As this is a valedictory rather than an inaugural lecture, it seemed legitimate to be a little self-indulgent in the choice of theme. Every medievalist at some time or other has to take an interest in the role of the pointed arch in the transformation of medieval architecture from Romanesque to Gothic and in the ways that the pointed arch form was subsequently manipulated through the later Middle Ages. It is only a short step, but one that has been taken less often than you might expect, to pursue that interest back into the early use of the pointed arch in Islamic architecture: to ask how it came to replace the semicircular arch of classical architecture and why it was used.

The late medieval English laity expressed their piety through ostentatious artistic and architectural patronage. The rood, a large-scale image of Christ on the cross, flanked by the Virgin and St John, and placed in or above the chancel arch, was a particular object of both liturgical and financial devotion in the later Middle Ages. One of the more interesting conclusions of recent scholarship has been the recognition that the late medieval desire to express one’s piety through donations to the church was not limited to the upper classes or to one gender. Both men and women of all social classes and ages participated to the best of their ability through collective as well as individual giving. Moreover, people made very deliberate choices about the types of images and architectural forms on which they spent their money. Scholars have argued that the roots of this very active lay patronage lie in the mid-thirteenth century when diocesan statutes first assigned responsibility for maintaining the nave and most of a church’s ornaments to its parishioners.

The late medieval English laity expressed their piety through ostentatious artistic and architectural patronage. The rood, a large-scale image of Christ on the cross, flanked by the Virgin and St John, and placed in or above the chancel arch, was a particular object of both liturgical and financial devotion in the later Middle Ages.1 One of the more interesting conclusions of recent scholarship has been the recognition that the late medieval desire to express one’s piety through donations to the church was not limited to the upper classes or to one gender. Both men and women of all social classes and ages participated to the best of their ability through collective as well as individual giving.2 Moreover, people made very deliberate choices about the types of images and architectural forms on which they spent their money.3 Scholars have argued that the roots of this very active lay patronage lie in the mid-thirteenth century when diocesan statutes first assigned responsibility for maintaining the nave and most of a church’s ornaments to its parishioners.4

The history of church architecture in seventeenth-century London lacks threads of continuity. It is dominated by two great men, Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren, whose contributions could not and did not straddle the whole metropolis or the whole of the century. Besides, the devising of a new church was too significant an act to be left entirely to those capable of architectural design. There is a related misconception that churches were seldom built in London between the Reformation and the Great Fire of 1666. Yet even within the City of London, numerous parish churches were rebuilt during this period, while Jones substantially remodelled Old St Paul’s Cathedral. Beyond the City, much more was happening. London’s earliest seventeenth-century suburban churches were broadly Gothic in style and medieval in type, while those built at the end of the century were entirely classical auditories. The same could be said of church building in a national context, although not without hefty qualification. What is fascinating, important, and insufficiently studied, is the nature of this transition and its wider historical meanings.

Architecture in Oxford between the Civil War and the early Georgian period presents a fascinating picture of great stylistic change and originality, as vernacular building traditions largely inherited from the Gothic of the Middle Ages were superseded by new design philosophies derived from Renaissance interpretations of classical architecture. The new architecture was driven by an increasingly élite and academic taste, largely dependent upon expensive foreign books and even more costly foreign travel, and necessitated fundamental changes to the established building practices of the colleges, which had hitherto relied largely on local master masons for both construction and design. As architecture ‘was something outside the ken of the average Oxford don’, knowledgeable men, especially those who had travelled abroad and seen modern buildings, became important arbiters of taste, and often drifted into architecture as a result. The first and most famous Oxford man to take this path was Christopher Wren of Wadham College in the 1660s, but he was followed a generation later by Henry Aldrich, Dean of Christ Church, after whose death in 1710 the mantle passed to George Clarke of All Souls College. It is with the significance of the latter two men’s activities at Christ Church that we will presently be concerned.

