the splendid reopening of the magnificent Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station, or the dilapidation of a little-known church in Eastbourne; the much-lamented demise of the original Routemaster bus, or the colossal majesty of the airship sheds that housed the R.101. But while these pieces display a wonderful range and variety, they are unified by Stamp’s wider quest: to explore, define and champion the very Englishness of English architecture and design. When fine examples are preserved and restored, he celebrates; when they fall victim to philistine neglect – or, worse, demolition – he mourns. And when the elegant is overshadowed by the merely modish, he deplores. In Anti-Ugly, Stamp has selected the best of these ‘excursions’, producing a compulsively readable collection that builds into an eloquent, learned, trenchant and often indignant portrait of our national design heritage.

Whatever 'ugliness' is, it remains a problematic category in architectural aesthetics – alternately vilified and appropriated, used either to shock or to invert conventions of architecture. This book presents sixteen new scholarly essays which rethink ugliness in recent architecture – from Brutalism to eclectic postmodern architectural productions – and together offer a diverse reappraisal of the history and theory of postmodern architecture and design. The essays address both broad theoretical questions on ugliness and postmodern aesthetics, as well as more specific analyses of significant architectural examples dating from the last decades of the twentieth century. The book attends to the diverse relations between the aesthetic register of ugliness and closely connected aesthetic concepts such as the monstrous, the ordinary, disgust, the excessive, the grotesque, the interesting, the impure and the sublime. This volume does not simply document the history of a postmodern anti-aesthetic through case studies. Instead, it aims to shed light on aesthetic problems that have been largely overlooked in the agenda of architectural theory. This book answers in detail the questions: How did postmodern architects appropriate troublesome contradictions bound to the raw ugliness of the real? How have the ugly and the antiaesthetic been a productive force in postmodern architecture? How can ugliness be of value to architecture? And how can architecture make good use of ugliness?

The first biography of pioneering female Pop Artist Pauline Boty.

What does jazz mean 20 years into the 21st century? Has streaming culture rendered music literally meaningless, thanks to the removal of all context beyond the playlist? Are there any traditions left to explore? Has the destruction of the apprenticeship model (young musicians learning from their elders) changed the music irrevocably? Are any sounds off limits? How far out can you go and still call it jazz? Or should the term be retired? These questions, and many more, are answered in Ugly Beauty, as Phil Freeman digs through his own experiences and conversations with present-day players. Jazz has never seemed as vital as it does right now, and has a genuine role to play in 21st-century culture, particularly in the US and the UK.