Journal articles on the topic 'Architecture, Chola'

Karur Kalyanapasupatheswarar temple is one of the most remarkable temples of the Chola period. The temple stands majestically on the western bank of the river Caveri, the gigantic structure drawing the attention of the visitors. The Kalyanapasupatheswarar temple, Karur, has been attempted in the succeeding pages. There is nothing special in such legends, which are associated with many religious centers of the country. But in the present context, what is noteworthy is the fact that such legends seem to have gained currency in a much early period, say that of the Cholas, for some sculptures depicting these stories are found carved on the gopuras, walls, and pillars which had come into existence by then. The sculptors were making use of such stories for the depiction of sculptural art. But later, these stories were collected, and with additions and distortions, they came to be associated with the place.

The temples have existed since the Sangam period, although they were built of perishable soil and wood and did not last long. But instead the Pallavas were the first to build cave temples and stone temples. It was later followed by the Pandya and Chola dynasties. This article describes the history, architecture and sculpture of the Someswarar Temple in Anthakudi, in the Keezhvellore taluk, Nagapattinam District, based on the evidence obtained through a field study. Along with these, the information known through the medieval Chola inscriptions here, the ancient Tamil people Architecture technique, structure of the temple and Chola sculptures have been studied historically. Therefore, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the ancient temples are not only places of worship but also treasures of art, history and culture.

Man lived as a savage in ancient times. At that time, man wandered like an animal, not knowing how to make a home and what to wear and what to eat. Then he gradually became civilized and met his needs and got civilized life from animal life. What helped him to become civilized were the various professions in which he learned little by little.It can be said that the arts are all professions that contribute to the well-being of man. It is these arts that give beauty and pleasure to the human mind. The arts that are considered to be special can be divided into five, namely, architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and epic, and afterwards koothu and dramas are combined into seven. The arts flourished wherever civilized people lived.We can find evidence in the various temples and palaces that the Chola monks also gave prominence to these arts. During the Chola period women lived freely without any restrictions. During the Sangam era, Viraliyar and Panar continued to develop music and koothu and rejuvenated the society. There is ample evidence that the Cholas followed the arts in worship as well.

Chekkizhar was a great poet in the medieval period of Tamil Nadu. He wrote his master piece work Periya Puranam which has considered as a greatest work in Tamil language. In this work the various skills of Chekkizhar has been exposed. He shows his mastery in the field of literature, fine art, medicine, law and history. As a chief minister of Chola empire he had various skills in the field politics, literature, art and architecture. He shows many of his skills in his work and for that his work is considered as a classical ever green master piece. Even though he wrote only one book it is enough to reveal his skills in the field of art. For that only he was compared with great scholars like Thiruvalluvar, Elangovadigal, and Kambar.

The crystal structures of six new crystals of oxo-cholic acids (oxo-CA) are reported: (I) 3α,12α-dihydroxy-7-oxo-5β-cholan-24-oic acid; (II) 3α,7α-dihydroxy-12-oxo-5β-cholan-24-oic acid; (III) 7α-hydroxy-3,12-dioxo-5β-cholan-24-oic acid; (IV-α) and (IV-β) 12α-hydroxy-3,7-dioxo-5β-cholan-24-oic acid; (V) 3,7,12-trihydroxy-5β-cholan-24-oic acid. (IV-β) is a pseudopolymorphic solvated form of (IV-α) and contains small channels which can trap disordered water molecules. In all the structures the four saturated cycles, forming the common alicyclic skeleton, have the same conformation, while the carboxylic side chain adopts flexible conformations in order to produce the most efficient crystal aggregations. The structures display a variety of supramolecular architectures dominated by networks of cooperative O—H...O hydrogen bonds forming different packing motifs often supported by weaker C—H...O interactions.

