Mazes and Labyrinths: A General Account of Their History and Developments by W. H. Matthews (review)
1970; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tech.1970.a894125
ISSN1097-3729
Autores Tópico(s)Literary, Cultural, Historical Analysis
Resumo464 Book Reviews technology and culture Droege understandably limited his text to the largest, newest, and best-designed terminals of his day, and because of this emphasis on the great monumental works, a subsidiary theme of considerable importance steadily emerges from his pages. All the stations he describes proved to be generously overbuilt for the obvious reason that when he wrote his book rail passenger traffic was expanding at such a rate that the number of passengers more than doubled in the first two decades of the new century. With the exception of South Station, Boston, no metropolitan terminal constructed during the present century in the United States that has continued in operation up to the present time was used to its full capacity save under the exigencies of war or during streetcar strikes. Moreover—and this ought to interest the urban planner as well as the historian of technology—the technical means for performing these feats of mass transportation were in existence by 1910. The fact that the operating elements of the foremost railroad terminals of the United States have remained unchanged and in sound working order since they were installed, sometimes more than half a century ago, and that each one of these stations is potentially capable of comfortably and safely handling 250,000-500,000 passengers per day, would seem to contain enormously significant lessons for anyone concerned with urban prob lems, but they have for the most part gone unheeded. The idea of technological progress in the 20th century has increasingly become a childish fiction. Carl W. Condit* Mazes and Labyrinths: A General Account of Their History and Devel opments. By W. H. Matthews. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1922; Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1969. Pp. xviii-j-254. $12.50. This is a reprint of a book first published almost half a century ago. It is the kind of volume that only a scholarly Englishman could pro duce: one who takes some quaintly obscure subject that nobody else has ever thought of writing a book about, collects material for years, and then turns this material into a graceful monograph. This agreeable curiosum goes into every aspect of the culture trait covered by the title. Matthews distinguishes between unicursal mazes (those having but a single path, without branches) and the multicursal (with branches and blind alleys). The unicursal maze merely folds and curls a path upon itself so as to fit the greatest possible length of route into a limited space. To traverse it requires merely stamina. The multicursal maze, with its forks and false passages, is meant to baffle the invader: to make it hard for him either to find the goal or, once inside, to get out again. The original labyrinth of Theseus and the Minotaur was evidently multi cursal, or Ariadne’s thread would not have been needed. Mazes may be anything from a drawing on a piece of paper up to a Dr. Condit, of Northwestern University, is the author of American Building,. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 465 full-sized garden maze like the famous one at Hampton Court. If full sized, meant to be traversed on foot and not merely with the point of a pencil, they may be above or below ground. The Etruscan king, Lars Porsena, is supposed to have had his tomb built in the form of an under ground maze. If on the surface, a maze may be made of stone, mosaic, turf, or hedge. Medieval European churches were often built with a mosaic maze inlaid in the floor. Rather than order a penitent to undertake a real pil grimage to Jerusalem, the confessor might be satisfied with a symbolic one. In this, the sinner negotiated the maze on his knees, ending at the “Jerusalem” at the center. Many hedge mazes wyere built on British estates from the 17th to the 19th centuries, but most of these were later demolished. One reason for their decline was that they required much cheap labor to keep the hedges clipped. A type of unicursal maze was formerly common in rural parts of northern Europe. This was merely a path, cut in turf in England or outlined with stones in Scandinavia. Such...
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