ABSTRACT

Architecture as Experience investigates the perception and appropriation of places across intervals of time and culture. The particular concern of the volume is to bring together fresh empirical research and animate it through contact with theoretical sophistication, without overwhelming the material.

 The chapters establish the continuity of a particular physical object and show it in at least two alternative historical perspectives, in which recognisable features are shown in different lights. The results are often surprising, inverting the common idea of a historic place as having an enduring meaning. This book shows the insight that can be gained from learning about earlier constructions of meaning which have been derived from the same buildings that stand before us today.

chapter |10 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|25 pages

Misprisions of Stonehenge

chapter |21 pages

‘The mutability of all things’

The rise, fall and rise of the Meta Sudans fountain in Rome

chapter 3|24 pages

Piranesi’s Pantheon

chapter |28 pages

From medieval sacred place to modern secular space

Changing perspectives on the cathedral and town of Chartres

chapter |25 pages

Paths of empowerment

Ritual reinscription of meaning on the plan of Amsterdam, 1886–1914

chapter 6|19 pages

Caput mundi?

St Peter’s and the deterritorialised church

chapter |18 pages

Places and memory

Multiple readings of a plaza in Paris during the commemoration of the French Revolution

chapter |20 pages

The erasure of history

From Victorian asylum to ‘Princess Park Manor’

chapter |23 pages

If walls could talk

Exploring the dimensions of heterotopia at the Four Seasons Istanbul Hotel

chapter 11|28 pages

November 1921

The burial of the Unknown Soldier and ‘ways of using’ the space of Washington, DC, 11 November 1921

chapter 12|16 pages

London Bridge revisited