Norfolk has long been recognised as one of the best counties in which to study parish churches. It has one of the highest densities of medieval churches in northern Europe reflecting its greater population and wealth in earlier times. It is also home to the largest number of round-towered churches in England and to more surviving medieval glass than most counties put together. Its towers and spires punctuate the open landscape and there are some churches from which you can see six or seven others. The building materials range from the local flint and carstone to imported limestones and brick. This diversity of material has led to a huge range of different styles of church - from tiny farmyard churches to those which feel as if they should be a cathedral even though they have probably never served more than a hundred people. This book will cover a cross section of churches throughout the county, both well-known and those waiting to be discovered by a wider audience. This fascinating picture of an important part of the history of Norfolk over the centuries will be of interest to all those who live in or are visiting this attractive county in England.

It is fascinating to think that many hundreds of generations of Londoners lie beneath the city without us knowing. Over many centuries burial grounds have been developed, built over and then forgotten, often beneath playgrounds, gardens or car parks. When modern development takes place, remains are disturbed and we are reminded of a London that has long since disappeared, particularly with recent archaeological discoveries across the city. In London's Hidden Burial Grounds, authors Robert Bard and Adrian Miles seek to uncover many of the capital's lost graveyards, often in the unlikeliest of places.

Built around 1100, the church of Asinou in Cyprus is decorated with accretions of images, from the fresco cycle executed shortly after construction to those made in the 17th century. This volume sets Asinou's art and architecture in the context of the surrounding area's changing fortunes under Byzantine and Ottoman rule.

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.

This volume considers the major trends and developments in Iranian architecture during the 1960s and 70s in order to further our understanding of the underpinnings and intentions of Persian architecture during this period. While narrative explorations of modernism have relied heavily upon classifications based on western experiences and influences, this book provides a more holistic view of the development of Persian architecture by studying both the internal and external forces that influenced it in the late twentieth century. The chapters compiled in Architectural Dynamics in Pre-Revolutionary Iran, accompanied by more than eighty images, shed light on the fascinating — and sometimes controversial — evolution of Iranian architecture and its constant quest for a new paradigm of cultural identity.

In Architecture of the World's Major Religions: An Essay on Themes, Differences, and Similarities, Thomas Barrie presents and explains religious architecture in ways that challenge predominant presumptions regarding its aesthetic, formal, spatial, and scenographic elements. Two positions frame its narrative: religious architecture is an amalgam of aesthetic, social, political, cultural, economic, and doctrinal elements; and these elements are materialized in often very different ways in the world's principal religions. Central to the work's theoretical approaches is the communicative and discursive agency of religious architecture, and the multisensory and ritual spaces it provides to create and deliver content. Subsequently, mythical and scriptural foundations, and symbols of ecclesiastical and political power are of equal interest to formal organizations of thresholds, paths, courts, and centers, and celestial and geometric alignments. Moreover, it is equally concerned with the aesthetic, visual and material cultures and the transcendent realms they were designed to evoke, as it is with the kinesthetic, the dynamic and multisensory experience of place and the tangible experiences of the body's interactions with architecture.