The castle of King Daniel (Danylo -in Ukrainian) in the Cholm (today the city of Chełm in Poland) has survived to this day only in the form of archaeological remains of foundations and walls. A significant archaeological layer is formed here as a result of the decline and gradual degradation of the complex. He retained a large amount of construction substance, architectural details, artifacts of the real-life of medieval times. Of particular importance to us are archaeological materials that reveal the construction and architectural features of King Daniel's residences. These materials are unique because, unfortunately, we do not have any other monuments that would show the King's construction activity. The complexes of the High and Low castles in the cityof Lviv were wholly dismantled in the 19th century. In other towns laid down by King Daniel -in Kremenets, Danyliv, Dorohychyn, Kamianets, Bakota, Kalmius, studies from objective reasons are difficult or impossible. Archeological studies have been carried out in the Cholm by specialists of the Institute of Archeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences since 2010. The castle site is centrally located on the so-called High Hill -Wysoka Górka. The results of archaeological research give a unique opportunity to navigate the nature of the architecture and material culture of the court of Danylo Romanovych in the mid and second half of the 13th century. The obtained archaeological results are significant for modeling the architecture of the residence. Also, results allow identifying the buildings from the materials and construction technologies used. Materials obtained during archaeological excavations on Wysoka Górka in Cholm in the area of Daniel Romanovych’s 13th century residential-sacral complex have been subject to examination. They come in the forms of bricks and glazed tiles, as well as sizeable shapeless and purposeless accumulations indicating post-manufacturing remains. The materials are white, green and multi-coloured. They refer to Halytsian alabasters and green glauconite from Cholm which were originally used there (before the fire of 1256) –the fact mentioned in the Halych–Volhynia Chronicle. The white materials examination was performed. They were diagnosed by means of a SEM microscope and x-ray diffraction. Furthermore, a micro area chemical analysis was conducted by means of SEM microscope with EDS module. The conducted examination indicated that the materials in question were manufactured using other than ceramic technologies, but similar to the ones used to produce silicate materials nowadays. As raw materials chalk and biogenic silica obtained from horsetail were used. The petrification procedure was conducted in hydrothermal conditions. As a result of this alchemical experiment, a material structurally similar to marble or massive limestone was obtained. The successful production of the materials translated into the possibility of the implementation of the ideological assumptions of the structures constructed under the explicit influence of the style of the 12-14century Tuscan School.This publication prepared in the framework of theproject "Northern part of the princely residential complex in the Сhelm" ("Północna część książęcego zespołu rezydencjonalnego w Chełmie") under the number 2014/13 / B / HS3 / 04930, funded by the National Science and Research Center and realized by the Institute of Archelogy and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw under the promotion of prof. A.Buko.

This article reviews the monuments of ancient fortification, which historically belonged to the remote chora of Chersonesus since the late IV century BC. Among them, the author highlights the urban and rural settlements that featured various defensive structures. This factor is associated with a wide territorial expansion of Chersonesus in the territory North-Western Crimea. The interpretation of some monuments remains controversial due to the absence of meticulous analysis of the functions of certain constructs and planning structures of the fortified settlements. The role of the fortified settlements of the remote chora of Chersonesus in the process of development of vast territories of the North-Western Crimea is also contentious. The key goal of this article consists in the analysis of ancient fortifications from the perspective of the existing archaeological classification and records from the written sources. For correlating the Chersonesus fortifications with the existing sections in archaeological classification, namely with the concept of “fort”, the author applies the analysis of defensive functions, which in turn, are reflected in architectural-planning solutions and provisioned by the ancient architects military tactical techniques, which can be observed in the architectural remnants. Based on the acquired results, the author offers a multifaceted comprehensive approach towards analyzing the architectural constructs, which allows conducting new historical reconstructions of defense system of the chora.

Membrane models of the stratum corneum (SC) lipid barrier, either healthy or affected by recessive X-linked ichthyosis, constructed from ceramide [Cer; nonhydroxyacyl sphingosine N-tetracosanoyl-d-erythro-sphingosine (CerNS24) alone or with omega-O-acylceramide N-(32-linoleyloxy)dotriacontanoyl-d-erythro-sphingosine (CerEOS)], FFAs(C16–24), cholesterol (Chol), and sodium cholesteryl sulfate (CholS) were investigated. X-ray diffraction (XRD) revealed a previously unreported polymorphism of the membranes. In the absence of CerEOS, the membranes formed a short lamellar phase (SLP; the repeat distance d = 5.3 nm), a medium lamellar phase (MLP; d = 10.6 nm), or very long lamellar phases (VLLP; d = 15.9 and 21.2 nm). An increased CholS-to-Chol ratio modulated the membrane polymorphism, although the CholS phase separated at ≥ 7 weight% (of total lipids). The presence of CerEOS led to the stable long lamellar phase (LLP) with d = 12.2 nm and prevented VLLP formation. Our XRD results agree well with recently published cryo-electron microscopy data for vitreous skin sections, while also revealing new structures. Thus, lamellar phases with long repeat distances (MLP and VLLP) may be formed in the absence of omega-O-acylceramide, whereas these ultralong Cer species likely stabilize the final SC lipid architecture of LLP by riveting the adjacent lipid layers.

