ABSTRACT

Bringing together a collection of high-profile authors, Biographies and Space presents essays exploring the relationship between biography and space and how specific subjects are used as a means of explaining sets of social, cultural and spatial relationships.

Biographical methods of historical investigation can bring out the authentic voice of subjects, revealing personal meanings and strategies in space as well as providing a means to analyze relations between the personal and the social. Writing about both actual (architectural) and imagined (pictorial) space, the authors consider issues of gender, childhood, sexuality and race, highlighting an increasing fluidity and interaction between theory, methods and history.

Biographies and Space is an original and exciting new book, with direct relevance to both architectural and art history.

chapter |5 pages

Introduction

Biographies and Space

chapter 3|20 pages

“Life as a ride in the métro”

Pierre Bourdieu on biography and space

chapter 4|18 pages

‘This scarlet intruder’

Biography interrupted in the Dining Room at Tatton Park Mansion

chapter 5|26 pages

Amsterdam eternal and fleeting

The individual and representations of urban space

chapter 6|16 pages

Turner

Space, persona, authority

chapter 7|24 pages

Mapping the ‘bios’ in two graphic systems with gender in mind

Reading Van Gogh through Charlotte Salomon and vice versa

chapter 9|12 pages

The art of reconciliation

Autobiography and objectivity in the work of Aldo Rossi

chapter 10|26 pages

Disinter/est

Digging up our childhood. Authenticity, ambiguity and failure in the auto/biography of the infant self