Art History & Visual Material Culture webinar - TIMOTHY BRITTAIN-CATLIN (University of Cambridge): "Old-New and New-Old: English Edwardian houses and the abolition of history"
| When: | We 17-03-2021 17:15 - 18:30 |
| Where: | Online |
Dr. Timothy Brittain-Catlin, University of Cambridge
‘Old-New and New-Old: English Edwardian houses and the abolition of history’
Abstract
The idea that the old building fabric of a building has value because it is old is, mainly, a twentieth-century innovation. At the start of the century, some of the finest houses built in England were created by architects who valued design quality over age. They designed buildings which freely mixed old and new fabric, and paid special attention to the junctions between the two. There is very little writing about this phenomenon, but it was spotted and promoted by writers in the magazine Country Life – possibly the first professional architecture critics in the modern sense.
About the speaker
Timothy Brittain-Catlin is the author of The Edwardians and their Houses: the New Life of Old England and directs the graduate architecture apprenticeship course at the University of Cambridge. In 2014 he published Bleak Houses: Disappointment and Failure in Architecture.