336 research outputs found
Botanic and poetic landscapes: a reading of two Persian texts on early Safavid gardens
Existing scholarship on Persian gardens reveals a pattern of common interest in spatial layout, formal quality, and symbolic meaning. Gardens are often depicted as symmetrically laid out enclosures, as introverted places for hedonistic purposes, as passive spaces for contemplation, and as symbolically charged, earthly embodiments of Qur’anic paradise. Such depictions present Persian gardens as salubrious oases intended purely for repose and delight. This discourse has oversimplified the history, meaning and function of Persian gardens, which were dynamic venues serving multiple and complex purposes. Against this background, the study attempts to shed new light on Persian gardens and landscapes through a fresh reading of two key Persian texts that provide historically grounded perspectives on the gardens’ botanical functions and poetical meanings. The first text, Irshād al-zirā‘a (Guidance on Agriculture), is a botanical manual offering extensive material on the science of agronomy and gardening as well as rare agricultural instructions regarding the laying out and planting of formal gardens, taking into account both garden aesthetics and the science of horticulture. The second text, Jannāt-i ‘adan (Gardens of Eden), is a compilation of five poems composed in 1557 by Shah Tahmāsp’s court poet and historian, Navīdī Shīrāzī, to celebrate the completion of the new imperial garden city of Qazvin. The new reading of these texts shows how Persian gardens served multiple functions ranging from the most practical to the most poetic, how formal aesthetics and paradise symbolism played only marginal roles in their design and creation, and how different considerations contributed to the creation of desirable garden environments. Adopting a historical method of analysis and interpretation, the study examines examples of both existing and imagined sixteenth-century Safavid gardens, in order to support the reading of and excerpt translations from the selected texts. The study paints a new picture of early Safavid gardens and their centrality as dynamic and adaptable places that fulfil the needs of their patrons, courtiers, harem members, visitors, and even the citizens of their respective cities. It brings to light overlooked factors that contributed directly or indirectly to garden form, structure and meaning, while reintroducing the Persian garden as an intersection where nature, indigenous design, local cultural and social lifestyle, economic efficiency, power, patronage and dynastic politics meet.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Architecture and Built Environment, 201
Presenting tangible heritage through virtual reality in education contexts
Global trends in heritage related work point to an increasing use of cutting edge
computing and technological setups. This emerging digital paradigm, which includes
new tools and platforms such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, has revolutionized
the documentation, representation and dissemination of the historical monuments
(Addison 2000). This has positively impacted diverse sectors such as tourism, archeology,
cultural heritage preservation, entertainment etc. Digital cultural heritage is transforming
the education sector as well. It is opening up new avenues in academic research and is
also significantly influencing stakeholders in school and higher education. In line with
these developments, the project is constituted in the following domain:
360 degree Virtual Reality (VR) immersive experiences of historical monuments
based on school syllabuses
A Procedural Approach to Creating American Second Empire Houses
In this work, we present a procedural approach to capture a variety of appearances of American Second Empire houses, which are well known for their mansard roofs and their inspired ornamentation. To develop this procedural approach, we have identified the set of rules and similarities of Second Empire houses. Our procedural approach, therefore, captures the style differences of Second Empire houses with a relatively few number of parameters.
Using our interface, we are able to generate virtual houses in a wide variety of styles of American Second Empire architecture. We have also developed a method to break up these virtual models into slices in order to efficiently and economically 3D print them. Using this method, we have printed miniatures of two landmark buildings in Savannah, GA and Baltimore, MD: The Hamilton-Turner Inn and Enoch Pratt House. We observe that the virtual models still provide more details because of the limited resolution of the 3D printing process
Investigating and Writing Achitectural History: Subjects, Methodologies and Frontiers.
The volume contains the abstracts and full texts of the 157 papers and position statements presented and discussed at the III EAHN (European Architectural History) International Meeting, Torino 19-21 June 201
The Sigiriya Royal Gardens:
Besides the efforts that are of descriptive and celebrative nature, studies related to Sri Lanka’s historical built heritage are largely to view material remains in historical, sociological, socio-historical and semiological perspectives. But there is hardly any serious attempt to view such material remains from a technical-analytical approach to understand the compositional aspects of their designs. The 5th century AC royal complex at Sigiriya is no exception in this regard.
