1st Edition
Writing the Materialities of the Past Cities and the Architectural Topography of Historical Imagination
Introduction: The architectural topography of historical imagination
I. Definitions
II. Crossing the Rubicon
III. Architectural topographic descriptions
IV. Figurational contingencies
Part I: Contingency in the historiographies of the English reformation, French revolution and era of the industrial revolution in England
Chapter 1: Contingency and artifice
I. Definitions
II. Events of the English Reformation
III. Events of the French Revolution
IV. Events from the period of the Industrial Revolution in England
Chapter 2: Encounter and utterance
I. Definitions
II. Events of the English Reformation
III. Events of the French Revolution
IV. Events from the period of the Industrial Revolution in England
Chapter 3: Milieu and movement
I. Definitions
II. The city as ‘environment’
III. The repression of the encounter field in the historiographies of the English Reformation, French Revolution and period of the Industrial Revolution in England
IV. The abbreviation, abridgement and metaphorical sublimation of the encounter field
Chapter 4: Figure and event
I. Definitions
II. Spatial stories
III. Maps and mapping
IV. The figures of events
Part II: Writing history as a city
Chapter 5: Proximity and distance
Identifying narrative figures in the architectural topographic sequences of archetypal stories
I. Definitions
II. Social stories
III. Architectural topographic sequences and toponemes
IV. Narrative figures as architectural topographic sequences
Chapter 6: The revolutionary encounter field: Paris c.1789–94 and other stories
how Thomas Carlyle, Simon Schama and Hilary Mantel ‘re-people’ the past
I. Definitions
II. Imagining the urban encounter field
III. Contrasting strategies of architectural topographic description in three narratives of the French Revolution
IV. Embodying the past in Carlyle, Schama and Mantel
Chapter 7: Recollection and re-enactment
Embodying nineteenth-century Sheffield in leader’s Reminiscences (1875)
I. Definitions
II. A history of ‘small details’
III. Embodying Sheffield in the text
IV. Narrative figures of ‘memory lane’
Chapter 8: Morphologies of feeling
Contingency and the experience of social change
I. Definitions
II. ‘The passing of Merrie England’
III. Toponemic disturbances
IV. ‘Feeling the change’: reflections on contingency
Appendix A: A notation for the architectural topographic sequencing of texts
Appendix B: Synopsis of Cinderella
Appendix C: additional architectural topographic sequences from Cinderella
Appendix D: Search terms and categories used in toponemic analysis
References
Index
Biography
Sam Griffiths is Associate Professor in Spatial Cultures in the Space Syntax Laboratory at the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture. His research interests focus on theories and methods for studying the historical relationship between people and built environments, the spatial culture of industrial cities and space syntax as an interdisciplinary research perspective in the humanities and social sciences. He has published a number of articles and book chapters on these topics. He is co-editor, with Alexander von Lünen of Spatial Cultures: Towards a New Social Morphology of Cities published by Routledge in 2016.
