Search results for ""Author Michelle Perrot""

The concluding fourth volume of this definitive monograph on Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) covers the last three decades of her long career. At the core is the Les Arcs skiing resort in the French Alps, where Perriand played a key role in the project development. A pioneer of bioclimatic architecture, she oversaw the architectural and urban design of Arc 1600 and Arc 1800 and created the interiors and entire outfitting down to cutlery and china for the more than 4,500 apartments. Les Arcs, an extraordinary undertaking both in sheer size and the extent of Perriand's contribution, marks the culmination of her research on alpine housing in unison with nature. The book also features a number of projects - housing and art spaces - between Paris and Tokyo, in which she aimed once more to push the borders of a specific modern, cultivated way of living. It also offers a comprehensive appraisal of seven decades' work that manifests the creative force and vision of this extraordinary woman, one of the most eminent protagonists of modern architecture and design. Also available: Charlotte Perriand Volume 1, 1903-1940 ISBN 9783858817464 Charlotte Perriand Volume 2, 1940-1955 ISBN 9783858817471 Charlotte Perriand Volume 3, 1956-1968 ISBN 9783858817488

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An erudite and highly enjoyable exploration of the most intriguing of personal spaces, from Greek and Roman antiquity through today The winner of France’s prestigious Prix Femina Essai (2009), this imaginative and captivating book explores the many dimensions of the room in which we spend so much of our lives—the bedroom. Eminent cultural historian Michelle Perrot traces the evolution of the bedroom from the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans to today, examining its myriad forms and functions, from royal king’s chamber to child’s sleeping quarters to lovers’ trysting place to monk’s cell. The history of women, so eager for a room of their own, and that of prisons, where the principal cause of suffering is the lack of privacy, is interwoven with a reflection on secrecy, walls, the night and its mysteries. Drawing from a wide range of sources, including architectural and design treatises, private journals, novels, memoirs, and correspondences, Perrot’s engaging book follows the many roads that lead to the bedroom—birth, sex, illness, death—in its endeavor to expose the most intimate, nocturnal side of human history.

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The nineteenth century was the golden age of private life, a time when the tentative self-consciousness of the Renaissance and earlier eras took recognizable form, and the supreme individual, with a political, scientific, and above all existential value, emerged. The present book, fourth in the popular series, chronicles this development from the tumult of the French Revolution to the outbreak of World War I—a century and a quarter of rapid, ungovernable change culminating in a conflict that, at a stroke, altered life in the Western world.Guided by six eminent historians, we move from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, which conceived of man as a noble creature of reason, into nineteenth-century Romanticism with its affirmation of distinctively individual creatures in all their mystery and impulsiveness, exalting intuition as a mode of knowledge. More and more, men and women wanted to sleep alone, to be left alone to read and write, to dress as they pleased, to eat or drink anything they liked, to consort with and love whomever they fancied. Growing democracies advanced those wishes to the status of rights, expanding markets stimulated them, and migration encouraged them. That new frontier, the city, simultaneously weakened family and community constraints, spurred personal ambitions, and attenuated traditional beliefs.The authors dramatize the nineteenth century’s organized effort to stabilize the boundary between public and private by mooring it to the family, with the father as sovereign. Such chapters as “The Sweet Delights of Home,” “The Family Triumphant,” and “Private Spaces” describe the new domestic ideal of the private dwelling as a refuge from perils and temptations in the public arena, the father as benevolent despot, the wife as contented practitioner of domestic arts, the children as small versions of adults, equipping themselves to follow in their parents’ righteous footsteps. Particularly in England, the middle class was central to the formation of this homely standard, which spread to the working classes through evangelical preaching, utilitarian writings, and economic changes and improvements that resulted in a separation of home and workplace. At the same time, the gentry was transforming castles into country houses, knights into foxhunters, and landowners into gentleman farmers. The domesticating process also expressed itself in hygienic practices (soap, waterclosets, bathtubs), fashions in clothing, and vogues in sports, courtship, and lovemaking.From the time of the French Revolution, when private or special interests were looked upon as shadowy influences likely to foster conspiracy and treason, through the rapid transformations of the nineteenth century, the authors reveal the more radical forms of modernity that arrived with the twentieth century, with its explosions of trade and technology. Besides the external development of goods and conveniences, the expanses of the psyche were also being reorganized, bringing a new openness about sexuality liberated from procreation and marriage. Feminism, a relatively sporadic movement in the nineteenth century, became a more persistent force, while young people and the avant-garde continued to break the rules and push for change as an end in itself. As always, law lagged behind reality: in practice, more and more people rebelled against communal and family discipline. The declaration of war in 1917 put a hold on some of the flowering of individuality, but the unstoppable trend toward personality nurtured by private life was only temporarily curbed.

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