Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2007. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 198-205). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2013. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: During the 12th century the Ab Suger, a church leader from near Paris in France, initiated a new approach to church architecture, the Gothic style. He diverted from the existing traditions and utilized pointed arches as one of the basic components of the new style. Pointed arches, unlike normal arches, distribute load-carrying weight not only downwards, as normal arches do, but also sideways. Strategically placed flying buttresses can help neutralize the thrust to the sides and reduce the weight on walls. Walls no longer had to be massive and it became possible to utilize big parts of the walls for windows, which were filled with brightly coloured glass. The style deliberately made use of height and enclosed spaces as a design element, to an extent unknown until that time. For some four centuries cathedrals in this style were built all over Europe, before the style was replaced with the coming of the Renaissance. The 19th century saw the coming of a style of Gothic Revival. New building materials had become available and there were fundamental differences between the original Gothic style and the Neo-Gothic (or Gothic Revival) style. In some instances elements of the original style lost their functions and were applied in a purely decorative function in the Gothic Revival style. With the colonization of Africa, the Neo-Gothic style came to South Africa. It took root locally and became part of South African church architecture. Local conditions required that some adaptations be made and several varieties of the Neo-Gothic style became part of the South African architectural landscape. Many church buildings were constructed in South Africa in this style during the last century and a half. The ones older than sixty years enjoy some measure of protection under current legislation relating to heritage conservation. It became evident that within the variety of Neo-Gothic idioms a number of churches have become so simplified that only some characteristics of the style have remained. Throughout the study it was indicated how the significance of a building and its architectural style also impact on the non-material culture of a community. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Gedurende die 12de eeu het ab Suger, ‘n kerkleier van naby Parys in Frankryk, met ‘n nuwe benadering tot kerkargitektuur na vore gekom wat later as die Gotiese styl sou bekend staan. Hy het afgewyk van bestaande tradisies en gebruike in verband met kerkargitektuur. Deur die aanwending van spitsboë is die afwaartse druk van ‘n kerk se dak gedeeltelik na buite verplaas, in plek van alles na onder. Strategies geplaasde boogstutte het die sywaartse druk geneutraliseer. Hierdie boumetode is saam met die gebruik van geribde gewelwe gebruik om die druk in so ‘n mate van symure af te haal dat die mure nie meer dik en sterk moes wees nie en dit moontlik was om groot dele van die mure met vensters van gekleurde glas te vul. Die nuwe styl het ingeslote ruimtes en hoë gewelwe gehad soos die Middeleeuse mens nog nie vantevore geken het nie. Vir sowat vier eeue lank het katedrale in dié styl oral oor Europa opgeskiet, totdat dit met die koms van die Renaissance deur ander style vervang is. In die 19de eeu het daar ‘n herlewing in die Gotiese styl gekom. Beter boumateriale was beskikbaar en die Gotiese Herlewingstyl het in sommige opsigte groot verskille met die oorspronklike getoon. Van die Gotiese boustyl se komponente is aangepas om totaal ander funksies te vervul. Verskeie aspekte van die Gotiese styl is slegs behou as versiering. Met die kolonisasie van Afrika het die Gotiese Herlewingstyl na Suid-Afrika gekom. Die styl het posgevat en versprei in Suid-Afrika maar plaaslike omstandighede het aanpassings daarvan genoodsaak en etlike variasies op die Neo-Gotiese tema het na vore gekom. ‘n Groot aantal kerke is in die afgelope anderhalf eeu in Suid-Afrika in hierdie styl gebou. Sommiges daarvan geniet ‘n mate van beskerming ingevolge Suid-Afrika se bewaringswetgewing. Hierdie studie fokus op kerkgeboue met Neo-Gotiese stylkenmerke in ‘n bepaalde geografiese gebied in Suid-Afrika. Daar is bevind dat van die variasies op die Neo-Gotiese styl so vereenvoudig het, dat daar slegs enkele stylkenmerke by hulle oorgebly het. Deurgaans is aangedui op watter wyse die betekenis van die kerkgebou en die styl daarvan ook die nie-tasbare kultuur van ‘n gemeenskap geraak het.