The article presents an apsidal temple excavated by the 6th Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities at Nikoleika, in the chora of ancient Helike. The building was erected at the end of the eighth century, after levelling which probably destroyed a Protogeometric construction. A mudbrick altar erected in the first half of the eighth century lay buried beneath the temple floor: offerings and faunal remains from the altar area are presented, noting evidence for ritual dining. A terminus ante quem for the abandonment of the Geometric temple is provided by mid sixth-century architectural terracottas, presumably from its successor.

The article examines the problems in developing approaches for the description and stylistic interpretation of antique masonry, as well as the issues in their stylistic dating. The task of dating construction remains belonging to the 7th century B.C.E. to the turn of the era, has attracted the scholarly attention of the scientific community since the 1940s and has been considered by both foreign and Russian researchers. The article's research object is the construction remains of Greek civil and military architecture in the Mediterranean and the Northern Black Sea regions - territories considered to have been the center and periphery of the Greek Oikumena. The study applied the comparative-typological method, the synchronization of objects in time and space, and dating by analogy. Both in Russian and foreign studies a significant amount of data has been collected for the analysis and construction of appropriate conclusions regarding the distribution and popularity of certain masonry in particular periods of time. However, due to the presence of many factors affecting the ancient construction and stone-carving craft, a number of exceptions due to local natural, economic, raw material, and administrative factors can be distinguished in the observed patterns. Thus, the whole picture of the formation of the construction and stone-carving craft (with the allocation of the corresponding types of masonry in a certain historical period) can be reconstructed only with a comprehensive examination of all of them. As the most interesting objects in this regard, the article cites a number of architectural remains belonging to the monuments of the distant chora of Tauric Chersonesos dating to the second half of the 4th century B.C.E.

An important theme in place marketing, branding, and architectural literature – and practice – is the development of a strong, attractive image, through (primarily) visual representation of a location. But considering that today we live in cities that are digital hybrids, in which we are connected to a wider system of information, how is an ‘image of the city’ constructed in this context, and are there other strategies and tactics that should be considered? Using Plato’s notion of chora and Claudius Ptolemy’s notion of chorography as points of departure that will lead us to consider Michel de Certeau’s concept of walking as an experiential and dialectic process through which we relate the spatial stories of places and moreover, in the context of digital locative media, we will point to ways by which this may be accomplished. In introducing the reader to the concept of digital chorographies as a means by which a place’s spatial narratives may be constructed, we suggest that a current emphasis on visual representation (for example, of attractive place product elements/attributes, such as architectural landmarks and cityscapes, etc.) should be considered in conjunction with the articulation and narration of qualities contributing to a place’s realm of meaning.

In Ben Jonson's Epicoene, the misanthropic Morose pathologically seals his home against the “common noises” of London, “turning Turk” against his neighbors. What opens up the queer space of Morose's home, ironically, is his equally queer marriage to a cross-dressed boy, a travesty of marital domesticity that parallels the urban travesty of spatial isolation. While the eventual breaching of architectural and gender facades seems to reinscribe social norms, Jonson's play profoundly questions how we construct the space of home, the space of self. Indeed, by setting Epicoene near the Whitefriars theater, where the play was first performed, Jonson adopts chorographic techniques to represent “home” to viewers drawn from that social and spatial milieu. Through a reconsideration of Plato's chora, this essay explores how a vengeful community wrenches open Morose's closet-cum-home, forcing him to renounce his manhood and reducing him to a nonsubject.

The expansion of the Bosporan Kingdom (the interior colonization of Bosporus) was caused by the need for commercial grain in the Greek markets of the Mediterranean. The steep rise in the Bosporan rulers’ incomes followed the annexation of Sindica—one of the most fertile lands of the Northern Pontic region, situated in the Lower Kuban basin. This study discusses the history of the vast chora of the Greek Gorhippia in the southeastern fringes of Sindica, focusing on findings from a Bosporan fort—the Raevskoye fortified settlement. We reconstruct the evolution of the anthropogenic landscape of the area over four centuries (Hellenistic and Early Roman period). The chronology is based on a collection of Bosporan coins from the fortified settlement. We analyze the factors due to which the habitation layers of the fortified settlement span a period from the Early Bronze Age to the High Middle Ages. We provide a new topography of the Early Iron Age aboriginal site, along with that of the fortified site existing during the three Bosporan stages. Special attention is paid to the fortification system, arranged in the Hellenistic period. Studies in recent decades have suggested that the fortifications were constructed according to the typical Bosporan technique of adobe-stone architecture. The fortified settlement evolved over a long period as an economic and political center of a large borderland zone between the Greek civilization and the archaic societies of the Caucasian piedmonta peculiar frontier of the classical era.

