Yelda Nasifoglu
B.Arch. (Pratt), M.Arch. (McGill), M.Sc. (Oxon), Ph.D. (McGill)
I received my PhD in 2018 in the History and Theory of Architecture from McGill University with my dissertation ‘Robert Hooke’s praxes: reading, building, drawing’ where I studied these shared practices in the scientific and architectural work of the 17th-century virtuoso Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Most recently, I have been a Researcher with the AHRC-funded project ‘Reading Euclid’s Elements of Geometry in Early Modern Britain’ based at the Faculty of History, University of Oxford and affiliated with the Centre for the Study of the Book at the Bodleian Library. I organised the networked exhibition Seeing Euclid and am also one of the editors of Robert Hooke’s Books Database, an online source launched in 2015. Between 2012 and 2016, I was also a Research Assistant for the Early Modern Conversions project based at the Department of English at McGill.
With a dual background in architecture (B.Arch., Pratt; M.Arch. & Ph.D, McGill) and history of science, medicine, and technology (M.Sc., Oxford), I am interested in the relationship between art and science as they were perceived during the Early Modern period and in particular the insights and problems posed by the recent approaches to architecture as mathematical practice, as well as book collecting and material reading practices.
Currently I am an associate member of the Faculty of History, Oxford.
Supervisors: Benjamin Wardhaugh, Philip Beeley, Alberto Perez-Gomez, and Paul Yachnin
I received my PhD in 2018 in the History and Theory of Architecture from McGill University with my dissertation ‘Robert Hooke’s praxes: reading, building, drawing’ where I studied these shared practices in the scientific and architectural work of the 17th-century virtuoso Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Most recently, I have been a Researcher with the AHRC-funded project ‘Reading Euclid’s Elements of Geometry in Early Modern Britain’ based at the Faculty of History, University of Oxford and affiliated with the Centre for the Study of the Book at the Bodleian Library. I organised the networked exhibition Seeing Euclid and am also one of the editors of Robert Hooke’s Books Database, an online source launched in 2015. Between 2012 and 2016, I was also a Research Assistant for the Early Modern Conversions project based at the Department of English at McGill.
With a dual background in architecture (B.Arch., Pratt; M.Arch. & Ph.D, McGill) and history of science, medicine, and technology (M.Sc., Oxford), I am interested in the relationship between art and science as they were perceived during the Early Modern period and in particular the insights and problems posed by the recent approaches to architecture as mathematical practice, as well as book collecting and material reading practices.
Currently I am an associate member of the Faculty of History, Oxford.
Supervisors: Benjamin Wardhaugh, Philip Beeley, Alberto Perez-Gomez, and Paul Yachnin
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Papers by Yelda Nasifoglu
Dissertation by Yelda Nasifoglu
Book Reviews by Yelda Nasifoglu
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17498430.2016.1208392
Conference/Seminar Presentations by Yelda Nasifoglu
The rebuilding of London allowed Wren and Hooke unprecedented access to craft knowledge, not only from contemporary traditions but also from archaeological findings of ancient Roman construction materials. Studying the Fleet Ditch project, how they adapted this knowledge into their larger natural philosophical framework is the subject of this paper.
This paper studies Clavius’s proposed mathematical curriculum and his arguments regarding the integration of mathematics and philosophy, also citing evidence from an early seventeenth-century academic comedy written in the Jesuit-run English College in Rome.
Air and its circulation had special significance in Hooke's scientific work. He had experimented with the air pump, and conducted anatomical experiments on respiration, pumping air into the lungs of animals. He obsessively recorded the weather, and designed several instruments to measure and to take advantage of the movement of air. Hooke was certainly not unique in his interests; Francis Bacon had already written about the winds (Historia ventorum, 1622), John Evelyn proposed solutions for cleaning London’s air (Fumifugium, 1661), Nathanial Henshaw invented an air chamber to cure disease (Aero-Chalinos, 1664), and John Aubrey dedicated the first chapter of his Naturall Historie of Wiltshire to air.
What influences did these scientific studies have on architecture and urban design? What role could the conceptual conversion of air, from its Vitruvian form as one of the four elements into an independent substance that could be physically studied and manipulated, play in architecture?
Air and its circulation had special significance in Hooke's natural philosophical work. In the latter 1650s, he had assisted Robert Boyle (1627-1691), designing and operating the famous air-pump; and later as the Curator of Experiments of the Royal Society, he conducted further experiments on the physical properties of air, measuring its elasticity, pressure at sea, and resistance to bodies moved through it. Perhaps more significantly, seven years before he was commissioned to build the Bethlem, Hooke was also studying air's effects on respiration, conducting vivisections 'Preserving Animals Alive by Blowing through their Lungs with Bellows'; the analogy between these experiments and his later design for the hospital is striking.
