Chirk Castle: Gardens

The Architectural Consequences of Postmodernity

The latest volume has been published in the Ashgate Studies in Architecture series (edited by Eamonn Canniffe) The Dissolution of Place: Architecture, Identity and the Body by Shelton Waldrep

Postmodern architecture - with its return to ornamentality, historical quotation, and low-culture kitsch - has long been seen as a critical and popular anodyne to the worst aspects of modernist architecture: glass boxes built in urban locales as so many interchangeable, generic anti-architectural cubes and slabs. This book extends this debate beyond the modernist/postmodernist rivalry to situate postmodernism as an already superseded concept that has been upended by deconstructionist and virtual architecture as well as the continued turn toward the use of theming in much new public and corporate space. It investigates architecture on the margins of postmodernism - those places where both architecture and postmodernism begin to break down and to reveal new forms and new relationships. The book examines in detail not only a wide range of architectural phenomena such as theme parks, casinos, specific modernist and postmodernist buildings, but also interrogates architecture in relation to identity, specifically Native American and gay male identities, as they are reflected in new notions of the built environment. In dealing specifically with the intersection between postmodern architecture and virtual and filmic definitions of space, as well as with theming, and gender and racial identities, this book provides provides ground-breaking insights not only into postmodern architecture, but into spatial thinking in general.

Crib

St. Lawrence, Morland: Exterior

Durham Cathedral: Cloister

Chirk Castle

Sir Owen Williams (1890-1969): Daily Express Building, Manchester (1936-39)

The Architectural Consequences of Educational Reform

December sees the publication of the latest volume in the Ashgate Studies in Architecture (edited by Eamonn Canniffe) - A Life in Architecture and Education: Mary Beaumont Medd by Catherine Burke More than a biography of Mary Medd (née Crowley), one of the foremost Modernist architects in the UK, this book critically examines her innovative designs for school buildings in post-war Britain. In doing so, it provides a detailed exploration of the relationships between architects, educators, artists and designers in shaping a new approach to designing for education.

Durham Cathedral: Interior