This article explores the connection between the castellated façade of Montepulciano’s Palazzo Comunale and Florence’s development into a territorial state in the mid-fifteenth century. In 1440, the comune of Montepulciano commissioned a new façade for its town hall from the prominent Florentine architect Michelozzo. While scholars have widely accepted Michelozzo’s design as an imitation of Florence’s Palazzo della Signoria, hitherto unpublished documents preserved in Montepulciano’s Biblioteca Comunale e Archivio Storico ’Piero Calamandrei’ enable further interpretation of the town hall’s fortress-like profile from a geopolitical and military perspective. According to the new textual evidence, Montepulciano maintained a close cooperation with the Dieci di Balìa — Florence’s war committee — from the late 1430s onwards and contributed to its military efforts against Milan, which climaxed in the battle of Anghiari the same year that the façade renovation was initiated. In view of Florence’s decisive victory in the battle, this article argues that the familiar castellated appearance of the new façade was a celebratory manifestation of the city’s military pride and that this was shared by the town. The architecture of the town hall can also be seen as testifying to the role played by castellation in expressing Florence’s territorial ideology.

This article reconstructs an exceptional lifting device — a cruciform lewis — drawn by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger (1484–1546) at St Peter’s Basilica in Rome and connects it to the other drawings, mainly of Vitruvian theory, on the same sheet (now in the Uffizi in Florence). Elements of this sheet, dated to January 1542, have been studied in isolation, but this article connects them, underscoring how Sangallo’s theoretical interests in the art of building and the practicalities of masonry construction were inseparable. A question posed by the sheet is whether it documents Sangallo’s archaeological discoveries of ancient Roman tools or presents newly contrived ones — categories that Sangallo’s drawings move fluidly between. His studies should be understood in relation to the immediate problems that he faced on the building site of St Peter’s and within the broader context of other Renaissance drawings of machines, such as those by Francesco di Giorgio and Leonardo da Vinci.

This article presents hitherto overlooked documents at Vassar College in the United States relating to the character and reputation of the architect John Soane (1753–1837). The antiquarian and topographic author John Britton (1771–1857), a lifelong friend and associate of Soane, planned to write a ’tell-all’ biography in which he would reveal the malicious nature of the architect, and his obsession with remembrance and veneration, to scandalous effect. The scope and purpose of Britton’s intended exposé are established here through notes and correspondences that describe the resentful microclimate of the architects, writers, employees and family members in Soane’s orbit. A further manuscript by Britton, which satirises his devotion to Soane and the architect’s house museum, is also analysed. In the process, the article broaches the role of architectural journalism in fashioning the reputations of architects and their private and public personas in early Victorian London. It also considers the relationship of temperament to architectural invention and historiographic permutations in the controversial appraisal of Soane.

This article re-evaluates an unfinished book project by the celebrated Edinburgh architect David Bryce (1803–76). It demonstrates that a group of drawings in the British Architectural Library hitherto attributed to Bryce’s employer William Burn (1789–1870) was in fact the work of the young Bryce, who executed them between 1827 and 1831. This corpus emerges as the first stage of Bryce’s book project, of which only one volume, ‘Sketches of Scotch and Old English Ornament’ (c. 1831–36), was compiled but not published. Bryce’s initiative, in turn, emerges as the preparatory effort for one of Victorian Scotland’s great sourcebooks, The Baronial and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of Scotland (1845–52) by Robert William Billings. In itself, Bryce’s unpublished work represents a notably early engagement with the architecture of early modern Scotland; in its relation to the work of Billings, it played an appreciable role in the revival of Scotland’s national architecture.

