34 research outputs found

    Isle Memorial Union Building architect drawing 000-0681

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    Drawing by the architecture firm of Kenneth W. Brooks that was ultimately rejected by the Board of Trustees and the Associated Students.https://dc.ewu.edu/ewu_buildings_grounds/1112/thumbnail.jp

    Music and elite identity in the English country house, c.1790-1840

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    In this thesis I investigate two untapped music book collections that belonged to two women. Elizabeth Sykes Egerton (1777-1853) and Lydia Hoare Acland (1786-1856) lived at Tatton Park, Cheshire, and Killerton House, Devon, respectively. Upon their marriage in the early nineteenth century, they brought with them the music books they had compiled so far to their new homes, and they continued to collect and play music after marriage. I examine the vocal music in Elizabeth’s and Lydia’s collections, and I aim to show how selected vocal music repertoires contributed toward the construction of landed elite identity in these women and their husbands, concentrating on gender, class, national identity and religion.In chapter one, I concentrate on songs that depict destitute and suffering individuals to move both listeners and performers to compassion. The songs are topical and provide insights into contemporary understandings of sympathy and landed elite responsibility for the distressed. In chapter two, I focus on the ingoing and outgoing movements of music in the country house, and the consumption of foreign music in the home. I divide the chapter into two sections, first examining Elizabeth’s Italian vocal music that she collected during her girlhood years in London and York in the 1790s. The Italian music that Elizabeth brought to Tatton complemented other Italian objects and items in the home. Italian culture appealed to the Egerton family both before and after Elizabeth and Wilbraham married. In the second section, I investigate Lydia and her family’s journey to Vienna for the Congress in 1814-1815. Lydia took away with her a book of vocal music to remind her of home in a foreign environment. While away in Vienna, the Aclands attended concerts and music salons, and they purchased music books to bring back home to add to their collection. In the final chapter, I concentrate on the man of the house at music and I consider the social expectations, duties and responsibilities that had befallen our landed elite men, Thomas Dyke Acland and Wilbraham Egerton. I discuss Thomas’s and Wilbraham’s musical engagements and occasions for performing music, and how men’s music-making contributed to a masculine identity.By placing the vocal music in broader social and cultural contexts, reading personal correspondence, newspaper articles, account books and diaries, we can begin to understand what our families thought about music, and how they used and experienced music in and around their homes, forming an important part of their lifestyle

    Of good use or serious pleasure : Vitruvius Britannicus and early eighteenth century architectural discourse

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    The central thesis of this work is that Colen Campbell's three volume Vitruvius Britannicus (1715-25) is not, as it has been frequently seen, a Palladian manifesto designed to change architectural practice in England (and in the process Campbell's own fortunes as an architect), but rather a publication celebrating architectural achievements, consumed by polite society. The twentieth century view of Vitruvius Britannicus, stems from John Surnmerson's seminal work, Architecture in Britain 1530-1830. It posits Vitruvius Britannicus as a stylistic manifesto that served the particular interests of Colen Campbell and his associates as advocates of and builders in the Palladian style, and foregrounds the idea of the author. This view has been incorporated almost unquestioningly into subsequent interpretations not least because it conforms to a powerful 'Whig' interpretation of history emphasising periodisation, style, revolution, development, and the search for origins. In contrast I argue that Vitruvius Britannicus met the demands of a market interested in architecture as a topic of polite conversation. The subscription lists for Vitruvius Britannicus show that it was neither priced to be, nor received as, a builder's manual, nor was it a stylistic manifesto. Rather, it was a celebration of contemporary British architecture that gave pleasure and some instruction to polite society. Drawing on disciplines outside of art and architectural history, I consider Vitruvius Britannicus as an object of consumption offering an alternative reading of the publication that highlights a number of important avenues for further research. Chapter 1 positions the thesis within critiques of stylistic history. Chapter 2 briefly introduces some historiographic issues, and then considers the contents and style of the publication, and the nature of its subscribers. This highlights issues neglected in histories of Vilruvius Britannicus and challenges many of the commonly held conceptions of the publication. These conceptions are then examined in Chapter 3 in the light of evidence and issues raised in the previous chapter. Chapter 4 considers other architectural and illustrated books and positions Campbell's work within wider publishing paradigms such as cartography and a literature of tourism. Chapter 5 outlines some of the intellectual ideas that influenced the way in which publications such as Vitruvius Britannicus were understood. This is developed in Chapter 6 which considers the way in which Vitruvius Britannicus functioned within a contemporary architectural discourse that codified the group identity of a polite elite

    An Exploration of the Development of Huddersfield's 1970 Market Hall: Architectural Decoration with Cheap Greens; An Architect's Dream?

