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Writing the Materialities of the Past
Cities and the Architectural Topography of Historical Imagination
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Book Description
Writing the Materialities of the Past offers a close analysis of how the materiality of the built environment has been repressed in historical thinking since the 1950s. Author Sam Griffiths argues that the social theory of cities in this period was characterised by the dominance of socio-economic and linguistic-cultural models, which served to impede our understanding of time-space relationality towards historical events and their narration.
The book engages with studies of historical writing to discuss materiality in the built environment as a form of literary practice to express marginalised dimensions of social experience in a range of historical contexts. It then moves on to reflect on England’s nineteenth-century industrialization from an architectural topographical perspective, challenging theories of space and architecture to examine the complex role of industrial cities in mediating social changes in the practice of everyday life.
By demonstrating how the authenticity of historical accounts rests on materially emplaced narratives, Griffiths makes the case for the emancipatory possibilities of historical writing. He calls for a re-evaluation of historical epistemology as a primarily socio-scientific or literary enquiry and instead proposes a specifically architectural time-space figuration of historical events to rethink and refresh the relationship of the urban past to its present and future. Written for postgraduate students, researchers and academics in architectural theory and urban studies, Griffiths draws on the space syntax tradition of research to explore how contingencies of movement and encounter construct the historical imagination.
Table of Contents
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
Author(s)
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.