Reconciling beauty and utility in early city planning: the contribution of John Nolen.

In the history of city planning, the dichotomy between the aesthetic aspirations of the City Beautiful and City Practical movements is overstated. The aesthetic impulse did not disappear but persisted as an important thread through the development of comprehensive planning approaches into the 1920s. The nexus between beauty and utility was negotiated and expressed across four main discourses: broad social improvement, aesthetic functionality, economic rationality, and holistic design. Ultimately, beauty became wedded to utility within the very nature of the comprehensive city plan itself. The work of the leading city planner John Nolen is central to an understanding of these historic continuities and informed the early evolution of city planning theory and practice. Nolen's challenge to the City Beautiful paradigm, while still retaining an artistic sensibility, reaestheticizes scholars' appreciation of the City Practical.

See Josephus: viewing first-century sexual drama with Victorian eyes.

This article looks first at how the art of J.W. Waterhouse responds to the classical world: how complex the scene of reception is, triangulated between artist, the ancient past, and his audiences, and extended over time. Second, it looks at how this scene of reception engages with a specific Victorian problematic about male sexuality and self-control. This is not just a question of Waterhouse using classics as an alibi for thinking about desire, but also of the interference of different models of desire and different knowledges of the classical world in the reception of the painting's narrative semantics.