Visitors to resorts were enveloped in a new world that had the casino and its pleasures at its core. The novel forms that the institution assumed in the nineteenth century represent a change in the structure as a whole. The casino did important cultural work in the imaginations of nineteenth-century observers, recalling other social spaces, from the court to the church, and offered a contrast to other locations associated with nineteenth-century modernity. The architectural elements that were not directly related to gambling had the subsidiary purpose of keeping people within the physical confines of the building so that they would return to the gambling tables. Nineteenth-century casinos were anchored in attempts to generate and encourage certain forms of middle-class sociability. The casino produced an environment in which the emotions were unmoored, and new sensations attacked any previous emotional core that visitors possessed. Unlike other spaces that channeled emotion – the cathedral or the court – the nineteenth-century casino did so in the service of play, pleasure, and financial gain.

Thephysical structures within which people lived, learned, prayed, and played – the “built environment”– were both technological accomplishments and expressions of cultural and social meaning. From imperial palaces to domestic residences, from schools, temples, shrines, monasteries, and tombs to theaters and shops, buildings were placed in urban or rural landscapes following the principles of geomancy (most notably tombs) and other religious traditions (monasteries on sacred mountains, for example) or responding to commercial and social needs (shops, restaurants, and theaters in urban centers). Buildings were also products of the natural environment, constructed from materials that were either readily accessible or affordable to buy. The natural environment was more than a source of building materials or a backdrop for human activity. Rivers, lakes, forests, and mountains, along with the geological makeup of the land and its soils, were features of the natural landscape experienced by human actors who utilized and managed them with varying degrees of success. Climate also was a powerful and often unpredictable force that people were dependent upon for survival. Geographic space as imagined and represented through mapping is an equally important approach to deciphering human activity in relation to the physical environment.

This chapter deals with the issue of the role of philosophy in Mesoamerica and its sources. Offering an expansive account of philosophy, it argues that the sources of philosophy in ancient Mesoamerica include, but are not limited to, textual material. While there is a long textual tradition in Mesoamerica, particularly in Maya and Aztec cultures, we find philosophy in other sources as well, including architecture, art, oral tradition, and performance. The chapter describes the ways philosophy can be found in these numerous sources, and argue for the importance of philosophical interaction with anthropology, art history, and other relevant fields.

This chapter considers how strategies for representing the skyscraper indexed competing understandings of the nature of organization, a term with multiple valences in the early twentieth century. Whether one judged skyscrapers to be hideous blights or rapturous delights, few in the period failed to marvel at the powerful technic of organization marshaled by and for its mass. But to whom should its beholders credit that technic proved a harder matter to resolve. Descriptions of skyscraper construction by builder William Starrett and writers John Dos Passos and Willa Cather mark an oscillation between viewing this structure’s organization as an art, showcasing not just the skill but also the beauty of capital’s captivating choreography of bodies and materials used to materialize these structures, and organization as a politics, the active mobilization of laborers to resist modes of capitalistic organization by revealing the invisible and unaesthetic exploitation disguised by capitalism’s breathtaking arrangements.

Since the work of Maurice Halbwachs, the spatial dimension and conditionality of memory – its connectedness and links to space and place – have been well known.1 Halbwachs asserts that collective memory is only possible if it is ‘localized’.2 Hence, the trope of a city or town as a landscape of memory has become fixed in memory studies and has even given rise to the term ‘urban memory’.3 Urban memory can refer to anthropomorphic phenomena (as when the city is said to have a memory of its own). More commonly, however, it points to the city’s status as a physical place and an ensemble of objects and practices which enables recollections of the past and embodies it through traces of successive building and rebuilding.4 The inhabitants of a city thus draw upon its image to identify with its past and present as a political, cultural, and social entity. In that sense, the urban landscape of Republican and Imperial Rome has thoroughly been investigated and reconstructed as a landscape of memory.

