Broadway Hall Care Home, Dudley, West Midlands
The award winning Broadway Halls Care Home in Dudley is just a short walk from the busy shopping centre of this thriving West Midlands town. With stunning views across Priory Park, the home has the advantage of a rural setting in an urban area.
THAMES NEWS - 14.12.83. PIGS FUTURE THREATENED, DEEN CITY FARM, LONDON - CASH CRISIS.
THAMES NEWS - 14.12.83. PIGS FUTURE THREATENED, DEEN CITY FARM, LONDON - CASH CRISIS. _x000D_
PM. 8
Cruiserspotting Southend-on-Sea
The YT gits muted the audio on version 2, so here is the original version. Take a timelapse trip through Southend-on-Sea from the Pier to the town square via the now closed York Road Market
The Salford Houdini
Amazing pub trick
Learning in Worship by Sheikh Dr Shomali, St Augustine's Church, London, 9th Sep 2017
St. Louis’ Mid-Century Modern Architecture: The Matter of Materials by Mary Reid Brunstrom
In the immediate post-World War II years, architects and engineers in the St. Louis region produced a significant inventory of what are now characterized as Mid-century modern buildings. Formal experimentation was prompted by the availability of materials such as structural steel, in a climate in which architecture simultaneously led and responded to the era’s search for the expression of postwar confidence and optimism embodied in phenomena in such as air travel. At the same time, architecture helped mediate the anxieties inherent the atomic age. While new materials defined a leading edge of architecture, St. Louis’ signature material brick experienced a flowering in postwar architecture such as in Eric Mendelsohn’s B’nai Amoona synagogue, producing continuity in the fabric and texture of St. Louis’ built environment. Traditional decorative materials, in particular stained glass, which constitutes a major theme of the modernist narrative, were refreshed by the incorporation of more abstracted, dynamic and modern forms used mainly but not exclusively in church architecture.
I have undertaken extensive research in the context of a recently completed catalogue essay for a Fall 2015 exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum on Modern Design, 1935-65. The advent and adoption of new materials for building emerged as a prominent and pervasive theme in this research. For the JNEM symposium, I propose a presentation based on this research. My paper will provide a broad overview of St. Louis’ modernist architecture of the period, a format which could serve as an introduction to the region’s rich inventory of modernist buildings. My talk would encompass typologies in both the public and private domain including public memorials, recreation facilities, public and private housing, transportation, religious architecture, buildings for education, public libraries and hospitals. The talk would focus on buildings in which materials were essential elements in the search for structures that would serve modern goals and uses. I would illustrate my argument with leading examples such as Gyo Obata’s use of thin shell concrete in the Priory Chapel and the McDonnell Planetarium, Murphy and Mackey’s use of expansive plate glass at Washington University’s Olin Library, and the same firm’s pioneering use of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome concept for the design of the Climatron at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Executed with triangular Plexiglass panels hung from an aluminum frame by aluminum wire, the Climatron was hailed by the national AIA as “one of the most important buildings in American architectural history.” I would of course bring in Eero Saarinen’s use of the stainless steel and concrete skin for the Gateway Arch, but unless otherwise indicated, I would not dwell on that because I imagine the material of the Arch will be more than adequately covered over the course of the symposium.
I would also explain the use of prefab buildings for the phenomenon of the housing estate, ranging from modular houses constructed on site by developers to the Lustron house trucked in from the factory in Cleveland, Ohio and assembled on site. In further elaboration of the rich array of materials that characterize building in the region at midcentury, I will briefly touch on innovations such as Cemesto wall panels, a fire-resistant combination cement and asbestos product developed for mass production during World War II and used by Charles Eames, Frank Lloyd Wright and others.
Where materials where sourced, how they were promoted in the architecture and design media, and how they were understood to convey a modern message are threads that I will take up in my paper. I will elucidate the role that certain St. Louis buildings played in the promotion of specific building materials and methods. For example, House and Home promoted tract housing based on modular wall systems developed in St. Louis by Burton Duenke in collaboration with the architect, Ralph Fournier. This approach illuminates a further important theme, namely the way in which materials helped advance architectural goals of the period such as the integration of a building’s interior and exterior.
