One of the most peculiar texts of French Romanticism is Jules Michelet’s today little-read tome, L’Insecte (1857), a fascinating forerunner of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. In Book 2, Chapter 8, entitled ‘De la rénovation de nos arts par l’étude de l’Insecte’ [On the renovation of our arts through studying insects]. Michelet writes there already of two themes that are central to the panorama of intersections between natural history thinking and architectural thought and practice outlined in this essay (itself an interim report on a much longer research project). Here I can take up only some key episodes in the veritable explosion of interest throughout the long nineteenth century (1789 to 1914), and after 1850 in particular: in inorganic and organic nature as sources of inspiration, models even, in the quest to confront the challenges not only of modern society and construction but also of the yearning for a modern style in architecture, and the issue of the new ability to see rather than intuit the inner workings of nature. Michelet writes:

Architectural settings of the early Tudor period, executed in terracotta and adorned with Renaissance ornament, have long attracted the interest of architectural historians. The surviving examples at Sutton Place in Surrey and Layer Marney in Essex are well known, as is the series of terracotta tombs across East Anglia, which date from the 1520s and likewise include Renaissance detail. A group of contemporary funerary monuments in Hampshire, that also exhibits Renaissance detail, has been largely overlooked by scholars. These monuments can be associated with the Renaissance work in Winchester Cathedral, and in particular with the well-known presbytery screens. The group includes the remains of a chapel at Thruxton, with a tomb chest for Sir John and Mary Lisle, built between 1524 and 1527. The Lisle chapel was demolished in the 1790s to provide material for the refurbishment of the church tower. An important series of Renaissance carvings were set into the tower at this time (Fig. 1). Long overlooked by scholars, their original position in the Lisle chapel will be reconstructed in this essay.

Apethorpe Hall (Fig. 1) in Northamptonshire, a Grade I listed country house, has been sorely neglected for the last twenty years. It is currently undergoing essential repairs in the hands of English Heritage, a situation that is providing architectural historians with an opportunity to examine the fabric of the building in greater detail than ever before. As part of this project — which will eventually result in the publication of a monograph — the masonry has been subjected to close study, yielding unexpectedly far-reaching results.

In the early nineteenth century thousands of Scots emigrated to Nova Scotia, Canada, settling there principally in Pictou and Antigonish Counties. This article considers the transformation of the domestic architecture of emigrants from the Scottish Highlands, from earth and random-rubble-walled ‘black houses’ to Classically ornamented and proportioned timber-framed houses. It demonstrates that, in contrast to the transferable traditions of Lowland Scottish settlers, virtually no element of the Scottish Highland vernacular building tradition was established in Nova Scotia, and that Scottish Highland emigrants adopted a new architecture with near total uniformity. These changes in architectural practice are described here in some detail, and then interpreted as indicators of changed social practice within the immigrant Highland community.

‘The greatest fa presto in architectural history’, as Paul Frankl called him — although there are plenty of other contenders for that dubious honour — Gilbert Scott occupies an ambiguous place in the history of English architecture. The sheer volume of his work, and its lack of stylistic consistency, disturbed his contemporaries and have continued to vex later writers. Yet the history of the Gothic Revival cannot be written without him, and through some of his buildings he helped shape its future course. Among these buildings was the chapel at Exeter College, Oxford, begun in 1856 and finished three years later. The survival of a substantial collection of drawings and correspondence in the college’s archives enables us to establish and reinterpret the significance of this magnificent and still somewhat under-appreciated building.

While globalizing trends stimulate the creation of entirely new regions, established regional and local identities remain. Architectural historians, among others, explore the ways in which regionalism has been — and continues to be — defined and redefined. Current issues in this debate include what regional architectural traditions might be; whether regions can be defined by architecture; and how regional traditions of architecture have been defined and interpreted by artists, authors and scholars. Nineteenth-century Belgian architecture is particularly relevant in this context. The formation of Belgian Art Nouveau’s style and identity have both been the object of numerous studies, but while Art Nouveau is probably the best-known creation of Belgian nineteenth-century architecture, it is hardly the only one, nor indeed the only interesting one. One of the sources identified for Belgian Art Nouveau has been the milieu of the so-called Flemish Renaissance Revival, which produced such architectural gems as Emile Janlet’s (1839–1919) Belgian pavilion at the World Exhibition in Paris (1878) and Jean Winders’ (1849–1936) own house and studio (1882–83) in Antwerp (Fig. 1).

