Dig, Spin, Repeat, is a body of process based installation objects that uses minimalistic aesthetics placed strategically in the gallery to highlight the architecture of the room. By connecting these unique architectural elements, the work aims to achieve mindfulness similar to the research of Ellen Langer: encouraging active observation. Drawing from my background in sports and factory work, I create multiple repetitive forms out of hand-spun yarn and sourced clay. The room-sized installation objects produced from these raw materials explore the value of staying in the present moment for both the viewer and myself.

Using the American careers of Walter Gropius and Gyorgy Kepes as case studies, this dissertation addresses the intersection of art and architecture with the reciprocal politics of knowledge production and state formation in the mid-twentieth century United States. Inasmuch as the careers of Gropius and Kepes--wartime émigrés from Germany and Hungary, respectively--retrace the narrative of importation and assimilation linking interwar European modernism and its post-World War Two American legacies, this project also implicates that larger narrative and its constructions. Avant-garde practices in the Weimar Republic orbit advanced a model of design as a practice of knowledge, ideation or "expertise," which found fertile ground in the new political conditions of postwar America. The intersection of design practices with practices of knowledge production reconfigured design from material craftsmanship or artistic invention to a fluid set of competences and techniques oriented towards establishing new cultural, political, and economic agency for the designer. The constitution of this agency and its limits is the central historical and conceptual problem of this dissertation. From their strategic positions on architectural faculties at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and in their multiple roles as administrators, educators, writers, and designers, Gropius and Kepes both responded to and shaped several emergent discourses on knowledge that traversed the academy, the federal government, the design professions, and the wider political and intellectual life of the nation: the discourse of economic "stimulus" that posited the intersection of knowledge and legislative practices and their combined agency in the social body; the discourse of planning that charted the intervention of the "managed economy" regime across the nation's urban fabric; the discourse of the creative mind that posited knowledge as a key economic and political resource; and finally, the discourse of instrumentality that defined the political agency of knowledge-production within the postwar research university. Among the events leading Gropius and Kepes to confront those discourses, as chronicled in this dissertation, were the wartime administrative reorganization of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the establishment of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, and postwar curricular reform at MIT at large. In each of those instances, art and architecture emulated the disciplinary practices of knowledge production: research, education, methodology, collaboration. But more importantly, the disciplines of design adopted and elaborated in their own terms the ends of those organized knowledge practices in the promotion of unpredictability and innovation, necessitating in turn the curbing of controls and the circumscription of agency. The pursuit of this mode of practice, characterized by internal delimitation, situated design within an emergent political regime dedicated to the maintenance of socio-economic freedoms, articulated in the United States within a newly consolidated and organized federal government institution, and accompanied by new legislative and ideological articulations of national identity.

This dissertation explores the rich interplay between architecture and art historical research that emerged in Germany in the final decades of the nineteenth century through the rediscovery of the Baroque. The close connection during these years between the establishment of the Baroque as an independent architectural style within the young field of Kunstwissenschaft, the burgeoning interest in Baroque space and the mechanics of perception in psychological aesthetics, and the appearance of the Baroque in many of the most important architectural projects of the late nineteenth century made the style a flashpoint for far-reaching debates concerning the roles of art history and architecture in a period marked by profound transformations. Focusing on the reception of the Baroque in Berlin, this dissertation examines the important role of the style in attempts by architects to reexamine their discipline in the context of historicism, the unprecedented growth of the metropolis, and the complex and often conflicting array of regional and national conceptions of identity that accompanied the political development of the German Empire. Through a series of case studies documenting the remarkable interplay of art history and architectural practice in Berlin from the mid-1880's to the turn of the twentieth century, the dissertation traces the emergence of the "NeuBarock" ("New Baroque").

This dissertation examines the illustrations and text of Scribner's Monthly, arguably the most prominent monthly magazine during the 1870s. Initiating improvements in reproduction technology and art criticism, Scribner's played a major role in the development of the nation's art world in the Gilded Age, transforming the reception, perception and consumption of images by the American public.

