Examining discomforts physical, emotional, conceptual, psychological and aesthetic dimensions, the contributors to this volume offer an alternate, cultural approach to the study of architecture and the built environment. By attending to a series of disparate instances in which architecture and discomfort intersect, On Discomfort offers a fresh reading of the negotiations that define architectures position in modern culture. The essays do not chart comforts triumph so much as discomforts curious dispersal into practices that form modern life and what that dispersion reveals of both architecture and culture.
The essays presented in this volume illuminate the material culture of discomfort as it accrues to architecture and its history. This episodic analysis speaks to a range of disciplinary fields and interdisciplinary subjects, extending our understanding of the domestication of interiors (and objects, cities and ideas); and the conditions under which by intention or accident they discomfort.
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| Notes on contributors |
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| Acknowledgements |
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1 Thinking through discomfort |
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1 | (7) |
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2 `Good God, Mrs Nicholson!': slaves and domestic disquiet in eighteenth-century Scotland |
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8 | (16) |
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24 | (12) |
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4 Wandering sensations: supernatural discomforts and modern domesticity |
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36 | (15) |
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5 Climatic discomforts: [ subtropical climates, racial character and the nineteenth-century Queensland house |
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51 | (13) |
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6 Technological progress as an obstruction to domestic comfort: Hugo Van Kuyck and the introduction of the American example in post-war Belgium |
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64 | (16) |
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7 Everything but the orgy truck: shopping for radical architecture at MoMA, 1972 |
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80 | (18) |
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98 | (15) |
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9 The Wolfers house by Henry van de Velde, as occupied by Herman Daled |
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113 | (9) |
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10 Blind windows: a particularly domestic discomfort |
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122 | (10) |
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11 Reality without restraint: bathtime in the Villa dall'Ava |
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132 | |
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David Ellison is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. His research focuses on the literary and cultural histories of Victorian domesticity.
Andrew Leach is Professor of Architecture at the University of Sydney, Australia. Among his books are What is Architectural History? (2010), The Baroque in Architectural Culture 18801980 (2015, with John Macarthur and Maarten Delbeke) and Rome (2016).
