This thesis examines how the lifestyles of the middling sorts evolved during the period 1660 and 1760 as reflected in their relationship to material goods in three contrasting, but geographically near towns. The towns are similar to the degree that their history and circumstances led to them being viewed as backwaters, and this may have influenced consumption practices. Ludlow had lost its importance as the Capital of Wales; it stagnated until its fortunes began to be revived by achieving leisure town status. Hereford was a cathedral city and a county town, but was mainly poorly built and congested. It was locally, rather than nationally important. Tewkesbury was an inland port and a manufacturing centre, but it had been eclipsed by the larger and more successful cities of Bristol and Gloucester. This study of household goods in the middling interiors of Ludlow, Hereford and Tewkesbury between 1660 and 1760 set out first to investigate the extent to which the possessions of the middling ranks reflected their social status. The second aspect is to analyse the geographical spread of new goods in the three towns to determine the extent to which economic circumstances and location influenced consumption. Thirdly, the intention is to determine how status and politeness was expressed in the early modern home. Finally, this study aimed to ascertain what these factors could tell us about early modern consumers in the three towns. A sample of the domestic goods of the middling ranks from Ludlow, Hereford and Tewkesbury is examined and compared. The material culture of the three towns has previously attracted little academic interest. It is my intention that this thesis on the three towns complements and contributes to the existing bodies of work on early modern regional culture studies.

This thesis analyses artefacts belonging to the playwright, socialist and critic Bernard Shaw, which form part of the collections at Shaw’s Corner, Hertfordshire, now managed as a National Trust property. My original contribution to knowledge is made by revealing Shaw through the artefacts in new or under-explored roles as socialist-aesthete, art patron, connoisseur, photographer, celebrity, dandy, and self-commemorator. The thesis therefore challenges the stereotypical views expressed in the literature which have tended to focus on Shaw at Shaw’s Corner as a Fabian with ascetic characteristics. The thesis aims are achieved by contextualizing the Shaw’s Corner Collections, both extant and absent. Historically the artefacts in the house have been viewed from the perspective of his socialist politics, ignoring his connoisseurial interests and self-fashioning. Hence there was a failure to see the ways in which these elements of his consuming personality overlapped or were in conflict. By examining artefacts from the perspectives of art and design history, focussing on furniture, private press books, clothing, painting and sculpture, Shaw is shown to be a highly complex and at times contradictory figure. The discontinuities and ambiguities become clearer once we examine the possessions from the house which were removed and sold by the National Trust after Shaw’s death. Whilst some Shavian scholars and art historians have acknowledged Shaw’s role as an art critic and the impact it had on his dramaturgy, there has been little recognition of the ways in which this influenced his domestic interiors, consumption, and personal taste, or indeed his interest in the decorative arts and design. Artefacts and furniture in the house today reflect Shaw’s role as a socialist-aesthete, and his involvement with Arts and Crafts movement practitioners and Aestheticism. As an art patron Shaw also shared the aims of artists, connoisseurs and curators working in the first decades of the twentieth century, and we see evidence of this through certain artefacts at Shaw’s Corner. With a strong aesthetic sense, he devoted time to matters of beauty and art, but was equally governed by economics and a desire to bring ‘good’ art and design to everyone. Shaw was considered to be one of the greatest cultural commentators and thinkers of his generation, but he was at the same time a renowned celebrity and influential figure in the mass media. The literature has tended to dismiss the latter role in order to preserve his place among the former, but I argue here that Shaw did not necessarily view the two as separate endeavours. In fact items from the house, notably Shaw’s clothing and sculpture, are considered as the bearers of complex philosophical, symbolic or iconographic meanings relating to his self-fashioning, aesthetic doctrines, and desire for commemoration, which demonstrate the links between the celebrity and the critic. By considering the artefacts in conjunction with the Trust’s archive of Shaw photographs, as well as his representation in popular culture, and by then relating this material dimension to his writings, the thesis brings a new methodological approach to the study of Shaw. More importantly this thesis reveals new knowledge about the philosophical ideas, humanity, generosity, and personal vanity of the man that lay behind those artefacts.