The power of place to stir memory was well-known in antiquity, and is exemplified by a speech Cicero places in the mouth of Piso in de Finibus (On Ends). Piso reflects on the Athenian cityscape, and remarks on the capacity of places and the memory associated with them to stir emotion even more strongly than hearing or reading.1 Accordingly, the role of monuments and buildings in Republican memory has been the focus of a good deal of recent scholarship.2 Nor was the mnemonic potential of buildings lost on the princeps himself: as recent work by Eric Orlin and others has shown, architecture played an important role in the Augustan regime, shaping memories of recent events, and stimulating remembrance of a more distant past.3 Examples include the temple of Apollo on the Palatine and the new constructions on the Capitoline (treated elsewhere in this volume), as well as the Forum Augustum, with its statues of Republican notables (the summi viri) evoking a particular model of Roman history.

When assessing the evolution of the early Roman Republic, scholars typically designate a break between the fifth/fourth centuries and the end of the fourth century BCE/beginning of the third, based on political, legal, and military milestones. Archaeologists detect a similar break, as members of the new nobilitas turned to architecture as a vehicle for self-representation. Where most scholarship characterizes buildings and the broader cityscape as a reflection of political change, this chapter deploys theories of object agency and object-scapes to argue for their agency in effecting such change. Questioning whether Romans were conscious, at the time, of a new era dawning, I suggest that circumstantial evidence supports a hypothesis that, at least in the later Republic, they were.

Donald Trump called ‘Make America Great Again’ his ‘whole theme’. He blazoned the slogan in signal white on his red baseball cap and even trademarked it. The use of building metaphors is the standard puff of presidential election campaigns. The reference to building bridges is especially potent, metaphorically, as a way of combining the virtues of building with the political ideal of connecting people. Hence Bill Clinton’s slogan for his successful 1996 presidential election campaign was ‘Building a Bridge to the 21st Century’. This chapter considers how politicians exploit the building metaphor and how the idea of building is integral to the laws by which states achieves a necessary balance between stability and change.

During his last days at Oxford in 1840, John Ruskin inscribed in a new notebook, ‘I have determined to keep one part of diary for intellect and another for feeling.’ There is no diary for 1845, when Ruskin made his first Italian tour without his parents. Instead, broadly speaking, what Paul Tucker calls Ruskin’s Résumé is for intellect and the letters home to his father for feeling. The emphasis in this chapter is not upon the letters as travel writing or as indices of Ruskin’s intellectual journal, but rather upon their intrinsic qualities as communications between a son and his father that, though written abroad and taking nine or ten days to arrive, sustain the intimacy of a connection between two difficult and complex personalities who have a ‘strong desire to be speaking’ to one another. Whereas Browning and Barrett are embarking upon a new relationship, John Ruskin seeks to maintain an established connection with a beloved father whose demands are testing.

At the beginning of the Roman Principate, there was no self-evident model for the residence of the Roman emperor. During a long period of experimentation, emperors and their architects attempted to fashion spaces appropriate to the social rituals of their courts and to the self-image they aimed to project. By the end of the first century, a viable palace model was established in Rome, and elements of this were then redeployed in the palaces of the Tetrarchic period. This chapter presents a selection of literary sources, archaeological plans, photographs, and computer visualizations to illustrate the developing Roman palace model, its Hellenistic forerunners, and its afterlife in the Tetrarchic period. It also contains a selection of sources relating to imperial villas in Italy for which there are archaeological remains. This collection shows that imperial villas did share some common features, even if a clear ‘imperial villa model’ never developed.

This essay interprets Erwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism of 1951 by situating the book within the Marburgian tradition of neo-Kantian philosophy. To do so, Panofsky’s relation to Marburgian neo-Kantianism is first contextualized and explicated, specifically by way of his well-known relationship to Ernst Cassirer and his own programmatic statements about art historical method. With this foundation in place, Panofsky’s specific claims in Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism are positioned as an attempted art-historical translation of the Marburgian commitment to ground knowledge on underlying structures of knowledge. Panofsky’s effort in this regard is shown to relate to nomological traditions of scholarship, wherein covering laws are an express and essential aim of research. Interpreting Panofsky’s argument in this way helps clarify the book’s uneven reception in the humanities, wherein an ideographic approach focusing on historical specificity for its own sake is a more accepted norm.