The eminent British architect, designer and educator Charles Robert Ashbee (1863–1942) lived and worked in Jerusalem from 1918 to 1922, as Civic Adviser to the City of Jerusalem and principal officer of the Pro-Jerusalem Society. This proved to be a busy and fruitful period in his late career. Back in England sixteen years later, following a final visit to Palestine, Ashbee compiled his Jerusalem Collection, assembling and classifying all the research and planning material he had collected and developed during his Jerusalem years. Edited by Ashbee in his old age and never published in its entirety — and therefore remaining virtually unknown — the collection contains not only textual material but also hundreds of original drawings, plans and watercolour perspectives, together with photographs, the illustrated material bearing autograph annotations throughout.

Charles Quennell embodied many of the possibilities and contradictions of British architecture in the first decades of the twentieth century. He is a little-known figure today, but one who deserves further consideration, not only for his own remarkably interesting and varied career but also because of the light he sheds on some of the less explored aspects of architecture in the 1895–1935 period. Throughout his life he combined a strong interest in history with a search for efficiency and design appropriate for the modern world. Both of these preoccupations were widespread among his generation although, apart from a few notable exceptions, rarely can they be found combined to as great a degree as in Quennell. For example, in 1914 he was a keen exponent of standardization and at work on large romantic houses in Hampstead Garden Suburb. By 1918 he had designed what have been called the first modern houses in the country and had just published the first of the bestselling books in the series co-authored with his wife, A History of Everyday Things in England. In 1930 he was writing a contemporary tract The Good New Days and he built a neo-Palladian villa. He has been little studied to date, the main accounts being Alastair Service’s of his work in Hampstead, a Masters thesis by Nick Collins focused on issues of building conservation, and Graham Thurgood’s article on his 1920s work in Essex.

In the early years of the Second World War, Leslie Martin complied a photographic album to record the architectural work done in partnership with his wife Sadie Speight since 1934. It amounted to ‘quite a lot’, he wrote to Ben Nicholson. Thirty years later, Martin — by now Professor of Architecture at Cambridge and Head of the Land Use and Built Form Studies Centre — was to dismiss his pre-war work as ‘really insignificant in scale’. Martin’s own book, Buildings and Ideas, 1933–83, contains a highly selective account of this early period. This partial view has been further obscured by the persistent misdating and misidentification of the practice’s two most substantial pre-war houses — Brackenfell in Cumberland and Four Acres, North Ferriby, near Hull — in the literature of the Modern Movement in Britain. Of the two, Brackenfell is of particular interest, as the house of Alastair Morton, design director of a textile firm and novice painter. Martin’s own brief comments and the volume of drawings which survive for Brackenfell suggest that this was an important commission for Martin and Speight, and one which precipitated a significant shift in their approach to architecture. However, our inadequate knowledge of the work of the partnership means that the house has so far eluded full analysis. This article proposes to disconnect the evidence of this building from Martin’s subsequent career and architectural theories, and to view it instead in the context of its period. Using Brackenfell as its focus, the article aims to clarify Martin and Speight’s evolution as designers, and to probe the significance of their association with a distinguished group of artists during the late 1930s.

Between 1956 and 1963 James Stirling and James Gowan created a seminal body of work, one that seemed to challenge the overly-institutionalized state of contemporary modernism, and even to point the way to other alternatives beyond it. Their buildings were quasi-brutalist and pre-postmodern, startlingly original in the context of the worthy architecture of the welfare state, yet able to draw on inter-war forms of continental modernism as well as the architecture of the industrial city. The notoriously fractious relationship between the partners was an important factor in this achievement. Mark Girouard has used the term ‘creative tension’ to describe this relationship, deriving it from an interview with Michael Wilford, who worked as an architectural assistant in the partnership’s last years and later (in 1971) himself became Stirling’s partner. This formulation may well relate to a colourful and discordant new architectural identity — a sometimes playful, sometimes edgy combination of angry young men, teddy boy architects and awkward, blunt provincials shaking up the big city — emerging in contrast to the anonymous public architect of the time. Girouard uses ‘creative tension’ to label a photograph of Stirling and Gowan (Fig. 1): Stirling leans easily to the side looking wryly camerawards, while Gowan, absorbed and tense around the mouth, looks down and outwards to the right; between the two is a gap measured out by the line of columns seen behind them. The contrast with a photograph reproduced later in the same book, of Stirling and Wilford sitting companionably across a table, seems to speak for itself.