Using Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici's mausoleum in San Lorenzo in Florence as a case study, this article asks why high-ranking members of Florentine society increasingly opted for burial in a sacristy in the years after c. 1350. Countering the argument that the attraction for patrons was primarily one of size, it argues that sacristies were seen as ideal burial places in which to convey the souls of the departed through purgatory, since they were both repositories for collections of saints’ relics that might intercede on the deceased's behalf and the busiest spaces in a church, where priests would have had innumerable opportunities to offer prayers for them. In discussing this choice, the article considers Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici's anxiety for the health of his soul and why he took the highly unconventional step of establishing two chapels in San Lorenzo to care for it; and it goes on to consider how the design of the so-called Old Sacristy was conceived to assist. In doing so, it offers a range of new documentary evidence regarding the early usage of the space, and it concludes with observations about the strategies employed by patrons in the siting of their tombs so as to maximise the care for their souls.

This article reconsiders Michelangelo's unrealised façade project for the church of San Lorenzo in Florence. While surviving evidence, particularly the extant wooden model preserved today in the Casa Buonarroti, gives a good indication of the façade's planned appearance, we are still unclear about how Michelangelo intended it to attach to the church. By reassessing surviving graphic and written sources for the commission, the article argues for a reconstruction of Michelangelo's design as a narthex. It draws further support from an analysis of the intended building site on Piazza San Lorenzo, which, due to its restricted space, suggests that only a narthex construction was possible. By envisaging the façade of the church as a narthex, Michelangelo may have intended it to function as a focal point for religious and civic ceremonies that took place in the piazza.

The Great Pagoda in Kew Gardens is the most important surviving chinoiserie building in Europe. Restoration of the building in 2017–18 was attended by extensive documentary and forensic research, which revealed two markedly different eighteenth-century schemes of decoration undertaken by the architect William Chambers in 1761 and 1784. Both schemes were characterised by the use of innovative and experimental building materials and the application of a varied colour palette which can be shown to have close affinities with temporary, ephemeral buildings. With so few surviving contemporary examples for reference, colour and building materials appear as important characteristics of chinoiserie architecture. The discoveries at Kew demonstrate that these elements were fundamental to the style, which was never constrained by any fixed set of rules. Chambers drew on no single source for the building, but instead imaginatively adapted the Chinese style in a structure of great virtuosity.

The Japanese Imperial Mint, which began its operation producing gold and silver coins in Osaka in 1871, has come to represent the self-modernisation of Japanese architecture and society more generally, both in its industrial purpose and western classical style. This article focuses on the planning, construction and socio-spatial design of the mint to resituate the project in the context of British imperial expansion. New archival research in both Japan and Britain, enabling close analysis of overlooked drawings and documents, establishes the Japanese Imperial Mint's dependence on the transfer of men, machinery and plans from the former Hong Kong Mint, mediated and managed by the two firms Glover & Co and Jardine Matheson & Co. This article thus not only sheds new light on these two individually important buildings in colonial and imperial history, and the engineers involved, but illuminates the relationship between British colonial architecture and the activities of British merchants at the edge of empire in East Asia in the nineteenth century.

In 1923, at the request of the government of India, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) in Britain authorised a specialist research stream. Its purpose was to investigate problems in architectural acoustics specifically related to the new Assembly Chamber then under construction in Imperial Delhi. The design, by Sir Herbert Baker, was unusual for its era in that it was refined with recourse to measured data and calculations with a basis in modern physics. The acoustician, or ‘consulting architect’, was Hope Bagenal, and his appointment by Baker in 1922 marked the first international commission of a British acoustic consultant. This article examines the acoustic design of the Assembly Chamber in Delhi and identifies the inputs of the various individuals, both architects and scientists, involved. Drawing on the archives of Baker and Bagenal, the records of the DSIR and the Guastavino Company, as well as contemporaneous newspaper coverage, it also demonstrates the longer-term implications of the design and construction process at Delhi, including its role in stimulating subsequent government-funded research in architectural acoustics in Britain.

This article examines the posthumous interpretation of Charles Rennie Mackintosh as a pioneer of the Modern movement using the 1933 Mackintosh memorial exhibition as a case study. The exhibition, held at the McLellan Galleries, Glasgow, was a major event in the re-popularisation of Mackintosh following his death in 1928. Using archival material only recently made available, the article focuses on the actions of the architectural critic Philip Morton Shand, Britain's highly influential ambassador for the Modern movement in the interwar period. Shand identified Mackintosh as the sole link in a linear history of the movement leading back to its putative origins in Britain. Attempting to intervene in the exhibition, Shand clashed with its organiser, William Davidson — a close friend and patron of Mackintosh. The correspondence between Shand and Davidson reveals new aspects of the Mackintosh historiography in the development of the British Modern movement.

This article considers the position of the Anglo-Portuguese architect Edward Reynolds (1926–59) in the British avant-garde of the 1950s. In Modern Architecture: A Critical History (1980), Kenneth Frampton suggested that Reynolds's student projects at the Architectural Association in London ‘exerted a decisive influence on the development of Brutalism’. This article scrutinises that claim through the lens of Reynolds's interactions with his peers, including the so-called French House group, an informal network that included his tutors John Killick, James Gowan and Peter Smithson. Notable characteristics of Reynolds's work — chiefly the use of complex and irregular geometries to articulate patterns of activity and movement — are discussed, as are contemporary projects by other members of the group and trends such as the New Brutalism, biomimicry and the revival of pre-war strands of Modernism.

This article considers Alvar Aalto's two church and parish centre projects in Wolfsburg in light of the architectural, political and sociocultural contexts that framed their design and construction in post-war Germany. The study interrogates how architect and parish came together to build the ecclesiastical complexes of Heilig-Geist (1960–62) and Stephanus (1963–68), and how the parties interacted and engaged with widely debated issues in church architecture and urban planning. Close analysis of the buildings and their design processes, based on site visits as well as the study of architectural drawings and models, shows that Heilig-Geist and Stephanus acquire sacred character primarily through the connections they establish between interior and exterior space. The dynamic between inside and outside relates the buildings to key ideas in contemporaneous church architectural theory concerning inward- and outward-looking church-building, part of the broader discourse on the relationship between the sacred and the profane.

A very particular type of modern house in Britain — A-frames of the 1950s and 1960s — emerged from a much longer history of British and Scandinavian-German primitivism centred on the cruck-frame. This article focuses on a small number of architect-designed examples and introduces one of the main proponents of the type, Peter Boston (1918–99). The tension between the A-frame's familiarity as a universal dwelling type and its adoption as a signifier of modernity is a central theme. In the British twentieth-century context, the ‘modern’ included a strong vernacular element, and the new A-frames, which formed part of the ‘timber revival’ of the 1950s and 1960s, were informed by a long-standing interest in the history of cruck-framed construction from the Arts and Crafts onwards, which in turn was part of a wider pan-north European building culture.