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    An exploration of the origins and development of Queensgate Market; a 1970 covered retail market in Huddersfield in the United Kingdom. The market’s roof of glazed reinforced concrete asymmetric hyperbolic paraboloid shell umbrellas and prominent artwork have led to never ending controversy. Proposed demolition of the building in 2003 and its listing on grounds of its architectural or historic importance in 2005 accentuated the community’s dichotomy over the market’s qualities. Can the building be better understood by examining antecedents and historical practice? Through a review of markets and market architecture and design, hyperbolic paraboloid shell roofs engineering, retail design and public art the research aims to explore aspects of the development of Queensgate Market; the trajectories of art, engineering and architectural practice the transfers of awareness, knowledge, empowerment and actualisation the mechanisms and vectors at play in such transfers; education and autodidactic learning and dissemination through publication and migration. the connections based on proximity, employment, meeting and travel. It was carried out by site visits, primary and secondary sources and interviews with people involved with design and construction. Queensgate Market is identified as the unique nexus and climax in the expression of markets, hyperbolic paraboloid shells and civic art. The study concludes that the vagaries of human migration, challenge, proximity, education and friendship are informal but important vectors in addition to technology, commercial, legislative and societal norms to the realisation of the projec

    Architectural taste and patronage in Newcastle upon Tyne, 1870-1914

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    This thesis examines architectural taste and patronage in Newcastle upon Tyne between 1870 and 1914. During this period, the city experienced dramatic expansion as the wealth generated in industry, finance and retail was channelled into commercial and public architecture. The overall aim is to determine whether Newcastle formed a distinctive architectural culture. Newcastle's economic and social profile gave rise to specific patterns of taste and patronage. The thesis explores the cultural networks that shaped the built form of the city, arguing that architectural patronage in Newcastle was dominated by a cultural oligarchy. This group formed an architectural culture, a relatively self-contained community in which particular styles and architects were favoured above others. Newcastle was a major centre of industry, finance and retail, and played a significant role in the national economy. The thesis seeks to reposition Newcastle within the context of the dynamic forces that were reshaping Britain's built environment. As the period progressed, the distinctive patterns of taste and patronage within the city were eroded by the increasingly national economy, the influence of the metropolis and the more active role played by the centralised state. The thesis relates the architectural culture under study to the national mainstream, thus shedding light on the relationship between provincial architecture and the metropolis. The thesis employs a range of methodological strategies in order to bring the different facets of architecture into focus. With clearly defined geographical and temporal boundaries, it seeks to clarify the economic, social and cultural factors that underpin architectural production, thus offering a new insight into architectural patronage

    An exploration of the relationship between language choice in CEO letters to shareholders and corporate reputation

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    This paper proposes a taxonomy to assist in more clearly locating research on aspects of the association between corporate reputation and corporate accountability reporting. We illustrate how our proposed taxonomy can be applied by using it to frame our exploration of the relationship between measures of reputation and characteristics of the language choices made in CEO letters to shareholders. Using DICTION 5.0 software we analyse the content of the CEO letters of 23 high reputation US firms and 23 low reputation US firms. Our results suggest that company size and visibility each have a positive influence on the extent to which corporate reputation is associated with the language choices made in CEO letters. These results, which are anomalous when compared with those of Geppert and Lawrence (2008), highlight the need for caution when assessing claims about the effects on corporate reputation arising from the language choice in narratives in corporate annual reports.         Author has checked copyrightDG 16/11/12Names JG 2012-11-1

    Using and evaluating CASE tools : from software engineering to phenomenology

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    CASE (Computer-Aided Systems Engineering) is a recent addition to the long line of "silver bullets" that promise to transform information systems development, delivering new levels of quality and productivity. CASE is particularly intriguing because information systems (IS) practitioners spend their working lives applying information technology (IT) to other people's work, and now they are applying it to themselves. CASE research to date has been dominated by accounts of tool development, normative writings (for example practitioner success stories) and surveys recording IT specialists' perceptions. There have been very few in-depth studies of tool use, and very few attempts to quantify benefits, therefore the essence of the CASE process remains largely unexplored, and the views of stakeholders other than the IT specialists have yet to be heard. The research presented here addresses these concerns by adopting a hybrid research approach combining action research, grounded theory and phenoinenology and using both qualitative and quantitative data in order to tell the story of a system developer's experience in using CASE tools in three information systems projects for a major UK car manufacturer over a four year period. The author was the lead developer on all three projects. Action research is a learning process, the researcher is an explorer. At the start of this project it was assumed that the tools would be the focus of the work. As the research progressed it became evident that the tools were but part of a richer organisational context in which culture, politics, history, external initiatives and cognitive limitations played important roles. The author continued to record experiences and impressions of tool use in the project diary together with quality and productivity metrics. But the diary also became home to a story of organisational developments that had not originally been foreseen. The principal contribution made by the work is to identity the narrow positivistic nature of CASE knowledge, and to show via the research stories the overwhelming importance of organisational context to systems development success and how the exploration of context is poorly supported by the tools. Sixteen further contributions are listed in the Conclusions to the thesis, including a major extension to Wynekoop and Conger's CASE research taxonomy, an identification of the potentially misleading nature of quantitative IS assessment and further evidence of the limitations of the "scientific" approach to systems development. The thesis is completed by two proposals for further work. The first seeks to advance IS theory by developing further a number of emerging process models of IS development. The second seeks to advance IS practice by asking the question "How can CASE tools be used to stimulate awareness and debate about the effects of organisational context?", and outlines a programme of research in this area

