Yingzao Fashi (State Building Standards) is the oldest extant Chinese technical manual on buildings. It was compiled by Li Jie, a Superintendent of State Buildings (later Director of Palace Building) in 1100 and published by the Song sovereign in 1103 (Figure 1).

There are thirty-four chapters in the Yingzao Fashi, starting with a concise definition of the main terms used in the manual by tracing their textual origins. The main body of the book specifies the units of measurement, design standards and construction principles with structural patterns and building elements illustrated in drawings. Furthermore, it specifies standard estimates for labour works, documents material data, and lists recipes for decorative painting and coatings, etc. It embodies the greatest achievements of Chinese architecture in its day.

The current international attention devoted to contemporary Chinese-financed and constructed development in Africa has tended to obscure complex and multivalent histories of the relationships between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and numerous African nations; and many of these histories date back decades. The ideological origins behind socialist China’s engagement with Africa, and the geopolitical dynamics that continue to propel them forward, trace back to the time of Chairman Mao Zedong, who first coined the term ‘intermediate zone’ in 1946 to position the vast expanse of contested territories and undecided loyalties existing between the ideological poles of the Soviet Union and the United States after World War II. Nine years later (1955), at the first Non-Aligned Movement conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai declared that

Adolf Loos’s famous essay, ‘Ornament and Crime’, decisively linked unornamented architecture with the culture of modernity and, in so doing, became one of the key formulations of modern architecture. To a great extent, the essay’s force comes from arguments drawn from nineteenth-century criminal anthropology. Nevertheless, Loos’s work has been consistently understood only within the context of the inter-war avant- gardes. In the 1920s, Le Corbusier was particularly enthusiastic in bringing Loos’s work to the fore, thereby establishing its future reception. ‘Ornament and Crime’ became an essential catalyst for architecture’s conversion away from the historicism of the nineteenth century to modernism. At the turn of the century, Loos’s essay already foreshadowed the white abstraction of ‘less is more’ architecture and the functionalist rigour of the International Style which would dominate the twentieth century.

In preparation for the 1994 celebrations of the ‘Bauhaus in Tel Aviv’, the newly renovated city was painted white. To its numerous visitors, Tel Aviv boasted the largest concentration world-wide of 1930s modernist buildings (Figs. 1, 2). The impact of this ‘live museum’ was compounded by an abundance of exhibitions and festivities that promoted the Mandate period ‘International Style Architecture’ as a national heritage. This new awareness of Israel’s modern architecture provoked scholarly consideration. In particular, attention has been directed toward the architects who shaped the landscape of the Jewish population in Mandate Palestine known as the Yishuv. Scholars, however, have not adequately questioned the relationship forged by architectural historians between Modern Architecture and Zionism. This paper challenges the uniform treatment of this juncture by exposing distinctions between the different Zionist ideologies embedded in the architectural production of the 1930s. I will illustrate such ideological tension by focusing on the work of Erich Mendelsohn in Palestine on the one hand and on the Tel Aviv architectural circle — known by the Hebrew word for ‘circle’, Chug — on the other.

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.

The construction of New Delhi is often presented as the peak of British colonial architecture, a monumental undertaking that was nevertheless the Empire’s swansong. Although the city was dedicated only half a generation before the Raj was terminated and the whole Empire set out down the road of decolonization, New Delhi was not the last and final chapter in the history of British colonial architecture. The buildings erected by the British Mandatory government of Palestine — first and foremost, the British High Commissioner’s Residence (completed 1931) and the Palestine Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem (dedicated 1937 and now called the Rockefeller Museum) — were architectural achievements of considerable merit, and, more importantly, they carried further the architectural discourse of New Delhi with commanding sophistication. It was, perhaps, in Palestine that the Empire produced its last intellectually ambitious architectural statement.

In the public eye the long gallery is a popular, often spectacular feature of Elizabethan and Jacobean houses and as such has been exclaimed at, described, measured, praised or criticized by generations of visitors. Considering this, and the obvious importance of the room in its period — noted and discussed by Gotch as long ago as 1901 — it is surprising that until Howard Colvin wrote his introductory chapter to Volume IV of the History of the King’s Works almost no enquiry had been made into its architectural or social origins and development. In his recent book, Renaissance Paris, David Thompson remarks that ‘the evolution of the gallery in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is a favourite matter for argument among architectural historians’, a comment which may apply to continental galleries and historians but not, generally, to their English counterparts. So that, whilst continental galleries of the Renaissance and seventeenth century have often been discussed and analysed, especially in terms of their classical prototypes and their sophisticated, frequently highly programmatic decorations, the English gallery has been neglected. Yet the English had a particular genius for galleries of varied design which, in response to practical architectural considerations, they incorporated into their house-plans with an originality and ingenuity seldom matched abroad (Figs 1–3).

