Rooms With A History

Rooms with a History

Inspirational and visually on trend, Ashley Hicks's latest work is a pattern book for the twenty-first century. Offering insights and revelations, Hicks's own exquisitely quirky and colorful historicist interiors are discussed with designs from the recent and faraway past. Ashley Hicks has created a mix of manifesto, souvenir album, and confession in this collection of noteworthy rooms--featuring his own one-of-a-kind interiors along with rooms that have inspired him. The manifesto aspect is rather limited, since Hicks is not a great believer in aesthetic rules or the value of so-called good taste, but as a souvenir album, it charts Hicks's personal creative journey of the last few years, illustrated with photographs of some favorite historical interiors and objects that represent a mixture of source material and inspiration. The book's twelve chapters reveal Hicks's creative process, how he approaches different themes in his own interiors, furniture designs, and works of art, and how these themes can be applied to the works of others. Such subjects as flowers, color, layers, form, pattern, and memory are presented in the context of actual projects. Historical and recent interiors are discussed for their decorative value--notable rooms and architecture include the Pantheon in Rome; Emperor Maximilian's tomb in Innsbruck; the Royal Pavilion, Brighton; and the Petit Trianon at Versailles. Hicks has created a book for devotees of decorating and the history of interior design.

Literary Rooms

The four prose texts discussed in Literary Rooms position themselves in a literary tradition which highlights the manifold purposes the private room may serve: it is a mirror of the inhabitant, a context in which to position the self, a place of and motor for identity quests, a rich metaphor, and a second skin around the inhabitant’s physical body. Even in times of increasing globalization and urbanization, the room continues to root the inhabitant; it serves as a retreat from the world and as a place in which to (re)negotiate questions of belonging, gender, class, and ethnicity. At the same time, the room is inevitably porous and constantly oscillates between inclusion and exclusion. The literary texts examined in this book are each highly fragmented and gesture towards a fragmentation of the contemporary world out of which they have grown as well as towards an abundance of fragmented self-images. Linking the approaches of narratology, globalization, and spatial criticism, Literary Rooms argues that in order to account for the spatial properties of the room, discourses developed during the spatial turn need to be extended and reevaluated.

USSR.