The Home Nations And Empires And Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces

This book explores ephemeral exhibition spaces between 1750 and 1918. The chapters focus on two related spaces: the domestic interior and its imagery, and exhibitions and museums that display both national/imperial identity and the otherness that lurks beyond a country's borders. What is revealed is that the same tension operates in these private and public realms; namely, that between identification and self-projection, on the one hand, and alienation, otherness and objectification on the other. In uncovering this, the authors show that the self, the citizen/society and the other are realities that are constantly being asserted, defined and objectified. This takes place, they demonstrate, in a ceaseless dynamic of projection versus alienation, and intimacy versus distancing.

This book examines ephemeral exhibitions from 1750 to 1918. In an era of acceleration and elusiveness, these transient spaces functioned as microcosms in which reality was shown, simulated, staged, imagined, experienced and known. They therefore had a dimension of spectacle to them, as the volume demonstrates. Against this backdrop, the different chapters deal with a plethora of spaces and spatial installations: the wunderkammer, the spectacle garden, cosmoramas and panoramas, the literary space, the temporary museum, and the alternative exhibition space.

The museum of the East India Company formed, for a large part of the nineteenth century, one of the sights of London. In recent years, little has been remembered of it beyond its mere existence, while an assumed negative role has been widely attributed to it on the basis of its position at the heart of one of Britain’s arch-colonialist enterprises. Extensively illustrated, The India Museum Revisited provides a full examination of the museum’s founding manifesto and evolving ambitions. It surveys the contents of its multi-faceted collections – with respect to materials, their manufacture and original functions on the Indian sub-continent – as well as the collectors who gathered them and the manner in which they were mobilized to various ends within the museum. From this integrated treatment of documentary and material sources, a more accurate, rounded and nuanced picture emerges of an institution that contributed in major ways, over a period of 80 years, to the representation of India for a European audience, not only in Britain but through the museum’s involvement in the international exposition movement to audiences on the continent and beyond.

This book presents a series of pedagogical experiments translating climate science, environmental humanities, material research, ecological practices into the architectural curriculum. Balancing the science and humanities, it exposes recent pedagogical experiments from renown educators, while also interrogating a designer’s agency between science and speculation in the face of climate uncertainty. The teaching experiments are presented across four sections: Abstraction, Organization, Building, and Narrative, exposing core parts of an architect’s education and how educators can simultaneously provide fundamental skills and constructive literacy while instigating environmental sensibilities. Chapters cover issues such as an unstable hydrosphere, water infrastructure, remediating materials, methods of disassembly and adaptive reuse, as well as constructing new aesthetic categories of climate change, and implementing oral histories of construction, among many others. Written and edited by expert design educators actively engaged in experimenting in new forms of pedagogy, this book will be of great use to architecture instructors at all levels looking to renew their teaching practices to more directly address the climate emergency. It will also appeal to those academics across the built environment interested in the ways design can affect and adapt to climate change.

Homer's stories of Troy are part of the foundations of Western culture. What's less well known is that they also inspired Ottoman-Turkish cultural traditions. Yet even with all the historical and archaeological research into Homer and Troy, most scholars today rely heavily on Western sources, giving Ottoman work in the field short shrift. This book helps right that balance, exploring Ottoman-Turkish involvement and interest in the subject between 1870, when Heinrich Schliemann began his excavations in search of Troy on Ottoman soil, and the battle of Gallipoli in 1915, which gave the Turks their own version of the heroic epic of Troy.

With changing technologies and social habits, the communal cinema experience would seem to be a legacy from another era. However, the last decade has seen a surge in interest for screening films in other, temporary public settings. This desire to turn pubs, galleries, parks, and even boats, into temporary cinema spaces is moved not only by a love for movies, but also a search for ways of being and working together. This book documents current practices of pop-up and site-specific cinema exhibition in the UK (with a focus on Scotland), tracing their links with historical forms of non-theatrical exhibition such as public hall cinema and fairground bioscopes. Through archival research, observation and interviews, the project asks how exhibitors create ephemeral social spaces, and how the combination of film and venue reinvents cinema as device and as social practice.

Dr Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory.

An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computers and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Augé calls "non-space" results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Augé uses the concept of "supermodernity" to describe a situation of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating essay he seeks to establish an intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity.