This introduction to the special collection begins with a historiographical overview of the American Renaissance. Here we will see how both popular perception and academic study of the subject have been affected by wider forces, including the advent of modernism, the emergence of the preservation movement and the increased attention given to social inequalities in public discourse today. This is the context in which the articles in the collection are situated and introduced. The final section considers aspects of the subject requiring further work, in particular the American Renaissance as a transnational phenomenon linked to the notion of the ‘Angloworld’.

This article considers the origins, both scholarly and personal, of The American Renaissance 1876–1917 exhibition (1979) and the accompanying book catalogue, setting them in the context of architectural and cultural developments in the United States from the 1940s to the 1970s. It traces how the exhibition came about, what it was trying to achieve and how it was received, both at the time and subsequently. It shows that the exhibition was not conceived as an attack on modernism as such or as a work of architectural conservatism. Rather, it was an attempt to rescue from obscurity an entire chapter of American architectural history that had been excluded by the modernising narratives of Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Vincent Scully and others, and to reassess what this architecture might contribute to the present.

The identification of the American elite with the Renaissance in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as seen in the extended Capitol Building and National Mall in Washington DC, can be traced back to architectural, historiographical and cultural trends taking place in Britain. The writings of John Ruskin, Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds framed the debate in the United States. At first Ruskin’s antipathy towards the Renaissance was exacerbated by the Nativist Party’s opposition to Catholic immigration, but then the writings of Pater and, particularly, Symonds achieved what Wallace K. Ferguson described as ‘the thorough naturalization of Renaissancism in the English-speaking world’. Symonds’s Hegelian interpretation of the historical era as a ‘spirit of self-conscious freedom’ enabled Americans from the 1870s onwards to post-rationalise the Renaissance as a national style. Symonds dethroned the Ruskinian cult of the Gothic and celebrated Renaissance classicism and secular individualism. His image of Italian despots as ‘self-made men of commerce’ and an ‘aristocracy of genius and character’ appealed to US capitalists, while his admiration for the sumptuous palaces built by these Renaissance ‘men of power’ reinforced the evolutionary theories of the British sociologist Herbert Spencer, whose principle of ‘the survival of the fittest’ became the creed of American plutocrats as they built their own palatial houses. Finally, his frequent references to the discovery of America by Columbus came to legitimise the image of the US as the heir of Renaissance culture, as proclaimed at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.

Study and travel in Europe provided a foundation for the establishment of artists and architects in the United States, including landscape architects and urban planners. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Charles A. Platt (1859–1933) and Charles Eliot (1861–97), men from privileged backgrounds in New York and Boston respectively, spent years in Europe seeking training and direct knowledge of historic patterns in garden, park and city making. Both shared their observations in influential articles for professional and popular journals and in publications that discussed what they had observed abroad and showed how it could be applied to American needs. Separate publications about their work and ideas further reinforced their influence. Platt, originally trained as an etcher and painter, approached first landscape design and then architecture from the perspective of an artist. He became one of the earliest and most influential figures in the formal garden revival in the United States, especially in landscapes for country houses, for which he also became one of the country’s most admired designers. In contrast, Eliot studied European patterns as a landscape architect who was also interested in both land preservation and regional planning. He led in establishing the Trustees of Public Reservations (1891), America’s first private-sector state-wide landscape trust, and the Boston Metropolitan Park Commission (1893), the country’s earliest regional landscape-planning state agency. The two men and their work represent contrasting methods and objectives, yet their interlocking careers sketch a broader panorama of the European precedents for American conditions at the turn of the twentieth century and beyond.

