‘Belching it Forth their Sooty Jaws’: John Evelyn's Vision of a ‘Volcanic’ City
Abstract Observers of seventeenth-century London often used anatomical or geographical metaphors when writing about an early modern city undergoing rapid physical, commercial, and demographic expansion. Between the 1640s and 1680s, the writer and diarist John Evelyn regularly used volcanic language and imagery to evoke a cityscape blighted by dense clouds of smoke emitted by the city's industrial furnaces. This vision of a ‘volcanic’ city was personal, inspired by Evelyn's exploration of Vesuvius in 1645, while reflecting a broader scientific and popular fascination with volcanic activity. Considered in the immediate political context, the ‘volcanic’ city was both a powerful expression of royalist anxiety about the instability of the capital, and an assertion of the need for a powerful monarch to actively regulate the social and commercial energies of the metropolis.
An Italian Voyage
The Triennale di Milano is a periodic cultural event staging temporary discursive settings on culture, social meaning, and form. It is a permanent catalyst for discussions and interventions; it is a place about places. The Triennale, housed in the Palazzo delTArte, focuses on architecture, design, decorative, and industrial art. This public organization was set up over 50 years ago with the aim of providing opportunities for cultural and aesthetic reflection and for research and new projects on the country, the city, the home, and the objects that surround us. and, more specifically, on the future of the metropolis. As the organizers observed: Legends and Utopias, dreams and philosophies for metropolises have, during the last decades, undergone radical rethinking or even collapsed totally, following changes in often contradictory growth patterns in society and science. Nevertheless, the conviction that there is a strict link between civilisation ami the urban phenomenon has remained. Triennale were set in a new space: in the middle of that inner-outer city duality, and even physically they occupied the fabric of these two city areas. . . . The general aim is a rethinking of the city through a logic that accepts its fragmentation and the composite nature of its various parts. If we were to accept as obvious the fact that architecture is by its very nature discontinuous and fragmentary, we would then no longer need fear either the presence of conventions or even read the models of the past. ' Nine Projects for Nine Cities In the 1987 exhibition Le Citta Immaginate, the presentation of urban design proposals was a rehearsal for the exhibition to come. The Triennale saw the Italian city as a laboratory for solving current urban problems. Nine cities were chosen to be sites for architectural projects, within certain physical development frameworks. In the section entitled A Journey Through Italy, the visitor was assisted in understanding the complex history of urban visions in each city and their main problems today. This section was not an architectural treatise, not an encyclopedia of solutions, but journey as a metaphor for knowledge, for knowledge with its hazards and adventures. ~ The projects of the 17th The coming exhibition is part of a larger cycle of events about the future of urban society. The cycle began in 1986 with two exhibitions on the home (7/ Progetlo Domcstico) and the workplace (// Luogo del l.avoro). It was followed in 1987 with an exhibition on the theme of imagined cities (Le Citta hnmagiuate), where an imaginary journey through Italy provided the conceptual framework for sponsored urban design projects. The Triennale organizers have involved public administrations and rallied corporate and public support, to invite proposals by several international teams for each city. In each case, large-scale architectural interventions were sought to anchor general structuring principles based largely on transportation by road, rail, and water. Six responses from the nine city contexts have been chosen here to summarily represent the main design concept in operation. Notes 1 World Cities and the Future The last exhibition, the culminating event of the cycle, is organized tor September 1988 on the theme World Cities and the Future of the Metropoles. With this international endeavor, the Triennale seeks to shed some light on current trends in urban environment of the Metropoles, Triennale di Milano (catalogue, 1987), p. viii. 2 I'ierluigi Nicolin, Nine projects lor nine Italian cities (unpublished I 988), p. 4. manuscript, > Ibid., 4 Ibid., p. f. p. 2.
Books of Orders: the Making of English Social Policy, 1577–1631
The importance of the Caroline Book of Orders has not gone unrecognized by historians of early Stuart England. Admirers of the personal rule of Charles I saw in it a cornerstone of that regime's paternalism. Historians of county government, while noting doubts about its centralizing tendencies, have shown it pushing local magistrates towards more efficient methods of poor relief and social welfare. Students of popular attitudes and the moral assumptions of the crowd find the Book of Orders confirming traditional values which helped to guarantee social cohesion in periods of economic crisis. Yet the origins of so remarkable an enactment have attracted little attention, beyond the unfounded assumption that it owed much to Laudian policies of ‘Thorough’. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that its genesis has no less historical interest than its impact; and that we shall better appreciate its social and political implications if we are aware of the complex forces which shaped it.