INTRODUCTION TO COMMERCIAL BUILDING

Introduction to commercial buildings



Introduction to commercial buildings

Pre-Georgian Monuments Churchyards have often been used for burial for many centuries: few places can boast of such continuity of use, or of such historical importance. Medieval churchyard memorials and early post-Reformation outdoor tombs are extremely rare: exceptions such as the canopied monument at Astbury, Cheshire are all the more remarkable. People rich enough to be buried beneath a grand memorial usually opted to be laid to rest inside the church. Medieval grave-markers have often sunk into the ground and wooden markers have long since perished: what has come down to us is a very limited selection of what we assume to have been erected. Early modern outdoor survivals such as the elaborate chest tomb to Henry Wood at Watering bury (Kent) of the 1630s are of high significance.

The rate of survival of such tombs is unclear. Exposed to the weather and vulnerable to later campaigns of clearance, they are prone to collapse and dismantling, and the choice and availability of weather-resistant building stone has been a key factor in determining their survival. The later seventeenth century witnessed the rise of the headstone: single pieces of stone set directly into the earth, sometimes with matching footstones. Imagery and inscriptions were initially very limited (skulls and crossbones were a favoured motif). This was to become one of the most important forms of memorial in Britain. Legible dated examples are relatively rare from this period, and the condition of outdoor tombs is steadily declining, making identification ever harder. From the mid seventeenth century onwards, Anglicans began to have reservations about burial inside churches. Both Nonconformists and Jews began to open burial grounds for their reserved use in London from the 1650s onwards. Such places are among the earliest surviving testaments to developments in religion and to patterns of migration, and hence are of particular historical significance.

Figure 1 Oldest surviving example of a Pre Georgian building in South Carolina

Victorian and Edwardian houses are still giving good service today, but few have their original windows the frames of the Victorian and Edwardian sash windows were made of wood, they expanded in damp weather unless they were painted regularly. Painting was quite a palaver because some part of the window and it's the wall frame which held it was always inaccessible, and care needed to be taken when painting close to the edges near the channels.

Georgian Public Monuments The early years of the eighteenth century witnessed a rise in the erection of public statues and monuments. Often the work of the leading architects and sculptors of their day, they form the visual centrepiece of formal architectural compositions and public spaces, and are thus very prominent indeed. The statue by Scheemakers of Thomas Guy, at his foundation of Guy's Hospital, Southwark in 1734 was an early appearance of a non-royal subject in this medium. Architectural monuments began to appear in the early eighteenth century as part of the Baroque rediscovery of classical ...