Introduction to Heritage Assets: 19th- and 20th-Century Convents and Monasteries

A short description of the history and architecture of English nineteenth and twentieth-century convents and monasteries, with an emphasis on their most significant attribute

A Renaissance Instrument to Support Nonprofits: The Sale of Private Chapels in Florentine Churches

Catholic churches in Renaissance Florence supported themselves overwhelmingly from the contributions of wealthy citizens. The sale of private chapels within churches to individuals was a significant source of church funds, and facilitated a church construction boom. Chapel sales offered three benefits to churches: prices were usually far above cost; donor/purchasers purchased masses and other tie-in services; and they added to the magnificence of the church because donors were required to decorate chapels expensively. Donors purchased chapels for two primary reasons: to facilitate services for themselves and their families, such as masses and church burials, that would speed their departure from Purgatory; and to gain status in the community. Chapels were private property within churches, but were only occasionally used directly by their owners. The expense of chapels and their decorations made them an ideal signal for wealth, particularly since sumptuary laws limited most displays of wealth. To overcome the contributions free-rider problem, these churches sold private benefits not readily available elsewhere, namely status and salvation.

Early Modern Guildhalls : Habitus in transition?

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Excavations at the Nubian royal town of Kerma: 1975-91

Kerma is an ancient city on the Nile in Middle Nubia, long known and the subject of renewed recent exploration. Its position, at the southern limit of Egyptian control, sets it strategically on the routes to the African interior. Its environment in the arid desert results in remarkable preservation of organic remain

Reconnecting Schools and Neighborhoods: A proposal for School Centered Community Revitalization in Baltimore Maryland

This project explores the concept of school-centered community as a key aspect in assisting urban renewal through architecture. It employs this concept through the architectural design of a middle school in Baltimore, Maryland that has a focus on music. The existing context of an urban site in the Oldtown area is analyzed to generate a solution to the area’s educational problems as well as to provide an urban renewal plan. In order to develop a project that has great potential to succeed, the projects site was specifically chosen based on its context

Basket-Handle Arch and Its Optimum Symmetry Generation as a Structural Element and Keeping the Aesthetic Point of View

The arches were a great advance in construction with respect to the rigid Greek linteled architecture. Its development came from the hand of the great Roman constructions, especially with the semicircular arch. In successive historical periods, different types of arches have been emerging, which in addition to their structural function was taking aesthetic characteristics that are used today to define the architectural style. When, in the construction of a bow, the rise is less than half the springing line, the semicircular arch is no longer used and the segmental arch is used, and then on to another more efficient and aesthetic arch, the basket-handle arch. This study examines the classic geometry of the basket-handle arch also called the three-centered arch. A solution is proposed from a constructive and aesthetic point of view, and this is approached both geometrically and analytically, where the relationship between the radius of the central arch and the radius of the lateral arch is minimized. The solution achieved allows the maximum springing line or clear span to be saved with the minimum rise that preserves the aesthetic point of view, since the horizontal thrust of a bow is greater than the relationship between the springing line of the arch and the rise. This solution has been programmed and the resulting software has made it possible to analyse existing arches in historic buildings or constructions to check if their solutions were close or not from both points of view. Thus, it has been possible to verify that in most of the existing arches analyzed, the proposed solution is reached

‘More trouble than Coventry Cathedral’: The Architectural Identity of Mortonhall Crematorium, Edinburgh 1961-67.

In 1962 architect Sir Basil Spence wrote to the Lord Provost of Edinburgh that the Mortonhall Crematorium ‘job is giving me more trouble than Coventry Cathedral’. The postwar period in Scotland witnessed Modernist architecture becoming inextricably linked with ambitious utopian visions representing a new social order based on equality and improvement, whether for the living or the dead. Glasgow and the West had set the bar high in terms of progressive crematorium building during the 1960s – its record was remarkable – Scotland’s first crematorium, Maryhill opened in 1895 and Daldowie, Craigton and The Linn all completed by 1962. Edinburgh might have been hard pressed to match this achievement had it not responded by commissioning the internationally renowned Sir Basil Spence. The result was one of the finest crematorium designs in Europe. The story of Mortonhall, illustrates very eloquently, the arguments and compromises over costs that architects often had to face to produce civic buildings of quality that identified the visions and values of an urban society and culture. This paper chronicles the architect’s quest to create not only ‘a dignified and austere crematorium for the city of Edinburgh’ but also to ‘get the best crematorium in Britain’