Categories
British Domestic/residential Europe Garden/park/landscape

Castle Howard, Yorkshire, 1699-1801

An English landscape garden using an eclectic combination of architectural typologies and building styles. Castle Howard is an English castle and landscape garden located in North Yorkshire. From a first glance, viewers tend to draw their attention towards the magnificent splendour of the castle, without paying much attention to the surrounding landscape. The ornamental architecture […]

Categories
British Community/urbanism Industrial/resource extraction North America Race Uncategorized

The Hastings Mill Store and the Colonial Project of “Vancouver”, 1865

A city built around resource extraction and the dispossession of indigenous lands and culture The Hastings Mill Store was built in 1865 and is an important case study to examine how British colonists used land as an extractive resource to build industrial capital in BC. The colonial government systematically displaced and dispossessed the lands and […]

Categories
Africa Institutional/cultural/religious Settler colonialism Uncategorized

Forms and Symbols of Cultural Appropriation: The Egyptian Building

The Egyptian Revival Style enjoyed attention in the United States (US) as “an exotic” and as a primarily architectural phenomenon in the mid-nineteenth century.1 Architectural markers from the time—such as the original Library of Congress (1808), and the Washington monument (1848)—point to the problematic nature of colonial power exerting influence through the fetishization of ancient […]

Categories
Asia British Empire Institutional/cultural/religious Settler colonialism

Mayo College, Ajmer, India, 1885

The British Raj Thrives due to Mayo College In 1875, the British founded Mayo College in the town of Ajmer, located in the Rajputana (now known as Rajasthan) area in India. During the days of the British Empire, the area of Rajputana was divided into princely states, each having its own ruler who owed allegiance […]

Categories
Asia Military/fort Spanish

Fort San Pedro: Defense, Christianity and Labour

Fort San Pedro is a military structure created at the height of the Spanish colonial presence in Cebu, located in the Central Visayas region of the Philippines. The project faces the Cebu strait, where it defended Spanish colonial settlements from Moro raids and conflicts with Dutch forces. As with numerous similar forts distributed throughout the […]

Categories
Industrial/resource extraction North America

Lowell Mills: The Factory Town in Massachusetts (1835-1955)

A City Created By the Mills The Industrial Revolution was a change in human life circumstances that occurred in Britain, the United States, and Western Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, owing in large part to developments in industrial technology. 1 Massachusetts became one of the wealthiest manufacturing centres in the nineteenth […]

Categories
Asia Empire French Geography Religious Typology

The Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica of Saigon (1877 – 1880) – Colonial Justification Through Religion

The Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica of Saigon, constructed between 1877 and 18801, can be considered a garish example of French colonial architecture located in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The religious structure, officially, the Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of The Immaculate Conception was commissioned by Bishop Lefevre and designed by Jules Bourard.2 One will note […]

Categories
Asia British Community/urbanism Institutional/cultural/religious Race

Teak and Gold: Decolonial Resistance in British Rangoon

All the colors, creeds, breeds, and voices become Rangoon; Rangoon was born in Rangoon, Rangoon was raised in Rangoon, Rangoon stood on par with other cities around the world. Proud Rangoon, the son of an urban city:  (From Dressmaker Rangoon by Maung Chaw Nwe and translated by Kenneth Wong, 2013)1  The growth of British control […]

Categories
Asia Institutional/cultural/religious Public/government Typology

The Akasaka Palace | Tokyo | 1899-1909

The Meiji Restoration The Meiji period (1868–1912) was decisively an era of construction. It saw the military state of the Tokugawa shogunate replaced with a Westernized nation under a restored imperial authority. One of the most urgent tasks facing the Meiji leaders, who were largely drawn from the early samurai class of the Tokugawa Era […]

Categories
Europe French Institutional/cultural/religious

Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève: Iron and Knowledge as Materials of Colonization

Henri Labrouste’s Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve is a building of conflicting ideas. On its classical stone exterior the names of 810 authors inscribe a catalog of the most prominent philosophers, scientists and authors of the time. Within its walls, these same author’s works are housed amidst a modern forest of skeletal iron and glass. Just as Labrouste’s […]

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