The monuments of the Byzantine Empire stand as a testimony to architectural ingenuity. The history and development of such ingenuity, however, may often be difficult to trace, since this requires investigating ruins, peeling away centuries of renovations, and searching for new documentary evidence. Nevertheless, identifying the origins of specific innovations can be crucial to an understanding of how they later came to be used. In fact, ‘creative “firsts” are often used to explain important steps in the history of art’, as Edson Armi noted, adding that ‘in the history of medieval architecture, the pointed arch [and] the flying buttress have receive this kind of landmark status’.

Since the nineteenth century, scholars have observed both flying buttresses and pointed arches on Byzantine monuments. Such features were difficult to date without textual evidence, and so they were often assumed to reflect the influence of the subsequent Gothic period. Archaeological research in Cyprus carried out between 1950 and 1974, however, had the potential to overturn this assumption.

This article analyses the gatehouse of the wealthy Benedictine abbey of St Benet's Holm in Norfolk, one of the set-pieces of English monastic architectural patronage in the fourteenth century. The ruinous condition of this building, and its sequestered location, means that it has attracted little scholarly attention in the past, and the neglect has been exacerbated by the presence of a brick windmill-tower superimposed on its remains four centuries after the gatehouse was built. This forced marriage, at once preposterous and compelling in effect, has absorbed most of the attention paid to the site, and because what is left of the gatehouse's main façade is embedded within the mill-tower, and thus difficult to photograph, its artistic uniqueness and quality of execution have been concealed. There has hence been no serious attempt to investigate or contextualize it (Figs 1, 2).

‘Remember the impression one gets from good architecture, that it expresses a thought.’ Wittgenstein's prompt to himself comes to mind when, in looking at Elizabethan buildings today accepted as ‘good architecture’, we ask, but what is the thought? The thinking behind prodigy houses and their lodges is not easy to discern; it has to be addressed indirectly because the Elizabethans left no statements about their architectural intentions. But it is useful to look at discourses adjacent to architecture. Of these, rhetoric, the ancient art of persuasion, is one of the most significant. ‘Rhetoric and architecture’, writes the historian of memory, Mary Carruthers, ‘have had a venerable dialogue’. This essay argues that such a dialogue exists in the minds of the Elizabethan patron-builders, at various levels of consciousness. New ideas meet with, and in turn are shaped by, an education in which rhetoric has played a significant role.

St Philip Neri, founder of the Roman Oratory, died in 1595, just in time to see the completion, after twenty years, of the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella (known as the Chiesa Nuova)— except for the facade (finished c. 1607). Even before his canonization in 1622 the church was a place of pilgrimage. The community he founded inhabited a mass of miscellaneous buildings east of the church, decrepit, cramped, and acquired piecemeal over time when funds allowed. The musical ‘oratories’ — concerts with a sermon in the middle — also attracted many visitors, and the eponymous hall in which these events took place was inadequate. The community's rule allowed them to accept donations but not to beg or canvass for them. Nevertheless, by 1624 they were able to contemplate building a new sacristy on the west of the church and they were also buying up adjacent properties on that side. Initially most of the block was already built on, but by 1650 they owned practically all of it, and the shape of a new complex (Figs 1 and 2) was discernible from partly or wholly completed new structures.

Batty Langley (1696-1751) is one of the most familiar and generally infamous figures of Britain's eighteenth-century Gothic Revival (Fig. 1). Following his father, he trained as a gardener and was one of the early promoters of the irregular style that prefigured William Hogarth's ‘line of beauty’. Langley's interest, however, turned to architecture and he produced numerous architectural treatises and pattern books, the majority of which were concerned with Classical architecture. This was a sensible decision since, as Eileen Harris and Nicholas Savage observe, ‘Langley had much to gain by concentrating his publishing activities on architecture, for which there was a considerably larger, more diversified, and less discriminating market.’ His most well-known publication, however, is concerned with the Gothic: Ancient Architecture: Restored, and Improved by a Great Variety of Grand and Useful Designs, Entirely New in the Gothick Mode (1741-42).

The heating and ventilation of the two debating chambers in the British Houses of Parliament occupied the minds of various Select Committees and some of the country’s most renowned scientists and engineers during the nineteenth century. Indeed, since the seventeenth century the chambers had been major sites for technical experimentation in the field of ventilation, which, according to the Victorian physician Neil Arnott, reflected the technological and scientific advances made during this period. Nineteenth-century writers chronicled the design and testing of the numerous heating and ventilation systems that had been deployed. However, the strategies implemented during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were not entirely successful in generating a pleasant internal environment. The destruction of the ancient Palace of Westminster by fire on 16 October 1834 therefore provided an important opportunity to design completely new debating chambers from first principles.

The dominant historical account of constructional polychromy in Britain describes its emergence in the fifteenth century as a by-product of the introduction of brick-making under Flemish influence. Blue bricks, over-fired or possibly deliberately vitrified, were put to use creating patterns and colour contrasts in load-bearing walls. This constructional polychromy passed from fashion in the late Renaissance period before returning to popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, prompted, it is said, by John Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851–53), and landmark buildings, notably William Butterfield’s All Saints, Margaret Street in London, designed in 1849.

