The impact of bureaucratic procedures on architectural planning in the Late Middle Ages in the Low Countries
Autor(en): |
Merlijn Hurx
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Medium: | Tagungsbeitrag |
Sprache(n): | Englisch |
Tagung: | 6th International Congress on Construction History (6ICCH 2018), July 9-13, 2018, Brussels, Belgium |
Veröffentlicht in: | Building Knowledge, Constructing Histories [2 vols.] |
Seite(n): | 81-87 |
Jahr: | 2018 |
Abstrakt: | Although, the growing impact of bureaucratic procedures on architectural planning may strike us as typical modern, its origins go back to the Late Middle Ages. To control the ever-increasing cost of building, the French and English courts introduced a centralised governance in the late fourteenth century. Other princes, among whom the Dukes of Burgundy, soon followed suit; the dukes introduced a centralised administration to effectively organise and control the many construction sites in their domains in the Low Countries. I will argue in this paper that this was not only a financial reform, however; it also represented an important step towards a more rationalised architectural planning. The rediscovery of a vast part of the early sixteenth-century building administration of the Duchy of Brabant allows to understand how meticulously well planned and monitored construction for the court was in the Low Countries. |