One of the best-known monastic settlements of western Europe, the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel occupies the summit of a prodigiously steep island site off the coast of Normandy in northern France. The church was built between 1023 and c. 1080–85. The monastic buildings, to the north of the church, were arranged vertically as much as horizontally, reflecting the constraints of the site. They appear to have comprised three adjacent and interconnecting buildings, two of three storeys, the other of two. However, two of these three ranges were overbuilt in the early thirteenth century by an ambitious development which became known as the Merveille (c. 1212–28). This article seeks to identify the buildings that the Merveille replaced and thus the entire complex as it existed in the twelfth century. This inevitably involves a certain amount of speculation and perhaps for this reason the complex has hitherto been largely ignored, important though it is for an understanding of the abbey’s early history. The article also discusses other building projects relevant to the monks, such as the cemetery, the twelfth-century Hôtellerie and the thirteenth-century infirmary and mortuary chapel, and analyses the genesis of the Merveille. Among the findings or propositions are that the monks’ cemetery was housed in what may once have been a ducal palace; that the abbey’s cloister occupied the same position as it does today but was at a lower, mezzanine level and was smaller than the present cloister; that the chapter house and infirmary were probably adjacent to the west walk of the cloister; that the original provision for kitchen and cellar and for sleeping space was inadequate; and that the Merveille, which was the work of Abbot Raoul des Îles, was not entirely new-build as sometimes thought, but a transformation and redevelopment of buildings that already existed.

While the role of women as designers and/or patrons of architecture in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland is increasingly recognised, their role in the making of architecture remains contested. This article sheds light on the subject by drawing not just on the extensive secondary literature, but also on records of livery companies and other primary sources in London and Dublin. It begins with the building site, focusing on female apprenticeship. Here substantial evidence is provided showing that girls bound to bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers as apprentices — the so-called ’lost labourers’ of recent scholarship, recorded in guild registers and court minutes — did not in fact acquire craft skills or work as on-site operatives in those trades. The article then turns to those areas of the building process to which women did make a substantial contribution: first the practical realm, including brickmaking, lime-burning and the cleaning and preparation of carved and moulded work for painters and decorators; then the organisational realm of business, including property development, house-building and estate management. Taken together, these stories from the margins of architectural and labour histories make clear the distinction between competence in skills and competence in business, giving a more accurate picture of the multifarious nature of female participation in the construction industry in the Georgian era.

The picturesque aesthetic of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, as manifested in country house architecture, often involved moving the principal floor from an elevated piano nobile down to ground level, lowering one’s visual perspective and facilitating more direct movement between house and garden. While these developments are well recognised in the literature, one repercussion for architects has been largely overlooked: how to deal, in both practical and aesthetic terms, with the vertical challenges posed for a groundlevel principal floor by uneven terrain or pre-existing fabric. A particularly interesting case study is provided by the work of James Wyatt at two very different houses, the classical Dodington Park (1796–1813) and gothic Ashridge House (1807–13), through his carefully conceived and implemented use of small interior level changes, or stepped floors. Although the initial problems were similar, Wyatt’s solutions differed markedly in response to the demands of each commission; they also contrasted with the various approaches adopted by contemporaries such as Humphry Repton, John Nash and John Soane. Overall, this article suggests both the scholarly challenges, and the importance, of devoting enhanced attention to the interior topography of the picturesque experience.

Trinity Church, built in the British concession at Shanghai in 1847–48, was the first Christian church erected for the foreign community there. Although it was an important centre of worship for that community, within twenty years it had collapsed and been demolished; it was replaced by the current church, erected to designs by George Gilbert Scott between 1866 and 1869, since when the original church has been largely forgotten. However, the failures in construction that led to its demolition are instructive. Drawing on the transnational knowledge network of the British empire, especially the experience of the existing British settlements at Hong Kong and Canton (Guangzhou) a thousand miles to the south, the projectors of the building attempted to combine western and Chinese constructional traditions and practices. The colonists believed they were educating the workforce in the (purportedly superior) methods of the west, but they succeeded only in producing a constructional hybrid, with disastrous consequences. As a work of construction, the first Trinity Church reveals the problematic nature of building production in early treaty-port era Shanghai, while as a cultural construct it stands as a failed example of the so-called pedagogy of imperialism.

