Architecture has historically been an important part of a cultural repertoire used by states to construct the nation code. In modernity authoritative state definitions of the nation were possible due to the clearly demarcated cultural boundaries that existed between states, and although states seldom had total control over the nation code they were for the most part able to construct dominant, cultural symbols of the nation. In this age of nation-building distinct national styles of architecture, which emerged through the modification of universal styles to particular contexts, provided a significant space for nation codification. Victorian Britain provides a clear illustration of these general trends. At this time many prominent British architects accepted state commissions to design public buildings in a quintessentially British style. Styles reliant on historical reference such as Gothic and neo- Classical were used by the British state to legitimate their imperialistic, colonial aims. In the twentieth century the emergence of the modem code of architecture, with its more universalised aesthetic, challenged boundaries between national styles. However, many states did attempt to modify this style, as modernism's progressive logic and utopian ideals were ideas with which governments wanted to align 'their' nations. The cultural boundaries of the state have become more porous due to processes associated with globalization. In most European societies the nation is increasingly a fragmented, diverse concept, and the relatively stable relationship between nation and state in modernity has frequently become unstable under globalized conditions. Post-national identities that pay little heed to geographical and political boundaries have emerged, with new forms of citizenship association threatening the ability of the state to provide the stable national identities that were to a large extent possible in modernity. This dissertation argues that the ambiguous relationship between the nation, the state and post-national identities fmds a tangible form in some contemporary state-led architecture projects. The Millennium Dome, the Jewish Museum, and the Reichstag all express many of the tensions inherent in contemporary state-led architectural projects. The dominant discourses around these buildings are of transparency, openness, and democracy, reflecting themes in contemporary European politics. As the wider political and cultural discourses in which buildings are situated can often shape their interpretation, the architects responsible for these buildings have attempted to control the symbolic meanings attached to their work as far as is possible. States still have a continued interest in architecture that expresses national identities, but vitally not with the same degree of mastery they once had. In short architecture is a discursive medium, and as such harbours the potential to codify collective identities. The state-led architectural projects assessed here reflect some of the dominant discourses in the construction of post-national identities. Resultantly these buildings have also provided a focus for contestation about contemporary identity projects. The dissertation makes two significant contributions to existing knowledge: firstly by bridging the gap that currently exists between sociology and architectural theory and secondly by developing this framework with reference to three specific illustrative examples in contemporary European architecture.

The purpose of my study is to explore previously overlooked and therefore hidden eighteenth-century architectural histories using the lens of John Carr of York (1723-1807). This can help elucidate our understanding of, and challenge accepted ideas around, architectural histories that traditionally have a London based, stylistic, gendered or elitist class bias, coupled with an exclusive view of the practice of architecture based on the great drawing offices of premier architects such as Carr’s peers Robert Adam and Sir John Soane. By using John Carr of York in this way we can see that there are alternative architectural histories that exist in conjunction with and not in opposition to, these established ideas. In particular, the hidden architectural histories I focus on include the role of women as architectural practitioners and patrons, the accuracy of the previously held view of who eighteenth-century architectural patrons were and subsequently the influences upon them, and the role of the architect within the professional function.

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No description available.

Interest in the "everyday" within the arts and humanities is almost as ubiquitous as the subject itself. For some time now it has been not only unsurprising, but positively expected that research be conducted into the apparently banal activities and effects of the everyday world. Architectural history and theory does not fall behind in this development. However, just as our everyday lives are diffuse and various, so too are the aims and approaches of those who study it. In this introduction I hope to offer a concise view of some works that have been influential in the development of the report. It is not my intention to investigate the cited works in full, but only to "flag" them for attention. This "flagging," or laying down of markers, will continue throughout the report. I begin with those works that have influenced the conception of the everyday in this report in the broadest terms. So - Sigmund Freud, Henri Lefebvre and various feminist writers have predominantly offered an historical and conceptual bracket (1901 - 1986) to the report. I then discuss the influence of Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau and Jane Rendell in terms of the development of a practice appropriate to the study of everyday life. Before beginning the report proper, I discuss issues arising from the choice of "subject" - the corridor of Wates House.

Thesis argument: There is a Culture of Violent Reductivism in Representing Warsaw, which means that: Warsaw is reduced to a symbol of heroism in the hands of God/History or the Expert; imagining is reduced to historic imaginary and by the same token futuristic imaginary; both based on a positivist-romanticist system of thought; the reductivism deploys philosemiotic violence (acts of offering with expectations attached); the reductivism/violence is a symptom of a ‘neurosis’ of the social national/imaginary; the reductivism stops Warsaw/Poland from imagining present and future more openly. An alternative is to represent Warsaw as a series of post-historical objects that: are discrete texts, singular images, drawings, physical objects; are paradigmatic and analogical; they move from specificity to specificity; offer different forms, where ‘form’ is non-objective and means relationship; are a series of critiques, reflections, descriptions that work as architectural hypotheses; represent three exemplar imaginaries of Warsaw (the Birth, the Rebirth, the Second Rebirth); together form a ‘distracted’ architectural archive of Warsaw’s imaginaries. In this way, the thesis posits an example of a methodology of representing Warsaw that opens the possibility for Warsaw/Poland to imagine itself differently. Key themes: Culture of violent reductivism in representing Warsaw, reduction of Warsaw to a symbol of heroism, domination of the historic futuristic imaginary, philosemi(o)tic violence, neurosis of the social imaginary (guilt), positivist romanticism, post-historical object, paradigmatic knowledge, non-objective form, seriality of representation, architectural hypothesis, three imaginaries of Warsaw, ‘distracted’ archive of imaginaries.

