Cultures and Transition
This theme brings together work that examines the role of architecture and landscape in contexts of cultural transformation. Through the development of detailed micro-historical case studies, it examines the ways in which design has been ideologically solicited and deployed at historical moments of transition. Research in this theme responds to the abstraction of classic ‘progressivist’ narratives by paying close attention to the specific agency of architecture and landscape and to the complex negotiations between politics, economics, culture, technology and material that inevitably occur under conditions of transformation. This allows for new kinds of accounts to be developed, ones that give more nuanced, textured and critical accounts of their objects of study than has hitherto been the case.
Work here spans Andrew Ballantyne’s AHRC-funded research on ‘mock Tudor’ architecture (with Andrew Law GURU) in the modern period; Ian Thompson’s writing on landscapes as various as the English Lake District and the gardens of Versailles; Martin Beattie’s investigations into cross-cultural encounters of the Bauhaus in India; and the work of Zeynep Kezer (current recipient of the prestigious Aga Khan MIT Postdoctoral Fellowship for Research in Islamic Architecture) on architecture and planning in the context of the modernization of Turkey.
People: Sam Austin, Andrew Ballantyne, Martin Beattie, Peter Kellett, Ian Thompson and Zeynep Kezer.
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