One of the most enduring themes in the creation and reception of architecture has been the tension between its definition on the one hand as an autonomous ‘art’ practised on the drawing board by individual artists, and on the other as a social activity structured by complex external relationships. That tension was already evident in the Vitruvian distinction between visual, practical and structural qualities. In nineteenth-century England, the issue of individual versus collective ‘authorship’ became bound up with the Puginian tradition of moral and polemical debate, with its stress on strong polarizations of values; hence, the 1892 book, Architecture a Profession or an Art, edited by two protagonists of the latter viewpoint, Norman Shaw and T. G. Jackson. Each succeeding movement — Arts and Crafts, Beaux-Arts and so forth — put forward its own reformist reformulation of the art-versus-society relationship, but it was only in the twentieth-century Modernist years, when ‘language’ and propaganda became as essential as ‘design’ to any architect of standing, that the landscape of architectural criticism and debate finally became dominated by these rhetorical, socio-architectural recipes of reform. Diverse and impassioned concepts of the role of architecture clustered around key individuals or organizations, and around their most important buildings and programmes, whether a ‘traditional’ grand building such as Coventry Cathedral (Basil Spence, 1951–62) or an entire new town. There was high esteem for ‘heroic masters’ and iconoclastic utopianism, of the kind that was largely responsible for the break-up of CIAM in the late 1950s; and at the same time, there was the pervasive influence of communal ideologies and state intervention, and the high status of ‘public’ architectural design offices such as the London County Council (LCC) and Hertfordshire County Council. Nowhere, however, was there a simple, extreme polarization of values; rather, there was a constantly shifting mosaic.

The relationship between architect and patron is of crucial importance in determining the character of any building, and nowhere more than in a country house. Here the patron not only pays for a building; he also lives in it. He might well have decided views on what a country house ought to look like, views that could be influenced by scholarship, travel, a wish to emulate or surpass neighbours’ houses, family pride, or simply a vague sense of his position as a ‘natural leader of society’. Before the rise of the architectural profession in the eighteenth century, owners of country houses often acted as their own architects, usually working in collaboration with a mason or builder. By the mid-nineteenth century this practice had virtually died out. The owner now had to find some means of reconciling his ideas on the appearance and layout of his house with those of a man who possessed the prestige that attached to professional status, and, perhaps, the arrogance of the Romantic artist who saw the country-house commission as a means of self-expression. William Talman’s arguments with his clients in the late seventeenth century gave an inkling of the ‘vexations’ that might occur when professional architect and patron, each with ideas of his own, disagreed; while Vanburgh’s arguments with Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, over Blenheim reached well-known and well-documented levels of vituperation. Such conflicts were by no means isolated occurrences.

Miraculously, the great Gothic cathedral church of St Peter at York escaped the worst transgressions of both the Reformation and the Civil War, and so survived into the Georgian period more completely intact and with fewer major architectural losses or alterations to the original medieval fabric than perhaps any of the other English cathedrals. Early eighteenth-century visitors were astonished by the building’s state of preservation, and almost unanimously praised its perfection and beauty. The Blathwayt brothers of Dyrham Park, for example, found it in 1703 ‘not quite so large as that of Lincoln, but . . . better lighted . . . and loftier; the windows . . . infinitely more beautiful and the interior very much better decorated’. In 1722 John Macky regarded it as ‘much the finest [cathedral] in England, and not inferior to any I have seen in Italy . . . The Paintings on Glass in the Windows, are better preserved than any where else . . . The Choir is spacious and noble . . . the Chapter House exceeds any thing of the Kind in the World’, and a few years later Defoe described it as possessing ‘much more ornament of a singular kind, than we see any thing of that way of building grac’d with. I see nothing indeed of the kind of structure in England go beyond it’ and he called York ‘the beautifullest church of the old building that is in Britain’.

Charles Eastlake, in writing A History of the Gothic Revival, said of St James-the-Less, Westminster:

Here the whole character of the building, whether we regard its plan, its distinctive features, its external or internal decoration is eminently un-English.

No one British building by George Edmund Street displays such an amount of Continental influence, and it can be regarded as representing the high water mark of Street’s adaptation and incorporation of features and forms derived from Continental precedents.

In September 1850, only eight years before work started on St James-the-Less, Street had crossed the English Channel for the first time. In ten days he saw Paris, Chartres, Alenҫon, Caen, Rouen and Amiens, and developed an enthusiasm for foreign travel which he retained throughout his life. Thereafter his annual tours were always well planned and hastily conducted, a great number of buildings being seen in a very short time. Thus each year Street would go, ‘sketchbook in hand, with some ancient town or thrice noble cathedral set before him as his goal’.

The chronological extension of Howard Colvin’s Dictionary from its starting point of 1660 in the first edition of 1954 to the earlier date of 1600 in the second edition of 1978 enabled him to assess the career of Inigo Jones and that in itself provided him with sufficient justification. It also, inevitably, brought in a group of practising craftsmen who were capable of producing original designs as the occasion demanded but whose livelihoods depended to a greater or lesser extent on their manual and administrative skills. They were usually masons by training, such as Nicholas Stone, Robert Stickells, William Arnold, William Edge and the Yorkshire company of Akroyd, Bentley and Clark who migrated to Oxford in 1609, but they included notable carpenters such as Francis Carter, Robert Lyming and John Scampion, the bricklayer Peter Mills and the glazier Barnard Dinninghof.