At the eastern end of the Edinburgh World Heritage Site, a protrusion of volcanic rock known as Calton Hill is situated on the northern side of the Waverley Valley. This area sits approximately 100m above sea level at its highest point - around 20m higher than Princes Street in the First ‘New Town’ and at approximately the same height as the Castle Esplanade in the ‘Old Town’ of Edinburgh. During the early nineteenth century, the hill and its land to the north were developed, to extend the city of Edinburgh towards the Port of Leith, in order to open up new routes of access and communications between the port, the city, and the surrounding lands to the south and east. The resulting development provoked debates on the best approach to the development of the urban landscape, the suitability and resonance of specific architectural styles within the urban realm, and the use of public funds for large-scale urban development projects. In addition, the visual prominence of the hill in the city presented a stage for massive changes to the visual context of the boundaries of the city, the relationship between the Old and New Towns, and Edinburgh’s relationship with its surrounding countryside. This blurring of the rural and the urban alongside new interpretations of the classical and the gothic, further emphasised the discordance between societal classes, initially marked out by the mid 18th century expansion of the first New Town and which became further emphasised during the city’s industrial expansion in the latter half of the 19th century. The great care over the choice for the hill’s architectural character as an allegorical commentary on Scotland’s role within the constitutional development of the United Kingdom became muddied throughout the 19thcentury, as shifts in both societal perceptions and government constructs resulted in an evolution of the hill and its structures within the mindset of the Scottish populus. Although the structural evolution of the site during the later 19th and 20th centuries had lesser visual impact on the urban realm, as Scottish national identity swayed from a political to a culturally led discourse in architectural terms, perceptions of the structures on Calton Hill were considered to be representative of Scottish support for the construct of the British State during the 19th century. This was further confirmed by the development of the Scottish Office in the 1930s on the southern side of the hill, and the failed establishment of a Scottish Parliament in 1979, which was to be sited in the vacant Royal High School building. This culminated in the site becoming the focus for grassroots led campaigns for Scottish Independence and Home Rule by the later 20th century. This thesis therefore focuses on the changing relationship between the perception of the hill and its structures over time, by exploring the architectural evolution of the site within broader aesthetic, social and political dialogues. It considers the extent to which the site, its structures, and the discourse surrounding the development of the hill represent the nuances that define Scotland as a nation, and help us to further understand how Scots viewed their identity, within both a British and Scottish context from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. This approach not only places the architecture on the hill within a broader discourse surrounding architecture’s relationship with national, state and imperial identities, it also demonstrates how a more nuanced exploration of urban landscapes can contribute to a better understanding of the contemporaneous societies who developed the urban realm, and the events and debates that surrounded their development. Due to the wide variety of themes that this thesis explores, and the extended timeframe that this work covers, the geographical limitations of the study area are mercurial in their extent, changing focus with the issues being discussed throughout the text. However, for clarity and for ease of reading, the physical study area has been defined as that of the external limits of Playfair’s 1819 plan for the Third New Town (Plate ii), which in the present day is defined through the following locations: The southern limit is the North Back of Canongate; the northern limit is the bottom of Leith Walk, at the intersection with Great Junction Street; the western limit is where Waterloo Place meets Princes Street, and follows Leith Street to the top of Broughton Street; and the eastern boundary is at the junction of Easter Road, Regent Road and Abbeymount, running down Easter Road to meet Leith Walk at its northernmost point.

Thomas Hardy is the only major English novelist to have been a professional architect. In his essay, “Memories of Church Restoration,” written for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (1906), it was clear that, for Hardy, architectural structures preserved the spirit of all those who had created and originally worked and lived within them. By their very presence, then, ancient and medieval buildings were historical artifacts housing the memories of past lives. This intertwining of humans and the built environment became the stuff of Hardy’s novels, short stories, poetry, and essays. Drawing on autobiographical material, including correspondence and notebooks, as well as novels and poetry, this thesis examines the various ways in which Hardy engages with ideas and debates about architecture taking place in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While previous studies have examined the treatment of architecture in Hardy’s fiction, this thesis focuses on key figures in the architectural world and the complex role their ideas play in his work. Hardy explores a combination of ideas from leading architectural thinkers, at times offering an important synthesis to coexisting architectural ideas. I argue that Hardy saw architecture as recording centuries of memory, rooted in an instinctual life that connects humans with the natural world in an intimate way, evoking evolutionary time. In so doing he expanded the meaning of the “architectural” well beyond the confines of medievalist or classical ideas, or debates sparked by architects and critics such as A.W.N. Pugin and John Ruskin and architecture, in its broadest definition, acts as a metaphor for the way the past lives on in the present, undergoing continual processes of change; for destruction and decay; and for the way buildings undergo natural processes. The nexus of architectural ideas also allows Hardy to respond to questions of the role of art in relation to society and social communities.

