Search Results

Astrology is the art of predicting events on earth as well as human character and disposition from the movements of the planets and fixed stars. Medieval astrology encompassed both general concepts of celestial influence, and the technical art of making predictions with horoscopes, symbolic maps of the heavens at particular moments and places constructed from astronomical information. The scientific foundations of the art were developed in ancient Greece, largely lost in early medieval Europe and recovered by the Latin West from Arabic sources in the 12th and 13th centuries. Late medieval astrological images were successfully Christianized and were adapted to particular contexts, acquired local meanings and changed over time.

Astrology developed into a scientific branch of learning in ancient Greece, but because of the opposition of the Church Fathers it was transmitted to early medieval Europe in only fragmentary form in technically unsophisticated textbooks and popular divinatory genres. Literary and scientific texts provided more general ideas about the nature and attributes of the planets which were influential on later iconography. The first significant astrological images appear in 11th-century illustrated astronomical texts (e.g. London, BL, Cotton MS. Tiberius BV), which were acquired and produced by monasteries to aid with time-keeping and the construction of the Christian calendar....

(b Ramsgate, Oct 23, 1865; d Brighton, Feb 10, 1945).

English architect, interior designer, garden designer and writer . He was articled to Charles Davis (1827–1902), City Architect of Bath, from 1886 until 1889 but learnt little and was largely self-taught. In 1889 he started his own practice on the Isle of Man, where he built a number of buildings, including his own Red House, Douglas (1893). He was a leading member of the second-generation Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and was among the first to build on the simpler, more abstract and stylized designs of C. F. A. Voysey, a refinement of the ideas of William Morris, Philip Webb, R. Norman Shaw and others from the period 1860–90. From about 1890 until World War I, the Arts and Crafts Movement, as represented by Baillie Scott, Voysey, C. R. Ashbee, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Parker & Unwin and others, became the most important international force in architecture, interior design, landscape and urban planning. The work of these architects influenced Adolf Loos and Josef Hoffmann in Austria, Joseph Maria Olbrich and Peter Behrens in Germany, Eliel Saarinen and others in Scandinavia, and Frank Lloyd Wright, Irving Gill, Greene & Greene in the USA....

Swiss, 19th – 20th century, male.

Active in Germany.

Born 31 December 1849, in St Gall; died 1921, in Planegg.

Architect, painter, decorative designer, theorist. Designs (furniture/fabrics/metal objects/ceramics).

Jugendstil.

From 1868 to 1871 Hans Eduard von Berlepsch-Valendas was a student of architecture with Gottfried Sempers in Zurich. After graduating he abandoned architecture while he was living in Frankfurt, to go and train as a painter in Munich (...

(Hicks)

(b ?Sheffield, 1785; d Port of Spain, Trinidad, Nov 1846).

English sculptor, designer and architect. In 1810 he exhibited at the first Liverpool Academy Exhibition and showed models and drawings there in 1811, 1812 and 1814. These included designs for the restoration of the screen in Sefton church, Merseyside, and for a chimney-piece for Speke Hall, Liverpool, and two drawings of Joseph Ridgway’s house at Ridgmont, Horwich, Lancs. Bridgens designed furniture and furnishings in Gothic and Elizabethan styles for George Bullock. In 1814 he moved to London with Bullock, using his address at 4 Tenterden Street, Hanover Square, and prepared designs for Sir Godfrey Vassal Webster (1789–1836) for improvements to Battle Abbey, E. Sussex, and similarly for Sir Walter Scott’s home, Abbotsford House, at Melrose on the Borders. Two chair designs for Battle Abbey were published in Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository of Arts in September 1817, and Bridgens was also involved in the design of chairs supplied to Abbotsford House in ...

(b Amsterdam, July 12, 1893; d Amsterdam, May 11, 1949).

Dutch interior designer, furniture designer and writer. He was the son of a furniture dealer and was involved with the profession from an early age. He took lessons with the architect J. L. van Ishoven (1870–1931) and gained work experience in Germany. After operating independently for a few years he became the leading designer of the Amsterdam firm Metz & Co. His work displayed a rational concept of form and became well known through exhibitions and publications. At the firm of Hendrik Pander & Zonen in The Hague, where he was employed from 1924 to 1933, he specialized in using different types of wood that gave his taut, functional, batch-produced furniture a distinctive decorative character. On account of their plastic shapes his designs were considered to be related to those of the Amsterdam school architects. For Bromberg functionalism in interiors was a vital starting-point. He created various model rooms and homes in order to illustrate new ideas about the arrangement of domestic interiors. He also taught and wrote manuals, children’s books and many articles in periodicals and trade journals promoting contemporary applied art. He was particularly active within the Dutch Association of Trade and Industrial Art and the ...