New construction technology and new aesthetic trends are emphasized as the characteristics of Chola influence which have been adapted in Cham religious architecture. The temple architecture and sculptures of Champa thus provide the best information on reflecting the pinnacle of Champa art dating from the 11th and 13th centuries CE. Champa became a center for transportation with its prosperous port-cities/port-polities expressing demand for import-export commodities, especially the trade between South India and South China. The Champa kingdom had thus been one of the main bridges for Chola art to reach Southeast Asian states which was achieved through the commercial perspective and religious art. Kiến trúc tôn giáo Champa từng tiếp thu những đặc điểm của Chola mà tiêu biểu là kỹ thuật xây dựng và xu hướng nghệ thuật. Kiến trúc và điêu khắc đền-tháp Champa hàm chứa những thông tin tốt nhất về thời kỳ hưng thịnh của vương quốc từ thế kỷ 11 đến 13 trong mối quan hệ văn hóa với Chola. Champa từng là một trung tâm vận chuyển với hệ thống cảng-thị phát triển, có khả năng đáp ứng được các nhu cầu xuất nhập khẩu hàng hóa cao cấp, đặc biệt trong mối giao thương giữa vùng Nam Ấn và Hoa Nam, do đó vương quốc duyên hải này đã giữ vai trò là cầu nối cho nghệ thuật Chola phổ biến ở Đông Nam Á, thành quả này được phản ảnh qua lăng kính của các mối quan hệ hải thương cũng như các công trình nghệ thuật tôn giáo.

In the history of a great country like India, there have been many rulers since ancient times who ruled different regions of India at different times. But few of these rulers are called great rulers. Maurya ruler Chandragupta Maurya and Emperor Ashoka, Gupta ruler Chandragupta II (Vikramaditya), Vardhana ruler Harshavardhana, Kushan emperor Kanishka, Satavahana ruler Gautamiputra Satkarni, Chalukya ruler Pulakeshi II, Chola rulers Rajaraja Chola and Rajendra Chola, Rashtrakuta ruler Amoghvarsh, Pratihar ruler Mihira bhoja, Mughal emperor Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar are named. Among these great rulers of India were two rulers whose lives and work were very similar. The rulers were the Gupta emperor Chandragupta II (Vikramaditya) and the Mughal emperor Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar. The similarity between Chandragupta II (Vikramaditya) and Jalaluddin Mohammad Akbar is that the grandfather of both the rulers was the real founder of their kingdom. Both the rulers came to power through struggle (war). Both the rulers were tolerant rulers. The empire of the two rulers extended from present day Pakistan in the north to the mouth of the river Narmada in the south and from the mouth of the river Ganga in the east to the mouth of the river Indus in the west. Art, architecture, etc. developed during the reign of both the rulers. Due to the excellent administrative system of both the rulers, their empire remained stable for many generations to come. The main similarity between the two rulers is that in the history of India, only this two rulars have the Navratna in their court.