Despite its monumental scale, its position at a turning point in the development of Gothic architecture and its visionary spatial conception, the cathedral of Bourges has remained an anomaly of medieval architectural history. Conceived and built concurrently with the cathedral of Chartres, Bourges has persistently been viewed as the lesser of the two buildings. This thesis attempts to contextualize supposed irregularities of Bourges' design and to review existing historiographical notions of the building in order to rearticulate its artistic character and redefine its historic position. Historically, Bourges has been overshadowed by the greater success of Chartres as a model on which subsequent buildings were based. In turn, the somewhat fragmented acceptance of Bourges' ideals has led to an historiography in which the building is perceived as a series of individual elements rather than as the embodiment of a powerfully focused vision. These factors, and the resulting insistent comparisons of Bourges with Paris as an antecedent and with Chartres as a contemporary, have nurtured a significant bias against Bourges and a consequent disparity in studies of High Gothic architecture. In seeking to redefine the role of Bourges in the history of Gothic architecture, it is essential to identify the unifying force which motivated the first architect of the building who envisioned the original design which was preserved, virtually intact, throughout the building's sixty-year period of construction. At Bourges, it was a fascination with spatial amplitude on a very large scale which fueled the builder's efforts, and it was toward the goal of spatial equilibrium that all elements of the building were oriented. The designer's highly integrated spatial conception was concretized through his use of form and structure, resulting in a building of powerful homogeneity. In the creation of its spatial configuration, and with respect to those buildings influenced by it, Bourges' elevation and structure are its most distinctive features. Bourges' elevation consists of five levels distributed over three planes, resulting in simultaneously two and three dimensional characteristics. The complete three-story elevation of the inner aisle is amply visible through the very tall main arcades so that the two elevations form a single aesthetic unit. At the same time, the three planes differentiate the volumes of the building without being spatially divisive. The elevation's individual components provide an element of vertical continuity while the multiplicity of its planes assures an expansiveness of space throughout the building. Although the elevation is perhaps a more obvious feature of the building's spatial configuration, Bourges' singular vision is no less a function of its structure. The flying buttress, which was introduced towards the end of the twelfth century, provided a powerful structural tool for the builders of both Chartres and Bourges because it provided the technology necessary to build very high, vaulted buildings without using a cumbersome, galleried construction. The artistic emancipation resulting from the use of the flying buttress provided a strong impetus, not only to re-evaluate the Early Gothic aesthetic, but also to develop an entirely new appreciation of structure itself. The Bourges architect capitalized on both aspects of the flying buttress, availing of the artistic opportunities it gave to the building as a whole, and of the aesthetic properties inherent within it. Bourges' flyers manifest a clear understanding of the structural dynamics of masonry construction and a profound desire to exalt those structural properties to a point where they visually contribute to the realization of the designer's spatial concept. They are daringly slender, steeply profiled, supporting members which transfer the thrust of the main vaults to the heads of similarly slight pier buttresses. The designer audaciously employed very spare supporting members, not only to economize on the amount of material used, but also to reduce the elements to essential visual minima. The flyers create the characteristically erect exterior profile of the building and provide a unifying element for its three tiers which correspond to the interior volumes. They are not only vital to the stability of the building but also to its appearance, betraying the designer's awareness of the aesthetic potential of structure which sets him apart from his contemporaries. Unlike Chartres, Bourges' vision was rarely reformulated in its entirety; its success as a whole was too heavily dependent on the building's size and particular configuration. Although its elevation was rearticulated in several buildings in France, Spain, and even Italy, and the building's structural system was extremely precocious, Bourges' design never became an architectural formula because it was ill-adapted to the thirteenth-century liturgy. Its lack of a transept and the consequent unification of space failed to reflect the separation of laity and clergy which became increasingly marked in the liturgy from the twelfth century on. Furthermore, the building did not provide the variety of liturgical spaces requisite to thirteenth-century worship. Although Bourges failed to make as visible and lasting an impression on subsequent buildings as Chartres, it represents a profoundly unique architectural statement which marks a particular, creative moment in the history of medieval architecture. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2005. / Vita. Thesis advisor: Sheila Bonde. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 201-209). Also available online.