The Da Vinci Code
The Da Vinci Code is a 2003 mystery-detective novel written by Dan Brown. It follows symbologist Robert Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu as they investigate a murder in Paris's Louvre Museum and discover a battle between the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei over the possibility of Jesus having been married to Mary Magdalene. The title of the novel refers to, among other things, the fact that the murder victim is found in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, naked and posed like Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing, the Vitruvian Man, with a cryptic message written beside his body and a pentagram drawn on his chest in his own blood.
The novel is part of the exploration of alternative religious history, the central plot point of which is that the Merovingian kings of France were descended from the bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, ideas derived from Clive Prince's The Templar Revelation (1997) and books by Margaret Starbird. The book also refers to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) though Dan Brown has stated that it was not used as research material.
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Birmingham | Wikipedia audio article
This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
00:04:50 1 History
00:05:00 1.1 Pre-history and medieval
00:08:45 1.2 Early modern
00:12:49 1.3 Industrial Revolution
00:17:15 1.4 Regency and Victorian
00:20:16 1.5 20th century and contemporary
00:26:51 2 Government
00:29:04 3 Geography
00:31:33 3.1 Geology
00:32:44 3.2 Climate
00:36:08 3.3 Environment
00:38:34 4 Demography
00:45:30 5 Religion
00:48:51 6 Economy
00:55:55 7 Culture
00:56:04 7.1 Music
01:01:10 7.2 Theatre and performing arts
01:03:48 7.3 Literature
01:05:56 7.4 Art and design
01:08:29 7.5 Museums and galleries
01:10:41 7.6 Nightlife and festivals
01:15:20 7.7 Food and drink
01:17:47 7.8 Entertainment and leisure
01:18:24 7.9 Dialect
01:18:38 8 Architecture
01:22:45 9 Transport
01:27:40 10 Education
01:27:50 10.1 Further and higher education
01:31:10 10.2 Primary and secondary education
01:33:20 11 Public services
01:34:34 11.1 Library services
01:36:10 11.2 Emergency services
01:37:08 11.3 Healthcare
01:38:23 11.4 Water supply
01:39:09 11.5 Energy from waste
01:40:16 12 Sport
01:46:12 12.1 Commonwealth Games
01:47:33 13 Media
01:51:09 14 Notable people
01:51:19 15 Sister cities
01:51:34 16 See also
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I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.
- Socrates
SUMMARY
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Birmingham ( (listen), locally also: ) is the second-most populous city in the United Kingdom, after London, and the most populous city in the English Midlands. It is also the most populous metropolitan district in the United Kingdom, with an estimated 1,137,123 inhabitants, and is considered the social, cultural, financial, and commercial centre of the Midlands. It is the main local government of the West Midlands conurbation, which is the third most populated urban area in the United Kingdom, with a population of 2,897,303 in 2017. The wider Birmingham metropolitan area is the second largest in the United Kingdom with a population of over 4.3 million. It is frequently referred to as the United Kingdom's second city.A market town in the medieval period, Birmingham grew in the 18th-century Midlands Enlightenment and subsequent Industrial Revolution, which saw advances in science, technology, and economic development, producing a series of innovations that laid many of the foundations of modern industrial society. By 1791 it was being hailed as the first manufacturing town in the world. Birmingham's distinctive economic profile, with thousands of small workshops practising a wide variety of specialised and highly skilled trades, encouraged exceptional levels of creativity and innovation and provided an economic base for prosperity that was to last into the final quarter of the 20th century. The Watt steam engine was invented in Birmingham.The resulting high level of social mobility also fostered a culture of political radicalism which, under leaders from Thomas Attwood to Joseph Chamberlain, was to give it a political influence unparalleled in Britain outside London, and a pivotal role in the development of British democracy. From the summer of 1940 to the spring of 1943, Birmingham was bombed heavily by the German Luftwaffe in what is known as the Birmingham Blitz. The damage done to the city's infrastructure, in addition to a deliberate policy of demolition and new building by planners, led to extensive urban regeneration in subsequent decades.
Birmingham's economy is now dominated by the service sector. The city is a major international commercial centre, ranked as a beta- world city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network the joint highest ranking with Edinburgh and Manchester of all British cities outside of London; and an important transport, retail, events and conference hub. Its metropolitan economy is the second largest in the United Kingdom with a GDP of $121.1bn (2014), and its six universities make it the largest centre of higher educat ...