Research into the material culture of the household and the domestic interior has increased rapidly during recent years. It has primarily focused on the appearance and use of domestic space leaving household management and maintenance a neglected area of study. Furthermore the relationship between the ownership of goods, the domestic interior and the use of the home has not been studied in conjunction with the management and maintenance of the household. Additionally, research into the material culture of the household has predominantly focused on quantitative changes experienced during the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth. It has long been established that the ownership of household goods increased in this period, but similar research has not taken place to explore the nature of these goods, nor to extend this work to the subsequent period. This thesis brings these aspects of research together for the first time to create a synthesis between the ownership of goods and the changing nature and use of the home and household maintenance and management. The argument proposed here suggests that the changing nature of the material culture of the household and developments to the use of the home had an impact upon the way that the household was managed and maintained. The complex inter-woven relationship between the material culture of the domestic interior and the ways in which it was maintained and managed reveals that both elements were a part of an emerging middle class culture of domesticity. Therefore, this thesis makes a significant contribution to a holistic understanding of the household by looking at the ownership of goods and the use of domestic space within the context of maintenance and management.

In the late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century English domestic interior, games mediated and influenced the experience of age and masculinity. Games embodied, reflected, and shaped culture. Games united education, entertainment, and players’ imaginations inside the formative social environment of the home. The domestic interior was the catalyst that facilitated the agency of games. I explore the representation of age and masculinity in miniature images of boys, youth, and men in games and the agency of games as they interacted with players. I use three intersecting lenses: how people experience miniature objects; social interactions in domestic spaces; and the ability of an ordinary belonging to influence perceptions, ideas, and behaviour. In two case studies, I argue that games were serious cognitive technologies with agency that mediated and shaped players’ understanding of age and masculinity. In case one, I investigate the visuality, materiality, and experience of playing the didactic board game The New Game of Human Life (1790). The game consists of a battle between vice and virtue that males meet throughout the life stages. In case two, I analyze a series of five sets of paper dolls and their books published by Samuel and Joseph Fuller between 1810 and 1816. The male paper doll-book is an intermedial product that encourages players to imagine and act out adventures. In both cases, I argue games were active cognitive technologies that communicated with players. Games were visual and material culture that fashioned masculine identity. Games played in the domestic interior were communicative media designed to shape players’ ideas about masculine identity and their behaviour. / Graduate / 2022-08-10

This reviewed book offers a fascinating series of inquiries into the objects, architecture, and spaces in home interiors in early modern Italy, particularly in Florence, Venice, and Bologna.

<p>The objective of this licentiate thesis is to investigatearchitectural experience and creation in virtual space and itsrepresentational problems. The thesis comprises three articlespublished during the years 2001-2003, and a website,www.arch.kth.se/~zimm.</p><p>The articles investigate architecture as a transgressivestate between the virtual worlds of imagination and thedomestic interior, introducing obsessive dreambuilding as amethod of negotiating material fictions in real space. The mainrepresentative of this kind of architectural activity is thefictional character Baron des Esseintes in Joris-KarlHuysmans´ novel À Rebours (1884). Together with thearchitectural transformations created by the architect Sir JohnSoane and the artists Kurt Schwitters and Gregor Schneider, theprojects share and develop the theme of extreme individualityand explore the architectural imagination at work in the mindof the obsessive dreambuilder. These architects of parallelrealities create operative fields of artificiality andimagination, where architectural space splits into differentontological states, providing fields for observation ofperceptional and representational problems.</p><p><b>Keywords:</b>Architecture, Against Nature/À Rebours,Artifice, Artificiality, Domestic interior, Dream, Experience,Fiction, Hypertext, Huysmans, Imagination, Individuality,Interactivity, Interface, Obsession, Obsessive dreambuilding,Perception, Representation, Schwitters, Schneider, Soane,Symbolism, Virtual Reality</p>

The objective of this licentiate thesis is to investigatearchitectural experience and creation in virtual space and itsrepresentational problems. The thesis comprises three articlespublished during the years 2001-2003, and a website,www.arch.kth.se/~zimm. The articles investigate architecture as a transgressivestate between the virtual worlds of imagination and thedomestic interior, introducing obsessive dreambuilding as amethod of negotiating material fictions in real space. The mainrepresentative of this kind of architectural activity is thefictional character Baron des Esseintes in Joris-KarlHuysmans´ novel À Rebours (1884). Together with thearchitectural transformations created by the architect Sir JohnSoane and the artists Kurt Schwitters and Gregor Schneider, theprojects share and develop the theme of extreme individualityand explore the architectural imagination at work in the mindof the obsessive dreambuilder. These architects of parallelrealities create operative fields of artificiality andimagination, where architectural space splits into differentontological states, providing fields for observation ofperceptional and representational problems. <b>Keywords:</b>Architecture, Against Nature/À Rebours,Artifice, Artificiality, Domestic interior, Dream, Experience,Fiction, Hypertext, Huysmans, Imagination, Individuality,Interactivity, Interface, Obsession, Obsessive dreambuilding,Perception, Representation, Schwitters, Schneider, Soane,Symbolism, Virtual Reality / NR 20140805

