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Books > Arts & Architecture > Architecture > Religious buildings
The 1997 conference of the British Archaeological Association was
held in Glasgow and took the Cathedral there ars its main theme.
This volume includes many of the papers given at the conference.
Follwoing a general introduction on the building history of the
cathedral, there are chapters covering the cult of St Kentigern,
the major excavations of 1992-3, the design of the crypt, the choir
and its timber ceiling. Other chapters look at aspects of
patronage, the wider architectural context of the cathedral, and at
the Romaneque sculpture and manuscripts with the diocese.
Utopia" is a word not often associated with the city of Bangkok,
which is better known for its disorderly sprawl, overburdened
roads, and stifling levels of pollution. Yet as early as 1782, when
the city was officially founded on the banks of the Chao Phraya
river as the home of the Chakri dynasty, its orientation was based
on material and rhetorical considerations that alluded to ideal
times and spaces. The construction of palaces, monastic complexes,
walls, forts, and canals created a defensive network while
symbolically locating the terrestrial realm of the king within the
Theravada Buddhist cosmos. Into the twentieth century, pictorial,
narrative, and built representations of utopia were critical to
Bangkok's transformation into a national capital and commercial
entrepot. But as older representations of the universe encountered
modern architecture, building technologies, and urban planning, new
images of an ideal society attempted to reconcile urban-based
understandings of Buddhist liberation and felicitous states like
nirvana with worldly models of political community like the
nation-state. Bangkok Utopia outlines an alternative genealogy of
both utopia and modernism in a part of the world that has often
been overlooked by researchers of both. It examines representations
of utopia that developed in the city-as expressed in built forms as
well as architectural drawings, building manuals, novels, poetry,
and ecclesiastical murals-from its first general strike of migrant
laborers in 1910 to the overthrow of the military dictatorship in
1973. Using Thai- and Chinese-language archival sources, the book
demonstrates how the new spaces of the city became arenas for
modern subject formation, utopian desires, political hegemony, and
social unrest, arguing that the modern city was a space of
antinomy-one able not only to sustain heterogeneous temporalities,
but also to support conflicting world views within the urban
landscape. By underscoring the paradoxical character of utopias and
their formal narrative expressions of both hope and hegemony,
Bangkok Utopia provides an innovative way to conceptualize the
uneven economic development and fractured political conditions of
contemporary global cities.
This book contains the first published results of Schwaller's 12
years of research at the temple of Luxor and its implications for
interpreting the symbolic and mathematical processes of the
Egyptians through their sacred architecture.?
When was the Dome of the Rock built and what meanings was the
structure meant to convey to viewers at the time of its
construction? These are questions that have preoccupied historians
of Islamic art and architecture, and numerous interpretations of
the Dome of the Rock have been proposed. This book returns to one
of the most important pieces of evidence: the mosaic inscriptions
running around the two faces of the octagonal arcade. Detailed
examination of the physical characteristics, morphology and content
of these inscriptions provides new evidence concerning: the
chronology of the planning, construction, and decoration of the
building; the iconography of the Dome of the Rock; the evolution of
Arabic epigraphy in the early Islamic period; and the public
expression of religious concepts under the Umayyad caliphs.
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