Historical analysis of the 1951 Festival of Britain has tended to overlook its ideological genealogy, and also to give less consideration to the Exhibition of Architecture, Town Planning and Building Research at Lansbury in Poplar on the Isle of Dogs than to the architecture and displays at the South Bank site (Figs 1 and 2). That genealogy reflects an intersection between the formulation of colonial policy and the adaptation of Modern Movement theory and practice during the final phase of British imperialism. Consequently the purpose of this paper is to recover various aspects of this intersection, during the nearly three decades from the British Empire Exhibition of 1924. Focusing on design practice in the Empire, especially the national exhibition buildings erected at those major international expositions that led up to and culminated in the Festival of Britain, it also examines the wider representation of architectural and colonial development in professional media and public propaganda.

The late medieval English laity expressed their piety through ostentatious artistic and architectural patronage. The rood, a large-scale image of Christ on the cross, flanked by the Virgin and St John, and placed in or above the chancel arch, was a particular object of both liturgical and financial devotion in the later Middle Ages. One of the more interesting conclusions of recent scholarship has been the recognition that the late medieval desire to express one’s piety through donations to the church was not limited to the upper classes or to one gender. Both men and women of all social classes and ages participated to the best of their ability through collective as well as individual giving. Moreover, people made very deliberate choices about the types of images and architectural forms on which they spent their money. Scholars have argued that the roots of this very active lay patronage lie in the mid-thirteenth century when diocesan statutes first assigned responsibility for maintaining the nave and most of a church’s ornaments to its parishioners.

The eighteenth-century garden house built by the 1st Duke of Notrthumberland at Hulne Priory, some three miles west of Alnwick Castle, has been attributed both to Robert Adam and to Capability Brown. Adam certainly worked at Alnwick, providing delicate and fanciful Gothick interiors for the saloon, library and chapel in the castle and for the record tower. He designed the Lion Bridge, which was built across the Aln in 1773, and in November 1777, he prepared designs for the Gothick tower at Brizlee in Hulne park, built by the Duke in 1781. Brown received a payment of £300 from the Duke in July 1769 for unspecified work and was still employed on landscape improvements at Alnwick in September 1772.

Sir William Brereton’s description is the earliest account of Ormond Castle, Carrick on Suir (Fig. 1). It was the favourite house of Thomas Butler, 10th Earl of Ormond. Inside the building a unique decorative scheme in plaster of mid-sixteenth-century date has survived. The castle, now known as Ormond Castle, takes it name from its former owners, the powerful Anglo-Norman family of Butler, who came to Ireland in 1185 with King John. James Butler (d. 1338) was created Earl of Ormond in 1315. In the seventeenth century another James Butler, 12th earl, was elevated to a dukedom of Ormonde after the restoration of Charles II.

It is the aim, in this article, to identify the reasons why certain designs for courthouses in early-nineteenth-century Ireland remained unexecuted, and to do so by analysing surviving drawings and placing them in the political context at this time of Irish local government and of the efforts of Westminster politicians to institute reform. The funding and erection of courthouses were managed by grand juries, an archaic form of local government which gave few rights to smaller taxpayers and was widely perceived as an unaccountable institution associated with the ancien régime. In addition to hosting court sittings, courthouses were used by these grand juries for their private meetings and functions. By exploring the agendas and pretensions of these bodies, and by looking at the fluctuating availability of funding sources that were needed to initiate building work, I will argue through a series of Irish case studies that a renewed focus on elite patronage and its associated politics allows a new insight into courthouse building, which places less emphasis than is often the case on, for example, the role played by the changing legal profession in the architectural development of the courthouse.

In nineteenth-century Ireland, courthouses demarcated the visible and tangible presence in the urban landscape of the law and state-sanctioned justice. Laws passed by the Irish parliament and then, after its abolition in 1800, by the Westminster government, were enforced in assize courthouses by travelling judges on established ‘circuits’, visiting each city or county town twice a year (in the spring and summer). These judges travelled with great splendour through the countryside, and were welcomed by a high sheriff at the county border and escorted with military pageantry, ritual, and procession to their destination.

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.

With a focus on post-war Britain (and Scotland in particular), this article contributes to the literature on the history of ’community’ by examining its apparent inverse, namely privacy. In particular, it explores the interest that emerged in 1960s Britain in a type of housing that was considered to provide enhanced privacy for residents — the courtyard house. The article begins by looking at the ways in which privacy was considered in official documentation on homes and housing in the post-war period in both England and Wales, and Scotland. It then turns to the work of the University of Edinburgh’s Housing Research Unit in the 1960s, which included not just the design and construction of housing schemes, but also social investigation of the built results. The article examines the ’urban’ housing designed in Cumbernauld and the ’rural’ counterpart in Prestonpans, both of which were intended to provide enhanced privacy for residents. It then looks at the unit’s evaluation of the completed courtyard housing built at Prestonpans as well as another survey undertaken in Dundee, both of which explored the residents’ experience of privacy. Overall, the article argues that the idea of privacy, as understood by designers and experienced by residents, played an important role in post-war housing, as part of the ambition not just to improve standards, but also to provide new choices.

During the twentieth century, diverse cultures from around the globe served as vital sources for architects who attempted to merge Modernist ideas with traditional values. Richard Neutra (1892–1970) absorbed ideas from Japan, the American Middle West and his own native Austria, and eventually his study of these regions deeply affected his work. By analysing archival sources and period publications, this article reveals that even before emigrating to the United States (1923), and throughout his career, the cultures of California, Latin America and Spain were also sources for Neutra's work. He travelled extensively throughout these regions, he researched their local customs and architecture and he deftly and purposefully incorporated vernacular elements, such as sun-shading devices, ventilation strategies and interior patios, into his own work. For his Latin American and Spanish colleagues, his work exemplified a successful fusion between their own traditions and Modernist principles.

Strangely, the ideal city of the Renaissance was promoted not so much by Venus, but by Mars — not by an abstract appreciation of beauty but by the necessities of war. Here was surely one of the great ironies made by the peculiar Renaissance belief in the intrinsic power of geometry. To Filarete, Leonardo da Vinci, and others who imagined ideal cities, geometry was a comprehensive ordering system to which streets, walls, and public buildings alike might be subordinated.

Collegiate gothic architecture built in the United States during the early twentieth century has generally been considered an anti-modern reaction to the rapid changes of the period. This article challenges that interpretation by analysing the collegiate gothic architecture and planning of the University of Chicago from its incorporation in 1890 up to 1918, focusing on the work of Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, which hitherto has been almost entirely neglected. In these decades, the campus changed considerably from the original 1893 quadrangular plan by Henry Ives Cobb. Archival sources are used to trace this shift, with particular attention to three major buildings designed by Charles Coolidge: the Tower Group (1903), Harper Memorial Library (1912) and Ida Noyes Hall (1916). In their architecture and planning, each of these projects set new precedents for the adaptive possibilities of collegiate gothic and changed how the campus related to its urban neighbourhood. From 1900, the university’s leaders consciously opened the campus to its surroundings and realigned it to the Midway Plaisance, the renowned public greenway designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. In doing so, the university pioneered a new campus typology, the academic avenue, which represented a positive embrace of urban life within wider debates on the American city. Through this typology, the university’s collegiate gothic architecture made meaningful connections with Chicago’s progressive civic culture, in consonance with the educational philosophy of its founding president, William Rainey Harper.

Castell Coch, William Burges’s extraordinary Victorian fantasy castle in South Wales, is now regarded as an iconic building of the Gothic Revival (Fig. 1). It was first seriously re-appraised in 1951, by the late Professor W. G. Howell in an article on the castle, shortly after it had been handed into the care of the Ministry of Works.

The article was illustrated by an architectural model of one of the castle’s most spectacular interiors, the Marchioness of Bute’s bedroom at the top of the Keep Tower. The model then disappeared from sight for fifty years, eluding those researchers who have since revived Burges’s reputation, and it was assumed that it had been destroyed. Last year, however, the model, still in excellent condition, emerged from storage at Dumfries House, an Adam mansion near Old Cumnock in Ayrshire, which has been a Bute family property since the early nineteenth century. Although the role of architectural models is a study in itself, the rediscovery of this example casts new light upon the role models played in commissions for Lord Bute, and at what stage they were used, and as such makes it worthy of study.