Orientador: Luiz Cesar Marques Filho / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-04T16:32:59Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Rabelo_MarcosMonteiro_M.pdf: 1262563 bytes, checksum: d6310467e3a482305707f317a2a96433 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005 / Resumo: A igreja abacial de Saint-Denis, situada nos arredores de Paris, figura entre os grandes monumentos da Idade Média européia. As fontes medievais abundam em referências à sua proeminência, designando-a como a ¿mãe das igrejas francesas¿. Por muitos séculos, ela foi o núcleo da prestigiosa abadia real, estatuto que a isentava de qualquer dominação feudal ou eclesiástica, estando sujeita apenas ao rei. No que respeita à história da arte, pode-se dizer que o período mais significativo na trajetória da igreja abacial é o da reforma promovida pelo abade Suger, realizada entre 1137 e 1144. Suger promoveu uma reformulação completa na parte ocidental (nártex) e na cabeceira (o coro e a cripta), transformando completamente o antigo edifício, da época carolíngia (século VIII). O nártex foi ampliado e ganhou elementos novos, como a rosácea na fachada, três portais de entrada e as estátuas-coluna, hoje desaparecidas, que flanqueavam o portal central. No coro, a mudança foi ainda mais intensa: a pequena abside carolíngia foi substituída por uma estrutura de grandes dimensões, equipada com sete capelas radiantes. A grande novidade ficava por conta dos vitrais que recobriam as janelas desses oratórios, os quais permitiam à luz do dia espalhar-se por todo o coro, desobstruído das grossas paredes. As mudanças estruturais e a nova concepção do espaço tornavam o edifício bastante distinto, quando comparado às construções românicas da época; a Saint-Denis de Suger é vista pelos estudiosos da arte medieval como um protótipo, onde a arquitetura gótica encontrou sua primeira definição, irradiando-se, nos séculos seguintes, para toda a Europa. Esta dissertação de Mestrado apresenta a tradução de um dos textos capitais para a compreensão das realizações de Suger em Saint-Denis, o De Consecratione Ecclesiae Sancti Dionysii, acompanhado de notas explicativas e dois textos críticos: um sobre o lugar de Suger na historiografia da arte medieval e outro acerca das relações entre teologia e ¿estética¿ no templo edificado pelo abade / Abstract: The abbey church of Saint-Denis, situated at the vicinity of Paris, is one of the most proeminent of the European Middle Ages. Medieval sources have a great number of references to its importance, naming it as the ¿mother of the French churches¿. For many centuries, the abbey church was the core of the prestigious royal abbey, and its status has made it free of any feudal or ecclesiastical domination and only subject to the king himself. To art historians, the most significative moment in the history of the church is the great reform promoted by abbot Suger (1122-1151) during the years 1137-1144. Suger has achieved a complete reformulation in the western sector (the narthex) and the chevet (the choir and the crypt), transforming the old carolingian building (erected at the 8th century). The narthex was enlarged and added of three new portals and statue-columns (disappeared) that flanked the central portal. In the choir, the changes were still more significant: the little carolingian apse was removed and, at its place, a new and great structure was constructed, equipped with seven radiant chappels. But one of the most significant innovations present in Suger¿s new building were the stained glass windows, the great vitraux that let the daylight spread over the choir. One can say that the structural changes and the new conception of the ecclesiatical space gave the church of Suger a new form, quiet different from other romanic sanctuaries of its time. This new building erected under Suger¿s administration is considered by the scholars as the beginning of Gothic architecture, which should spread thereafter all over Europe. This Ms. Dissertation offers a translation (to portuguese) of Suger¿s little book De Consecratione Ecclesiae Sancti Dionysii, with explicative notes and two analytical texts: the former is about the place of Suger at the medieval art historiography and the latter is about the relations between the theology and the ¿aesthetics¿ in the old Saint-Denis abbot¿s temple / Mestrado / Historia da Arte / Mestre em História