Passion And Control Dutch Architectural Culture Of The Eighteenth Century

Passion and Control explores Dutch architectural culture of the eighteenth century, revealing the central importance of architecture to society in this period and redefining long-established paradigms of early modern architectural history. Architecture was a passion for many of the men and women in this book; wealthy patrons, burgomasters, princes and scientists were all in turn infected with architectural mania. It was a passion shared with artists, architects and builders, and a vast cast of Dutch society who contributed to a complex web of architectural discourse and who influenced building practice. The author presents a rich tapestry of sources to reconstruct the cultural context and meaning of these buildings as they were perceived by contemporaries, including representations in texts, drawings and prints, and builds on recent research by cultural historians on consumerism, material culture and luxury, print culture and the public sphere, and the history of ideas and mentalities.

Interiors in the Age of Enlightenment provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the cultural history of interior design and interior spaces from 1700 to 1850. Considering the interior as material, social and cultural artefact, this volume moves beyond conventional descriptive accounts of changing styles and interior design fashions, to explore in depth the effect on the interior of the materials, processes, aesthetic philosophies and cultural attitudes of the age. From the Palace of Versailles to Virginia coffeehouses, and from Chinoiserie bathhouses to the trading exchanges of the West Indies, the chapters in this book examine a wide range of themes including technological advancements, public spaces, gender and sexuality, and global movements in interior designs and decorations. Drawing together contributions from leading scholars, this volume provides the most authoritative and comprehensive survey of the history of interiors and interior architecture in the long eighteenth century.

The most famous monument of the Dutch Golden Age is undoubtedly the Amsterdam Town Hall by architect Jacob van Campen inaugurated in 1655. Today we stand in awe confronted with the grand Classicist façade, the delightful horror of the sculptures in the Tribunal, and the magnificence of the huge Citizens' Hall. In the period of its construction, many artists and writers tried to capture the overwhelming impact of the building by, among other comparisons, relating it to the ancient Wonders of the World and by stressing its splendour, riches, and impressive scale. In doing so, they constructed the Town Hall as the ultimate wonder, thus offering a silent, but very powerful testimony to the power and position of the City of Amsterdam and its rulers as equals of the other European regimes. To fully understand these mechanisms of power, this book relates the Town Hall to other, impressive buildings of the same period-the palace of the Louvre, Saint Peter's Basilica, and Banqueting House-and their visual and textual representations. Thus, this book gives a broad audience of readers new insights into the agency of magnificent buildings. The Amsterdam Town Hall in Words and Images does not restrict itself to a national scope or a purely architectural analysis, but clarifies how artists and writers all over Europe presented buildings as wonders of the world. This book is pioneering in its analysis of seventeenth and eighteenth-century paintings, prints, drawings, poems, and travel accounts and offers a new understanding of how the wondrous character of these grand buildings was constructed.

In terms of design, scale, and blending of ecologicical and aesthetic function, Amsterdam’s seventeenth-century Canal District is a European marvel. Its survival for four centuries is a testament to its ingenuity, reflected in its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010. The Canal District today is an extraordinary example of resilient historic design and cultural heritage in a living city, but it is not without present-day challenges: in recent years, its urban ecology has become subject to severe pressures of global tourism and supergentrification. This edited volume brings together seventeen reputable scholars to debate questions about the origins, evolution, and future of the Canal District. With these differing approaches and perspectives on the Canal District the contributions render a collection where the whole is much more than the sum of the parts. The book breaks new ground in our understanding of the District’s historic design, its evolution over four hundred years, and the fundamental issues in future-facing strategies and policies. While the main focus is clearly on Amsterdam, the discussions in this collection have an important bearing on broader questions of urban historic preservation elsewhere, and on questions about enduring urban design.

This title was first published in 2002: In the second half of the 18th century, philosophy provided the fundamental characteristics of architechture. The architects of the 19th century then introduced the empirical comparative study of buildings. This phenomenon has usually been regarded exclusively in terms of historicism, but this is to underestimate the fact that they were architects. The problems for which they sought solutions did not belong to the past, but were part of their own age or the future. The architecture of the past was, to the 19th-century architect, significant to a large degree as a silent witness of a bygone era - a representation of beauty. Historical architecture provided study material for their inquiries into the aesthetic "laws" that they hoped would give the 19th century a splendid contemporary architecture. The art of building, as a way of visibly edifying society, was the most important of all the arts, with architectural theory showing the way to this lofty purpose. This book takes this as a starting point. Focusing on place as well as time, the text discusses the Dutch architects who contributed to this idea, discussing several of the most important, but ultimately seeing their activities, not as the cause, but the expression of movements that continuously changed the face of architecture. The particularly "Dutch" nature of architecture took "visual beauty" to result from the visible success of technical intelligence and creativity rather than philosophy and aesthetics. The grand-19th century themes discussed in the book are, the author suggests, somewhat "un-Dutch", originating as they did from an idealist, intellectual tradition.

This bookfocuses on the complex ways in which architectural practice, theory, patronage, and experience became modern with the rise of a mass public and a reconfigured public sphere between the end of the seventeenth century and the French Revolution. Presenting a fresh theoretical orientation and a large body of new primary research, this book offers a new cultural history of virtually all the major monuments of eighteenth-century Parisian architecture, with detailed analyses of the public debates that erupted around such Parisian monuments as the east facade of the Louvre, the Place Louis XV [the Place de la Concorde], and the church of Sainte-Genevieve [the Pantheon]. Depicting the passage of architecture into a mediatized public culture as a turning point, and interrogating it as a symptom of the distinctly modern configuration of individual, society, and space that emerged during this period, this study will interest readers well beyond the discipline of architectural history.

"During the seventeenth century Dutch influence on the Baltic region, both economic and aesthetic, was unrivaled. In the wake of the Dutch monopoly on Baltic trade, cultural contacts between the Dutch Republic and the Baltic world flourished. The Dutch Republic was even to fulfil an exemplary function in the Baltic world not solely limited to the commerce of commodities but extending to the domain of architecture and art as well." "The history of this lively trade in good taste is told on the basis of rich archival material, including drawings, book and art collection inventories, correspondence, travel journals, and diaries."--BOOK JACKET.