    The European Trade in Stained Glass, with Special Reference to the Trade between the Rhineland and the United Kingdom 1794-1835

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    The study is set against a period of cultural and political change in Continental Europe and the United Kingdom at the beginning of the nineteenth century. As a result of the Concordat between Napoleon and Pope Pius VII signed on the 15 July 1801, the Pope agreed that he and his successors would take no action against the buyers of church property. In this way the secularising of church property, firstly in France and later in other countries, was legalised. The wholesale redistribution began during the Peace of Amiens in 1802, one of the “Goods” on offer being stained glass. The United Kingdom was the primary beneficiary of this redistribution with its emerging interest in historical objects, firstly antiquarian, then commercial and later intellectual. Because of the extent of the trade in stained glass in this period the study concentrates on the trade between the Rhineland and the United Kingdom, with the focus being between 1815-1835, when a new constellation of buyers, sellers and installers of Rhenish stained glass appeared. The function of the appendices is twofold: firstly to remove detailed but relevant data from the main text so as not to obscure the main argument and secondly to provide the reader with data not strictly within the parameters of the thesis. The analysis of the available and newly discovered data takes three approaches to acquisition and installation and is presented in three case studies. Firstly the activities of the Regency Contractor architects, highlighting Sir Jeffry Wyatville and William Wilkins who were responsible for the most significant Rhenish stained glass installations in this period. The second analyses Edward Spenser Curling (1771-1850) whose newly discovered diary (by the author) of his activities between 1827-36, sheds new light on the detailed mechanics of the stained glass trade of this period and the networks existing in Cologne and the United Kingdom. The discovery of this diary proves that Curling acquired all the Altenberg and St Apern stained glass panels presently in the United Kingdom. The third study analyses a number of facets that influenced the trade in the United Kingdom, particularly the activities of the stained glass painters Betton and Evans

    A.W.N. Pugin's English residential architecture in its context

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    This Dissertation investigates all of A.W.N. Pugin’s known English residential architecture for the first time, placing it in the context of the domestic and institutional architecture of comparable small buildings, particularly Anglican parsonages, of the period in which he lived and worked. The Dissertation is preceded by a summary of the theoretical issues that architects were addressing from the beginning of the nineteenth century, in particular those which Pugin was later to make a central part of his own theoretical writings. Following an examination of the conventions of the domestic architecture of the period, the Dissertation analyses Pugin’s own buildings, primarily categorising them by plan type. Pugin’s attitude to the orientation, location and landscape of his work is then considered, followed by an analysis of his preferred building forms, their materials, their detailing, and their decoration. In addition, the Dissertation investigates the extent to which Pugin’s architecture was actually historicist, reviving English or Continental Gothic forms and details. The Dissertation further investigates Pugin’s professional practice as a domestic architect, defining the nature of his partnership with his favoured building contractor, George Myers, in the context of contemporary contracting practice. The practical problems of Pugin’s constructions, and the character of his professional relationship with his clients are also assessed. The thesis proposes that elements of Pugin’s architectural theory existed previous to his career amongst English architectural writers and critics, but that medium and small houses designed between 1800 and the mid-1840s were overwhelmingly based on a limited number of conventionalised plans. It will show that Pugin’s residential planning was inherently different from that of these conventional buildings, and that it is classifiable into a number of distinct categories. This thesis furthermore argues that Pugin’s residential architecture was often far from functional and was not essentially historicist. This thesis will show that the planning of medium and small houses changed radically from the 1840s, incorporating aspects of planning which Pugin had pioneered; a conclusion suggests to what extent Pugin’s architectural creativity was expressive of cultural change and preoccupation beyond the realm of architecture. An Appendix is attached which summarises the chronology of all of Pugin’s known residential works
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