There is, in our sense of place, little cognisance of what lies underground. Yet our sense of place, instinctive, unconscious, primeval, has its own underground: the secret spaces which mirror our insides; the world beneath the skin. Our roots lie beneath the ground, with the minerals and the dead. (Hughes 83) The-Home-and-Away-Game Imagine the earth-grounded, “diagrammatological” trajectory of a footballer who as one member of a team is psyching himself up before the start of a game. The siren blasts its trumpet call. The footballer bursts out of the pavilion (where this psyching up has taken place) to engage in the opening bounce or kick of the game. And then: running, leaping, limping after injury, marking, sliding, kicking, and possibly even passing out from concussion. Finally, the elation accompanying the final siren, after which hugs, handshakes and raised fists conclude the actual match on the football oval. This exit from the pavilion, the course the player takes during the game itself, and return to the pavilion, forms a combination of stasis and movement, and a return to exhausted stasis again, that every player engages with regardless of the game code. Examined from a “diagrammatological” perspective, a perspective Rowan Wilken (following in the path of Gilles Deleuze and W. J. T. Mitchell) understands as “a generative process: a ‘metaphor’ or way of thinking — diagrammatic, diagrammatological thinking — which in turn, is linked to poetic thinking” (48), this footballer’s scenario arises out of an aerial perspective that depicts the actual spatial trajectory the player takes during the course of a game. It is a diagram that is digitally encoded via a sensor on the footballer’s body, and being an electronically encoded diagram it can also make available multiple sets of data such as speed, heartbeat, blood pressure, maybe even brain-wave patterns. From this limited point of view there is only one footballer’s playing trajectory to consider; various groupings within the team, the whole team itself, and the diagrammatological depiction of its games with various other teams might also be possible. This singular imagining though is itself an actuality: as a diagram it is encoded as a graphic image by a satellite hovering around the earth with a Global Positioning System (GPS) reading the sensor attached to the footballer which then digitally encodes this diagrammatological trajectory for appraisal later by the player, coach, team and management. In one respect, this practice is another example of a willing self-surveillance critical to explaining the reflexive subject and its attribute of continuous self-improvement. According to Docker, Official Magazine of the Fremantle Football Club, this is a technique the club uses as a part of game/play assessment, a system that can provide a “running map” for each player equipped with such a tracking device during a game. As the Fremantle Club’s Strength and Conditioning Coach Ben Tarbox says of this tactic, “We’re getting a physiological profile that has started to build a really good picture of how individual players react during a game” (21). With a little extra effort (and some sizeable computer processing grunt) this two dimensional linear graphic diagram of a footballer working the football ground could also form the raw material for a three-dimensional animation, maybe a virtual reality game, even a hologram. It could also be used to sideline a non-performing player. Now try another related but different imagining: what if this diagrammatological trajectory could be enlarged a little to include the possibility that this same player’s movements could be mapped out by the idea of home-and-away games; say over the course of a season, maybe even a whole career, for instance? No doubt, a wide range of differing diagrammatological perspectives might suggest themselves. My own particular refinement of this movement/stasis on the footballer’s part suggests my own distinctive comings and goings to and from my own specific piece of home country. And in this incessantly domestic/real world reciprocity, in this diurnally repetitive leaving and coming back to home country, might it be plausible to think of “Home as Capital of the Region”? If, as Walter Benjamin suggests in the prelude to his monumental Arcades Project, “Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” could it be that both in and through my comings and goings to and from this selfsame home country, my own burgeoning sense of regionality is constituted in every minute-by-minutiae of lived experience? Could it be that this feeling about home is manifested in my every day-to-night manoeuvre of home-and-away-and-away-and-home-making, of every singular instance of exit, play/engage, and the return home? “Home, Capital of the Region” then examines the idea that my home is that part of the country which is the still-point of eternal return, the bedrock to which I retreat after the daily grind, and the point from which I start out and do it all again the next day. It employs, firstly, this ‘diagrammatological’ perspective to illustrate the point that this stasis/movement across country can make an electronic record of my own psychic self-surveillance and actualisation in-situ. And secondly, the architectural plan of the domestic home (examined through the perspective of critical regionalism) is used as a conduit to illustrate how I am physically embedded in country. Lastly, intermingling these digressive threads is chora, Plato’s notion of embodied place and itself an ancient regional rendering of this eternal return to the beginning, the place where the essential diversity of country decisively enters the soul. Chora: Core of Regionality Kevin Lynch writes that, “Our senses are local, while our experience is regional” (10), a combination that suggests this regional emphasis on home-and-away-making might be a useful frame of reference (simultaneously spatiotemporal, both a visceral and encoded communication) for me to include as a crucial vector in my own life-long learning package. Regionality (as, variously, a sub-generic categorisation and an extension/concentration of nationality, as well as a recently re-emerged friend/antagonist to a global understanding) infuses my world of home with a grounded footing in country, one that is a site of an Eternal Return to the Beginning in the micro-world of the everyday. This is a point John Sallis discusses at length in his analysis of Plato’s Timaeus and its founding notion of regionality: chora. More extended absences away from home-base are of course possible but one’s return to home on most days and for most nights is a given of post/modern, maybe