A significant number of tombs have survived from the Han dynasty (Western Han 206 BC-AD 8, Eastern Han 25–220), an important period for tomb architecture in China. The number of examples is in stark contrast to the lack of evidence of other architecture from the period. In fact, no timber architecture built before the Tang dynasty (618–907) exists today. While much care and scholarly effort has been devoted to the interpretation of ancient architecture, funeral architecture has not received adequate study and scrutiny.

One of the two wealthiest men of his generation in England, Richard Beauchamp, thirteenth Earl of Warwick, served under three Lancastrian kings: he had been tutor to the young Henry VI, ambassador to the Council of Constance, variously Captain of Calais and of Rouen, and he had, of course, fought in the service of the kings of England in France. In 1437 he was made Lieutenant-General and Governor of France and Normandy, leaving for France in August of that year and it was during this trip, two years later, that he died, in 1439, in Rouen, aged fifty-eight. He had made a good first marriage in 1397 to Elizabeth, only daughter and heir of Thomas Berkeley, followed by an excellent second in 1423, to Isabel, daughter of the Earl of Gloucester and eventually sole heir to the Despencer fortune, and also widow of Richard’s cousin and namesake the Earl of Worcester (who had died in 1422).

In Architectural History 45 (2002), Jonathan Foyle proposed ‘A Reconstruction of Thomas Wolsey’s Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace’. Foyle drew attention to Cardinal Wolsey’s intervention at Hampton Court, so long overshadowed by the work of his more flamboyant and better-documented successor, Henry VIII. However, in bringing to the fore Wolsey’s aggrandizement of the manor previously occupied by Giles, Lord Daubeney, Foyle overlooked existing evidence relevant to his thesis, most notably with regard to the Great Hall, where he ascribed a first-floor hall and sequence of apartments to Wolsey. In doing so, he credited Wolsey with introducing the Italian concept of the piano nobile, ten years before the king commenced the surviving Great Hall.

In December 1624, the London draper and merchant adventurer, John Kendrick (Fig. 1), died leaving a large proportion of his considerable fortune to charitable causes. Like other early seventeenth-century metropolitan benefactors, he sought to attack the causes of poverty as well as to relieve its impact, and his legacies included the sums of £7,500 and £4,000, bequeathed respectively to the Berkshire towns of Reading and Newbury, to establish workhouses for the employment of the poor. Workhouses were a relatively new public institution at this date. In the wake of the dissolution of both monasteries and religious guilds in the 1530s and 1540s, and consequent decline in charitable support to the poor, urban authorities experimented with a range of measures to relieve poverty. A small number of towns and cities, including York (1567) and Chester (1577), used charitable funds and locally raised poor rates to establish workhouses to provide work and training to the poor. The workhouses were not residential and in some cases merely acted as distribution points for raw materials to be processed at home. In a parallel development, other towns and cities, including London (1555) and Ipswich (1569) established houses of correction to punish vagrants and to force them to work. Some also provided training schools for the young. The state moved quickly to endorse such measures. Legislation was introduced in 1576 requiring justices of the peace to supply stocks of wool, hemp, flax, iron or other materials to provide work for the poor and to establish houses of correction in each county for incorrigible rogues and those who refused to work. Penalties for non-compliance with the legislation were introduced in 1610.

When Christopher Wren visited Paris in 1665–66, he famously returned with ‘almost all France in paper’. His friend and colleague Robert Hooke, however, was not so lucky; his collection of architectural books and prints was acquired from London. This article outlines the contents of Hooke’s architectural library and considers the general availability of architectural publications in late seventeenth-century London.

Recent research into the history of science has alerted us to the rich cultural contribution a growing awareness of science made to eighteenth-century society in general and to the literate classes in particular. The boundaries of art and science, it has become apparent, were less stringently defined than today, and a growing literature is revealing the crossover from the visual arts to science, especially to medicine, optics, and the applied science of mechanics. It might be asked how far architecture, so close to the physical world in its materials and in its ambition, connected with science during the eighteenth century.

The Romanesque revival, like the Gothic revival, was an international movement. It passed easily across national boundaries and its effects were felt throughout Europe and across America. In Britain it was overshadowed by the Gothic revival out of whose historiography it grew, and is easily confused with the Norman revival that enjoyed considerable popularity in the 1830s and 1840s. Both the Norman revival and the study of the Romanesque were the fruit of British antiquarianism, because in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was in this country a well developed scholarly interest in pre-Gothic, round-arched buildings.