Collegiate gothic architecture built in the United States during the early twentieth century has generally been considered an anti-modern reaction to the rapid changes of the period. This article challenges that interpretation by analysing the collegiate gothic architecture and planning of the University of Chicago from its incorporation in 1890 up to 1918, focusing on the work of Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, which hitherto has been almost entirely neglected. In these decades, the campus changed considerably from the original 1893 quadrangular plan by Henry Ives Cobb. Archival sources are used to trace this shift, with particular attention to three major buildings designed by Charles Coolidge: the Tower Group (1903), Harper Memorial Library (1912) and Ida Noyes Hall (1916). In their architecture and planning, each of these projects set new precedents for the adaptive possibilities of collegiate gothic and changed how the campus related to its urban neighbourhood. From 1900, the university’s leaders consciously opened the campus to its surroundings and realigned it to the Midway Plaisance, the renowned public greenway designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. In doing so, the university pioneered a new campus typology, the academic avenue, which represented a positive embrace of urban life within wider debates on the American city. Through this typology, the university’s collegiate gothic architecture made meaningful connections with Chicago’s progressive civic culture, in consonance with the educational philosophy of its founding president, William Rainey Harper.

The Park Hill estate in Sheffield was one of the most monumental and experimental projects in twentieth-century British housing. Designed by two young architects, Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, it was constructed between 1957 and 1961 under the city’s Labour-led council, one of the country’s most visionary post-war local authorities. The estate has been celebrated for its ’streets in the sky’ design, an architectural approach associated with Alison and Peter Smithson which sought to salvage and recreate patterns of working-class community and social life from the slums that were razed during the rebuilding of Britain’s cities. This article deconstructs mythologies that have come to dominate narratives about Park Hill and its approach to community. It shows that the design of the estate did not recreate the pattern of nineteenth-century housing which formerly stood on the site, nor was it conceived to recreate the working-class community which had existed there. In doing so, this article reassesses the supposed political radicalism of the British welfare state in the early post-war period. While Park Hill has been acclaimed as architecturally innovative, its politics were not straightforwardly progressive. Like much post-war reconstruction, it sprang from a dialogue with older liberal frameworks of welfare delivery.

While some of the major hospitals built in Britain following the creation of the National Health Service have attracted scholarly attention, Vale of Leven — the first NHS hospital — has been largely overlooked. Erected in 1952–55 at Alexandria, to the northwest of Glasgow, it was built with funds provided by the civil defence budget and was designed as both a potential emergency hospital during wartime and a peacetime general hospital to meet the needs of the local population. The architect, Joseph L. Gleave (1907–65), regarded the project as an opportunity to design a hospital based on the principles of the modern movement and, when it opened, it was applauded as the first ’modern’ hospital built by the NHS. As with the emergency hospitals built at the outset of the second world war, the design was based on a separation between circulation (the ’spine’) and accommodation, which comprised standardised but expandable modular units plugged into the spine, allowing flexibility for future change. Although Vale of Leven Hospital was not replicated, aspects of its planning and design were influential in the short term, and its legacy can be seen in the more compact standardised model of the nucleus hospitals developed in the 1970s.

This review article marks a departure for the journal — the start of an occasional series looking at areas often given inadequate attention in the pages of Architectural History. While the United Kingdom, Europe, United States and (at least some of) the countries of the former British empire are generally well covered in the journal, other parts of the world are not, and of these Latin America is perhaps the most conspicuous. This is partly for historical linguistic reasons (most research on Latin America is written in either Spanish or Portuguese) and partly because, when English-language publication is considered, the overwhelming influence of the US in this region means that the magnet of American publication is almost irresistible. This has meant that both Architectural History and the broader discipline as it exists in the UK have missed out on an important area of architectural-historical research and debate. To address this — to bring the architecture of Latin America to the attention of our readers and, conversely, to bring our journal to the attention of researchers in the region — the editorial board invited the Colombian-born architect Felipe Hernández, associate professor at Cambridge and member of the editorial board of Architectural History, to introduce the fascinating work of this continent and the wider issues it raises for the discipline.