The most impressive scholarly work in the story of Stonehenge was carried out by John Aubrey, who should be the hero of the tale. With encouragement from the king (Charles II) he embarked on an antiquarian study first of the standing stones at Avebury, and then, in his efforts to work out some kind of […]

Unlike that to the west, the south parvis – the open, public space lying before the fagade – maintains its medieval configuration virtually unchanged (Figure 4.4). The south transept fagade fronts onto a relatively broad area which, in the Middle Ages, allowed the erection of merchants’ stalls, documented along the south flank of the nave […]

Sarah Bonnemaison We live in a society where life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Guy Debord1 An appreciation of the transience of things, and the concern to redeem them for eternity, is one of the strongest impulses in allegory. Walter Benjamin2 Spectacle As we see in these two quotations from Guy Debord […]

Zeynep Kezer Introduction The Four Seasons Istanbul Hotel was inaugurated with a series of high-profile invitation-only receptions spread over the course of three nights in early October 1996.1 The opening events created quite a splash, receiving extensive coverage in the Turkish media. Four Seasons Regent Hotels and Resorts and its local partner Sultanahmet Turizm AS […]

The ‘after’ narrative of New London Bridge centres around Robert McCulloch an American chainsaw magnate and entrepreneur who paid $2,460,000 for the nineteenth-century structure which he planned to move and reconstruct 12.3 G. Yates (attributed), ‘The Building of London Bridge’, watercolour, undated in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. The bridge had originally cost around £500,000 to […]