Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the Public Eye

Hyde, Timothy

ISBN 10: 0691243557 / ISBN 13: 9780691243559

Edité par Princeton University Press, 2023

A propos de cet article

N° de réf. du vendeur 402180133

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the Public Eye
• Éditeur: Princeton University Press
• Date de parution: 2023
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0691243557
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780691243559
• Reliure: Couverture souple
• État de l'article: New

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

A novel interpretation of architecture, ugliness, and the social consequences of aesthetic judgment

When buildings are deemed ugly, what are the consequences? In Ugliness and Judgment, Timothy Hyde considers the role of aesthetic judgment--and its concern for ugliness--in architectural debates and their resulting social effects across three centuries of British architectural history. From eighteenth-century ideas about Stonehenge to Prince Charles's opinions about the National Gallery, Hyde uncovers a new story of aesthetic judgment, where arguments about architectural ugliness do not pertain solely to buildings or assessments of style, but intrude into other spheres of civil society.

Hyde explores how accidental and willful conditions of ugliness--including the gothic revival Houses of Parliament, the brutalist concrete of the South Bank, and the historicist novelty of Number One Poultry--have been debated in parliamentary committees, courtrooms, and public inquiries. He recounts how architects such as Christopher Wren, John Soane, James Stirling, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe have been summoned by tribunals of aesthetic judgment. With his novel scrutiny of lawsuits for libel, changing paradigms of nuisance law, and conventions of monarchical privilege, he shows how aesthetic judgments have become entangled in wider assessments of art, science, religion, political economy, and the state.

Moving beyond superficialities of taste in order to see how architectural improprieties enable architecture to participate in social transformations, Ugliness and Judgment sheds new light on the role of aesthetic measurement in our world.

À propos de l?auteur

Timothy Hyde is associate professor in the history and theory of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Constitutional Modernism: Architecture and Civil Society in Cuba, 1933-1959. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Twitter @hyde_timothy