Hospitals and health centers are a unique category of architecture with clearly defined characteristics. Health architecture must offer imaginative, constructive responses and flexible solutions to the problem raised by this special type of facility: planning, budgets and space as well as the idiosyncrasies arising from each particular field of health. New Health Facilities presents the best examples of health architecture constructed in recent years and each of the architects demonstrates a solid understanding of the need to create new and better health facilities.
Architecture is unquestionably one of the arts, and certainly not a lesser one, but dealing with it purely as an art would be very incomplete. For, more than other arts, it depends heavily on technology as concerns materials used, construction techniques, and new technological possibilities in other fields.
Medieval castles have traditionally been explained as feats of military engineering and tools of feudal control, but Abigail Wheatley takes a different approach, looking at a range of sources usually neglected in castle studies. Evidence from contemporary literature and art reveals the castle's place at the heart of medieval culture, as an architecture of ideas every bit as sophisticated as the church architecture of the period.This study offers a genuinely fresh perspective. Most castle scholars confine themselves to historical documents, but Wheatley examines literary and artistic evidence for its influence on and response to contemporary castle architecture. Sermons, seals and ivory caskets, local legends and Roman ruins all have their part to play. What emerges is a fascinating web of cultural resonances: the castle is implicated in every aspect of medieval consciousness, from private religious contemplation to the creation of national mythologies. This book makes a compelling case for a new, interdisciplinary approach to castle studies. ABIGAIL WHEATLEY studied for her PhD, on which this book is based, at York University's Centre for Medieval Studies.
