Housing the New Romans: Architectural Reception and Classical Style in the Modern World
ISBN: 9780190272357
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Classical Studies;

In the last twenty years, reception studies have significantly enhanced our understanding of the ways in which Classics has shaped modern Western culture, but very little attention has been directed toward the reception of classical architecture. Housing the New Romans: Architectual Reception and Classical Style in the Modern World addresses this gap by investigating ways in which appropriation and allusion facilitated the reception of Classical Greece and Rome through the requisition and redeployment of classicizing tropes to create neo-Antique sites of "dwelling" in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The volume, across nine essays, will cover both European and American iterations of place making, including Sir John Soanes' house in London, the H#65533;tel de Beauharnais in Paris, and the Getty Villa in California. By focusing on structures and places that are oriented towards private life-houses, hotels, clubs, tombs, and gardens-the volume directs the critical gaze towards diverse and complex sites of curatorial self-fashioning. The goal of the volume is to provide a multiplicity of interpretative frameworks (e.g. object-agency enchantment, hyperreality, memory-infrastructure) that may be applied to the study of architectural reception. This critical approach makes Housing the New Romans the first work of its kind in the emerging field of architectural and landscape reception studies and in the hitherto textually dominated field of classical reception.


Katharine T. von Stackelberg is a historian and Latinist specializing in the representation of gardens and the ancient environment as cultural space in Classical Rome. She is the author of The Roman Garden: Space, Sense and Society (2009) and articles on the politics of Roman gardens and their representation of gender in both ancient and modern contexts.

Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis is an archaeologist and architectural historian who focuses on the architecture and gardens of ancient Rome, as well as their reception. She has published over a dozen articles on Roman gardens and architecture and their reception in the Classical Reception Journal, the Journal of Roman Archaeology, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. She also examines Islamic Architecture in Syria and Egypt and its connections to the Classical World.

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