Search results for ""author gary a. boyd""

With only a handful of British coalmines remaining active and with targets set to reduce carbon emissions, the coal industry now seems to be heading towards extinction. Yet, it was coal that turned Britain into a world-leader during the Industrial Revolution and established the conditions for the modern state. In the 20th century, it generated building programmes on a massive scale concerning miners’ welfare, settlements and housing. The form, space, organisation, and aesthetics of architecture became of critical importance not just to the process of the industry’s modernisation but also how it was perceived and understood both within and outside its workforce. But despite the centrality of coal mining and its workers to the development of modern Britain, as well as the contemporary recognition that aspects of its innovative architecture received, its built legacy has often been overlooked and physically almost completely erased. Divided into three parts, this is the first book which provides a critical and comprehensive examination of the architecture of coal in Britain and how it responded to the needs of the industry and, perhaps more significantly, its labour force. Part I explores the relationship between the architecture of coal and the provision of welfare. While this produced a series of enlightened built projects for miners and their communities especially between the wars – educational buildings, reading rooms, holiday camps, welfare institutes, sports grounds, swimming pools, medical centres, children’s playgrounds, etc. – it focusses on the paradigmatic integration of aesthetics and programme seen most emphatically in the creation of over 600 pithead baths. Part II looks at settlement and the relationships between responses to often adverse conditions within domestic environments in mining settlements and the development of broader and influential theories and practices concerning housing. Finally, Part III explores the modernisation of the industry during the post-war period arguing that that architectural design and representation became pivotal to the functional and symbolic requirements of the newly Nationalised entity and its position within, and singular contribution to, post-war society.

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At the formation of the new Republic of Ireland, the construction of new infrastructures was seen as an essential element in the building of the new nation, just as the adoption of international style modernism in architecture was perceived as a way to escape the colonial past. Accordingly, infrastructure became the physical manifestation, the concrete identity of these objectives and architecture formed an integral part of this narrative. Moving between scales and from artefact to context, Infrastructure and the Architectures of Modernity in Ireland 1916-2016 provides critical insights and narratives on what is a complex and hitherto overlooked landscape, one which is often as much international as it is Irish. In doing so, it explores the interaction between the universalising and globalising tendencies of modernisation on one hand and the textures of local architectures on the other. The book shows how the nature of technology and infrastructure is inherently cosmopolitan. Beginning with the building of the heroic Shannon hydro-electric facility at Ardnacrusha by the German firm of Siemens-Schuckert in the first decade of independence, Ireland became a point of varying types of intersection between imported international expertise and local need. Meanwhile, at the other end of the century, by the year 2000, Ireland had become one of the most globalized countries in the world, site of the European headquarters of multinationals such as Google and Microsoft. Climatically and economically expedient to the storing and harvesting of data, Ireland has subsequently become a repository of digital information farmed in large, single-storey sheds absorbed into anonymous suburbs. In 2013, it became the preferred site for Intel to design and develop its new microprocessor chip: the Galileo. The story of the decades in between, of shifts made manifest in architecture and infrastructure from the policies of economic protectionism, to the opening up of the country to direct foreign investment and the embracing of the EU, is one of the influx of technologies and cultural references into a small country on the edges of Europe as Ireland became both a launch-pad and testing ground for a series of aspects of designed modernity.

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