(fl 1804–45).

English architect, designer and drawing-master. He appears to have had strong connections during his early life with South Devon: his earliest known design, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1804, was of a Villa with a Distant View of the Catwater, Plymouth, and other designs (1807–12) also relate to this county. However, Brown may have been living in London during this period as he ran an architectural academy at 4 Wells Street. There the importance of perspective drawing was taught, and in 1815 he published the Principles of Practical Perspective. He also became increasingly interested in furniture design, and in the need for designers in this discipline to master the art of perspective. Drawing is one of the main themes in his work the Rudiments of Drawing Cabinet Furniture (1820), which consists of 24 coloured plates, each accompanied by commentary. The designs are in the Classical style and acknowledge the work of Thomas Hope (ii), George Smith and Charles Percier. Brown also praised the quality of George Bullock’s cabinetmaking, and the plates appear to have been derived from Bullock’s designs. One plate depicts a sofa made in ...

(b 1838; d ?London, 1913).

English architect and designer. He studied under the architect James Kellaway Colling (c. 1815–1905), an expert on Gothic architecture, and spent several years as assistant to Matthew Digby Wyatt, who at the time was working on the then India Office (1867–8), Whitehall, London. Davis was a designer of architectural ornament, furniture, wallpaper, textiles, ironwork and ceramics, and in 1870 some of his designs were published in Building News. For James Shoolbred & Co., London (fl 1870–1900s), he designed furniture in the medieval, Jacobean, Stuart, Louis XVI and Japanese styles and in the style of Robert Adam and James Adam, illustrated in the company’s catalogue Designs of Furniture … and Interior Decoration (1876). A selection of furniture designed by Davis and manufactured by Shoolbred was shown at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. In 1885 he published Art and Work, which contains 85 lithographic plates of ornament for marble, stone and terracotta and designs for furniture, ceramics, metalwork and textiles, accompanied by notes on the design sources; among the plates are several after drawings, previously unpublished, by the ...

German, 20th century, male.

Born 12 April 1871, in Berlin; died 15 April 1925, in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland).

Draughtsman, architect, decorative artist, designer, illustrator, author. Furniture, jewellery, lamps, art objects.

Jugendstil.

Deutscher Werkbund.

In Munich, August Endell studied philosophy, art history, aesthetics and psychology, notably a course run by Theodor Lipp on the psychological effect of the perception of lines and forms. There, in ...

French, 17th century, male.

Born 1606, in Nantes; died 25 May 1689, in Rome.

Painter, draughtsman, engraver, decorative designer, architect, writer. Historical subjects, mythological subjects. Wall decorations, designs for tapestries, medallions.

Charles Erard was his father's pupil, and at the age of 18 followed him to Rome where he undertook his serious studies. On his return to Paris the king awarded him a bursary to go to Rome and complete his education, where they arrived on ...

(Otto)

(b Copenhagen, Feb 14, 1893; d Copenhagen, June 21, 1965).

Danish architect, designer and writer. As early as 1915 he collaborated with Aage Rafn in the competition for the railway stations on the island of Bornholm. The project was a brilliant artistic paraphrase of local architectural tradition, liberated from academic convention as well as provincial sentimentality. From 1909 to 1920 he studied at the Arkitektskole of the Kunstakademi in Copenhagen. He worked in Sweden in 1916–17 as a colleague of Sigurd Lewerentz and Gunnar Asplund. From the early 1920s he undertook a large-scale architectural practice in which substantial projects such as state-supported housing developments played an essential part. His large housing blocks, for example Hornbækhus (1923), Copenhagen, were well-proportioned, traditionally constructed multiple-bayed buildings with a minumum of classical elements of style. For the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris (1925), Fisker designed the Danish pavilion in a cubism of severe brickwork. The trend towards the refined prismatic block in smooth brickwork was further elaborated in the unrealized project for the Danish Students’ House (...

