Alle Publikationen
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2016
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(2016): Noise and Sound Reconciled. How London Clubs Shaped Conversation into a Social Art. In: Études Épistémè (29). DOI: 10.4000/episteme.1208
Abstract: This essay aims to show how London clubs played a decisive role in the shaping of conversation into a social art. It first examines the evolution of conversation in England both as a cultural concept and as a social practice in the context of the emergence and success of club sociability over the course of the eighteenth century. Conversation was at the heart of urban sociability practices and especially flourished in the London coffee-houses of the end of the seventeenth century. At the same time, conversation was theorized, conceptualized, modeled and discussed in a prolific and varied normative literature. Was the conversation that animated the first coffee-houses of the same nature as the conversation which prevailed in the exclusive circles of the second half of the eighteenth century? This study then points at obvious dissonances between the theory and the practice of conversation within the world of London clubs. While club conversation was a rite of worldly sociability, whose refined principles clubmen were supposed to master, it often sounded far from the smooth and polite prescriptive model it was expected to conform to. To what extent was Samuel Johnson, the founder of The Club and one of the greatest conversationalists of his time, a significant agent in the transformation of conversation into a social art in itself? Finally, this analysis claims that gentlemen's clubs contributed to shape a new model of conversation in England, in which noise and sound could co-exist and the paradoxes inherent in club conversation could be reconciled.
2015
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(2015): Site Decorum. In: Architectural Theory Review 20 (2), S. 228-246
Abstract: Site decorum refers to the fitting relationship of the site to the building. In classical architectural theory, the character of place affected style and materials: for example, buildings in the country were decorated with less refined finishes than those in the city. Italian Renaissance architects also considered scenography as part of site decorum, so that the position of the observer was taken into account when calculating the appropriate volumes and detail. This resulted from the mastery of linear perspective, a technique that permitted the manipulation of elements to coordinate with the sight-lines of the viewer. Less well known in the context of architecture is the significance of atmospheric perspective, where things become indistinct as they move away from the eye, which could be countered by emphasising the main horizontal, vertical, and massed elements of a building. In the nineteenth century, Charles Robert (C. R.) Cockerell described the methods of designing for different vantage points, noting that the best architects reconciled the two modes of far and close view, and demonstrating how drawing conventions are instruments that might be harnessed to appropriate siting. The salient theme of site decorum is one of perception, namely that a building’s coherent order is relative to the beholder.
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