This paper is exploring dementia village architecture as a new architectural model, addressing the dementia care challenge, and linking it to the continuous process of deinstitutionalization, as a broader political, social, and cultural project. The paper will investigate the specific challenges and opportunities of the village model, through a case study of two exemplar cases of this model, asking, what are the properties of ‘villageness’, and to what degree are they each responding to an idea of ‘villageness’? This is explored through different scales of the village, going from ‘part’, to ‘relation between parts’ and ‘whole’, investigated through themes, related to the dementia care challenge; domestic interior, promenade, and community.

Abstract In my study of architecture, I have surveyed the interior of the apartment from the perspective of colouration, in Finland from 1948 to 1955. My study comprised traditionally considered high-cultured architecture — legitimate architecture — and architecture representing the everyday, which does not have the status of legitimate architecture. My research into this subject adopted a material based approach, with qualitative research methods and applied with a theory-guided content analysis. The periodicals Arkkitehti and Kaunis Koti formed the central content of my study, representing legitimate and popular architecture from the post-war reconstruction period. On the basis of this material, I compiled a depiction of the colouration of the home during the postwar reconstruction period. In addition, I studied the use of colours in legitimate and popular architecture during that period. There has been no previous systematic depiction of the interiors of the home in Finland. The presupposition of my study was that during the post-war reconstruction period, the colour preferences of architects and the general public neared. During the post-war reconstruction period, the attention of most architects was directed towards the living conditions and needs of the general public. The primary focus of architects was in housing. This was due to the large number of homeless people requiring housing after the war. From the basis of functionalism, the discourse on the social content of architecture created the foundation for building planning during the post-war reconstruction period. In the material examined in this study, colour was identified with happiness. Nature connected the Finnish people. Even in the urban setting, the experience of nature was considered important. The multihued greenery of the window shelf present in almost every living room was one display of "the living spirit" of nature brought into the urban apartment. During the post-war reconstruction period, colouration of interiors was not homogenous. The composition of the colouration, and the ways in which colour were used, changed according to the room type. The over-arching concept in the colouration of the rooms was that of a purposeful aesthetic. The changes were connected with the development phase of the room type, its contents, as well as the importance of the space in comparison to the entirety of spaces in the apartment. In addition to the colouration change between room types, some of the apartment furnishings and their colouration changed noticeably during the post-war reconstruction period. The importance of good taste was also emphasised in different ways in different room types. In the colouration of older, established room types issues of good taste were often raised, and the interior was constructed on the basis of critique of previous interior design colourations. In connection with newer room types, such as the kitchen and the children's room, a purposeful aesthetic was at the forefront and good taste was hardly talked about, since colouration was not given as a value in relation to what had come before. Dissymmetry of colouration was common for all home interiors. The dissymmetry was derived from the modernity principle of embracing the new and forbidding the traditional. Personal observations in the use of associative and dissociative names for colours, displays Bourdieu's conception of good taste, represented in the formation of legitimate taste and popular taste. However, the criticism of Shusterman displays well, that this is a definition derived from high-culture, which is already value-ridden. The romantic period during the