A recurrent preoccupation in the history of taste, especially as manifested in architecture, is the attribution of national characteristics to individual styles. Among the better-known examples is the customary nationalist definition accorded to the so-called Château style in Canada, whose stylistic features are as clearly defined as its geographical and historical locations. Thereby it provides a descriptive matrix for the means by which retrospective subjective association can be confused with contemporary cultural intention, in a process here defined as initiation, identification, consolidation, tradition, and recapitulation.

With these words George Poole commenced his paper to the Lincoln Diocesan Architectural Society in May 1857. He expressed a hope that has been repeated throughout the intervening years in a flow of papers attempting to explain a work of quite astonishing individuality, spacial invention and surface richness. A work that does not slot into the neat progression of stylistic development which, as Peter Kidson has recently pointed out, is ‘an intolerable state of affairs of tidy-minded art historians’. For this reason, perhaps, the pressure of cultural attitudes upon successive authors is noticeable. Not only has it coloured their understanding of the building’s history, but no doubt it also colours our own, and weights our judgement. This review, therefore, is firstly a study of approach, and secondly a statement of current thinking.

Modern society is characterized by an exaggerated worship of theory, an attitude that reflects the human predicament and insecurity. We think that in it we can find salvation from the threat of chaos. But we must realise that pure theory without feeling cannot create anything. You cannot set up series of methods applicable to the most varied circumstances; only intuition can help here. Let me put it this way: theory and methodology should form a basis for an intuitive working method. The question is not which dominates the other, but how to co-ordinate them. Method is not the antithesis of art, not its enemy but its prerequisite. (Alvar Aalto, speech at Jvyäsklylä Kesäpäivät (Summer Days), 1965)

‘Joinery’ in Chinese architecture is defined as non-structural carpentry (xiao muzuo, literally ‘minor carpentry’), as distinguished from ‘carpentry’ (da muzuo, or ‘major carpentry’). It is one of thirteen building operations specified in the Yingzao Fashi, the official standard for building construction, published and enforced by the Song sovereign in 1103. According to the Yingzao Fashi, joinery includes the delicate woodwork of interior structures, such as fixed, movable or removable partitions, screens, doors and windows, decorative or ornamental ceilings, floors and staircases. It also covers buildings or structures on a small scale, including well pavilions or huts, entrance gates, fences and balustrades, and gigantic furniture, such as shrines and sutra-case cabinets.

The enduring concept of the orders was fundamental to the perpetuation of the classical tradition, and it is central to much architectural theory. One of the most resoundingly influential of its elucidations was published in 1570 by Andrea Palladio (1508–80) in the opening book of his architectural treatise, the Quattro libri dell'architettura (Four Books of Architecture). There, as in other theoretical works from around this period and later, the five orders — Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite — are presented as a hierarchy of purportedly ideal exemplars; and, in this particular case, their universal ‘principles’ (precetti) are conveyed through two sets of illustrations, one depicting colonnades (Fig. 1) and the other arcades (Fig. 2), together with many further plates showing various individual details. In each of the main illustrations, the specimen is given its own designated proportions of column-diameter to column-height, ranging from 1:7 for Tuscan to 1:10 for Composite, and a distinctive formal make-up for both the column and its accompanying entablature. What is little borne in mind, however, is that this published rendition of the orders dates from towards the end of Palladio's career and was preceded by three decades of prolific practice, during which time his approach — as we shall discover — was in many respects very similar. In other words, the Quattro libri treatment of the orders was not merely a necessary and predictable inclusion in such a publication, or just a theoretical or ‘paper’ exercise, which is rather how it has also been viewed, since, as we shall see, it was representative to a very substantial degree of Palladio's actual established practice and its underlying rationale and philosophy.

More than thirty books containing designs for country houses were published in England between 1780 and 1815. Their character and content give an indication of the changes in the conception and creation of country houses in a period which saw the rise of a very large number of superficially diverse and idiosyncratic domestic buildings. Country house building activity as a whole in this period has not before been systematically studied. An investigation of the design publications of the period is a good starting point for such a study.

The range of these publications is wide, encompassing expensive folio editions of large and lavish houses for rich patrons as well as modest designs for farmers and country gentlemen. They contain the greatest amount of written theory by contemporary architects relating to the design of country houses.