(b Baden, nr Vienna, July 15, 1885; d Stockholm, Jan 8, 1967).

Austrian architect, interior designer, teacher and writer. He studied architecture at the Technische Hochschule, Vienna, and then worked for a year with Bruno Möhring in Berlin. After a study visit to Italy he established himself as an independent architect in Vienna in 1910, building in the period before World War I a number of single-family houses distinguished by highly simplified forms and balanced proportions; examples include the Villa Hoch (1912) and Villa Wassermann (1914), both in Vienna. After the war he taught at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Vienna (1919–25), and collaborated with Adolf Loos and others in the Viennese garden city movement, which was based on English models. He took a leading role in the construction of cooperatively run garden suburbs and also contributed five residential buildings, several storeys high, to Vienna’s communal housing scheme, for example Winarskyhof (1924). Frank played a significant role in the propagation of artistic innovation in the early 20th century. As a member of both the ...

(b Bristol, May 26, 1833; d London, Oct 6, 1886).

English architect, designer and writer. He had an early interest in archaeology, which was fostered by fragments of medieval carving in his parents’ garden. From the age of 15 he began sketching buildings all over the West Country. In 1851 he contributed illustrations to The Antiquities of Bristol and Neighbourhood, by which time he was apprenticed to William Armstrong of Bristol. Armstrong, perhaps recognizing Godwin’s aptitude, entrusted him with much of his architectural work. This brought Godwin early responsibility but little formal training, a lack that he felt dogged his professional life. In 1854 he established an independent practice, and in an attempt to further his career, in 1856 he joined his brother, an engineer, in Londonderry, Ireland. During his visit he studied castles and abbeys throughout Ireland. He also designed three small Roman Catholic churches in a severe Gothic style at St Johnstown (1857–61), Newtown Cunningham (...

(b Cologne; fl Strasbourg, 1590s).

German cabinetmaker, writer and engraver. He is recorded as a cabinetmaker and citizen of Strasbourg from 1596. He appears to have been a pupil of the architect Johann Schoch, who designed Schloss Gottesau, near Karlsruhe (c. 1587), and the Friedrichsbau of the Heidelberg Schloss (c. 1601–7). Guckeisen, in collaboration with Veit Eck (fl Strasbourg, 1587), wrote a Kunstbüchlein (Strasbourg, 1596) dedicated to masons and cabinetmakers. He also wrote a similar work, Etlicher Architectischer Portalen, Epitapien, Caminen Und Schweyffen, published in the same year in Cologne. They were followed in 1599 by a series of engraved designs for six chests, also published in Cologne. In collaboration with the cabinetmaker and etcher Hans Jakob Ebelmann, Guckeisen also produced the Schränke (1598), Seilenbuch (1598), Architectura Kunstbuch Darinnen Alerhand Portalen Reisbetten Undt Epitaphien (1599) and Schweyfbuch (1599), the last dedicated to the cabinetmaker Jacob Riedel in Strasbourg. As a designer of ornament, Guckeisen was familiar with the whole repertory of Renaissance decoration, using it in varied combinations....

(b Lyon, 1867; d New York, May 20, 1942).

French architect, furniture designer and writer. After attending the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, in 1885 he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; he left four years later without a diploma, however, to work for a builder as both architect and site craftsman. The influence of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc is evident in his early works, particularly the Ecole du Sacré-Coeur (1895), in which the exposed cast-iron structure of V-shaped columns is an adaptation of a drawing taken from Viollet-le-Duc’s Entretiens sur l’architecture (1863–72). These early commissions, built in a picturesque and eclectic manner, culminated in the Castel Béranger block of flats, Paris, where his first use of the Art Nouveau style appeared in its decorative elements. He visited Brussels in 1895, where he met Victor Horta, whose Maison du Peuple was then under construction. After seeing Horta’s work Guimard made changes to the original neo-Gothic decorative elements of the Castel Béranger, introducing a colourful mixture of facing materials and organically derived embellishments, based on his belief that decoration is the more effective for being non-representational. Between ...

Italian, 17th century, male.

Active in Ferrara.

Died 1644.

Painter, engraver, architect, engineer, poet. Stage sets.

Francesco Guitti worked for the city and for the duke. In 1638 he produced the plan for the decoration of the stage sets for the first Carnival, which he published with other plans, as engravings, under the title of ...

