October 23, 2023
Em Dombrovskaya, WPAMC '24
As we visited museums concerned with the daily lives of people in the past on our British Design History trip, I started taking note of the investment museums are making in multi-sensory experiences of the home. In many cases this means the presence and interpretation of tallow candles. Tallow candles have been made by rendering animal fat within the home at least since the existence of the Roman Empire. Beeswax candles were ...
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October 17, 2023
Becca Lo Presti, WPAMC '24
Figure 1: The glass wall of the new Bath Spa reflects the iconic Bath Stone from nearby buildings while also asserting the contemporary date of the construction.
The city of Bath in the UK has an almost jarringly yellow look (fig.1). For over a millenia, the built environment of this UNESCO-designated heritage site has been synonymous with a particular type of pale yellow local limestone (of the Great Oolite Group for the ...
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September 11, 2023
Cecelia Eure, WPAMC '24
Figure 1: A desk from the Wallace Collection. Photo by the author.
On our trip to England for British Design History, I had the joy of seeing many beautiful pieces of material culture. From large collections like the Victoria & Albert museum to smaller spaces like Dennis Severs’ house in Spitalfields, we saw a wide range of British design and antiques. In most of the spaces we entered, the public wasn't allowed to ...
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September 01, 2022
Sylvia Hickman, WPAMC '23
Kerista was an urban commune based in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, which I had the pleasure of studying as part of a class on the material culture of America's communal utopias. Active in its most successful iteration from 1971 to 1991, Kerista was a small group of no more than 30 people at any given time. They were most known for their practice of polyfidelity, a form of non-monogamy in which ...
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