In the early eighteenth century the traveller from the west entered central London through one of two gates in the Roman-medieval walls: Ludgate or Newgate. In either case he passed under an archway which served also as a prison. The latter, last rebuilt after the Great Fire of London, confined felons and debtors from the City of London and the county of Middlesex, and smugglers and debtors to the Crown. Crowded together as many as thirty to a room, the inmates of Newgate Prison lived in abominable conditions amid filth and vermin. A constant threat was the jail distemper, a form of typhus which frequently proved fatal. The disease spread to the courtroom of the adjoining sessions house in April 1750. Sixty men died, including the Lord Mayor, two judges, an alderman, and several barristers and jurymen. A committee was immediately formed to inquire into the tragedy, and in its report of 11 December 1750 it directed George Dance the Elder, Clerk of the City Works, to make a plan for improving the prison. Nothing, however, came of this, and the only steps actually taken to prevent a recurrence of the epidemic were the installation of ventilators in the prison - in the process seven of the eleven workmen contracted the fever and one died - and the placing of herbs in the justice hall during subsequent sessions.

Historians of British architecture have long suggested that a fundamental characteristic of the ‘neo’-classical style of the later eighteenth century was the developing relationship between architectural design and the practice of archaeology. John Summerson, for example, opened his account of British neo-classicism by defining it in terms of a ‘concept of art through archaeology, that is, of the enrichment of the present by persistent inquiry into the nature of the past’. More recently, Robin Middleton and David Watkin found that James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s ‘Proposals’ for The Antiquities of Athens represented a ‘clear statement of a neoclassical aesthetic in 1748 [which] emphasizes the close connection between the study of archaeology and the practice of architecture’, whilst Damie Stillman has suggested that later eighteenth-century classicism ‘combined the imaginative use of the past with a new scientific and archaeological approach’. Such definitions of the interrelation of the creative and the academic, placed as all are in the context of chapters discussing the travels of British architects in the Mediterranean, may be taken to imply that fundamental aspects of late eighteenth-century British design resulted from archaeological research undertaken by the architects themselves. It has perhaps been too readily assumed, however, that British architects who travelled in the Mediterranean in the period between about 1740 and the Napoleonic Wars really did engage personally in a kind of study which can legitimately be called ‘archaeology’. Moreover, although residence at Rome was unquestionably their principal objective in travelling, the activities of British architects there have tended to become conflated with the degree to which ancient Greek architecture was coevally being explored.

The 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury’s Letter Concerning the Art, or Science of Design was finished early in 1712; Shaftesbury, abroad in Naples and already ailing, sent the manuscript to London, addressed to Lord Somers. Within a year the author was dead. In his last two years of life, Shaftesbury had been able not only to prepare for the press the second edition (London, John Darby, 1714) of his Characteristicks, first published in 1711, but also to put together a sequel which he entitled Second Characters. This new work was to consist of four essays, the first being the Letter Concerning Design and the second the Judgment of Hercules.

In architectural history, there can be no substitute for seeing a building for yourself. To my shame, after almost a quarter-of-a-century pursuing George Gilbert Scott junior, I have at long last been to see one of his unpublished but documented works and discovered that it is one of his most important and interesting — a key design in his move towards the adoption of an English Late Gothic style for which he would become known. My only consolation is that nobody else interested in Scott seems to have visited it either or realized its significance — although the building had been listed by English Heritage as being by the architect’s father, Sir Gilbert Scott.

St Philip Neri, founder of the Roman Oratory, died in 1595, just in time to see the completion, after twenty years, of the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella (known as the Chiesa Nuova)— except for the facade (finished c. 1607). Even before his canonization in 1622 the church was a place of pilgrimage. The community he founded inhabited a mass of miscellaneous buildings east of the church, decrepit, cramped, and acquired piecemeal over time when funds allowed. The musical ‘oratories’ — concerts with a sermon in the middle — also attracted many visitors, and the eponymous hall in which these events took place was inadequate. The community's rule allowed them to accept donations but not to beg or canvass for them. Nevertheless, by 1624 they were able to contemplate building a new sacristy on the west of the church and they were also buying up adjacent properties on that side. Initially most of the block was already built on, but by 1650 they owned practically all of it, and the shape of a new complex (Figs 1 and 2) was discernible from partly or wholly completed new structures.

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).

Bridges lined with shops have always been rarities, but Robert Adam’s creation in Bath has more than novelty value. His restrained composition of curves and rectangles was one of the visual delights of English Neo-classicism. The uncluttered lines of the river façades were designed to be effective at a distance, while the elevations to the road provided an interesting play of light and shadow for passers-by.

Paradoxically, the success of the concept destroyed the architecture. Within twenty years of its building, commercial pressures on this prime shop site dictated an expansion upwards, with a butchery of those graceful elevations which fortunately Adam was not alive to witness. Then in the nineteenth century, individual leaseholders enlarged their shop windows or cantilevered out over the river as the fancy took them. Storms and road widening also took their toll. By 1948 the buildings had ‘become pathetic travesties of the original design.’ In that very year, Bath City Council removed a wooden structure from the back of one shop; the tide had turned. From then on the story has been one of gradual restoration.

My treatment of this subject falls into two parts. In the first (and longer) part I shall look at the three major theories of the role of history in architectural education that have held sway in English architectural education this century: what I term the ‘realist’ (derived from Lethaby), the classicist and the modernist. In the second I shall criticize all three, discuss the ideas that have guided the teaching of history at the Bartlett School in the past ten years and make some broader proposals for the development of architectural history as a discipline.