Search results for ""author andrew leach""

Andrew Leach’s Rome is the first book in Polity’s exciting new ‘Cities in World History’ series, which aims to provide the general reader and traveller with historically informed companions to the world’s greatest cities. Most city guides are good on practical details but very thin when it comes to recounting the histories of cities and contextualizing the buildings and sites for which they are famous. These new books from Polity bridge the gulf between guide and history by offering concise and accessible accounts written by some of the world’s leading historians. Rome has a history unmatched in richness by any city on the globe. It looms large in the word’s cultural imagination, and for millennia it has been a meeting point of great cultures, a place where myth mixes freely with history, leaving neither unscathed. In this compact history, Leach demonstrates what most visitors to the Eternal City will instinctively understand: that the buildings, streets, monuments and gardens of this ancient city give the visitor moments of direct communion with its past. He reveals the long, twisting history of Rome through its ruins, art works and monuments, its metro stations and modern apartment blocks. Each chapter takes the reader on a physical journey invoking Rome in different moments of its life. Engaging historical narrative is supplemented with maps and photos, making Rome an indispensable companion for those who want to dig below the city’s surface.

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Andrew Leach’s Rome is the first book in Polity’s exciting new ‘Cities in World History’ series, which aims to provide the general reader and traveller with historically informed companions to the world’s greatest cities. Most city guides are good on practical details but very thin when it comes to recounting the histories of cities and contextualizing the buildings and sites for which they are famous. These new books from Polity bridge the gulf between guide and history by offering concise and accessible accounts written by some of the world’s leading historians. Rome has a history unmatched in richness by any city on the globe. It looms large in the word’s cultural imagination, and for millennia it has been a meeting point of great cultures, a place where myth mixes freely with history, leaving neither unscathed. In this compact history, Leach demonstrates what most visitors to the Eternal City will instinctively understand: that the buildings, streets, monuments and gardens of this ancient city give the visitor moments of direct communion with its past. He reveals the long, twisting history of Rome through its ruins, art works and monuments, its metro stations and modern apartment blocks. Each chapter takes the reader on a physical journey invoking Rome in different moments of its life. Engaging historical narrative is supplemented with maps and photos, making Rome an indispensable companion for those who want to dig below the city’s surface.

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In his landmark volume Space, Time and Architecture, Sigfried Giedion paired images of two iconic spirals: Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International and Borromini’s dome for Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza. The values shared between the baroque age and the modern were thus encapsulated on a single page spread. As Giedion put it, writing of Sant’Ivo, Borromini accomplished 'the movement of the whole pattern [...] from the ground to the lantern, without entirely ending even there.' And yet he merely 'groped' towards that which could 'be completely effected' in modern architecture-achieving 'the transition between inner and outer space.' The intellectual debt of modern architecture to modernist historians who were ostensibly preoccupied with the art and architecture of earlier epochs is now widely acknowledged. This volume extends this work by contributing to the dual projects of the intellectual history of modern architecture and the history of architectural historiography. It considers the varied ways that historians of art and architecture have historicized modern architecture through its interaction with the baroque: a term of contested historical and conceptual significance that has often seemed to shadow a greater contest over the historicity of modernism. Presenting research by an international community of scholars, this book explores through a series of cross sections the traffic of ideas between practice and history that has shaped modern architecture and the academic discipline of architectural history across the long twentieth century. The editors use the historiography of the baroque as a lens through which to follow the path of modern ideas that draw authority from history. In doing so, the volume defines a role for the baroque in the history of architectural historiography and in the history of modern architectural culture.

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