European Architecture In Colour From The Greeks To The Nineteenth Century

A Cultural History of Color in Antiquity covers the period 3000 BCE to 500 CE. Although the smooth, white marbles of Classical sculpture and architecture lull us into thinking that the color world of the ancient Greeks and Romans was restrained and monochromatic, nothing could be further from the truth. Classical archaeologists are rapidly uncovering and restoring the vivid, polychrome nature of the ancient built environment. At the same time, new understandings of ancient color cognition and language have unlocked insights into the ways – often unfamiliar and strange to us – that ancient peoples thought and spoke about color. Color shapes an individual's experience of the world and also how society gives particular spaces, objects, and moments meaning. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Color examines how color has been created, traded, used, and interpreted over the last 5000 years. The themes covered in each volume are color philosophy and science; color technology and trade; power and identity; religion and ritual; body and clothing; language and psychology; literature and the performing arts; art; architecture and interiors; and artefacts. David Wharton is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA. Volume 1 in the Cultural History of Color set. General Editors: Carole P. Biggam and Kirsten Wolf

Includes entries for maps and atlases.

The richness and diversity of European architecture over the past two centuries is captured in this comprehensive survey with almost two hundred illustrations of building types in twenty-three countries, including Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. The book's breadth of geography and time give it a special place among treatments of the general subject. It illustrates how the nineteenth century, although primarily eclectic, produced a number of architectural successes -- Haussmann's grandiose reshaping of Paris, Engel's classical Helsinki, the Gothic revivalism of the rebuilt Palace of Westminster. Doreen Yarwood shows that Art Nouveau was the first movement to break with this eclecticism, but that it nonetheless drew its inspiration from the past. She illustrates how the modern movement, developed in some countries between the wars, used concrete, steel, and glass for strength and simplicity. Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and others used this approach to great effect; in the 1950s it became a mass movement. The 1970s brought calls for an architecture reunited with its environment, leading to the safety of classicism or light-hearted eclecticism.