The history of humanity has seen a constant competition to harness more useful energy. How has architecture in periods before 1900 been shaped by its energy context?
The history of humanity has seen a constant competition to harness more useful energy. How has architecture in periods before 1900 been shaped by its energy context? Academic Level : Bachelor Paper details Core text: Astrid Kander, Paolo Malanima and Paul Warde, Power to the People: Energy in Europe over the Last Five Centuries (Princeton, 2014) Please note that this text is available online through the university library website. Search for it in the catalogue and follow the instructions to find the text. The book describes the energy history of recent centuries, and how it has affected many different aspects of life. It does not discuss architecture in very much detail. Bring together what you have learned about architecture this past semester, and read more about it for this essay, to think about how architecture was affected by energy availability before 1900. You may want to consider the effect of energy on material choices, technologies, social priorities, and transport. Guidance Read the relevant parts of the core text carefully, taking notes (you do not need to read all the chapters on earlier history, though you may find it useful to dip into them to understand how things changed in the twentieth century – the start of the book is helpful as a summary). As you read, think about things which might affect architecture: materials and technologies, but also things like major social changes which might make particular types of building more or less important than they had been earlier in history. Make notes about the text and any other reading you do to prepare for your essay, and be careful to include in all your notes the page numbers and publication details of the places you found your information. Take notes throughout all reading (even online if you’re using some online sources) saying where you got each piece of information from, including page number (for printed sources and online journals) and date retrieved (which means the date you first read it) for other online sources.
The thing which this essay will be marked on above all else is good analysis: your own observations and careful thought about the topic. NOTES AND PLAN: (use these titles for your own notes, to help you make sure that you are including everything you need. You do not need to submit your notes.) YOUR NOTES Notes from Power to the People (always include page number) How are the things it discusses relevant to architecture? Notes from other reading (always include source and page number) – Energy and materials – Energy and technologies – Energy and transport – Energy and ideas/social priorities Your own analytical thought: How has energy shaped architecture? Your essay plan Introduction: (give some overall sense of the topic, and get us interested) Analysis: this is most of your essay, and you are looking to organise it in a way which suits your analytical findings from reading and thinking. It is very, very important that your essay should not mainly describe energy history or particular buildings. What is needed is a critical discussion of the relationship between the two. You may assume that the marker knows the outline of both the energy history and architectural history, and you only need to refer to them where needed for your argument. Please DO NOT use the following structure which will not encourage critical analysis: Part 1: energy history Part 2: architecture Part 3/conclusion: some attempt to talk about the two together Conclusion: Summarise what you have found, and if possible add briefly some interesting extra element: some way in which your analysis casts light on other parts of this semester’s course, or some way in which your reading for the essay might influence your own design work or architectural thinking. Writing and referencing Word Count: 1700-2000 words Illustration, referencing, and academic integrity Illustrate your essay with relevant images which support your argument, and include quotations where relevant. Do not copy and paste from the text or from any other source without putting quotation marks round it (‘ ’) and a proper reference telling us where it is from. This is for two reasons, the first being that you are showing us what you have read so that we can give you credit for it. The second reason is that you are otherwise claiming other people’s work as your own. This is a form of stealing, and is treated extremely seriously by the university. If you are taking an idea from any piece of writing, but changing the words, this does not need quotation marks, but it still does need a reference to tell us where the idea came from. The ONLY exception to this rule is facts which are so well-known that everyone can be assumed to know them – the dates of the Second World War, or the fact that Le Corbusier was a Modernist, for example. If you have got any other fact from any source, reference it. An essay of this length ought to have at least 20 references within the text, and potentially considerably more. Please use the Chicago style of referencing, with footnotes and bibliography. The details of how to do this are here (http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html), and it is necessary to observe their punctuation etc. closely in order to get it exactly right. Once you get into the habit it gets much easier. Make sure that as you do your reading you take as part of your notes the necessary details for referencing.