How did the restrictions imposed by eighteenth-century society help and hinder women in their fulfilment of the role of architectural patron? This article will examine the case of Henrietta Cavendish Holies Harley, second Countess of Oxford and Mortimer (1694–1755), and patron of the remarkable remodelling of Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire.

Soane began to pay detailed attention to the design of the interiors of Pitzhanger Manor, the country house in Ealing that Soane built for himself and his family, in the second half of 1801 when building work on the house was already well advanced.1 While the design for the vestibule, down to the smallest detail, was quickly completed, work on the Breakfast Room and the Library proved more difficult and was more protracted.2

Little is known about the contacts Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Minister to the Court of Louis XVI between 1784 and 1789 and future President of the United States, had with French architects during his residence in Paris, except those with Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721–1820), who collaborated with him on the design of the Capitol of Virginia in Richmond from 1785. We know, however, that, at the end of his stay in France, Jefferson was in close touch with the French architect and agriculturalist François Cointereaux (1740–1830), as is proven by several unpublished letters written by each of them.

In January 1859, Henry Cole, the first Director of the South Kensington Museum (from 1899 known as the Victoria and Albert Museum) was in Rome, commissioning the photographer Pietro Dovizielli to produce photographs of buildings in the capital which Cole considered ‘suggestive’ and ‘picturesque’.

Adolf Loos’s famous essay, ‘Ornament and Crime’, decisively linked unornamented architecture with the culture of modernity and, in so doing, became one of the key formulations of modern architecture. To a great extent, the essay’s force comes from arguments drawn from nineteenth-century criminal anthropology. Nevertheless, Loos’s work has been consistently understood only within the context of the inter-war avant- gardes. In the 1920s, Le Corbusier was particularly enthusiastic in bringing Loos’s work to the fore, thereby establishing its future reception. ‘Ornament and Crime’ became an essential catalyst for architecture’s conversion away from the historicism of the nineteenth century to modernism. At the turn of the century, Loos’s essay already foreshadowed the white abstraction of ‘less is more’ architecture and the functionalist rigour of the International Style which would dominate the twentieth century.

Liverpool Cathedral’s Lady Chapel was the first portion to be constructed of a building project which took until the end of the 1970s to complete. Often overshadowed by the later work, this comparatively small building has perhaps not been adequately documented and assessed as a work in its own right. Moreover, in the case of this portion of the cathedral, two architects were involved, and so an attempt to assess the extent of each person’s contribution is a necessary endeavour in any study of this building, but has not previously been undertaken in this case.

The relationship of Modernism in architecture with the symbolic needs of church- building was fraught with the dangers of betrayal: whether the architect indulged in personal spiritual expression, or used traditional forms, he could be accused of stylistic excess; if he applied a reductive functionalism, the result could be faulted as failing the brief. After the Second World War, expression and tradition were gradually admitted into Modernism to expand and enrich its vocabulary, and the limits of functionalism were reassessed. Churches were a field in which architects of the Modern Movement could explore their new concerns with poetic form and monumentality, in contrast to the more prosaic jobs in housing, schools, and so on; but few architects had the chance to work on churches in quite the same volume as the more pressing post-war building tasks. One firm of architects with an exceptional opportunity was Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, responsible for a series of Roman Catholic churches in Scotland, ‘the finest body of post-war church building in Britain’, according to Elain Harwood.1 This work has attracted attention from architectural historians before, particularly for its rich and humane interpretation of sacred architecture.

In late 2003, immediately after the publication in that year’s Architectural History of my article, ‘Teamwork or Masterwork?’, which discussed the issue of the ‘authorship’ of the Royal Festival Hall (RFH) design, a large, carefully-wrapped roll of drawings of early schemes for the RFH was discovered at the Matthew family house, Keith Marischal, East Lothian; together with the remainder of the archival material at the house, it has now been passed to Edinburgh University Library (Special Collections Department). As set out in this short postscript, they shed an important new light on the arguments put forward in the earlier article, whose text and footnotes should be consulted at the appropriate points, to obviate the need for repetition in this piece.