The enormous wealth of information and the unearthed material remains during more than hundred years of field-based research by several generations of archaeologists at Sigiriya provide ideal opportunity for such an analysis. The present study is, therefore, to fill the gap in research related to Sri Lanka’s historical built heritage in general and to Sigiriya in particular. Therefore the present research attempts to read Sigiriya as a landscape architectonic design to expose its architectonic composition and design instruments.
The study which is approached from a technical-analytical point of view follows a methodological framework that is developed at the Landscape Design Department of the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology. The study reveals that the architectonic design of Sigiriya constitutes multiple design layers and multiple layers of significance with material-spatial-metaphorical-functional coherence, and that it has both general and unique landscape architectonic elements, aspects, characteristics and qualities.
The richness of its composition also enables to identify the landscape architectural value of the Sigiriya, which will help re-shape the policies related to conservation and presentation of Sigiriya as a heritage site as well as the protection and management as a green monument. The positive results of the study also underline that the methodology adapted in this research has devised a framework for the study of other examples of historical gardens and landscapes of Sri Lanka, which will eventually provide insight into the typological aspects of the possible Sri Lankan tradition of landscape design
The Sigiriya Royal Gardens. Analysis of the Landscape Architectonic Composition
Besides the efforts that are of descriptive and celebrative nature, studies related to Sri Lanka’s historical built heritage are largely to view material remains in historical, sociological, socio-historical and semiological perspectives. But there is hardly any serious attempt to view such material remains from a technical-analytical approach to understand the compositional aspects of their designs. The 5th century AC royal complex at Sigiriya is no exception in this regard.
The enormous wealth of information and the unearthed material remains during more than hundred years of field-based research by several generations of archaeologists at Sigiriya provide ideal opportunity for such an analysis. The present study is, therefore, to fill the gap in research related to Sri Lanka’s historical built heritage in general and to Sigiriya in particular. Therefore the present research attempts to read Sigiriya as a landscape architectonic design to expose its architectonic composition and design instruments.
The study which is approached from a technical-analytical point of view follows a methodological framework that is developed at the Landscape Design Department of the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology. The study reveals that the architectonic design of Sigiriya constitutes multiple design layers and multiple layers of significance with material-spatial-metaphorical-functional coherence, and that it has both general and unique landscape architectonic elements, aspects, characteristics and qualities.
The richness of its composition also enables to identify the landscape architectural value of the Sigiriya, which will help re-shape the policies related to conservation and presentation of Sigiriya as a heritage site as well as the protection and management as a green monument. The positive results of the study also underline that the methodology adapted in this research has devised a framework for the study of other examples of historical gardens and landscapes of Sri Lanka, which will eventually provide insight into the typological aspects of the possible Sri Lankan tradition of landscape design
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Picturing India's "Land of Kings" Between the Mughal and British Empires: Topographical Imaginings of Udaipur and its Environs
Eighteenth-century paintings depicting the courtly culture of Udaipur have been widely described as iconic images representing the decadent "voluptuous inactivity" of Indian princes within idyllic palaces. More recently, scholars have interpreted such paintings as royal portraits constituting meaningful assertions of political and cultural power. Yet scholars have overlooked a topographical genre of painting in which Udaipur artists not only portrayed the ruler's face but also captured the charisma of Udaipur's urban space. This dissertation examines the means by which artists pictured Udaipur and its environs for multiple patrons and mixed audiences, thereby constructing the city's memory and mapping diverse territorial claims of regional kings, courtly elites, and merchants, as well as religious institutions and the emergent British Empire. Central to this account is a corpus of large-scale paintings, scrolls, drawings, and maps made in a time period of transitions in northwestern India, marked by several new courtly and non-courtly alliances, between the decentralization of the Mughal Empire in the early 1700s and the proclamation of British rule at the Ajmer Durbar in 1832. I argue that itinerant artists practiced their arts literally and metaphorically in between empires, and thus formulated their subjective, and, at times, subversive interpretations of urbanity, territoriality, and history as they circulated among various domains. By tracing the critical role played by artistic practices in the British Political Agent James