The ‘Avant-Garde’ in architecture seems a challenging subject: first, because the term has not yet clearly defined, despite the ubiquity of its use; second, because through that ubiquity it has become a buzz-word that is empty of precise meaning; third, because although this use includes the history of modern architecture, its application to this field has been largely unreflective and often unconsidered, as this thesis demonstrates. There is ambivalence as to which architectures are ‘Avant-Garde’ or should be regarded as ‘Avant-Garde.’ Therefore, there is a challenge in any question such as: what is the Avant-Garde in architecture? How can the architectural Avant-Garde be defined? What is the concept of the Avant-Garde in architecture? My thesis is a sociological conceptualization of the Avant-Garde in architecture. It is based on the mapping of the use the‘ term ‘Avant-Garde’ in architectural history, theory and criticism and its analytical tools are sociological. While it belongs to the above fields, it is informed by art theory and history, cultural studies, and the sociology of the professions, and includes sociological, cultural and political analyses. I suggest that the Avant-Garde is an Operation internal to architecture; a mechanism that does not only describe it but formulates it, motivates it, or else, influences our perception of it. I propose that the Avant-Garde is directed by prominent elements of its internal domain. It includes a filtering process, a rough selection process, and a selection process, by which one or more architectures internal conditions - are introduced to the discipline to renew the profession toward the desired and necessary, for the element who directs the operation, direction (see fig. 2, appendix). The end result of the selection process is what we commonly understand as ‘Avant-Garde’ architecture, e.g. Russian Constructivism or Bauhaus. I also propose that the Avant-Garde lies in and operates within the socio-ideological sphere of architecture and that renewal of the architecture's internal domain is necessary, thus the Avant-Garde is necessary, so as to make architecture respond to each time new external conditions and so endure, as a profession, over time. The Avant-Garde is for me an operation of renewal, a driver of difference and change in architecture (see fig. 1, appendix). The methodology adopted is as follows: I first introduce my analytical tools, some key sociological concepts, and concepts from the ‘Avant-Garde’ discourse (chapter 1). I then examine the filtering process and rough selection process in architectural history: I map the usage of the term in a historiographic corpus and arrive at the more frequently and the less frequently named ‘Avant-Garde’ architectures, which become my two case studies. These are Russian Revolutionary Architecture and Italian Rationalism (chapter 2). The third step is to arrive, through the comparison of my case studies, at those parameters that are crucial in being selected as ‘Avant-Garde,’ i.e. their ‘Avantgardification’ - this occurs after 1960 when the term starts being used describing architectures (part 2). The fourth step is to examine the period of the extended 19605 when the term starts appearing as a means of describing architectures and thus the selection process begins (chapter 6). As a fifth step I research the selection process in the discourse of architectural theory and criticism: I investigate in a particular corpus of writings which architectures, by whom they are chosen as ‘Avant-Garde,’ and the reason why, as Well as which are the concomitant effects of the usage of the term on architecture. In other words, beyond concentrating on which architectures or architectural movements are ‘Avant-Garde' in these writings, I focus on the effects of this selection and denomination (chapter 7). As a sixth step, I examine the selection process of my two case studies in architectural theory and criticism, i.e the Avantgardification of Russian Revolutionary Architecture and less of Italian Rationalism. I investigate when, by whom, and the reason why the first architecture is mostly selected as ‘Avant- Garde,’ as well as which are the concomitant effects on architecture (chapter 8, see also fig. 3, appendix). As a final step I examine the Avant-Garde as a sociological concept based on the key-concepts introduced in chapter 1 (Conclusions). A sociological conceptualization of the Avant-Garde is important for shedding light on issues beyond those of ‘Avant-Garde’ architectures. Through such a concept of the Avant-Garde we recognize issues of the profession, issues which are wider than questions which are directly connected to those architectures selected as such. Looking through the ‘Avant-Garde’ we understand the ways by which architecture is being renewed and Operated. By recognizing the conditions, in which the ‘Avant-Garde’ architectures have been created, and the way and time in which the term was employed to describe them, we understand the mode in which architecture, as a discipline, functions. My thesis is a hermeneutics of the architectural profession through the term ‘Avant-Garde.’

