Publications by Morgan Ng
In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, northern Europeans witnessed remarkable experien... more In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, northern Europeans witnessed remarkable experiential transformations in their secular architecture resulting from the proliferation of a once rare material: transparent, colourless window glass. This essay traces the aesthetic effects occasioned by the new relationship between early modern glazed spaces and their surrounding environments, introducing the concept of synthetic vernacularism to describe the dynamic geographical factors that shaped the local use of this industrial material in northern Europe. By allowing builders in frigid climates to simulate the open, light-suffused spaces found in classical architecture, glass facilitated the site-specific reinvention of a foreign style. It also fed the ever-growing thirst for interior illumination in bustling commercial cities, which in turn engendered culturally specific modes of visual perception and expression. Before the global triumph of architectural modernism, the localized application of glass constituted a regional ecology in the early modern built environment.
Taking the case of a late Renaissance treatise on Huguenot architecture, this essay explores the ... more Taking the case of a late Renaissance treatise on Huguenot architecture, this essay explores the potentials of collage as an expression of confessional contestation in the wake of the French Wars of Religion. The book’s hybrid imagery bears a formal language of cutting, removal, and addition, which evokes the confessional violence that precipitated in this period at the scale of the built environment. Illustrated plates depict open-plan temples with their ceilings and floors cut away, as if to reenact pictorially the dismantling of rood screens and liturgical furnishings in Catholic churches during episodes of iconoclastic purification. The same pages feature Calvinist Psalms and pious sayings that were once chanted and sung by French Protestants, as well as inscribed and layered in abundance on the walls of their churches and homes. In this mixed verbal-visual form, the medium of early modern collage was operative in a plurality of sensory registers and at disparate physical scales.
Cartography’s ascendance in the early modern period as a universal form of visual communication p... more Cartography’s ascendance in the early modern period as a universal form of visual communication profoundly destabilized earlier modes of literary and iconographic expression. Milton’s Paradise Lost, as this essay demonstrates, was a poetic response to this representational upheaval. More than offering an ekphrastic rendition of contemporary pictorial practices, Milton structurally “remapped” both scripture and classical epic to produce a literary work that accorded with new standards of representational authenticity. Close analysis of the poet’s long-neglected cartographic sources, alongside key passages of Paradise Lost, reveals such visual–textual exchanges at two perceptual scales. On the global scale of its narrative form, the poem exhibits a fantastically nonlinear temporal structure that mirrors the complex display of information on English bible maps. On a closer descriptive scale, Milton’s rich depictions of Edenic abundance draw from new standards of estate surveying to present Adam’s garden as the original prototype for rural property.
Papers by Morgan Ng
Per i nordeuropei a Roma nel Cinquecento, la cultura edilizia del paese mediterraneo esercitava u... more Per i nordeuropei a Roma nel Cinquecento, la cultura edilizia del paese mediterraneo esercitava un fascino particolare, che era radicato nelle condizioni ambientali del territorio italiano. Provenendo da regioni gelide, battute per gran parte dell’anno dal vento, dalla pioggia e dalla neve, questi visitatori oltramontani trovavano in Italia una stupefacente abbondanza di edifici porticati che si caratterizzavano per una luminosa trasparenza, mai vista nei loro paesi. Tali ineludibili differenze climatiche però mettevano in rilievo un dilemma di fronte a cui i Grand Tourists si trovano ancora oggi: come reinterpretare un’architettura scaturita da una geografia completamente diversa dalla propria? Il contributo si propone di affrontare questa problematica tramite un’indagine degli innovativi e poco studiati utilizzi architettonici del vetro chiaro durante il tardo Rinascimento, un periodo in cui l’invenzione di nuove tipologie di spazi invetriati permetteva la trasposizione del linguaggio classico nelle remote geografie settentrionali.
Conferences Convened by Morgan Ng
No building is an island – and in the context of the city, architecture takes shape in relation t... more No building is an island – and in the context of the city, architecture takes shape in relation to the street. Arcades and façade treatments, lighting fixtures and shop windows, setback and building height restrictions: each of these mediate how buildings interact with streets as spaces of visual display and public sociability. More recently, the construction of flyovers and underground transport systems has transformed streets into ever-more complex, multi-layered spatial armatures for architectural intervention. Streets serve as the liminal zones by which architectural form and symbolism meet with the contingencies of urban life.
Cambridge Talks VII seeks to bring fresh historical themes and tools to bear on the problem of Architecture and the Street. New research promises to enrich and challenge perspectives pioneered by Spiro Kostof, Jane Jacobs, and William H. Whyte. How does the infrastructural function of streets as circulation (of people, goods, water, and waste) press against the static character of architecture? How do streets serve as the spatial framework for social control, ceremony, procession, and protest? How might we theorize and historicize modern streets as sites of cultural memory and nostalgia? And above all, what are the effects of such social, political, and technological forces on architectural form?
Conferences - Workshops (concept and organization) by Morgan Ng
International, interdisciplinary conference
Cambridge, Jesus College, 27 June 2022, 10 am-6 pm
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Publications by Morgan Ng
Papers by Morgan Ng
Conferences Convened by Morgan Ng
Cambridge Talks VII seeks to bring fresh historical themes and tools to bear on the problem of Architecture and the Street. New research promises to enrich and challenge perspectives pioneered by Spiro Kostof, Jane Jacobs, and William H. Whyte. How does the infrastructural function of streets as circulation (of people, goods, water, and waste) press against the static character of architecture? How do streets serve as the spatial framework for social control, ceremony, procession, and protest? How might we theorize and historicize modern streets as sites of cultural memory and nostalgia? And above all, what are the effects of such social, political, and technological forces on architectural form?
Conferences - Workshops (concept and organization) by Morgan Ng
Cambridge Talks VII seeks to bring fresh historical themes and tools to bear on the problem of Architecture and the Street. New research promises to enrich and challenge perspectives pioneered by Spiro Kostof, Jane Jacobs, and William H. Whyte. How does the infrastructural function of streets as circulation (of people, goods, water, and waste) press against the static character of architecture? How do streets serve as the spatial framework for social control, ceremony, procession, and protest? How might we theorize and historicize modern streets as sites of cultural memory and nostalgia? And above all, what are the effects of such social, political, and technological forces on architectural form?