ARC008000 Archives

Urban Beauty

Urban Beauty asks a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to make cities beautiful? Most of us agree that beautiful streets, buildings and public spaces enrich our lives. They lift spirits, strengthen communities and even improve health. Yet the moment we try to define ‘urban beauty’, certainty crumbles. Is beauty objective, something we ‘know when we see it’? Or is it wholly subjective, forever ‘in the eye of the beholder’?

This book explores the fertile tension between these poles. Around the world, governments now regulate for beauty, planners and designers are tasked with delivering it, and communities increasingly demand it. But how do we pursue something that resists clear definition?

Structured in four parts across eight chapters, the book traces beauty’s rise as a public mission, probes its contested meaning, investigates what people prefer in their built environments and reports on innovative experiments that have sought to test out the delivery of a beauty agenda. Six guiding questions shape the journey, culminating in a seventh: can the unknowable ever be made knowable? Rather than offering one final answer, the book maps a rich and unsettled terrain, showing why urban beauty matters, and how it might guide the creation of more humane cities.

Landscape in the Longue Durée

Pebbles are usually found only on the beach, in the liminal space between land and sea. But what happens when pebbles extend inland and create a ridge brushing against the sky?

Landscape in the Longue Durée is a 4,000 year history of pebbles. It is based on the results of a four-year archaeological research project of the east Devon Pebblebed heathlands, a fascinating and geologically unique landscape in the UK whose bedrock is composed entirely of water-rounded pebbles. Christopher Tilley uses this landscape to argue that pebbles are like no other kind of stone – they occupy an especial place both in the prehistoric past and in our contemporary culture. It is for this reason that we must re-think continuity and change in a radically new way by considering embodied relations between people and things over the long term.

Dividing the book into two parts, Tilley first explores the prehistoric landscape from the Mesolithic to the end of the Iron Age, and follows with an analysis of the same landscape from the eighteenth into the twenty-first century. The major findings of the four-year study are revealed through this chronological journey: from archaeological discoveries, such as the excavation of three early Bronze Age cairns, to the documentation of all 829 surviving pebble structures, and beyond, to the impact of the landscape on local economies and its importance today as a military training camp. The results of the study will inform many disciplines including archaeology, cultural and art history, anthropology, conservation, and landscape studies.

This book also includes a downloadable appendix. Download it here (.pdf).

Fabricate 2011

FABRICATE is an international peer reviewed conference that takes place every three years with a supporting publication on the theme of Digital Fabrication. Discussing the progressive integration of digital design with manufacturing processes, and its impact on design and making in the 21st century, FABRICATE brings together pioneers in design and making within architecture, construction, engineering, manufacturing, materials technology and computation. Discussion on key themes includes: how digital fabrication technologies are enabling new creative and construction opportunities from component to building scales, the difficult gap that exists between digital modelling and its realisation, material performance and manipulation, off-site and on-site construction, interdisciplinary education, economic and sustainable contexts. FABRICATE features cutting-edge built work from both academia and practice, making it a unique event that attracts delegates from all over the world. FABRICATE 2011, 2014 and 2017 are now all available to download free from UCL Press.