even of ancient everyday experience. Even for the continually shifting nomad, nightfall in some part of the country brings the rest and recreation necessary for the next day’s wanderings. This fundamental question of an Eternal Return to the Beginning arises as a crucial element of the method in Plato’s Timaeus, a seemingly “unstructured” mythic/scientific dialogue about the origins and structure of both the psychically and the physically implaced world. In the Timaeus, “incoherence is especially obvious in the way the natural sequence in which a narrative would usually unfold is interrupted by regressions, corrections, repetitions, and abrupt new beginnings” (Gadamer 160). Right in the middle of the Timaeus, in between its sections on the “Work of Reason” and the “Work of Necessity”, sits chora, both an actual spatial and bodily site where my being intersects with my becoming, and where my lived life criss-crosses the various arts necessary to articulating a recorded version of that life. Every home is a grounded chora-logical timespace harness guiding its occupant’s thoughts, feelings and actions. My own regionally implaced chora (an example of which is the diagrammatological trajectory already outlined above as my various everyday comings and goings, of me acting in and projecting myself into context) could in part be understood as a graphical realisation of the extent of my movements and stationary rests in my own particular timespace trajectory. The shorthand for this process is ‘embedded’. Gregory Ulmer writes of chora that, “While chorography as a term is close to choreography, it duplicates a term that already exists in the discipline of geography, thus establishing a valuable resonance for a rhetoric of invention concerned with the history of ‘place’ in relation to memory” (Heuretics 39, original italics). Chorography is the geographic discipline for the systematic study and analysis of regions. Chora, home, country and regionality thus form an important multi-dimensional zone of interplay in memorialising the game of everyday life. In light of these observations I might even go so far as to suggest that this diagrammatological trajectory (being both digital and GPS originated) is part of the increasingly electrate condition that guides the production of knowledge in any global/regional context. This last point is a contextual connection usefully examined in Alan J. Scott’s Regions and the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition, and Political Order and Michael Storper’s The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy. Their analyses explicitly suggest that the symbiosis between globalisation and regionalisation has been gathering pace since at least the end of World War Two and the Bretton Woods agreement. Our emerging understanding of electracy also happens to be Gregory Ulmer’s part-remedy for shifting the ground under the intense debates surrounding il/literacy in the current era (see, in particular, Internet Invention). And, for Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison and John Frow’s analysis of “Australian Everyday Cultures” (“Media Culture and the Home” 57–86), it is within the home that our un.conscious understanding of electronic media is at its most intense, a pattern that emerges in the longer term through receiving telegrams, compiling photo albums, listening to the radio, home- and video-movies, watching the evening news on television, and logging onto the computer in the home-office, media-room or home-studio. These various generalisations (along with this diagrammatological view of my comings and goings to and from the built space of home), all point indiscriminately to a productive confusion surrounding the sedentary and nomadic opposition/conjunction. If natural spaces are constituted in nouns like oceans, forests, plains, grasslands, steppes, deserts, rivers, tidal interstices, farmland etc. (and each categorisation here relies on the others for its existence and demarcation) then built space is often seen as constituting its human sedentary equivalent. For Deleuze and Guatteri (in A Thousand Plateaus, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine”) these natural spaces help instigate a nomadic movement across localities and regions. From a nomadology perspective, these smooth spaces unsettle a scientific, numerical calculation, sometimes even aesthetic demarcation and order. If they are marked at all, it is by heterogenous and differential forces, energised through constantly oscillating intensities. A Thousand Plateaus is careful though not to elevate these smooth nomadic spaces over the more sedentary spaces of culture and power (372–373). Nonetheless, as Edward S. Casey warns, “In their insistence on becoming and movement, however, the authors of A Thousand Plateaus overlook the placial potential of settled dwelling — of […] ‘built places’” (309, original italics). Sedentary, settled dwelling centred on home country may have a crust of easy legibility and order about it but it also formats a locally/regionally specific nomadic quality, a point underscored above in the diagrammatological perspective. The sedentary tendency also emerges once again in relation to home in the architectural drafting of the domestic domicile. The Real Estate Revolution When Captain Cook planted the British flag in the sand at Botany Bay in 1770 and declared the country it spiked as Crown Land and henceforth will come under the ownership of an English sovereign, it was also the moment when white Australia’s current fascination with real estate was conceived. In the wake of this spiking came the intense anxiety over Native Title that surfaced in late twentieth century Australia when claims of Indigenous land grabs would repossess suburban homes. While easily dismissed as hyperbole, a rhetorical gesture intended to arouse this very anxiety, its emergence is nonetheless an indication of the potential for political and psychic unsettling at the heart of the ownership and control of built place, or ‘settled dwelling’ in the Australian context. And here it would be wise to include not just the gridded, architectural quality of home-building and home-making, but also the home as the site of the family romance, another source of unsettling as much as a peaceful calming. Spreading out from the boundaries of the home are the built spaces of fences, bridges, roads, railways, airport terminals (along with their interconnecting pathways), which of course brings us back to the communications infrastructure which have so often followed alongside the development of transport infrastructure. These and other elements represent this conglomerate of built