Tod's political and historical creation of "Rajasthan"--the land of kings--this dissertation challenges the dominant narrative that has mediated this region's architecture, landscape, and history. Separate chapters are devoted to shifts in artistic practice, from the painting of genealogical and poetic manuscripts to large-scale topographical paintings, relating them to tropes of praise, pleasure, and commemoration in the court's literary culture, mediation of urban memory, emergent forms of mapping, and spatial practices of processions. Udaipur's artists like Ghasi, who was also a "native" artist-assistant to Tod, the region's first British colonial agent, rendered Tod's explorations in the form of courtly processions while also adapting drafted architectural drawings for the depiction of Udaipur's princely domains. I compare the works of Ghasi and Tod, among several others, with those of artists working for the Jain religious and mercantile community. These little-studied paintings suggest the paradigmatic ways in which local artists reevaluated established pictorial genres and tropes for the purpose of mapping environs in relation to the emerging presence of the British Empire and reconfiguration of regional polities, religious sects, and mercantile communities. The visualization of South Asia's urban environs has largely been understood through the lens of the nineteenth-century British colonial archive of images and maps. Systematic studies of alternate imaginings found in contemporaneous pre-colonial Indian art have been all but absent. Addressing this lacuna, this dissertation cumulatively highlights a largely unknown visual archive of images of pre-colonial Indian cities to examine how both Indian and British artists imagined their urban environs for varied patrons. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the importance of affect in understanding epistemic practices and the nature of political, cultural, and artistic transitions in the long eighteenth century in the Indian subcontinent
Buddhist Architecture in East Asia
This issue focuses on the Buddhist architecture in East Asia. Over the last 2000 years, Buddhism had transformed not only the intellectual and practical lives but also the built environments of East Asia. The articles in this issue aim to capture the scope and diversity of East Asian Buddhist architecture and delineate the front lines of research in the field. In this collection, without bypassing the significant topics of famous temples, influential monasteries, and monumental landmarks, we try to restore a more balanced picture of Buddhist practice and the built environment by incorporating buildings and planning from the overlooked regions and aspects of Buddhism. Studies here feature shrines and temples in small villages as well as those in sacred mountains, forms reshaped by contemporary life as well as those of historical events, and practices in the domestic realm as well as those with pilgrimage significance. We want to go beyond the well-established scholarships on stylistic changes, technical development, and the typological studies of halls and pagodas in China, Japan, and Korea. There are in-depth discussions of examples from regions and cultures of religious hybridity, analyzing the way architecture is built for and shaped by the practices of a given community, integrated into the spiritual and material lives, and share themes and concepts to foster a comprehensive culture that sustains life and identity of a place. These are significant issues not only for the scholarship on architectural history, but also meaningful for the contemporary building of our own life and faith
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Constructing Community: Tamil Merchant Temples in India and China, 850-1281
This dissertation studies premodern temple architecture, freestanding sculpted stones, and Tamil language inscriptions patronized by south Indian merchants in south India and China. Between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, Indian Ocean trade was at its apex, connecting populations on European and Asian continents through complex interlocking networks. Southern India's Tamil region, in particular, has been described as the fulcrum of the Indian Ocean circuit; however, knowledge of intra-Asian contact and exchange from this period has been derived mostly from Arabic and Chinese sources, which are abundant in comparison with the subcontinent's dearth of written history. My project redresses this lacuna by investigating the material culture of Tamil merchants, and aims to recover their history through visual evidence, authored by individuals who left few written traces of their voyages across the Indian Ocean.
The arguments of my dissertation are based primarily on unpublished and unstudied monuments and inscriptions, weaving together threads from multiple disciplines--art history, literature, epigraphy, and social theory--and from across cultures, the interconnected region of the eastern Indian Ocean and the South China Seas, spanning the Sanskritic, Tamil, Malay, and Sinocentric realms. My dissertation challenges traditional narratives of Indian art history that have long attributed the majority of monumental architecture to royal patrons, focusing instead on the artistic production of cosmopolitan merchants who navigated both elite and non-elite realms of society. I argue that by constructing monuments throughout the Indian Ocean trade circuit, merchants with ties to southern India's Tamil region formulated a coherent group identity in the absence of a central authority.