Colored marble has been used throughout the Mediterranean as a building material, architectural veneer, sculptural material, even a support for painting since at least the second century BC. This thesis examines the poetics and symbolism of marbles, as a medium more than a material, over many centuries along three predominant lines: as images of substance according to a pre-modern concept of matter and pre-modern notions of geology; marble's apparent ability to bear light due to its polish and occasional translucency; and the longue durée that colored marbles constituted a form of natural (hence divine) painting. The use of marble in architecture and sculpture, as well as its depiction in painting and its description in literature, is examined from the Augustan era up untnil the close of the seventeenth century. Examples range from Durham to Samarra, from Ottoman folklore to popular piety in Florida, from Etruscan tomb painting to installation art, but key monuments like Hagia Sophia and the Cornaro Chapel offer case studies for in-depth analysis.

This project was inspired in a fundamental way by an interest in the function of Italian Renaissance portraiture. The essential question is concerned with the expanded functional range of portraiture within the context of early modern cross-cultural engagement between traditional foes. The dissertation casts a spotlight on the relationship between Italy and Ottoman Turkey, the most powerful and prominent of its contemporary Near Eastern counterparts. The first chapter explores the influence of the diplomatic culture particular to Venice on the artistic output -- including drawings, a painted portrait and a portrait medal -- resulting from the late fifteenth-century journey of the city's famous son Gentile Bellini to the Istanbul court of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II (Mehmed the Conqueror). The representations of the Turkish ruler are discussed as objectively motivated, fact-focused diplomatic "documents" in the spirit of the singularly Venetian tradition of the relazione produced by diplomats of the city upon the completion of diplomatic missions. The second chapter explores the renowned portrait collection of the early sixteenth-century Comasque scholar Paolo Giovio. As part of his assiduously cultivated collection of images of "famous" men and women, Giovio unconventionally possessed portraits of both deceased and contemporary Near Eastern figures. Among these were eleven images of Ottoman sultans. Although the influence of traditional motivations for collecting portraits is in evidence, the collection as a whole can also be fruitfully explored as a reflection of the scholar's lifelong interest in history and its chronicling. The unconventional inclusion of Near Eastern and other foreign figures suggests his preoccupation with global interconnection. His carefully crafted textual treatment of the figures -- he eventually composed brief eulogies to hang beneath each of the portraits -- suggests the precariousness of attempting to handle neutrally the Near Eastern "other." The images in conjunction with the text operate as an innovatively bold and frank commentary on contemporary history. A century separates Gentile's execution of Mehmed II's portrait and a series of portraits of the house of Osman produced by the workshop of another Venetian master, Paolo Veronese, through the indirect commission of the sultan Murad III (1574-1595) and his grand vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha. The inspiration for the third chapter, these fourteen portraits, produced, significantly, in the wake of the momentous Battle of Lepanto, are singular within the tradition of sultan portraiture for the degree to which the figures have been animated and humanized. Even allowing for the shift in stylistic trends from the end of the fifteenth to the end of the sixteenth century, I suggest that the psychological impact of the Battle of Lepanto and a specifically Venetian brand of civic self-consciousness played a heightened role in the formal solution adopted for the commission. "Veronese's" approach to the depiction of the Ottoman sultans shifted attention away from symbolic markers of difference, such as clothing, and focused attention instead on the corporeal reality and the psychological presence of the sultans, aspects highlighting the European potential of the figures and attesting to the reality of subtle rather than rigid boundaries in the definition of Europeans as categorically different from the Ottoman Turks -- a subtle act of assimilation in a crucial moment in the history between Europe and Ottoman Turkey that ultimately exhibits once again the functional flexibility of portraiture. Considered in relation to each other, the three case studies demonstrate the subtle functional flexibility of portraiture within a context bridging diverse cultures. These various acts of representation demonstrate the culture of early modern European cooperativity through their common effort to understand a foreign culture by means of visual accommodation.