space, possibly the most significant transformation of natural space that humanity has brought about. For the purposes of this meditation though it is the more personal aspect of built space — my home and regional embeddedness, along with their connections into the global electrosphere — that constitutes the primary concern here. For a sedentary, striated space to settle into an unchallenged existence though requires a repression of the highest order, primarily because of the home’s proximity to everyday life, of the latter’s now fading ability to sometimes leave its presuppositions well enough alone. In settled, regionally experienced space, repressions are more difficult to abstract away, they are lived with on a daily basis, which also helps to explain the extra intensity brought to their sometimes-unsettling quality. Inversely, and encased in this globalised electro-spherical ambience, home cannot merely be a place where one dwells within avoiding those presuppositions, I take them with me when I travel and they come back with me from afar. This is a point obliquely reflected in Pico Iyer’s comment that “Australians have so flexible a sense of home, perhaps, that they can make themselves at home anywhere” (185). While our sense of home may well be, according to J. Douglas Porteous, “the territorial core” of our being, when other arrangements of space and knowledge shift it must inevitably do so as well. In these shifts of spatial affiliation (aided and abetted by regionalisation, globalisation and electronic knowledge), the built place of home can no longer be considered exclusively under the illusion of an autonomous sanctuary wholly guaranteed by capitalist property relations, one of the key factors in its attraction. These shifts in the cultural, economic and psychic relation of home to country are important to a sense of local and regional implacement. The “feeling” of autonomy and security involved in home occupation and/or ownership designates a component of this implacement, a point leading to Eric Leed’s comment that, “By the sixteenth century, literacy had become one of the definitive signs — along with the possession of property and a permanent residence — of an independent social status” (53). Globalising and regionalising forces make this feeling of autonomy and security dynamic, shifting the ground of home, work-place practices and citizenship allegiances in the process. Gathering these wide-ranging forces impacting on psychic and built space together is the emergence of critical regionalism as a branch of architectonics, considered here as a theory of domestic architecture. Critical Regionality Critical regionalism emerged out of the collective thinking of Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis (Tropical Architecture; Critical Regionalism), and as these authors themselves acknowledge, was itself deeply influenced by the work of Lewis Mumford during the first part of the twentieth century when he was arguing against the authority of the international style in architecture, a style epitomised by the Bauhaus movement. It is Kenneth Frampton’s essay, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” that deliberately takes this question of critical regionalism and makes it a part of a domestic architectonic project. In many ways the ideas critical regionalism espouses can themselves be a microcosm of this concomitantly emerging global/regional polis. With public examples of built-form the power of the centre is on display by virtue of a building’s enormous size and frequently high-cultural aesthetic power. This is a fact restated again and again from the ancient world’s agora to Australia’s own political bunker — its Houses of Parliament in Canberra. While Frampton discusses a range of aspects dealing with the universal/implaced axis across his discussion, it is points five and six that deserve attention from a domestically implaced perspective. Under the sub-heading, “Culture Versus Nature: Topography, Context, Climate, Light and Tectonic Form” is where he writes that, Here again, one touches in concrete terms this fundamental opposition between universal civilization and autochthonous culture. The bulldozing of an irregular topography into a flat site is clearly a technocratic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness, whereas the terracing of the same site to receive the stepped form of a building is an engagement in the act of “cultivating” the site. (26, original italics) The “totally flat datum” that the universalising tendency sometimes presupposes is, within the critical regionalist perspective, an erroneous assumption. The “cultivation” of a site for the design of a building illustrates the point that built space emerges out of an interaction between parallel phenomena as they contrast and/or converge in a particular set of timespace co-ordinates. These are phenomena that could include (but are not limited to) geomorphic data like soil and rock formations, seismic activity, inclination and declension; climatic considerations in the form of wind patterns, temperature variations, rainfall patterns, available light and dark, humidity and the like; the building context in relation to the cardinal points of north, south, east, and west, along with their intermediary positions. There are also architectural considerations in the form of available building materials and personnel to consider. The social, psychological and cultural requirements of the building’s prospective in-dwellers are intermingled with all these phenomena. This is not so much a question of where to place the air conditioning system but the actuality of the way the building itself is placed on its site, or indeed if that site should be built on at all. A critical regionalist building practice, then, is autochthonous to the degree that a full consideration of this wide range of in-situ interactions is taken into consideration in the development of its design plan. And given this autochthonous quality of the critical regionalist project, it also suggests that the architectural design plan itself (especially when it utilised in conjunction with CAD and virtual reality simulations), might be the better model for designing electrate-centred projects rather than writing or even the script. The proliferation of ‘McMansions’ across many Australian suburbs during the 1990s (generally, oversized domestic buildings designed in the abstract with little or no thought to the above mentioned elements, on bulldozed sites, with powerful air-conditioning systems, and no verandas or roof eves to speak of) demonstrates the continuing influence of a universal, centralising dogma in the realm of built place. As