Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Review of Stephanie McCurry's book MAsters of Small Worlds Essay

Review of Stephanie McCurry's book MAsters of Small Worlds - Essay Example McCurry’s thesis stresses quite frequently on the significance of the role of gender and the patriarchal nature of the yeoman society, which she portrayed as being almost characteristic to the low country yeoman society. McCurry’s thesis is well argued and some of her sources are well researched as well. But not all of McCurry’s arguments are convincing. In fact, in most cases McCurry provided very little pertinent evidence for her arguments. The concepts of political and social unity however have been presented with some well examined evidence such that they seem more plausible than McCurry’s other arguments which are not only based on insufficient data but are argued such that the concepts themselves are open to several interpretations. McCurry bases most of her arguments concerning the yeoman society on the Low Country’s geographical factors. However, one finds that McCurry, in her aim to explore the principles of the culture and structure of the yeoman society has attempted to broaden the geographical precincts of the low country. Perhaps McCurry felt compelled to do so in order to present pertinent data for her arguments. It might be that McCurry did not find enough data to back up her thesis and arguments. Extending the geographical area of the low country (to cover certain areas believed to be in the â€Å"Middle Country†) might have given McCurry the possibility to explore more evidence from those areas, thereby making her thesis a tad richer with weightier data. The extending of geographical boundaries also gave McCurry the opportunity of exploring the similarities and connections of the working relationships between wealthy slave owning families and the farming families with no slaves. The ideal example to justify the hypothesis that the extending of the low country topography gave McCurry more data to work with is the instance when McCurry used the personal diary of a woman (believed to be

Monday, February 10, 2020

Interior architecture - Detail and the user Essay

Interior architecture - Detail and the user - Essay Example The large number of Scarpa’s architectural projects reflect his unique concepts and ideas of design (Scarpa, Beltramini, Battistella et al, 2007). Thesis Statement: The purpose of this paper is to investigate Carlo Scarpa’s use of the relationship between the body and architecture, and examine the roots of his conception of the elements of architectural construction as â€Å"beings†. Further, Scarpa’s imaging the user, with architectural details in relation to the user’s body, and his layering of memories based on the affinity between architecture and place, will be discussed. Relationship Between the Body and Architecture In European culture, there has always been a significant place for the relationship between the body and architecture, and the complex phenomenon of corporeality. This tradition originated from Marcus Vitruvius, the ancient Roman architect and engineer in the first century B.C., who compares the human body directly to the body of a building, and reinforces the analogy, so that the importance of symmetry, proportion and harmony in architecture become secondary to his theory of the link between corporeality and architecture. According to Dodds, Tavernor and Rykwert (2002: 28) â€Å"although this highly provocative subject has been treated with great attention and subtlety by critics, it remains nonetheless poorly understood†. ... Thus, the body was used not only to designate conceptual, but also material reality. Plato followed by Aristotle undertook to find a clear understanding of corporeality. The concept of the body is always open for further improvemen â€Å"through the continuous reciprocity of necessity and reason† (Dodds et al 2007: 28). Consequently, the body is perceived as a comparatively stable structure in the context of reality as a whole denoted by the cosmos. There is a surprising richness and depth of understanding of the relation between the human body and the world, the common corporeality and meaning, rendering the body as a microcosm. There is great reciprocity between the human body and the world, and between the human body and architecture. Joints, Frames and Building Construction Mass as â€Å"Beings† In the mid-nineteenth century, Gottfried Semper divided built form into two separate material procedures: the tectonics of the frame in which members of different lengths ar e joined together to encompass a spatial field, and the stereotomics of compressive mass that, â€Å"while it may embody space, is constructed through the piling up of identical units† (Frampton 2000: 181). Tectonics relates to the construction of buildings. The work of Carlo Scarpa is a contemporary manifestation of Semper’s approach supporting the concept of framework as aerial and dematerialization of mass, while the mass form is telluric or relating to the earth into which it is embedded deeply. The former tends towards the light, and the latter towards the dark. These gravitational opposites, the immateriality of the frame and the materiality of the mass are considered to symbolise the two cosmological polarities towards which they reach out: the sky and the earth. The experiential limits