Il existe en France plus de 44 236 monuments historiques, dont la diversité des typologies architecturales s’est considérablement accrue ces dernières décennies (édifices industriels, constructions modernes, etc.). Cette diversification constitue cependant une perte de repère des critères discriminant les monuments à conserver. Cette thèse de doctorat s’intéresse donc aux processus de patrimonialisation et à la sélection des édifices à protéger. Précisément, cette étude porte sur le phénomène inverse, celui des annulations de protection, en France depuis 1990. La présente recherche vise à mettre en évidence les facteurs intrinsèques et extrinsèques des radiations de protection - en net accroissement, particulièrement dans les cœurs de ville - et permettre ainsi une réflexion sur l’évolution du patrimoine et des politiques de protection. / In France there are more than 44.236 listed buildings, whose diversity of architectural typolo-gies increased significantly these last decades (industrials buildings, modern constructions, etc.). However, this diversification will entail the loss of criteria specifying the monuments which are meant to be preserved. This doctoral thesis is thus focused on the processes of pat-rimonialisation and on selection rules of buildings considered for listing. To be precise, this study relates to the opposite fact: thereviews, the cancellations of protections and therefore the delisting of buildings, in France, since 1990. This research aims to highlight the intrinsic and extrinsic factors of delisting requests – a net increase, mostly in the city centres - and thus to get an overall picture of the situation on inheritance evolution and on process for listing or delisting.

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Since the beginning of the 21st century, the future of religious heritage has provoked consideration within the fields of law, history, architecture and heritage. The origin of this problem is explained both by the decline in traditional worship practices, essentially Catholic in France, from the 1960s onwards, and by the Church’s lack of human and financial resources, which has resulted in the appearance of veritable "religious desert". This process, related to society’s secularisation, is expected to increase because of the likelihood of these two factors intensifying. If convents, monasteries, seminaries and other Catholic religious buildings have already been affected by this phenomenon, parish church buildings are now in turn losing their original function. Quebec has also experienced this phenomenon, but its historical and legal contexts have accelerated the transformation of churches which in turn resulted in the establishment of a "churches Plan" aiming at preserving church buildings by converting them.In this thesis, that pioneering programme is used in relation to the Lyons Saint-Etienne urban area, as a lens through which to read the French situation and as a tool for generating methods adapted to its specific context.The first part summarises the specific heritage and legal knowledge bases from Quebec and France concerning their parish churches, which is necessary for understanding the two contexts. The second part is an observational study, which defines the territory and creates an inventory of the corpus of research. We first provide an inventory of 429 parish churches within the territory studied here. From an analysis of their transformations, we propose three major typologies ("historical", "19th-century" and "20 h-century " churches), Using the cases of church conversions in ou corpus, we analyse the degree of compatibility between their previous worship use and their new uses, and then formulate hypotheses relating architectural interventions for adaptative reuse to restoration theories. The third part is an action-research interventional study. Three representative case studies from each church typology have been selected, in the town of Montarcher, Givors and Villeurbanne. For each case, a participatory approach has been set up with the municipality, inhabitants and associations, in order to propose reconversion scenarios adapted to local needs.This work shows that the demolition of parish churches, widely perceived as a common good, threatens the transmission of local identities. It therefore seems essential to start a global reflection on the evolution of this heritage, one which takes into account territorial issues, citizens' demands and the architectural diversity of these buildings. We show that the architect, through both his sensitivity to the place and his technical, can play a central role in implementing of these reflection. / Since the beginning of the 21st century, the future of religious heritage has provoked consideration within the fields of law, history, architecture and heritage. The origin of this problem is explained both by the decline in traditional worship practices, essentially Catholic in France, from the 1960s onwards, and by the Church’s lack of human and financial resources, which has resulted in the appearance of veritable "religious desert". This process, related to society’s secularisation, is expected to increase because of the likelihood of these two factors intensifying. If convents, monasteries, seminaries and other Catholic religious buildings have already been affected by this phenomenon, parish church buildings are now in turn losing their original function. Quebec has also experienced this phenomenon, but its historical and legal contexts have accelerated the transformation of churches which in turn resulted in the establishment of a "churches Plan" aiming at preserving church buildings by converting them.In this thesis, that pioneering programme is used in relation to the Lyons Saint-Etienne urban area, as a lens through which to read the French situation and as a tool for generating methods adapted to its specific context.The first part summarises the specific heritage and legal knowledge bases from Quebec and France concerning their parish churches, which is necessary for understanding the two contexts. The second part is an observational study, which defines the territory and creates an inventory of the corpus of research. We first provide an inventory of 429 parish churches within the territory studied here. From an analysis of their transformations, we propose three major typologies ("historical", "19th-century" and "20 h-century " churches), Using the cases of church conversions in ou corpus, we analyse the degree of compatibility between their previous worship use and their new uses, and then formulate hypotheses relating architectural interventions for adaptative reuse to restoration theories. The third part is an action-research interventional study. Three representative case studies from each church typology have been selected, in the town of Montarcher, Givors and Villeurbanne. For each case, a participatory approach has been set up with the municipality, inhabitants and associations, in order to propose reconversion scenarios adapted to local needs.This work shows that the demolition of parish churches, widely perceived as a common good, threatens the transmission of local identities. It therefore seems essential to start a global reflection on the evolution of this heritage, one which takes into account territorial issues, citizens' demands and the architectural diversity of these buildings. We show that the architect, through both his sensitivity to the place and his technical, can play a central role in implementing of these reflection.