"Expanding the Palace of Torah" offers a broad philosophical overview of the challenges the women's revolution poses to Orthodox Judaism, and Orthodox Judaism's response to those challenges.

The author presents here the “Crystal palace” as a symbol of the unity of human beings with each other and also with nature. In this unity beauty, truth and love find their highest actuality. The universality of human nature is the basis and impetus for creating a bond of community between the peoples of the world. Hence follow the author’s reflections on the conditions for developing universal society.

Assyria can be described as the founder of the imperial model of kingship in the ancient Near East. The Assyrian court itself, however, remains poorly understood. Scholarship has treated the court as a disembodied, textual entity, separated from the physical spaces it occupied – namely, the palaces. At the same time, architectural analyses have examined the physical structures of the Assyrian palaces, without consideration for how these structures were connected to people’s lives and works. The palaces are often described as (...) secluded, inaccessible locations. This study presents the first model of the Assyrian court contextualized in its actual palaces. It provides a nuanced model highlighting how the court organized the immense flow of information, people and goods entering the palace as a result of the empire’s increased size and complexity. It argues that access to the king was regulated by three gates of control which were manned by specific types of personnel and a more situational organization that moved within the physical spaces of the palace and was contingent on the king’s activity. (shrink)

Palace and Temple: 5th Symposium on Egyptian Royal Ideology. Edited by Rolf Gundlach and Kate Spence. Königtum, Staat und Gesellschaft früher Hochkulturen, vol. 4,2. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2011. Pp. viii + 210, illus. €58.

The interesting thing about the word for ‘palace’ in Homer is that there is no such word. All the words that mean ‘house’ may be applied to a royal palace, but all of them may equally well be used of the house of an ordinary citizen, μέγαρον is often translated ‘palace’, or some other word with connotations of kingly majesty. But it too, when it is not more narrowly localised to the living-room, means just a house in (...) general.Just as there is no separate word to designate a palace in Homer, so a qualifying adjective is never used to indicate that a particular house is ‘royal’. In fact, to Homer there is no sharp distinction between a palace and a house, except that a king is likely to have a bigger and better home, more sumptuously furnished.The Iliad and the Odyssey are much concerned with kings. So it is odd that no word serves to designate the king's palace and no other dwelling, especially when the poet so delights in describing the splendour of royal homes. The major archaeological sites of the Mycenaean period, in which the main stories of the poems are set, all contain a palace which is easily recognised, even in its ruinous state. Can one imagine a new arrival at a great Mycenaean site needing to be shown which was the palace, as Odysseus was shown at Phaeacia? It seems highly unlikely that the Mycenaeans should have had no special word for a palace, though there is so far no firm evidence for the existence of such a word in Linear B. If a ‘palace’ word existed, its special significance, if not the word itself, must have been forgotten by Homer's time, when a great many houses might be found within the city wall, as at Smyrna. There may, however, be traces of the ‘palace’ meaning still detectable.In Table 1, which has been compiled from the concordances of Prendergast and Dunbar, I have tabulated the frequency with which each of the regular words for ‘house’ is used to denote a dwelling occupied by gods, lesser divinities, mortals or animals. Various interesting points arise from this table.It is apparent that there is a far higher proportion of gods' houses mentioned in the Iliad than in the Odyssey. The figures for δόμος and δῶμα show this particularly clearly. But the difference is probably due entirely to the subject-matter: far more of the action is taken up with scenes among the gods in the Iliad than in the Odyssey. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Like any major religion, Daoism has a complex history and multiple branches, but among its most persistent elements are secluded mountain paradises populated both by divinities and by human beings. Ideas regarding the means of access to these transcendent abodes have been less consistent: Should Daoist adepts strive to be virtuous, or should they labor to “restore” themselves through esoteric, elite magic? A provocative answer to this question was given by the poet Tao Qian, who sided with Daoism's most (...) ancient authority by suggesting that Daoist harmony could not be achieved through mere individual study but, rather, could be found only in an uncorrupted social fabric, in his case defined as a humble lost village. This utopian vision, brought to life in the poem Peach Blossom Spring, not only rejected the esoteric values of the Daoist elite but also called into question imperial hegemonic structures in general. The fact that the poem's rustic utopian enclave was understood in these terms by generations of Chinese scholars and artists is revealed by the contrasting architectural forms used to represent these alternative concepts of the Daoist ideal: the palace and the village, the garden of leisure and the working farm. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Like any major religion, Daoism has a complex history and multiple branches, but among its most persistent elements are secluded mountain paradises populated both by divinities and by human beings. Ideas regarding the means of access to these transcendent abodes have been less consistent: Should Daoist adepts strive to be virtuous, or should they labor to “restore” themselves through esoteric, elite magic? A provocative answer to this question was given by the poet Tao Qian, who sided with Daoism's most (...) ancient authority by suggesting that Daoist harmony could not be achieved through mere individual study but, rather, could be found only in an uncorrupted social fabric, in his case defined as a humble lost village. This utopian vision, brought to life in the poem Peach Blossom Spring, not only rejected the esoteric values of the Daoist elite but also called into question imperial hegemonic structures in general. The fact that the poem's rustic utopian enclave was understood in these terms by generations of Chinese scholars and artists is revealed by the contrasting architectural forms used to represent these alternative concepts of the Daoist ideal: the palace and the village, the garden of leisure and the working farm. (shrink)

One way to think logically about virtual reality systems is to think of them as interactive depictions of possible worlds. Leibniz's "Palace of the Fates" is probably the earliest description of an interactive virtual reality system. Leibniz describes a system for the simulation of possible worlds by a human user in the actual world. He describes a user-interface for interacting multiple possible worlds and their histories.

This article examines how in his influential 1964 Fun Palace project the late British architect Cedric Price created a unique synthesis of a wide range of contemporary discourses and theories, such as the emerging sciences of cybernetics, information technology, and game theory, Situationism, and theater to produce a new kind of improvisational architecture to negotiate the constantly shifting cultural landscape of the postwar years. The Fun Palace was not a building in any conventional sense, but was instead a (...) socially interactive machine, highly adaptable to the shifting cultural and social conditions of its time and place. This constantly varying design for a new form of leisure center began in 1962 as a collaboration between Cedric Price and avant-garde theater producer Joan Littlewood. Littlewood had conceived of a new kind of theater designed to awaken the passive subjects of mass culture to a new consciousness. Her vision of a dynamic and interactive theater provided the programmatic framework on which Price would develop and refine his concept of an interactive, performative architecture, adaptable to the varying needs and desires of the individual. By assembling their own pedagogical and leisure environments using cranes and prefabricated modules in an improvisational architecture, common citizens could escape from everyday routine and serial existence and embark on a journey of learning, creativity, and individual fulfillment. The Fun Palace was one of the more innovative and creative proposals for the use of free time in postwar England. It also provided a model for the 1976 Centre Pompidou in Paris. (shrink)

In Aeneid 7. 1–285 Vergil colours his picture of early Latium with a religious atmosphere which can be fully appreciated only if these verses are read with an attentive awareness of Roman religious beliefs and practices. A detailed exegesis of all 285 verses would hardly be possible here, and I will limit myself to two major points, the account of Latinus' ancestry and the description of the royal palace , both because these passages are interesting in themselves for the (...) way they apparently contradict each other, and because they are good illustrations of how Vergil draws on the data of Roman religion, both its folklore and its cult, to fix in his reader's mind certain definite impressions about Latinus and the Latins. (shrink)