In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, New York was seized by a passion for things French in interior decoration. The influx of French eighteenth-century decorative arts from London and Paris exerted a powerful influence over the imaginations of a new millionaire class, while the emergence of the professional dealer-decorator established channels for the incorporation of these materials into the luxury residence. While these interiors were developed in collaboration with leading US architects such as Richard Morris Hunt and George B. Post, they also posed a subtle challenge to the discourse of intellectualism developed on architects’ behalf. Governed by issues of taste and commerce as well as by artistic judgement, these French interiors presented a compelling vision of aristocratic stature that was at once in keeping, and in conflict, with the aspirations of an American Renaissance. This article considers the role of eighteenth-century French-style interiors in the articulation of a ‘civilised’ architectural tradition in the United States during the so-called Gilded Age. Focusing on the private mansion, it reconsiders the notion of the American Renaissance as a principally academic movement by calling attention to the ways in which it also responded to the requirements of the elite class as well as the commercial marketplace.

In a second career begun in his retirement, Henry Morrison Flagler (1830–1913), the cofounder of Standard Oil and one of the wealthiest citizens in the United States, embarked on the development of the tropical wilderness of Florida. Starting in St Augustine, he built a network of luxury hotels and railroads that became the infrastructure for modern Florida. Creating a counterpart to the premier summer resort of Newport, Rhode Island, Flagler transformed Palm Beach, an undeveloped barrier island, into a winter playground for the new American aristocracy, starting with the Georgian-style Royal Poinciana Hotel. It was Whitehall, however, the mansion built for Flagler in 1900–02 as a wedding gift to his third wife, Mary Lily Kenan, that became the resort community’s monumental showplace. Designed by the New York firm of Carrère & Hastings in the Renaissance-derived classicism of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, the stately white palace fronting Lake Worth embodied Flagler’s cultural aspirations as a patron of the arts. As the first major client of Carrère & Hastings, Flagler was critical in launching the career of one of the most prominent architectural firms of the Gilded Age. This article examines Whitehall in the context of Flagler’s business practices and personal goals, consistent with Andrew Carnegie’s ‘Gospel of Wealth’. Architectural opulence not only boosted Flagler’s mercantile purposes, but also reflected a belief, nurtured by his relationship with Carrère & Hastings and other close associates, about the importance of classical architecture and the arts in the development of society.

Wealth from western investments lit up the Gilded Age. East and West, it financed the mansions, balls and philanthropy that were integral to upper-class culture. Historians of capitalism have argued that a national upper class coalesced during the late nineteenth century and that the development of a common culture was essential to its formation. Much of this work has focused on the Northeast. How did this play out in the Trans-Mississippi West? This article explores the roles that architects and the buildings they designed played in the intertwined processes of class formation, capitalist expansion and the advancement of white settler colonialism in the American West. It begins in the early 1880s, when Henry Villard (1835–1900), president of the Northern Pacific Railway, launched an ambitious plan to complete the transcontinental railroad and enlisted the architects McKim, Mead & White and their assistant, Cass Gilbert (1859–1934), to design buildings of all kinds along the line — an unprecedented move for a new western railroad. It then follows Gilbert back to St Paul to examine two major projects, one for local clients and one for Villard’s colleague, the eastern capitalist William Endicott, Jr (1826–1914). As agents for eastern capitalists and their counterparts in the West, the architects and the buildings they designed activated in the West an elite aesthetic and professional culture initially generated in the Northeast. Operating across local, regional and national scales, they contributed to the expansion of capitalist markets, the formation of a national upper class and, more broadly, the processes of settler colonialism in a rapidly changing region.

Architects and urban planners in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly those working in the City Beautiful style, held lofty ambitions yet struggled to carry them out. In cities such as Washington DC and Chicago, political resistance made executing their plans onerous. In the US colonies, however, they operated with greater liberty. This article follows the spatial vision of Daniel Burnham (1846–1912) from the mainland US to the Philippines. In that colonial setting, Burnham was able to realise his vision far more easily, as neither he nor the officials executing his plans were ultimately accountable to Filipinos. Forced labour, confiscated land, repurposed public money, unchecked political power and wartime social disruption all aided US architectural imperialism. Rather than regretting this, Burnham and his associates celebrated the opportunities that their undemocratic setting provided. This article treats not only Burnham but also William E. Parsons (1872–1939) and Cameron Forbes (1870–1959), who extrapolated and enforced Burnham’s plans, and Juan Arellano (1888–1960), the Filipino architect who, to his later regret, helped remake Manila in the colonisers’ image.

