The art and architecture of London

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Martial Rose and Julia Hedgecoe

The magnificent roof bosses of Norwich Cathedral are one of the great hidden glories of medieval art. There are more than one thousand of these delightfully carved and painted keystones in the high stone vaulting, dating from 1300 to 1515 and measuring between eight and twenty-four inches wide. The vast majority are figure carvings uniquely linked together in storytelling patterns, reflecting a variety of pagan, Christian, and folk subjects. Situated some eighty feet up from the floor of the cathedral, these ornaments are too distant to have been fully appreciated by worshippers over the centuries; by the same token, their inaccessibility has protected them from vandalism. This book reproduces the most striking and interesting examples, selected from the hundreds of exquisite color photographs taken by the distinguished photographer Julia Hedgecoe, under the auspices of the cathedral. They are introduced and fully described in a lively text by one of Norwich's foremost medieval historians, Martial Rose.

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Richard Dzhenkins

"Westminster Abbey is both an appreciation of an architectural masterpiece and an exploration of the building's shifting meanings. We hear the voices of those who have described its forms, moods, and ceremonies, from Shakespeare and Voltaire to Dickens and Henry James, we see how rulers have made use of it, from medieval kings to modern prime ministers. In a highly original book, classicist and cultural historian Richard Jenkyns teaches us to look at this microcosm of history with new eyes."--Jacket.

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Arnold Lewis

Chicago in the late nineteenth century was the wonder city of the Western world, its famous Loop the laboratory in which to study innovative commercial architecture. There, Old World assumptions were overthrown by New World realities, as the past was discounted, the present glorified, and the future eagerly anticipated. Visiting Europeans saw the Loop as an urban nucleus built by contemporary realists devoted to the pursuit of profits and a new, functional aesthetic. This futuristic city stunned them, and its crass mercantile class further appalled them: the three-minute lunch, the lightning-fast contract negotiations, the dead-run pace. Visitors also saw and admired what natives took for granted: Chicago's version of the present looked like the future. They critiqued it extensively in publications in France, Germany, and Great Britain, seeking to understand the causes linking the cloud-scraping office buildings of the Loop, the surrounding bucolic neighborhoods, and the expansive classicism of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago's Jackson Park and their implications for European culture. An Early Encounter with Tomorrow is the first book-length study of European criticism of 1890s Chicago. Arnold Lewis spent over twenty years researching in libraries abroad and in the U.S. to bring us this comprehensive and unique work. It is extravagantly illustrated with over seventy photographs, drawings, paintings, and contemporary cartoons. An exhaustive bibliography, arranged by country, is appended.

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Karl Sabbagh

Item discribes and discusses the selection, planning and convertion of Bankside Power Station into Tate Modern. A television series of the same title was shown on Channel 4 during April 2000.