Argyro Loukaki – författare

This book offers original interdisciplinary insights into cities as a diachronic creation of urban art. It engages in a sequence of historical perspectives to examine urban space as an object of apparent quasi-cycles and processes of constitution, exaltation, imitation, contestation and redemption through art.

Urban art transforms the city into a human-made sublime which is explored in the context of the Eastern Mediterranean. The book probes this process primarily through the example of Athens and Byzantine Constantinople, but also Jerusalem, Cyprus and regional cities, revealing how urban space unavoidably encompasses a spatial and temporal palimpsest which is constantly emerging. It presents new ideas for both the theorization and sensuous conception of artistic reality, architecture, and planning attributes. These extend from archaic, classical and Byzantine urban splendour to current urban decline as constitution and attack on the sublime and back. Urban processes of contestation and redemption respond recently to the new ‘imperialism of debt’ and the positivist, technocratic understandings and demands of Euro-governments and neoliberal institutions, while still evoking older forms of spatial power.Offering fresh notions on art, architecture, space, antiquity, (post)-modernity and politics of the region, this book will appeal to scholars and students of geography, urban studies, art, restoration, and film theory, architecture, landscape design, planning, anthropology, sociology and history.

This book offers original interdisciplinary insights into cities as a diachronic creation of urban art. It engages in a sequence of historical perspectives to examine urban space as an object of apparent quasi-cycles and processes of constitution, exaltation, imitation, contestation and redemption through art.

Urban art transforms the city into a human-made sublime which is explored in the context of the Eastern Mediterranean. The book probes this process primarily through the example of Athens and Byzantine Constantinople, but also Jerusalem, Cyprus and regional cities, revealing how urban space unavoidably encompasses a spatial and temporal palimpsest which is constantly emerging. It presents new ideas for both the theorization and sensuous conception of artistic reality, architecture, and planning attributes. These extend from archaic, classical and Byzantine urban splendour to current urban decline as constitution and attack on the sublime and back. Urban processes of contestation and redemption respond recently to the new ‘imperialism of debt’ and the positivist, technocratic understandings and demands of Euro-governments and neoliberal institutions, while still evoking older forms of spatial power.Offering fresh notions on art, architecture, space, antiquity, (post)-modernity and politics of the region, this book will appeal to scholars and students of geography, urban studies, art, restoration, and film theory, architecture, landscape design, planning, anthropology, sociology and history.

The Monumental is an interdisciplinary collection of original, cutting-edge contributions by international researchers pursuing the epistemology and ontology of monuments over time and geography. The contributors are specialists in geography, architectural theory and history, prehistoric, Greek and Roman archaeology, modern art, Byzantine studies, landscape theory, and heritage reception. Against the global climate of flux and uncertainty in the present turbulent world, the durability of monuments as “urban permanences” emerges as one of the few remaining spatial and mental anchorages. As such it is needed, maintained, enhanced, imitated, landscaped, and even invented. In particular, the monumental, a spatial and aesthetic phenomenon of perpetual importance, has recently acquired major new meanings. It now emerges as a key political, spatial, aesthetic, symbolic, architectural, and archaeological manifestation or entity, open to constantly new, even contradictory forms and expressions.

This collection addresses the urgent need for relevant research on the monumental. It breaks new ground by posing fresh questions on the ontology, temporality, purpose, politics, scale, place, contestations, and aesthetics of and around the monumental, from prehistoric time to the present, as well as in both Eastern and Western geographies. Monuments are explored as bearers of the urban majestic, extraordinary and sublime. The Monumental poses questions about changing perceptions, the evocative power of representation, identity construction, ideology and symbolism, the vital necessity for a communicative and active public space around monuments, imitation processes across geographical space-time, as well as the powers that construct, deconstruct, or identify the monumental but also the anti-monumental as such. Geographies of reference are the European space, the United States, and Asia. Wide-ranging theorizations alternate with in-depth analyses of paradigmatic cases. Conventional as well as alternative forms of the monumental in the present shifting world are also pursued.

The Monumental is of great value and interest to scholars, students, and professionals in the fields of architectural theory, history and design, archaeology, art theory and history, Byzantine studies, restoration, urban design and planning, human, urban and cultural geography, cultural studies, social anthropology, Asian studies, as well as those in wider subdisciplines.

The Monumental is an interdisciplinary collection of original, cutting-edge contributions by international researchers pursuing the epistemology and ontology of monuments over time and geography. The contributors are specialists in geography, architectural theory and history, prehistoric, Greek and Roman archaeology, modern art, Byzantine studies, landscape theory, and heritage reception. Against the global climate of flux and uncertainty in the present turbulent world, the durability of monuments as “urban permanences” emerges as one of the few remaining spatial and mental anchorages. As such it is needed, maintained, enhanced, imitated, landscaped, and even invented. In particular, the monumental, a spatial and aesthetic phenomenon of perpetual importance, has recently acquired major new meanings. It now emerges as a key political, spatial, aesthetic, symbolic, architectural, and archaeological manifestation or entity, open to constantly new, even contradictory forms and expressions.

This collection addresses the urgent need for relevant research on the monumental. It breaks new ground by posing fresh questions on the ontology, temporality, purpose, politics, scale, place, contestations, and aesthetics of and around the monumental, from prehistoric time to the present, as well as in both Eastern and Western geographies. Monuments are explored as bearers of the urban majestic, extraordinary and sublime. The Monumental poses questions about changing perceptions, the evocative power of representation, identity construction, ideology and symbolism, the vital necessity for a communicative and active public space around monuments, imitation processes across geographical space-time, as well as the powers that construct, deconstruct, or identify the monumental but also the anti-monumental as such. Geographies of reference are the European space, the United States, and Asia. Wide-ranging theorizations alternate with in-depth analyses of paradigmatic cases. Conventional as well as alternative forms of the monumental in the present shifting world are also pursued.

The Monumental is of great value and interest to scholars, students, and professionals in the fields of architectural theory, history and design, archaeology, art theory and history, Byzantine studies, restoration, urban design and planning, human, urban and cultural geography, cultural studies, social anthropology, Asian studies, as well as those in wider subdisciplines.