post-war reconstruction period, the content of which is understandable also from a popular viewpoint, showed clearly in the works of the architects. For many architects, the period remained short. From the perspective of Bourdieu, it can be thought that legitimate taste had for a moment neared popular taste. The "blue flower of romantic thought" did not blossom for long and the taste representing legitimate, rational thought regained its position. According to my supposition, the taste of popular and high-culture had nonetheless, momentarily neared. / Tiivistelmä Arkkitehtuurin alaan kuuluvassa tutkimuksessani, tarkastelen asunnon sisustusta värityksen näkökulmasta Suomessa vuosina 1948—1955. Tarkastelussani rinnakkain ovat perinteisesti korkeakulttuurina pidetty rakennustaide, legitiimi arkkitehtuuri, ja arjen käytäntöjä edustava arkkitehtuuri, jolla ei ole legitiimin arkkitehtuurin statusta. Tarkastelen tutkimusaihettani aineistolähtöisesti laadullisen tutkimuksen keinoin teoriasidonnaisen sisällönanalyysin avulla. Arkkitehti-lehti ja Kaunis koti -lehti muodostavat tutkimukseni keskeisen aineiston jälleenrakennuskauden legitiimin ja populaarin arkkitehtuurin ilmentäjinä. Tutkimuksessani kokoan aineistoon perustuvan kuvauksen jälleenrakennuskauden kodin värityksestä sekä tutkin tuon ajan legitiimin ja populaarin arkkitehtuurin värinkäyttöä. Kodin tilojen värityksestä ei ole aiemmin laadittu systemaattista kuvausta Suomessa. Tutkimukseni esioletuksena oli, että jälleenrakennuskaudella arkkitehtien ja suuren yleisön kodin värinkäyttöön liittyvät mieltymykset olivat lähellä toisiaan. Jälleenrakennuskaudella arkkitehtikunnan huomio oli kohdentunut suuren yleisön elinoloihin ja tarpeisiin. Arkkitehtikunnan suunnittelutehtävän painopiste oli asuntotuotannossa, sillä suuri määrä sodan jälkeen kodittomiksi jääneitä oli asutettava. Funktionalismin pohjalta käyty keskustelu arkkitehtuurin sosiaalisesta sisällöstä loi pohjaa jälleenrakennuskauden asuntosuunnittelulle. Aineistossani väri vertautui iloisuuteen. Luonto yhdisti suomalaisia. Kaupunkiympäristössäkin luontokokemusta pidettiin tärkeänä. Kodin sisustuksessa lähes poikkeuksetta esiintynyt olohuoneen kukkaikkuna oli yksi osoitus kaupunkiasuntoon tuodusta luonnon "elävästä hengestä". Jälleenrakennuskauden kodin sisustuksen väritys oli epäyhtenäinen. Värityksen sisällöt ja tavat käyttää väriä vaihtelivat huonetyypeittäin. Yhdistävänä yläkäsitteenä huonetilojen värityksessä oli tarkoituksenmukaisuuden estetiikka. Vaihtelut liittyivät huonetyypin kehitysvaiheeseen ja sisältöihin sekä tilalle annettuun painoarvoon asunnon huonetilojen kokonaisuudessa. Huonetyypin värityksen keskinäisen vaihtelun lisäksi osa kodin tilojen sisustuksista ja niiden värityksistä muuttui selvästi jälleenrakennuskauden kuluessa. Myös hyvän maun merkitystä korostettiin eri tavoin eri huonetyypeissä. Vanhempien, jo vakiintuneiden huonetyyppien sisustuksen värityksessä hyvä maku otettiin usein esiin ja hyvän maun mukainen sisutus rakentui aiempien sisustustyylien värityksen kritiikin kautta. Uudempien huonetyyppien, kuten keittiön ja lastenhuoneen, yhteydessä tarkoituksenmukaisuuden estetiikka oli etusijalla eikä hyvästä mausta puhuttu juuri lainkaan, sillä väritystä ei arvotettu suhteessa aiempaan. Värityksen epäsymmetrisyys oli yhteistä kaikille tarkastelemilleni kodin tilojen värityksille. Epäsymmetria ilmensi moderniteettiin sisältyvää ajatusta uudesta ja tradition kieltämisestä. Havaintoni assosiatiivisten ja ei-assosiatiivisten värinnimitysten käytöstä havainnollistaa Bourdieun ajatusta hyvää makua edustavan legitiimin maun ja populaarin maun muodostumisesta. Shustermanin kritiikki tuo kuitenkin hyvin esiin korkeakulttuurin piiristä lähtevän määritelmän, joka jo lähtökohtaisesti on arvovarautunut. Jälleenrakennuskauden romanttinen ajanjakso, jonka sisällöt olivat ymmärrettäviä myös populaarin näkökulmasta, näkyi selvästi arkkitehtien tuotannossa. Jakso jäi monen arkkitehdin kohdalla lyhytaikaiseksi. Bourdieu'n näkökulmasta voi ajatella, että legitiimi maku oli hetkellisesti lähentynyt populaaria makua. Jälkikäteen katsottuna arkkitehdit ovat tulkinneet maun rämettyneen väliaikaisesti. "Romantiikan sininen kukka" ei kovin pitkään ehtinyt kukkia, ja legitiimiä rationaalia linjaa edustanut maku valtasi asemansa takaisin. Esioletukseni mukaisesti populaarin ja korkeakulttuurin maku olivat silti hetkellisesti lähentyneet toisiaan.