When Nicholas Hawksmoor recalled the circumstances of the building of the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich (Fig. 1), begun in 1696, he twice made the point that the achievement of magnificence was part of the architectural brief. In his Remarks on the Founding and Carrying on the Buildings of the Royal Hospital at Greenwich, published in 1728, he noted that it was the desire of the foundress, Queen Mary, ‘who had a great Passion for Building’, ‘to build the Fabrick with great Magnificence and Order’. Later, as if defending a position, Hawksmoor noted ‘her Majesty’s fixt Intention for Magnificence’. Queen Mary had died in 1694 but her husband King William III, respecting her wishes, had ensured the continuation of the project under the architectural guidance of Christopher Wren who was assisted by Hawksmoor in this great endeavour.

Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannkus is remembered today as the manifesto of English Palladianism. It was published at the outset of Campbell’s own career as an architect, and although he had almost certainly begun work already on his important house at Wanstead, it was probably the publication of his book in 1715 which established his reputation in London and led in 1716–17 to his replacement of Gibbs as the architect in charge of the rebuilding of Lord Burlington’s house in Piccadilly. Despite this auspicious start, however, the role of Campbell both as a publisher and as an architect in the beginnings of the Palladian revival was soon obscured and then forgotten. The dilettante public which by its subscriptions made such a lavish publication possible generally treated it merely as a series of ‘views of seats’ in the traditional manner and failed to notice Campbell’s other aims.

Pope’s poem ‘Of Taste’, his Epistle to Lord Burlington, published in December 1731, has rightly been regarded as one of the major statements of Burlingtonian orthodoxy. Written to accompany the publication of a group of engravings from the earl’s collection of Palladian drawings, many of the poem’s balanced couplets appositely express the ideas of that coterie of classical purists in architecture and also in garden design. The reputation of the poem as a statement of architectural orthodoxy, such that it was bought by the contemporaries anxious to find ou.t what it was that the Palladians intended, was all the more prominent in the absence of any other statement from the Burlington circle, at a time when Kent or Ware were publishing only engravings.

At first sight Tredegar House seems sui generis (Pl. 4). There is nothing else like it in Wales, nor does any obvious English parallel come to mind. The quadrangular plan with corner pavilions distinguishes it from the double-pile houses of the 1670s and 1680s, while the lavish external decoration is difficult to match in the relatively sober elevations characteristic of British domestic architecture of the same period. What we have, in fact, is a great country house of the 1670s designed with something of the love of architectural ornament that was typical of the ‘artisan mannerist’ houses of twenty years earlier. At Tredegar the ornamental vocabulary is not quite what is usually described as ‘artisan mannerist’, but we may nevertheless suspect the hand of an artisan rather than that of a gentleman architect such as Hooke, May or Pratt.

In the 1950s, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) undertook a strict centralisation and collectivisation of the construction industry, including the entire field of architecture. As a result, architecture was practised almost exclusively within the framework of state-controlled enterprises, the units of which formed ‘collectives’ that structured professional cooperation. In line with the political and organisational significance of the collective, the aim was continuously to enhance the efficiency of the construction industry and to integrate into the socialist system a branch — namely, the architectural profession — that tended to be perceived as bourgeois and individualistic. Against this background, both the role of the architect within the collective and the best functioning of such units on a creative and economic level were subjects of constant discussion. Yet the system also allowed various possibilities for latitude. Facilitated by individual personalities and intersubjective processes, personal and creative possibilities existed within an otherwise highly regulated system. This article explores the three levels of the meaning and function of the collective — as a political, bureaucratic and social space — by addressing its historical origins and nature and by examining two case studies in which, notwithstanding official theory, individual architects were able to exercise a considerable degree of creative autonomy.

From his emergence on the cultural scene in the 1920s until his death in 1983, Kenneth Clark was one of the most influential figures in the history of British art and design, and his legacy remains strong. Clark’s life and work were entirely dedicated to communicating about art and transforming public understanding regarding its production and enjoyment. His first book, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste, investigated, condemned and elevated the status of Georgian and Victorian England’s enthusiasm for the Middle Ages. Written in the mid-1920s, it was published with Constable in 1928 when he was only twenty-five years old. By investigating the circumstances under which the book came to fruition and its importance in relation to Clark’s persistent interest in the Victorians — and John Ruskin in particular — a richer understanding of Clark’s ideas and beliefs can take shape.