This dissertation examines the catafalque erected for the reburial of Pope Paul V in S. Maria Maggiore on January 30, 1622. The catafalque, commissioned by the pope's nephew Scipione Borghese, was only the second catafalque ever built for a pope. It was a large tempietto type structure, fashioned of wood and plaster and covered with black cloth and candles. It was constructed by Sergio Venturi and Giovanni Battista Soria and adorned with thirty-six sculptures by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. These details are known to us through a funeral book, the Breve Racconto della trasportatione del corpo di Papa Paolo V della Basilica di S. Pietro a' quella di S. Maria Maggiore, Con Oratione recita nelle sue Esequie, and alcuni versi posti nell'Apparato , written by the poet Lelio Guidiccioni which contains extensive descriptions of the monument and obsequies as well as eighteen engraved plates of its architecture and sculpture. Further details are found in the eye witness accounts of Giacinto Gigli and Paolo Alaleone as well as payment records preserved in the Borghese Archives. These sources allow us to reconstruct the appearance and iconography of Paul's catafalque. Meaning is created through formal choices in the architectural design of the catafalque and the sixteen personified virtues which adorn it. While the iconography is not explicitly dealt with in the Breve Racconto, the visual clues are reinforced by poetry and scriptural quotations which appear both on the actual monument and in the funeral book. The iconography of the catafalque stresses the Borghese family's Romanitas and underscores the importance of Paul's patronage in both purifying the Roman Church and ushering in a new Golden Age. This dissertation begins by investigating the context of Paul's reburial. Chapter one looks the protocol surrounding the death and burial of seicento popes. It examines how Paul's obsequies fit into this tradition and where his catafalque sits in the trajectory of the development and use of catafalques for ecclesiastical funerals. Chapter two looks at the Breve Racconto and evaluates the accuracy of both the text and its author. Particular attention is paid to Guidiccioni's intellectual pursuits and his relationship with both Scipione Borghese and Bernini. Chapter two is devoted to Scipione Borghese and his patronage of art and architecture. Chapter three rehearses the history of the Borghese family, Paul's accomplishments as pope and his patronage. It also considers his presentation in contemporary panegyric. Chapter four outlines the appearance of the catafalque. Its form echoes both Imperial mausolea and early Christian martyria. Through this formal mimicry the very architecture becomes a metonym for the Pauline resurgence of Rome; it indicates Paul's physical and spiritual restoration of the early Church and also the new Golden Age ushered in by Borghese munificence and patronage. Chapter five tackles the question of the catafalque's authorship. It examines the involvement of Venturi, Soria and Bernini, attempting to reconcile the style of the building with each of their known works. Chapter six is devoted to the iconography of the sculptured virtues. It starts by considering the history of defining a ruler through his virtues and the appearance of these virtues in art. It then investigates the choice and portrayal of the sixteen virtues in this catafalque. The virtues chosen are ostensibly organized around the exegetical conceit of the Four Daughters of God, clearly suggesting Paul's triumph as pope and Christian prince. But many are also closely associated with Augustus and the Imperial cult and there is a clear undercurrent stressing Paul's Romanitas and comparing his reign to that of his imagined Imperial forbearers. This theme is familiar from Borghese panegyric, and presumably intended to further the reputation not only of the pope but also of his surviving family members.

