Author: User01

Every 31st March, the world looks toward Paris to celebrate Eiffel Tower Day. It was on this day in 1889 that Gustave Eiffel climbed the 1,710 steps of his newly completed masterpiece to unfurl the French tricolour flag at the summit. At the time, it was the tallest man-made structure in the world, standing at…

THE HUGUENOTS Exile from France, Settlement Across the World, and an Enduring Legacy The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 1685, and Its Consequences The Huguenots were French Protestants of the Reformed, that is, Calvinist, tradition. Their name, most likely derived from the German Eidgenossen meaning ‘oath-companions’, came into use in the 1560s as a…

Engineer, Visionary, and Builder of the Modern World 9th April 1806 — 15th September 1859 Introduction There are engineers, and then there is Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In a century that produced more great engineers than perhaps any other before or since, Brunel stands apart, not simply for the quantity or scale of his works, which…

THE GOTHIC REVIVAL c. 1740 – c. 1920 Introduction: The Return of the Pointed Arch Few movements in the history of Western architecture are as richly contradictory as the Gothic Revival. It was a style born of nostalgia yet expressed in the most ambitious buildings of a progressive industrial age. It was championed simultaneously by…

Architect, Designer, and Prophet of the Gothic Revival 1812 – 1852 Introduction In the annals of British architecture, few figures shine with such fierce, consuming brilliance as Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. Architect, designer, polemicist, and fervent Catholic convert, Pugin compressed into his brief forty years a creative output that would have exhausted several ordinary careers.…

ARCHITECTURE & HISTORY · VICTORIAN BRITAIN 13 July 1811 — 27 March 1878 Architect, restorer, and champion of the Gothic Revival, Sir George Gilbert Scott left his mark on nearly every corner of Britain. Over a career spanning five decades, he designed, built, or restored more than 800 structures, from grand railway hotels and royal…

Introduction There are museums that contain a nation’s art, and there are museums that are themselves works of art. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is, without question, the second kind. Rising above the Museumplein in a great mass of red brick, terracotta, turrets, and towers, it is one of the finest public buildings in the Netherlands,…

Introduction There are cities whose railway stations are merely functional, useful places to arrive and depart, but of no particular significance to the city’s identity or image. And then there are cities where the station is inseparable from everything the city means: where it stands not at the edge of civic life but at its…

On the morning of 25th April 2015, Italy’s Liberation Day, a date chosen with deliberate patriotic flair, the Frecciarossa 1000 entered commercial service between Milan and Rome. It was, by any technical measure, the fastest train in Europe at the time. But in Italy, a train is never merely a machine. The Frecciarossa 1000 was…

Introduction There is a particular kind of anticipation that belongs only to certain railway stations, a feeling compounded of departure and desire, of journeys about to begin and destinations already half-imagined. The Gare de Lyon in Paris produces this feeling more powerfully than almost any other station in the world. To stand on its concourse…