Similar impulses also are visible in merchants' literary production, illustrated through several newly translated panegyric texts, which preface mercantile donations appearing on temple walls in the modern states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh. Moreover, my work analyzes the complex processes of translation visible in literary and material culture commissioned by merchants, resulting from inter-regional and intercultural encounters among artisans, patrons, and local communities. Rather than identifying a monolithic source for merchants' artistic innovations, in each chapter I demonstrate the multiple ways in which merchants employed visual codes from different social realms (courtly, mercantile, and agrarian) to create their built environments. In Chapter Four, I provide a detailed reconstruction and historical chronology of a late thirteenth century temple in Quanzhou, coastal Fujian Province, and southeastern China, which both echoes and transforms architectural forms of contemporaneous temples in India's Tamil region.
Piecing together over 300 carvings discovered in the region in light of archaeological and art historical evidence, I develop a chronology of the temple's history, and propose that Ming forces destroyed the temple scarcely a century after its creation. In Chapter Three, I interpret stone temples patronized by the largest south Indian merchant association, the Ainnurruvar, as being integral to their self-fashioning in India and abroad. While the temples do not project a merchant identity per se, I show that they employ an artistic vocabulary deeply entrenched in the visual language of the Tamil region. Chapter Two looks at other forms through which merchants created a shared mercantile culture, including literary expressions and freestanding sculptural stones. These texts demonstrate that merchants engaged in both elite and non-elite artistic production. Chapter One analyzes the distribution, content, and context of Tamil merchant sponsored inscriptions within the Indian Ocean circuit, focusing on the modern regions of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, and Andhra Pradesh. An appendix offers new translations of important Tamil language mercantile inscriptions discovered throughout south India
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Char Bagh Avenue, Isfahan: genesis and demise. Pre-Islamic and Islamic garden influences in the Safavid creation and history of its subsequent degeneration
One of the most significant elements in the reconstruction of the historical Iranian city of Isfahan during the Safavid period (late-sixteenth century to late-seventeenth century) was the institution of the Chahar Bagh Avenue and its surrounding gardens. Inextricably attached to the creation of this great public space was the theme of the paradisiacal garden – an enclosure complete with landscaping and planting – tended and watered, which excluded the wilderness. The Garden ultimately resulted in a remarkable synthesis of political views expressed through Safavid architectural, artistic and urban representations. Cultural concepts underpinned by religious beliefs and insights derived from an ancient tradition that predated the advent of Islam played a pivotal role in progressing garden-making ideas over time. The Avenue has continued to characterize the urban pattern of Isfahan; today it remains the most prominent town axis that continues to retain a dialectical relationship between the now-transformed gardens and the ever-evolving city. Focusing on the Chahar Bagh Avenue’s physical configuration – Shah Abbas’ (1598-1602 CE) masterpiece – this thesis traces the genealogy of how intangible and tangible features were employed in the design of the Chahar Bagh to synthesize complex ideas of garden design that had evolved over time. The thesis considers diverse examples of gardens to define this genealogy – from the pre-Islamic gardens of the Achaemenids and Sassanids to the Islamic gardens of the Middle East, Spain, Morocco, Italy and central Asia, as well as the Mughal gardens of India – to identify changes within continued parameters involved in this evolution. Based on the hypothesis that adherence to the Qur’anic image of Paradise was an important aspect of the Safavid period, this thesis investigates and explores the possible influence of two factorial categories on the planning of the Chahar Bagh Avenue and, in particular, the design of the formal quartered gardens of the Chahar Bagh. Of these the first is the impact of the ancient and Islamic Persian garden pattern, and the second is the representation of Paradise in the Qur’an and the impact of the celestial image of Paradise as depicted in the Islamic Persian gardens. The thesis also chronicles the Chahar Bagh’s eventual degeneration into an urban artery in the post-Safavid period under the Qajar dynasty (1878-1925) and the various attempts at its partial preservation under the Pahlavids (1925-1979)
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