England's canal network, critical to the nation's predominance in the development of modern industry, goes largely unnoticed today except by some scholars of transportation. As I suggest in my introduction, one of the reasons may be that since the Second World War the canals have been cleaned up and turned into an attraction for boaters and tourists. With their brightly painted cabins occupied by families on vacation, the boats, now motorized, glide slowly and silently past the bucolic banks of the canals. These are, in appearance, as originally proposed by the development companies and drawn and engraved for the newspapers: beautiful country spaces to be admired and enjoyed by the public. Another reason may be the exertion of a willful nostalgia: because the comparatively slow-moving canals can appear pre-industrial we choose to think of them that way. These choices have made the English canal system part of a pre-modern England, imagined just as the canals were being built. That England would always stand as "a living emblem" of itself remained for the most part uncontested (putting Cromwell to one side) until the construction of the canals. No narrative was required to explain the meaning of the countryside of estates and villages: they were "taken as a given" and had "no apparent origins". The canals visibly introduced time into what was perceived as an unchanging landscape. Time entered not only in the speed of transport on the canals but also in the factories that ran by the clock and the canals that ran by timetable. The geological layers unearthed in the digging of the canals revealed the passage of eons of time and the instability of the earth itself. Time entered in the movement of people and goods in bustling new towns that were in the interior of the country, made prosperous in part by the access the canals gave them to the seas. There was enthusiasm for the progress of English industry and science, a sense of national pride, and great expectations for the wealth of the country. There was a sense that if the old landscape and the new could not be reconciled, the identity of the nation would be lost. The general ambivalence about the changes the canals would bring began at the top with the landed nobility who first financed and built them. Their desire to extract wealth from their own lands overcame their fear of a dynamic population. Gainsborough, in his Cottage Door paintings, appealed to his audience's sense of nostalgia for the passing of the timeless English landscape at the very moment that the canals were being built and many of them were investing in them. Ambivalence is also present in Constable's attempts to cope with landscapes expressive of both time and space. The desire to return to an almost mythic prior time is palpable and his attempt to leap into the future with The Leaping Horse avoids the issue in the other direction. The heyday of canals, from 1765 to 1835, is the interstice between the early days of modernity in England and modern England in its full-blown glory. It is also a curious period in which the development of one technology, the canal, as it was elaborated in the landscape, propelled two generations of artists to work on the same problem: the visual representation of time and space. If one sets a later date for modernity (which I believe would be incorrect), one has the additional liability of facing a closed system of a time-based society and visual culture. By setting the onset of modernity in the 1760's, the anxiety and the failure of artists to develop the presence of both time and space in their work. At the very cusp of the period, in a work such as Turner's Dudley, Worcestershire, time does not empty space of meaning, any more than the supremacy of space in pre-modern England truly nullified time.

This dissertation investigates one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the 20th century - the jewelry belonging to a female named Pu-abi buried in the so-called Royal Cemetery at the site of Ur in southern Mesopotamia, modern Iraq. The mid-third millennium B.C. assemblage represents one of the earliest and richest extant collections of gold and precious stones from antiquity and figures as one of the most renowned and often illustrated aspects of Sumerian culture. With a few notable exceptions most scholars have interpreted these jewels primarily as a reflection in burial of a significant level of power and prestige among the ruling kings and queens of Ur at the time. While the jewelry certainly could, and undoubtedly did, reflect the identity and status of the deceased, I believe that it might have acted as much more than a mere marker and that the identity and status thus signaled might have had a considerably more nuanced meaning, or even a different one, than that of royalty or royalty alone. Based on a thorough examination of the materials and methods used to manufacture these ornaments, I will argue that the jewelry was not simply a rich but passive collection of prestige goods, rather that jewelry that can be read in terms of active ritual, and perhaps cultic, production and display. The particular materials and techniques chosen for the making of Pu-abi's jewelry entailed methodological operations akin to what Alfred Gell has called the "technology of enchantment and enchantment of technology" and allowed these ornaments to materialize from their creation as a group of magically and ritually charged objects.

The German architect August Endell (1871-1925) is best known for his idiosyncratic buildings and interiors. As the first monographic study on his work in English, this dissertation uncovers the little-known design philosophy behind his works, and elucidates the intellectual origins and career of his important theory of experiential form. Endell was a polymath versed in scientific philosophy, empirical psychology, musicology and architecture. A man of extraordinary intellectual range, he saw his architectural practice as a laboratory for conducting experiments in psychology. In particular, his buildings explored architectural forms patterned on the workings of the human brain, as understood in late nineteenth century Germany. Previous studies of Endell generally have tried to situate him within one of the major German schools of thought in psychology, alternatively as a proponent of abstraction or empathy. Through detailed analyses of his built works and written texts, this dissertation argues that Endell was in fact attempting a reconciliation between abstraction and empathy, through what I have interpreted as experiential forms, namely forms drawn from collective memories, feelings, and ethical relations. Endell was an activist for architectural design driven by a "science" of consciousness, and he was convinced that built experiential forms could serve an important unifying social function, counteracting processes of social disaggregation he believed was taking place in pre-World War I Germany. Endell was discredited and ignored for much of the twentieth century, perhaps because his claims about the influence of architecture in the functioning of the human brain and sensorium, in the absence of scientific proof, seemed condemned to remain hypothetical. To re-examine his work today, when neuroscience is giving us an entirely new picture of the brain, is to recover an important chapter in the pre-history of attempts to adequate our built environment to our human condition.