A critique of the greatest reallocation of resources in the history of the world and an analysis of its effects on indigenous peoples, the growth of property rights, and the evolution of ideas that make up the foundation of the modern world.

The Grove Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts covers thousands of years of decorative arts production throughout western and non-western culture. With over 1,000 entries, as well as hundreds drawn from the 34-volume Dictionary of Art, this topical collection is a valuable resource for those interested in the history, practice, and mechanics of the decorative arts. Accompanied by almost 100 color and more than 500 black and white illustrations, the 1,290 pages of this title include hundreds of entries on artists and craftsmen, the qualities and historic uses of materials, as well as concise definitions on art forms and style. Explore the works of Alvar Aalto, Charles and Ray Eames, and the Wiener Wekstatte, or delve into the history of Navajo blankets and wing chairs in thousands of entries on artists, craftsmen, designers, workshops, and decorative art forms.

Focusing on the house and museum and its considerable collections of architectural fragments, models, drawings folios and publications, this book is about thirteen Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London, England, built in the early 1800s by the renowned eighteenth-century architect Sir John Soane. The book maps the influences, references, connections, extensions, and productions at play in Soane’s house-museum. The house, still a public museum, was highly original in its period, and it continues to influence and impress architects and historians alike. Today’s visitor is confronted by a dense, complex series of spaces, a strange accumulation of rooms, objects and effects. This book examines the ways in which Soane enlisted light, shadow, color, fiction and narrative, vistas, spatial complexity, the fragment, and the mirror to produce a spectacular space.

This book is a comprehensive resource covering the principles and practice of the conservation and restoration of furniture, and other decorative art objects made wholly or partly of wood. It integrates theory with practice to show the principles which govern interaction between wooden objects, the environmental and conservation treatments and the factors which need to be taken into account to arrive at acceptable solutions to conservation problems. The practical knowledge and experience of a team of conservators active in the field are bought together with theoretical and reference material from diverse sources and unified within a systematic framework. Specialist conservators from related disciplines cover diverse materials often incorporated into furniture.

From ancient Greece to Frank Lloyd Wright, studiola to smoking rooms, chimney boards to cocktail cabinets, and papier-mâché to tubular steel, the Encyclopedia of Interior Design provides a history of interior decoration and design from ancient times to the present day. It includes more than 500 illustrated entries covering a variety of subjects ranging from the work of the foremost designers, to the origins and function of principal rooms and furnishing types, as well as surveys of interior design by period and nationality all prepared by an international team of experts in the field. Entries on individuals include a biography, a chronological list of principal works or career summary, a primary and secondary bibliography, and a signed critical essay of 800 to 1500 words on the individual's work in interior design. The style and topic entries contain an identifying headnote, a guide to main collections, a list of secondary sources, and a signed critical essay.

Contains illustrations of mirrors dating from a mirror made in the second millennium before the common era to a postmodern mirror environment created in the late 1980s. Interdisciplinary sources including art history, mythology. An additional feature is the linking of mirrors with prose and poetry quotations from widely ranging sources (Zen koans to Woody Allen). With Illustrations.

This book discusses the often explosive relation between war and ideas between 1650 and 1900, how the ideas of philosophers and generals have influenced war, and how war in its turn has influenced ideas.

Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole shows that the Gothic style in architecture and the decorative arts and the tradition of medievalist research associated with Horace Walpole (1717–1797) and his circle cannot be understood independently of their own homoerotic culture. Centered around Walpole’s Gothic villa at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, Walpole and his “Strawberry Committee” of male friends, designers, and dilettantes invigorated an extraordinary new mode of Gothic design and disseminated it in their own commissions at Old Windsor and Donnington Grove in Berkshire, Lee Priory in Kent, the Vyne in Hampshire, and other sites. Matthew M. Reeve argues that the new “third sex” of homoerotically inclined men and the new “modern styles” that they promoted—including the Gothic style and chinoiserie—were interrelated movements that shaped English modernity. The Gothic style offered the possibility of an alternate aesthetic and gendered order, a queer reversal of the dominant Palladian style of the period. Many of the houses built by Walpole and his circle were understood by commentators to be manifestations of a new queer aesthetic, and in describing them they offered the earliest critiques of what would be called a “queer architecture.” Exposing the role of sexual coteries in the shaping of eighteenth-century English architecture, this book offers a profound and eloquent revision to our understanding of the origins of the Gothic Revival and to medievalism itself. It will be welcomed by architectural historians as well as scholars of medievalism and specialists in queer studies.

Mirror's figural imaginations have spread widely along the length of human history. A mirror's triptych technology, composed of three mirrored figures, each of which has individually been suggested by different mirror figures in the past, appears as an innovative mirror figure in Magritte's' La Reproduction Interdite: The Portrait of Edward James. The description, explicative and implicative analysis of this finding has been the central preoccupation of this work. The mirror's triptych technology includes chiasmus, the performance of criss-cross movements between opposing sides in a variety of directions; it adds a mirror that positions, en abyme, parts or entire reflections vis- -vis each other; moreover, it incorporates a mirror that changes the directions of causality, time and directionality. Three mirrors, bearing the singularity of each in their unique way of creating plurality, generate infinite and uncountable pluralities as they generate a "singular" mirror. With the mirror's triptych technology, the mirror of mimesis transforms its dance while endlessly playing, like interminable waves of water, with profundity; it interchanges directions, times and senses. Instead of repeating the verosimilarity of an imagined copy of reality, the mirror of mimesis acquires virtuality. Mise en abyme, metalepsis and chiasmus confound performance by adding a means for considering the undecidable. Mirror triptych technology then questions and destabilizes the traditional Mirror function and ads the possibility of envisaging it as a technology that instead of mimesis implies and promotes virtuality. Diana Silberman Keller research interests are on ideologies and education, post-structural critique, informal education, cultural studies, philosophy of the media and game studies. She has published numerous articles and books on informal pedagogy, ideology and education and textual and semiotic analysis of educational texts. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1992) and the European Graduates School (2007) have granted her Ph.D. titles. On 2008 she has been nominated associate professor at Beit Berl College, Israel by the Council of higher Education in this country and currently develops academic programs and research on New Media, Games Studies and Informal Education.