Search results for ""Author Steven Parissien""

The railway station is one of England’s most distinctive and best-loved building-types. Yet over the past century the nation’s stations have often been overlooked or dismissed, and have suffered accordingly. Today a new interest in railways – fuelled by the need for sustainability, by a growing awareness of the realities of transport economics and by the dedication of enthusiastic volunteers at heritage railways across the country – has sparked a renaissance for the historic railway station and a new appreciation of the aesthetic virtues and regeneration potential of imaginative station architecture. The English Railway Station is an accessible, engaging and comprehensively illustrated general history of the architectural development and social history of the British railway station, from the dawn of the Railway Age to the ravages of the 1960s and the station’s rebirth at the end of the 20th century. It traces how the station evolved into a recognisable building type, examines the great cathedrals and the evocative country stations of the Victorian era, and looks at how the railway station has, over the last fifty years, regained its place at the heart of our communities.

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An ambitious history of Britain told through the stories of twenty-five notable structures, from the Iron Age fortification of Maiden Castle in Dorset to the Gherkin. Building Britannia is a chronicle of social, political and economic change seen through the prism of the country's built environment, but also a sequence of closely observed studies of a series of intrinsically remarkable structures: some of them beautiful or otherwise imposing; some of them more coldly functional; all of them with richly fascinating stories to tell. Steven Parissien tells both a national story, tracing how a growing sense of British nationhood was expressed through the country's architecture, and also examines how these structures were used by later generations to signpost, mythologise or remake British history. Rubbing shoulders with some 'expected' building choices – the Roman baths at Aquae Sulis, the early Gothic splendour of Lincoln Cathedral and the Tudor jewel that is Little Moreton Hall – are some striking inclusions that promise to open doors into what will be, for many readers, less familiar areas of social history: these include The Briton’s Protection, a Regency pub close in Manchester city centre and the Edwardian Baroque Electric Cinema in Notting Hill, one of the country's oldest working cinemas. Thus as well as identifying the relevance of certain iconic structures to the unfolding of the national story, Building Britannia finds fascination and meaning in the everyday and the disregarded.

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Transport buildings—railway stations, airport terminals, bus and coach stations, motorway service areas, filling stations, and garages—are such a part of everyday scenery they are easily overlooked. This book is the first to take a close look at the architecture of British transport buildings of the twentieth century, a period during which transportation systems, methods, and even purposes underwent enormous change.The contributors to the book consider transport buildings both well known and unfamiliar from a variety of intriguing viewpoints. They explore the design and promotion of the London Underground, the battle between road and rail, the intentions of architects—to glamorize travel, to calm fears, to accommodate huge numbers of travelers—and the political and cultural significance of the transport buildings that have become a major part of modern life. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

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This innovative and compelling study reconsiders Whistler’s work from the context of his military service and his relationship with ‘nature at the margins’. Whistler came from a family of soldiers and engineers; his father, Major George Washington Whistler, was originally a US military engineer. Drawing and mapmaking were important components of the military training that Whistler acquired as an offi cer cadet at West Point Academy in 1851-4 and subsequently in the Drawing Department at the US Coast and Geodetic Survey,where he attempted to realise his father’s hopes that he would make engineering or architecture his profession. These infl uences in turn shaped Whistler’s attitude towards nature, as expressed in works ranging from his celebrated London ‘Nocturnes’ to his French coastal scenes – all of which were created after Whistler moved permanently to Europe in 1855.Whistler’s close observation of nature and its moods underpinned his powerful and haunting visions of nineteenth-century life. His images explore the contrasts between the natural and man-made worlds: rivers and wharves, gardens and courtyards, the ideal and the naturalistic. And his singular vison was always defi ned by his enduring affi nity with the makers of railways, bridges and ships, the cornerstones of Victorian wealth and trade. Infl uenced by Rembrandt, Whistler’s early etchings of London are notable for their focus on line and topographical accuracy. From the 1860s, his enthusiasm for Japanese art, too, infl uenced his attitude to perspective and spatial relations between objects. This led him, in his London Nocturnes, to reduce the external world before him to its bare bones. Whistler’s smoky images of warehouses, bridges, harbours and tall ships were designed to showcase a new kind of productive, wealth-generating landscape. It is a view of nature constrained by man-made structures: the shadowy outline of the warehouses and chimneys on the far shore; the mast and rigging of a Thames barge in the middle distance.This absorbing book reassesses a familiar and notoriously colourful artistic fi gure in a fascinating and pertinent new light, and is an important new contribution to our understanding of the Victorian art world and its physical context.

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