Yet the analogical correspondence between Hooke's natural philosophical work and his architectural practice was not unidirectional. Whether by explaining the structure of Prince Rupert's glass drops in terms of brick arches, or naming biological cells after monks' rooms, or describing his 'Method of Improving Natural Philosophy' as the project of a 'skilful Architect', Hooke used architectural metaphors to fill in certain ontological and epistemological gaps in natural philosophy. This paper contextualizes the connections between the different facets of Hooke's work in the period's seemingly enthusiastic yet uneasy relationship with usefulness, and applicability of newly discovered knowledge, while examining the advantages and disadvantages of the uncertainties of disciplinary boundaries.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17498430.2016.1208392
The rebuilding of London allowed Wren and Hooke unprecedented access to craft knowledge, not only from contemporary traditions but also from archaeological findings of ancient Roman construction materials. Studying the Fleet Ditch project, how they adapted this knowledge into their larger natural philosophical framework is the subject of this paper.
This paper studies Clavius’s proposed mathematical curriculum and his arguments regarding the integration of mathematics and philosophy, also citing evidence from an early seventeenth-century academic comedy written in the Jesuit-run English College in Rome.
Air and its circulation had special significance in Hooke's scientific work. He had experimented with the air pump, and conducted anatomical experiments on respiration, pumping air into the lungs of animals. He obsessively recorded the weather, and designed several instruments to measure and to take advantage of the movement of air. Hooke was certainly not unique in his interests; Francis Bacon had already written about the winds (Historia ventorum, 1622), John Evelyn proposed solutions for cleaning London’s air (Fumifugium, 1661), Nathanial Henshaw invented an air chamber to cure disease (Aero-Chalinos, 1664), and John Aubrey dedicated the first chapter of his Naturall Historie of Wiltshire to air.
What influences did these scientific studies have on architecture and urban design? What role could the conceptual conversion of air, from its Vitruvian form as one of the four elements into an independent substance that could be physically studied and manipulated, play in architecture?
Air and its circulation had special significance in Hooke's natural philosophical work. In the latter 1650s, he had assisted Robert Boyle (1627-1691), designing and operating the famous air-pump; and later as the Curator of Experiments of the Royal Society, he conducted further experiments on the physical properties of air, measuring its elasticity, pressure at sea, and resistance to bodies moved through it. Perhaps more significantly, seven years before he was commissioned to build the Bethlem, Hooke was also studying air's effects on respiration, conducting vivisections 'Preserving Animals Alive by Blowing through their Lungs with Bellows'; the analogy between these experiments and his later design for the hospital is striking.
Yet the analogical correspondence between Hooke's natural philosophical work and his architectural practice was not unidirectional. Whether by explaining the structure of Prince Rupert's glass drops in terms of brick arches, or naming biological cells after monks' rooms, or describing his 'Method of Improving Natural Philosophy' as the project of a 'skilful Architect', Hooke used architectural metaphors to fill in certain ontological and epistemological gaps in natural philosophy. This paper contextualizes the connections between the different facets of Hooke's work in the period's seemingly enthusiastic yet uneasy relationship with usefulness, and applicability of newly discovered knowledge, while examining the advantages and disadvantages of the uncertainties of disciplinary boundaries.
The multiple facets of Hooke's oeuvre make his collection of mathematical books particularly interesting and exemplary of that of a seventeenth-century natural philosopher, mathematical practitioner, and educator. Using Bibliotheca Hookiana (1703), the auction catalogue prepared after his death, his diaries and the lists of desiderata he prepared for specific auctions, and the annotations in some of the books surviving from his collection, this paper examines how Hooke procured, borrowed, read, and used his mathematical books.
The availability of Hooke’s diaries and the contents of his library at the time of his death, as well as his much-publicized disputes with other virtuosi – most famously with Isaac Newton (1643-1727) – make Hooke’s work an illuminating case study, as it stood in tension with a growing emphasis on the abstract and the theoretical, both in mathematics and in architecture.
at the History Faculty, University of Oxford
Visualising networks of correspondence, mapping intellectual geographies, mining textual corpora: many modes of digital scholarship have special relevance to the problems and methods of the history of science, and the last few years have seen the launch of a number of new platforms and projects in this area. With contributions from projects around the UK, these two workshops will be an opportunity to share ideas, to reflect on what is being achieved and to consider what might be done next.
The project theme was 'de natura instrumentorum', or the nature of instruments, and following books 9 and 10 in Vitruvius's "Ten Books of Architecture," we explored the status of instruments and machines from antiquity through to the Renaissance. In Exercise 1, early forms of computing (e.g. paper machines or volvelles, astrolabes) were investigated, and Exercise 2 involved replicating the map of Rome as well as the ‘horizon’ instrument invented by Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472). Exercise 3 explored machines, mechanisms, and contrivances from antiquity to the Renaissance, using them as inspiration towards creating original work.