Brussels 1900 Vienna examines the complex cultural networks between Austria and Belgium (1880-1930), and situates these interrelations within a wider European context. The collection covers various ...fields, including literature, translation, music, theatre, visual arts, café culture, and architecture.
The feel of the city Kenny, Nicolas
The feel of the city,
2014., 20140606, 2014, 2014-06-06, 2014-06-09
eBook
"The Feel of the City exposes the sensory experiences of city-dwellers in Montreal and Brussels at the turn of the century and the ways in which these shaped the social and cultural significance of ...urban space. Using the experiences of municipal officials, urban planners, hygienists, workers, writers, artists, and ordinary citizens, Nicolas Kenny explores the implications of the senses for our understanding of modernity."--Publisher's website.
What makes a city? What makes architecture? And, what is to be included in the discussions of architecture and the city? Attempting to answer such ambitious questions, this book starts from a city's ...specificity and complexity. In response to recent debates in architectural theory around the agency and locus of critical action, this book tests the potential of criticality through-practice. Rather than through conceptual and ideological categorisations, it studies how architecture and criticality work within specific circumstances. Brussels, a complex city with a turbulent architectural and urban past, forms a compelling case for examining the tensions between urban politics, architectural imaginations, society's needs and desires, and the city's history and fabric. Inspired by pragmatist-relational philosophies, this book tests the potential of criticality through-practice. It studies a series of critical actions and tools, which occurred in Brussels' architectural and urban culture after 1968. Weaved together, Brussels architectural production emerges from a variety of actors, including architects, urban policy makers, activists, social workers, and citizens, but also architectural movements and ideologies, urban renewal programs, urban traumas, plans and projects, and mundane everyday practices and constructions. This book contributes to the study of Brussels and offers a timely contribution to recent scholarship on the critical reappraisal of architectural debates from the 1960s through to the 1990s. In addition, by showing how pragmatist-relational philosophies can be made relevant for architectural theory, the book opens hopeful potentials for how architectural theory can better contribute to the formulation of a critical agenda for architecture.
Mary Thorp, an English governess working for a Belgian-Russian family in German-occupied Brussels, kept a secret war diary from September 1916 to January 1919. This long-forgotten diary sheds light ...on an important aspect of the First World War: civilian life under military occupation in a transnational conflict.
This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Brussels covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 900 ...cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Brussels.
The splendor and enticement of the Archdukes' Court in Brussels The Habsburg Court of Brussels remains one of the few early modern princely courts that have never been thoroughly studied by ...historians. Yet it offers a unique case, particularly with regard to the first decades of the seventeenth century. Once home to the Dukes of Burgundy, the ancient palace on the Coudenberg hill in Brussels became the principal residence of the Habsburg governors in the Low Countries and, in the period 1598-1621, that of Archduke Albert and his wife, the Spanish Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia. Eager to reassert the dynasty's authority in these parts, the Archdukes ruled the Habsburg Netherlands as sovereign princes in their own right. Based on the author's prize-winning dissertation, this book vividly brings to life the splendor of their court and unravels the goals and ambitions of the men and women who lived and worked in the palace.
Reforming Urban Laboris a history of the nineteenth-century social reforms designed by middle-class progressives to domesticate the labor force. Industrial production required a concentrated labor ...force, but the swelling masses of workers in the capitals of Britain and Belgium, the industrial powerhouses of Europe, threatened urban order. At night, after factories had closed, workers and their families sheltered in the shadowy alleyways of Brussels and London. Reformers worked to alleviate the danger, dispersing the laborers and their families throughout the suburbs and the countryside. National governments subsidized rural housing construction and regulated workmen's trains to transport laborers nightly away from their urban work sites and to bring them back again in the mornings; municipalities built housing in the suburbs. On both sides of the Channel, respectable working families were removed from the rookeries and isolated from the marginally employed, planted out beyond the cities where they could live like, but not with, the middle classes.
In Janet L. Polasky's urban history, comparisons of the two capitals are interwoven in the context of industrial Europe as a whole.Reforming Urban Laborsets urban planning against the backdrop of idealized rural images, links transportation and housing reform, investigates the relationship of middle-class reformers with industrial workers and their families, and explores the cooperation as well as the competition between government and the private sector in the struggle to control the built environment and its labor force.