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Royal Power takes Flight: A Reconsideration of the Staircase in the Early Modern Palace
By Atlanta Neudorf | @ARaeNeudorf In a letter written in 1663, Jean-Baptiste Colbert wrote to King Louis XIV of France that ‘in lieu of dazzling actions in war, nothing indicates better the greatness and spirit of princes than buildings’.[1] This sentiment illustrates the importance of palace architecture to the image and character of the prince in…
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Royal Palace or Hellish Temple? Using Architectural Style as a Source
By Atlanta R. Neudorf // arn26@cam.ac.uk When one pictures the historian undertaking their archival research, it is common to conjure up an image of the scholar poring over sources of the written word: newspapers, letters, pamphlets, or book manuscripts. Few would imagine this dusty figure staring at a building.
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Solving the Historical Puzzle of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum
By Atlanta Rae Neudorf Approaching the past as an historian is comparable to trying to solve a puzzle whose pieces are constantly changing shape. An element which momentarily appears to fit snugly in place comes suddenly into focus as glaringly wrong when new evidence comes to light. Whilst frustrating at times, these moments of clarity…
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Changing rooms in eighteenth-century London
By Carys Brown | @HistoryCarys On 8 February 1750, some time between the hours of 12 and 1 o’clock in the afternoon, Baptist Minister Benjamin Wallin was ‘musing’ at his desk in the upstairs study of his Southwark home when he suddenly ‘felt the Desk move the floor shake and the Front of the house seemed to…
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Inside the Modernist mind: Plastic Emotions by Shiromi Pinto (2019)
By Sam Young (@Samyoung102) Shiromi Pinto, Plastic Emotions (Influx Press, 2019), £9.99 Minnette de Silva was a remarkable individual. Sri Lanka’s first female architect and the first Asian woman to join the Royal Institute of British Architects, she pioneered the development of a ‘Regional Modernism’ style of urban design throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In…
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