summer temperatures start to climb into the 40°C range all these air-conditioners start to hum in unison, which in turn raises the susceptibility of the supporting infrastructure to collapse under the weight of an overbearing electrical load. The McMansion is a clear example of a built form that is envisioned more so in a drafting room, a space where the architect is remote-sensing the locational specificities. In this envisioning (driven more by a direct line-of-sight idiom dominant in “flat datum” and economic considerations rather than architectural or experiential ones), the tactile is subordinated, which is the subject of Frampton’s sixth point: It is symptomatic of the priority given to sight that we find it necessary to remind ourselves that the tactile is an important dimension in the perception of built form. One has in mind a whole range of complementary sensory perceptions which are registered by the labile body: the intensity of light, darkness, heat and cold; the feeling of humidity; the aroma of material; the almost palpable presence of masonry as the body senses it own confinement; the momentum of an induced gait and the relative inertia of the body as it traverses the floor; the echoing resonance of our own footfall. (28) The point here is clear: in its wider recognition of, and the foregrounding of my body’s full range of sensate capacities in relation to both natural and built space, the critical regionalist approach to built form spreads its meaning-making capacities across a broader range of knowledge modalities. This tactility is further elaborated in more thoroughly personal ways by Margaret Morse in her illuminating essay, “Home: Smell, Taste, Posture, Gleam”. Paradoxically, this synaesthetic, syncretic approach to bodily meaning-making in a built place, regional milieu intensely concentrates the site-centred locus of everyday life, while simultaneously, the electronic knowledge that increasingly underpins it expands both my body’s and its region’s knowledge-making possibilities into a global gestalt, sometimes even a cosmological one. It is a paradoxical transformation that makes us look anew at social, cultural and political givens, even objective and empirical understandings, especially as they are articulated through national frames of reference. Domestic built space then is a kind of micro-version of the multi-function polis where work, pleasure, family, rest, public display and privacy intermingle. So in both this reduction and expansion in the constitution of domestic home life, one that increasingly represents the location of the production of knowledge, built place represents a concentration of energy that forces us to re-imagine border-making, order, and the dynamic interplay of nomadic movement and sedentary return, a point that echoes Nicolas Rothwell’s comment that “every exile has in it a homecoming” (80). Albeit, this is a knowledge-making milieu with an expanded range of modalities incorporated and expressed through a wide range of bodily intensities not simply cognitive ones. Much of the ambiguous discontent manifested in McMansion style domiciles across many Western countries might be traced to the fact that their occupants have had little or no say in the way those domiciles have been designed and/or constructed. In Heidegger’s terms, they have not thought deeply enough about “dwelling” in that building, although with the advent of the media room the question of whether a “building” securely borders both “dwelling” and “thinking” is now open to question. As anxieties over border-making at all scales intensifies, the complexities and un/sureties of natural and built space take ever greater hold of the psyche, sometimes through the advance of a “high level of critical self-consciousness”, a process Frampton describes as a “double mediation” of world culture and local conditions (21). Nearly all commentators warn of a nostalgic, romantic or a sentimental regionalism, the sum total of which is aimed at privileging the local/regional and is sometimes utilised as a means of excluding the global or universal, sometimes even the national (Berry 67). Critical regionalism is itself a mediating factor between these dispositions, working its methods and practices through my own psyche into the local, the regional, the national and the global, rejecting and/or accepting elements of these domains, as my own specific context, in its multiplicity, demands it. If the politico-economic and cultural dimensions of this global/regional world have tended to undermine the process of border-making across a range of scales, we can see in domestic forms of built place the intense residue of both their continuing importance and an increased dependency on this electro-mediated world. This is especially apparent in those domiciles whose media rooms (with their satellite dishes, telephone lines, computers, television sets, games consuls, and music stereos) are connecting them to it in virtuality if not in reality. Indeed, the thought emerges (once again keeping in mind Eric Leed’s remark on the literate-configured sense of autonomy that is further enhanced by a separate physical address and residence) that the intense importance attached to domestically orientated built place by globally/regionally orientated peoples will figure as possibly the most viable means via which this sense of autonomy will transfer to electronic forms of knowledge. If, however, this here domestic habitué turns his gaze away from the screen that transports me into this global/regional milieu and I focus my attention on the physicality of the building in which I dwell, I once again stand in the presence of another beginning. This other beginning is framed diagrammatologically by the building’s architectural plans (usually conceived in either an in-situ, autochthonous, or a universal manner), and is a graphical conception that anchors my body in country long after the architects and builders have packed up their tools and left. This is so regardless of whether a home is built, bought, rented or squatted in. Ihab Hassan writes that, “Home is not where one is pushed into the light, but where one gathers it into oneself to become light” (417), an aphorism that might be rephrased as follows: “Home is not where one is pushed into the country, but where one gathers it into oneself to become country.” For the in-and-out-and-around-and-about domestic dweller of the twenty-first century, then, home is where both regional and global forms of country decisively enter the soul via the conduits of the virtuality of digital flows and the reality of architectural footings. 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