From the first years of its establishment in June 1857, to the end of the nineteenth century, the South Kensington Museum had amongst its collections over a hundred architectural models. First they were acquired through a policy of encouraged loans and gifts, followed by pro-actively commissioning model makers; other models, however, were at South Kensington through default, having remained on site where they had been made by ‘sappers’. The models, which included examples of Western, Asian and Far Eastern buildings and monuments, were first shown in displays under the headings of Ornamental, Architectural, Economics, and Educational. To give an indication of their initial importance to the museum, the early guidebooks feature architectural models amongst the ‘principle objects in the gallery’. Twenty years later most models had been transferred from what were essentially style galleries to the more utilitarian displays concerned with architectural and engineering practices, and within them they were merely included as part of the broader contextual themes. By the turn of the century, with the exception of the 1901 handbook to the models of Italian Renaissance painted interiors, they were rarely referred to at all in museum publications. By 1912 (soon after the Science and Art collections had been divided on either side of the Exhibition Road) most of the models were no longer on display and were thought by senior keepers to be of little use to museum collections. Many had been de-accessioned by the 1970s, when their position in the doldrums was reversed and models were once again included in the museum displays and exhibitions. This article explores the changes in attitude towards architectural models during the first 120 years of the V&A, focusing on the models of Western buildings.

My earlier article in Architectural History 43, ‘Christ Church, Streatham, and the Rise of Constructional Polychromy’, showed that James Wild’s church of 1840–42 was, in its use of coloured masonry, far ahead of its time (Fig. 1). It preceded, by about a decade, the High Victorian fashion for constructional polychromy usually associated with John Ruskin’s pronouncements on colour, contained in The Stones of Venice (1851 and 1853) and William Butterfield’s contemporaneous church of All Saints, Margaret Street (1849–59). The article argued that the interest in polychromy had, in fact, started much earlier in the century. The use of colour in ancient Greek architecture had been investigated and debated by the Institute of British Architects, under the guidance of Thomas Leverton Donaldson, in the 1830s while, in the 1840s, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin gave constructional polychromy a moral quality — an expression of honesty in construction — at the Grange and St Augustine’s Church, at Ramsgate (1845–50).

The buildings and landscaped grounds of the nineteenth-century international exhibitions were directly related to the architectural and urban design traditions of the cities in which they were built. At the same time, they possessed idealized qualities that made them innovative and distinct from other contemporary buildings. The result of collaborative planning among architects, engineers, and planning committees, the exhibitions were built to evoke ideal civic settings, their exhibition palaces, pavilions, and gardens forming exemplary complexes that synthesized both invention and tradition. The International Exhibition, the Weltausstellung, held in Vienna, Austria in 1873, was one such event (Fig. 1). Its buildings were both related to the architectural and urbanistic design traditions of nineteenth-century Vienna, and at the same time possessed idealized qualities that were inventive and progressive, marking new technological achievements.

In March 1904 John Pollard Seddon (1827–1906) and Edward Beckitt Lamb (1857–1932) published an extraordinary scheme entitled ‘Imperial Monumental Halls and Tower at Westminster’. Though never built, it was among the grandest and most visionary proposals London had ever seen and, next to Giles Gilbert Scott’s Anglican cathedral at Liverpool (1904–79), one of the last monumental expressions of Gothic revival architecture in Britain. Designed to immortalize the achievement of the men and women who had laboured to promote and defend the nation’s imperial interests, it was conceived as a lasting testament to the enthusiasm for empire that characterized late Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Figs 1-2).

Almost from the moment of its consecration, on 26 April 1876, the church of the Holy Angels at Hoar Cross in Staffordshire was spoken of as an exceptional building. There was more than local pride in a contemporary newspaper report of its unveiling, which declared it to be ‘one of the most beautiful churches in the kingdom … the dignity of the conception, the beauty of the proportion, and the elaborate care lavished on even the minutest detail, carry one back to those days which have left us such memorials as the Percy shrine or the Beauchamp chapel’. That perceptive reference to those medieval sources of inspiration suggests one of the reasons why the church made such an immediate impression. It was the first complete embodiment in a rural setting of a new ideal in the Gothic revival, which in the previous decade had turned its back on the exotic and eclectic style now called High Victorian and had returned to English architecture of the mid-fourteenth century as the point of departure for modern churches. At Hoar Cross, Bodley and Garner, the architectural partnership which had taken the lead in that movement, worked in close collaboration with an exceptional patron, Emily Meynell Ingram, to help realize a compelling new visual identity for the nineteenth-century Anglican parish church.

Little attention has yet been paid to the work of the East Anglian Arts and Crafts architect Basil Oliver (1882–1948) who is best known, if at all, for his book The Renaissance of the English Public House, published in 1947. Indeed he practised in the period, after the Great War, when the Arts and Crafts Movement is generally considered to have been a spent force, and so his obscurity comes as no surprise. We do not look to Oliver for insight into the fashionable styles of architecture such as emerging Modernism or even ‘art deco’. However, he is representative of a number of architects from this era who could be dismissed as traditionalists but who attempted to continue the ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement in difficult times.

Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, who had been in and out of West Africa since the 1940s as planners and architects, were optimistic about the role of architecture in the tropics on the eve of independence. In the text of Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zones they championed the development in Africa of the tropical modernism they had pioneered in their own work. In sharp contrast, John Lloyd, writing from Ghana just ten years later, conveyed a sense of the discipline’s estrangement from the context.