This study focuses on two little-known mid-nineteenth-century pamphlets which proposed radical changes to the ways in which large public and administrative buildings were planned. Although one author went to some lengths to remain anonymous, the other was soon to become recognized and respected as a major critic and historian of architecture. These ideas were thus by no means the fantasies of peripheral dreamers. Indeed, they were possible, practical solutions to current problems which used both proven and emerging technologies. Both authors advocated deep, top-lit, single-storey, ‘universal’, undifferentiated and continuous space as the best way to plan museums, libraries and offices, supported by clearly articulated reasoning. In so doing, they advanced arguments more usually associated with the open planning and ‘free’ plans of twentieth-century Modern architecture; they anticipated ideas put forward independently over three-quarters of a century later. The authors appropriated strategies already rehearsed in contemporary buildings that had been conceived for commercial, horticultural and industrial uses. They also understood how new technologies of construction and servicing developed outside the fields of public and representational buildings could help make the spaces in these types comfortable and environmentally acceptable.

Edinburgh's architecturally magnificent and much-admired historic school buildings, often set in opulent grounds, have come to symbolize the city's ongoing dichotomy between ‘normal’ state schools and ‘elite’ private schools. These schools are conspicuously sited in the most culturally prestigious locations in Edinburgh — the New Town, Old Town and Victorian bourgeois suburbs — and their architecture powerfully underpins their ideologies of longevity and tradition. The solidity of the built ‘heritage’ of these schools, however, obscures a story of great educational complexity and change. Many of the historic buildings are no longer used by the present school institutions; some now have alternative uses. Others have changed fundamentally their social and educational status (several, ironically, were originally built by wealthy donors as charitable orphanages for the ‘deserving poor’ and later converted to fee-paying day schools for the middle classes).

The complex history of these schools cannot be understood adequately without reference to the early history of their buildings. This article is intended as an initial exploration of these complexities. It focuses on two key Edinburgh case studies: the Edinburgh Academy (‘the Academy’), built to William Burn's design of 1823 and opened in 1824 (Fig. 1); and the Royal High School of Edinburgh (the ‘Royal High’), built to Thomas Hamilton's design of 1825 and opened in 1829 (Fig. 2). It examines the educational origins, brief, architectural design, and early use of these surviving purpose-built schools and, in particular, the associated negotiations and debate of 1822–23 that occurred at a municipal level, which links their controversial pre-histories.

From his emergence on the cultural scene in the 1920s until his death in 1983, Kenneth Clark was one of the most influential figures in the history of British art and design, and his legacy remains strong. Clark’s life and work were entirely dedicated to communicating about art and transforming public understanding regarding its production and enjoyment. His first book, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste, investigated, condemned and elevated the status of Georgian and Victorian England’s enthusiasm for the Middle Ages. Written in the mid-1920s, it was published with Constable in 1928 when he was only twenty-five years old. By investigating the circumstances under which the book came to fruition and its importance in relation to Clark’s persistent interest in the Victorians — and John Ruskin in particular — a richer understanding of Clark’s ideas and beliefs can take shape.

In 1945, Janet Vaughan, a distinguished haematologist, became Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, her Principalship lasting until her retirement in 1967. Described in her obituary as ‘a woman of extraordinary vitality and not a little impatience’, Vaughan — awarded the DBE in 1957 — played a key role in steering the college through a period of major change in British Higher Education. Not least amongst the changes was a significant growth in the number of students at university across the country, which resulted in numerous, often high-profile, construction projects. Somerville, which had been founded in 1879 as the University of Oxford's second college for women, was not untouched by this development, and at Vaughan's retirement party, her colleague, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Dorothy Hodgkin, referred to the several new buildings completed during the previous two decades. The college's post-war building campaign had begun modestly with two small infill developments by Geddes Hyslop in 1948–50 and 1954–56.

Graeme Shankland (1917–84) conforms in many ways to the popular image of a 1960s planner with his lyrical advocacy of inner city motorways and his suggestions of enormous programmes of renewal in ‘outworn’ Victorian city centres. As an advocate of the belief that ‘our problem in Britain is that it is our generation which must completely renew most of the older parts of our larger towns and cities’, Shankland was an important representative of what Peter Mandler has described as a new ‘more dirigiste version of urban planning’, an approach that had ‘little sentiment about historic townscapes’. As Mandler put it, ‘city centres were to be made “liveable” not by preserving the familiar (which was deemed grey and boring) but by projecting a vision of modern vitality.’ Shankland’s plan for Liverpool is notorious. Gavin Stamp described it as a ‘nightmare’ which was mercifully only ever partly completed. Raphael Samuel labelled him ‘the butcher of Liverpool’. Simon Jenkins’s antipathy towards planners developed after viewing Shankland’s Liverpool plan: ‘I was looking at Bomber Harris. This was the end of the beautiful city and that reaction has infused everything I have thought since about planning and architecture.’ At best, Paul Barker saw him as misguided: ‘I think, for example, of the destruction of the centre of Liverpool by well-meaning planners like Graeme Shankland.’