The most prominent and long-lasting of the timber truss-roofed buildings from imperial Roman times was the Basilica Ulpia, the interior of which has been reconstructed by recent writers but with little agreement regarding the upper sections. The reconstruction that best passes the test of engineering viability is shown here to be the one published by James E. Packer in 1997, but Packer’s reconstruction is unconvincing with regard to the roof. The argument advanced now is that the roof was constructed with double trusses of the kind once found in the early Christian basilicas of Old St Peter’s and San Paolo fuori le Mura, and then recorded in the eighteenth century by Jean-Baptiste Rondelet, which were very similar in size to those used for the Basilica Ulpia. The spacing of roof trusses was determined by the nave column spacing. Engineering analysis determines that the trusses had sufficient capacity to support the roof and that the double-truss arrangement was critical to avoid overloading the stone architraves. The article speculates that doubling the Roman truss may have been a previous innovation. It argues that the later early Christian basilicas relied on the Roman double truss because of its proven performance, and that this continuity was recognised by Auguste Choisy and others who considered their use to be a reflection of earlier Roman practice.

Between 1459 and 1474, the duke of Burgundy ordered the construction of an entirely new residence in Lille, known as Palais Rihour. It was Philip the Good’s most ambitious architectural project, which set new standards for the display of princely magnificence. Among the new architectural features were a regular plan, a long gallery, a square stair tower with straight flights, and brick-and-stone masonry. The design had a significant impact on the development of court architecture in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain and northern Europe. Despite its importance, Rihour has received little scholarly attention, the major work by Max Bruchet being almost a century old. The study of Philip’s residence is hampered by the loss of most of the structure. Following damage by two major fires in the eighteenth century, the entire complex was demolished in the mid-nineteenth century and today only the chapel and the relocated monumental stair tower survive. However, extensive archival research allows for a detailed reconstruction of Rihour’s phases of construction. The exceptionally numerous surviving letters offer a rare insight into the planning process and reveal the close involvement of Philip (1396–1467), and later his son Charles the Bold (1433–77), in the construction. Both Valois princes were concerned with minute details, and their frequent changes of mind caused despair among the building’s administrators, the auditors of the Chambre des Comptes of Flanders. The administrators advocated a more pragmatic approach, proposing cheaper alternative solutions to balance cost with the speed of construction. The innovative design was thus also the product of compromise.

The coffered dome designed by Philibert de L’Orme (1514–70) for the chapel of the Château d’Anet in northern France between 1549 and 1552 is a masterpiece of stereotomy — the stone vaulting technique characterised by the custom cutting (or dressing) of a vault’s components or voussoirs. The dome was executed by first individually dressing its large voussoirs, so that they would fit one another precisely, and then dry assembling them like the pieces of a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. The spiralling ribs that form the coffers added a layer of complexity to the work, for they are embedded in the voussoirs; thus the exact shape and position of the rib sections belonging to each voussoir had to be calculated precisely before dressing to ensure that, after assembling, they would form the correct pattern over the vault’s surface. The dome’s execution method continues to baffle historians, in particular with regard to the transfer of the complex pattern formed by the ribs on to the templates used by the stonecutters to shape the voussoirs. Based on a new 3D laser scan of the dome and on the analysis of late medieval and early modern stereotomic practices and theories, this article offers a new interpretation of the methods that de L’Orme adopted at Anet and of their significance within the panorama of sixteenth-century architectural practice and theory.