(b Zurich, Jan 25, 1901; d Herrliberg, nr Zurich, June 17, 1976).

Swiss architect, furniture designer and writer. He studied architecture (1919–23) at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich, under Karl Moser; one of his fellow students was Rudolf Steiger, his future partner. His student designs show an interest in the formal idiom of Expressionism. After graduating he worked for Otto Bartning in Berlin before returning to Zurich in 1924 to enter the practice of his father, Max Haefeli (1869–1941), and Otto Pfleghard (b 1869). In 1925 he set up on his own and acted until 1927 as Director of the Kollektivgruppe Schweizer Architekten zur Beteiligung an der Werkbundausstellung in Stuttgart, designing furniture and fittings for some of the dwellings on the Weissenhofseidlung (1927), the Deutscher Werkbund’s show housing estate in Stuttgart. His work was by this time thoroughly Modernist, and when CIAM was formed at La Sarraz in 1928 he was a founder-member.

Haefeli’s new approach to design is apparent in the houses he designed (...

(b Solothurn, Oct 23, 1924).

Swiss architect, theorist, designer and teacher. He established an independent practice in Solothurn in 1949. His early work, including schools, service, industrial and residential buildings, was designed on the basis of a free geometrical grid. From the early 1960s he introduced his own version of a construction system of modular blocks. Notable examples are the Sparkasse (1963), Kriegstetter, and the Höhere Technische Lehranstalt, Windisch, which consist of cubic blocks of glass and steel, with careful proportioning and detailing that reflect his study of Mies van der Rohe. The three steel building systems developed by Haller, differentiated as Mini, Midi and Maxi, are employed in several houses in the form of crystalline prisms and in the SBB-Ausbildungszentrum (1979–82) in Murten, which consists of integrated units set in parkland. Haller was also active in the field of research, developing quasi-utopian urban projects and the highly regarded USM Haller system of office and domestic furniture, which reflected his unitary conception of the architect as a planner, designer and engineer. Haller’s position as an exponent of a school characterized by a cool, technical perfection, seemingly opposed to nature, made him an influential figure in post-war Swiss modernism. He was the leader of the independent ...

British, 20th century, male.

Born 16 November 1892, in London; died 1957.

Painter, engraver, furniture designer, writer. Genre scenes, landscapes, architectural scenes.

Eric Hesketh Hubbard studied at Croydon School of Art, South Western Polytechnic and the Westminster School of Art. He became an accomplished printmaker, specialising in woodcuts and linocuts. Many of his works explore the life of gypsies and the fairground....

(b 1651; d Vienna, Feb 7, 1690).

German cabinetmaker and architectural theorist, active in Austria. Probably a native of south Germany, he travelled in Germany and Italy and is recorded in Vienna from 1682. After 1684 he became cabinetmaker to Eleanor Gonzaga (1628–86), widow of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III (reg 1637–57). After her death he was emancipated from guild restrictions.

Indau is known only through his publications. His main work, Wiennerisches Architectur-Kunst und Säulen-Buch (Vienna, 1686), is the first treatise on architectural theory published in Austria. Addressed not only to architects, masons and builders but also to carpenters and painters, it follows the tradition of the German Säulenbücher of the late 16th century and the 17th as a textbook on the five Classical orders of architecture, with 14 illustrations engraved by Elias Nessenthaler (1664–1714) accompanied by a brief text.

Instead of applying the proportions laid down by Sebastiano Serlio’s ...

(b London, Feb 15, 1809; d London, April 19, 1874).

English architect and designer. The son of a Welsh antiquary and furrier of the same name, Owen Jones was educated at Charterhouse School, London, before becoming a pupil of the architect Lewis Vuillamy (1791–1871). Following his apprenticeship he set out in 1832 for the Continent on a Grand Tour. In Greece Jones met Jules Goury (1803–34), a young French architect; both travellers had become fascinated by Classical architectural polychromy. In order to pursue this study further they visited Egypt, Turkey and Spain, where they undertook a detailed survey of the Alhambra. After Goury died of cholera in 1834, Jones completed their research, finally printing and publishing it himself as Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of the Alhambra (2 vols; London, 1842–5). His initial publication of the work in 1836–7 was never completed, but the three numbers that appeared (out of ten planned) were the first examples of ...