According to Sir Christopher Wren's son, writing many years after the events described, the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford (Figs 1-2) was to have

That purse belonged to Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury and former warden of All Souls College, Oxford, whose willingness to finance the Theatre necessitated the scaling back of the project. Although Wren's initial scheme is currently presumed lost, an unidentified project for a theatre (Fig. 3), today amongst the Wren drawings at All Souls, can be associated with the original design. The drawing, together with newly discovered documents, sheds new and unexpected light on the early history of Wren's first major building.

In the last ten years or so, there has been a growing historical interest in the architecture of post-war Britain, marked by a succession of historical monographs. I must apologize for turning again to what is becoming a rather familiar subject, especially as I have nothing to add to what is already known about it. Instead, I want to reflect on some of the reasons why the period absorbs so much interest, and on some of the things that stand in the way of our understanding of it.

The last decade has seen an explosion of scholarly works dealing with colonial architecture and town planning, a domain previously marginal in the historiography. In any case it has aroused the attention of ever more numerous researchers, a fact that has stimulated this attempt to take stock of it, by drawing on cases studied by this author in his own work. The exploration of colonialism now constitutes a significant field of doctoral research, of studies associated with the identification and protection of built heritage, and tends to mould new images in the history of architecture from the last few centuries. In actual fact, the innumerable works on the twentieth century – the subject here – comprise only a fraction of all the studies concerning nearly five centuries of colonization, if the beginning of the colonial era is identified with the discovery of America and the establishment of the first European trading posts in Africa.

Why did the English Gothic Revival ignore continental architecture for so long? Horace Walpole used motifs from Rouen Cathedral at Strawberry Hill in the mid-eighteenth century, it is true, and James Wyatt drew on the Portuguese abbey of Batalha for part of Fonthill Abbey, but these were straws in a wind that did not blow with any force until around 1850. The shift towards continental Gothic at that time, associated with Ruskin and with Benjamin Webb, is well known. Yet the national monoculture that went before tends to be taken for granted, or to be overlooked in favour of the growth of Gothic archaeology or of the incipient ‘Battle of the Styles’. This Late Hanoverian concentration on home-grown Gothic is doubly surprising when compared with the increasingly plural classicism of the day, which embraced Greek, Roman, Italian Renaissance, Louis XIV, and even Egyptian variants. It will be argued here that this cordon sanitaire can be linked with two continuing beliefs, sometimes held together, sometimes separately: that Gothic was invented in England, and that it reached its purest or finest expression there.

Medieval architecture, considered specifically as architecture, has been unevenly treated by its historians. The vast majority of the literature is devoted to churches, for the most part large cathedral or monastic churches. The implication that other types of building either do not survive or are not architecture is patently false since there are many of them, and not a few manifest a degree of complexity in design and detail equal to a major ecclesiastical building. In particular there has been no strong tradition among architectural historians for discussing the planning, iconography and aesthetics of eleventh- and twelfth-century secular structures. Perhaps this is because they fit uneasily within the style categories of Romanesque and Gothic, which were largely devised and developed through the analysis of ecclesiastical buildings.

When the horticulturist Joseph Paxton first published his proposal to house the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations inside a glasshouse of enormous scale at Hyde Park, London, the scheme was praised as a more practical alternative to an earlier idea that had been put forward by the Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition’s own Building Committee. However, the feasibility of Paxton’s idea soon became the subject of concern. The use of glasshouses for the cultivation of plants was well established, but could this type of building now be adapted to the task of accommodating artefacts? Could it also provide visitors to the Exhibition with a comfortable environment? A particular worry was the issue of cooling, given that the Exhibition was to take place in summer. Prospective exhibitors anxiously made reference to the hot and humid conditions inside greenhouses such as the Palm House at Kew Gardens and the Conservatory at Regent’s Park, and they criticized Paxton’s idea as a risky experiment. Paxton did not ignore the challenge. He pointed out that his design incorporated shading devices, provision for evaporative cooling and natural ventilation, all of which were intended to maintain comfortable temperatures on hot days. He argued that his proposals had been informed by his previous experience with conservatory design, claiming that he had validated the effectiveness of his ventilation and cooling strategy through smalls-cale experiments at Chatsworth House. That Paxton’s plans were accepted and realized was largely due to good fortune. His design was considered to be the only one that could be constructed in time for the opening of the exhibition, which had already been advertised internationally. The Executive Committee, however, requested that conditions inside the building be carefully monitored. In effect, the Great Exhibition Building at Hyde Park became a significant early experiment in what would now be termed ‘environmental design’ (Fig. 1).