The ‘Abbott Book’ is a seventeenth-century pocketbook of over three hundred pages of drawings and notes on decorative plaster and paint made by members of the Abbott family of Devonshire. It has a long and contested history. From the 1920s through to the 1950s, it was given sixteenth-century origins and described as a compilation made by several generations of the Abbott family. During this period, the book’s drawings were used to attribute much sixteenth- and seventeenth-century decorative plaster in the south-west of England to the Abbott dynasty of plasterers. Then, through the 1980s and 1990s, the Abbott story was revisited and dramatically revised. The book was declared a post-1660 work and previous notions of several generations of Abbotts creating it were dispelled. The whole work was reattributed to one man, John Abbott, who was born in 1642 and died in 1727. As a result, plasterwork across the south-west was reattributed to an anonymous ‘Devon School’ of plasterers and, with its new and dramatically shortened lifespan, the book’s usefulness as a source for the broader practices of plasterwork in the period was diminished. Using new evidence relating to watermarks, the genealogy of the Abbotts, the plasterwork they produced and the print sources they used for drawings in the book, this article rewrites the Abbott Book story. It restores the notion that the pocketbook was used by several different members of the Abbott family — at least three and possibly four — over the 150 years between c. 1580 and 1727. By providing a logic and a timeline for its complex compilation pattern, it allows the drawings in the book to shed new light on the design and production processes of seventeenth-century plasterwork not just in Devon, but also in England as a whole.

Numerous renowned antiquaries and architects in Georgian Britain were enthralled by a strange craze: they declared the ark of Noah to be the origin and divine model for architecture worldwide. This article analyses the fashion for ‘arkaiology’ (as the poet Robert Southey mockingly called it) by focusing on one of its most spectacular exponents, the architect Joseph Michael Gandy (1771–1843). Taking Gandy’s theories as the starting point to reconstruct a broader debate on climatological thinking about art and architecture, the article shows that the fascination with the deluge is best understood as a reaction against the climatic theory of the origins of architecture associated with Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the implicit cultural relativism that it entailed. The case of Gandy also sheds fresh light on the search for origins in late (Romantic) classicism. Instead of submitting to a climatically determined vernacular tradition, Gandy’s arkaiology allowed him to theorise the distant past as a space for speculative artistic reconstruction of the principles of architecture.

This article examines the work of the Austrian architect Clemens Holzmeister. A leading representative of Austrian architecture between the wars, and a significant figure in the 1950s and 1960s as teacher of the new generation of Austrian architects including Hans Hollein and Gustav Peichl, Holzmeister presents a perplexing image. In the 1920s, he played an important role in the early architectural projects of Red Vienna, but in the following decade he endorsed the Austrofascist regime of Engelbert Dollfuß and Kurt Schuschnigg of 1934–38. This article argues that his work presents other interpretative challenges too, for he was a prolific designer of churches, which have seldom been integrated into wider narratives of modern architecture. However his work is viewed, it was an important barometer of wider cultural and political currents in inter-war Austria, in particular the country’s attempt to construct a meaningful identity after the collapse of the Habsburg empire. The aim of the article is not to rehabilitate or recover Holzmeister, but to consider the light his work casts on inter-war cultural politics in Austria, as well as the broader questions over the implicit value judgements that inform histories of modern architecture.

Modern architects in the inter-war period were enthused by the potential of science and technology to inform their work. The educational dimension of this changing mindset was first recognised and explored at the Bauhaus in Germany, the experiments of which were to inspire the teaching of architecture in schools across Europe and the United States, particularly after the end of the second world war. In the United Kingdom, the quest for a more science-based approach to architectural education had an equally important source in the work of the government’s Building Research Station (BRS). From the early 1930s, the BRS initiated steps to familiarise architectural students with its methodologies, and in the postwar years such concerns were channelled into a comprehensive pedagogical reform agenda that culminated in the landmark Oxford Conference on Architectural Education of 1958. This article argues that it was William Allen (1914–98), rather than better-known figures such as Leslie Martin and Richard Llewelyn-Davies, who was the driving force behind this agenda. As chief architect to the BRS, Allen took up a pivotal position at the intersection of building science and professional practice. The article shows how, over the course of two decades, Allen used the institutional machinery of both the BRS and the Royal Institute of British Architects to inject a scientific outlook into the training of architects. His success in doing so positions Allen as a major figure in British post-war architecture, even though his own attempt to implement his vision as principal of the Architectural Association (1961–65) ended in failure.