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.’

Opportunities to attempt a bird’s-eye view of a field are rare, and my thanks go to the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain for providing the forum for just such an exercise. Most scholars, after all, spend the research part of their academic careers doing what seems best suited to their tastes and abilities and hoping to make a good job of it. There is little time for navel-gazing; and besides, most people have little time for it. Certainly scholars will consider the kind of methods to follow in order to bring their research to a successful conclusion: the ‘how’ in both practical and intellectual terms. But unless they are naturally of a theoretical turn of mind, they are more likely to spend their time with the what than with the why, let alone the whence and the whither. It is those issues that will form much of the substance of this paper. There is no intention here to peddle some theory; instead, the focus will be on how work on Islamic architecture and its history has been, is being and should be done. The approach will thus be more practical than theoretical.

The present essay is mainly concerned with the coronation entries staged for James I and Charles II by the City of London in 1604 and 1661, and especially with the temporary arches made out of wood and canvas and erected to mark nodal points along the routes. These events have been the subjects of scholarship keenly attuned to their place in accessions more than usually demanding upon representations of the king’s majesty, in as much as James was the first Stuart king of England and, by the terms of hereditary monarchy, his grandson’s reign began twelve years before his coronation, at the moment Charles I’s head was severed from the neck. Here, however, the arches will explain, or emblematize, a particular way of conceiving architecture: as an assemblage of readily-dismountable parts like Lego bricks, or like a trophy, the ornamental group of symbolic or typical objects arranged for display. In this kind of architecture ‘classical’ ornament comprises, not the material realization of a stable, rational, and universal intellectual system elsewhere promoted by the early Stuarts’ patronage of Inigo Jones, for example, but what Sir Balthazar Gerbier in 1648 called a ‘true History’ of destruction and triumph, the result of more or less random despoliation and reassembly. What follows is not, therefore, directly concerned with majesty, nor with the arches’ iconography or their audiences, their place in London’s ceremonial geography, nor even their elaboration of the ‘complex relationships between two distinct but interconnected political domains’, the City that built them and the monarchy that graced them.

The chapters about the classical orders in Book One of Palladio’s I quattro libri dell’archittetura are among the most influential architectural texts ever written. Together with Vignola’s Regola delli cinque ordini they represent the best-organized and most thorough formulation of the canon of the classical orders inherited from the Renaissance. This paper analyzes the genesis of Palladio’s theory of orders by comparing the proportions of the elements of the classical orders stipulated in his treatise with those advocated by Vitruvius and other Renaissance authors who had previously written about the orders.

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:

In 1560 Sir William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth's Principal Secretary and Privy Councillor (Fig. 1), transferred his London residence from Cannon's Row at the hub of the court at Whitehall to the golden three-quarter mile of the Strand. Straight away he named the property ‘Cecil House’ and it became his principal household residence during the law terms, the most active periods of government business. There was no more prestigious location and the house was to remain his London headquarters throughout his career until he died there in 1598.

An association between clinical and civic design has long been suspected — and indeed occasionally explicitly invoked — by commentators on architecture and urban design. Certainly, Mumford is not the only historian to have proposed a symbiotic relationship between hospital and town planning over the last two centuries or more. Yet the twentieth century has surely witnessed an intensification of this relationship, an intensification which points to a definite qualitative — if not even quantitative — shift. This article seeks to reconsider this relationship as it manifested itself in Britain after the Second World War, to investigate the similarities and points of contact between what are often considered by their practitioners to be two quite distinct discourses. It aims to do so through a consideration of a single major project, one which clearly exhibited characteristics of debates which manifested themselves in a more diluted form across numerous other schemes. This building, Greenwich District Hospital (1962–74), was one of two ‘heroic’ hospital projects undertaken in Britain during the 1960s and evidences a plethora of concerns prevalent at the time. Whilst flexibility was a fundamental desideratum, a consideration of the project’s zoning of functions and circulatory logic also reveals a profound affinity with the concerns of modernist urbanism. Moreover, it was not simply a case of hospital design plundering town-planning models for its own use; British urban theory may itself have owed a debt to clinical planning, each discourse involved in processes of specialization, separation and sanitization indicative of capitalism’s need to order and render controllable the phenomena of everyday life. Furthermore, this equivalence of architectural intervention at the level of both the hospital and the city plan raises important questions about modern society’s conception of safety, health and the environment.