The coffered dome designed by Philibert de L’Orme (1514–70) for the chapel of the Château d’Anet in northern France between 1549 and 1552 is a masterpiece of stereotomy — the stone vaulting technique characterised by the custom cutting (or dressing) of a vault’s components or voussoirs. The dome was executed by first individually dressing its large voussoirs, so that they would fit one another precisely, and then dry assembling them like the pieces of a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. The spiralling ribs that form the coffers added a layer of complexity to the work, for they are embedded in the voussoirs; thus the exact shape and position of the rib sections belonging to each voussoir had to be calculated precisely before dressing to ensure that, after assembling, they would form the correct pattern over the vault’s surface. The dome’s execution method continues to baffle historians, in particular with regard to the transfer of the complex pattern formed by the ribs on to the templates used by the stonecutters to shape the voussoirs. Based on a new 3D laser scan of the dome and on the analysis of late medieval and early modern stereotomic practices and theories, this article offers a new interpretation of the methods that de L’Orme adopted at Anet and of their significance within the panorama of sixteenth-century architectural practice and theory.

The Hawkfield Lodge was one of three emblematic buildings that Sir Thomas Tresham (1543–1605) erected as visible signs of the invisible tenets of his Catholic faith. Tresham was not only a wealthy Elizabethan landowner, with several productive manors and estates in Northamptonshire, but also a prominent Catholic recusant. Construction of all three lodges on two of his estates at Rushton and Lyveden began following his release, in 1593, from a twelve-year period spent primarily at his house in Hoxton, a period in effect an exile from his two family seats that had resulted from his recusancy. The Hawkfield Lodge at Rushton, however, no longer exists, unlike the Warrener's Lodge there (known today as the Triangular Lodge) and the New Bield at Lyveden. Its absence would be of little consequence if the two extant lodges were without the richly emblematic form and ornamentation that have been studied in detail. But it appears to have been a building of a very similar kind, and its construction is well documented. That the masons completed it at least to the level of the roof is clear from the careful reading of the interwoven building accounts that were produced for both the Warrener's and Hawkfield lodges by Tresham's steward at Rushton, George Levens, which include descriptions of the building work, and the payments made for it, and constitute a full volume of the Tresham Papers held at the British Library. Focusing on various details given in these accounts, this article reconstructs the Hawkfield Lodge and presents architectural drawings of its hexagonal ground plan (Fig. 1) and of its reflected ceiling plan or, in other words, the arrangement as seen from below of its elaborate ceiling (Fig. 2). By comparing the plan to those of the two extant lodges (Figs 3 and 4), it also makes clear their symbolic relationships.

Although British architects played a major role in the rediscovery of the Byzantine monuments of Greece in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, earlier interest in the subject has remained obscure. Four lectures, read at the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Royal Academy and the London Architectural Society from 1843 to 1857, reflect a lively interest in Byzantine church architecture in the mid-nineteenth century. Delivered by Charles Robert Cockerell (1843), Edwin Nash (1847), Thomas Leverton Donaldson (1853) and John Louis Petit (1858), these lectures constitute some of the earliest attempts in England to explore both well-known monuments such as Hagia Sophia and lesser-known churches in Greece, Turkey and elsewhere. The manuscript records of these lectures show that influential British architects were not only familiar with Byzantine monuments, but were also able to look at them from the viewpoint of the designer and the builder. Emphasising the potential of Byzantine architecture to inform new design, they paved the way for the Byzantine revival, half a century later, and for the systematic investigation of Byzantine architecture from the late nineteenth century onwards.

The Townshend Archive at Raynham Hall, Norfolk, which is currently being catalogued by the Norfolk Record Office, contains some interesting material not only for social and political historians, but also for their architectural counterparts. Apart from important new information on the extensive building activities of the 2nd Viscount Townshend at his seat, Raynham Hall, during the period 1703 to 1732 (which in itself merits publication) another set of documents has emerged which throw light on the building of an equally intriguing country house, Ramsbury Manor.

The third Earl of Burlington, as is well known, had strong family connections with the county of Yorkshire: his title itself is a variant form of Bridlington, the market town on the East Riding coast. The link however has generally been associated with his estate at Londesborough some twenty-five miles from Bridlington, which he visited regularly and where he is buried in the parish church; but the family also possessed extensive property on the other side of the county in the West Riding, centred on Bolton Abbey in Wharfedale, and it is Lord Burlington’s architectural activities on and in the neighbourhood of this estate which form the subject of the present article.

Apart from the records of individual clients, two main sources help us to understand Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s financial affairs: his account book in the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society in London, and his bank account with Drummonds in Charing Cross which stretches unbroken from 1753 (some four years after Brown left Stowe to start an independent career as a landscape designer) to his death in 1783. Thanks to the research of Miss Dorothy Stroud, the account book in the Lindley Library has long been familiar, but the material at Drummonds, now the Drummonds Branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland, deserves to be better known.

The eighteenth-century church establishment was unromantic about religion. The efforts of its divines, from Archbishop Tillotson onwards, were devoted to proving the good sense and practical virtues of Christianity, not probing its mysteries. The huge medieval churches it had inherited were almost embarrassing in their unsuitability to the worship of that time. Wren had summed up the requirements for a cathedral - ‘a Quire, Consistory, Chapter House, Library, Preaching-auditory’

An important collection of over two hundred and twenty drawings relating to the former Cambridge University Library (1829–40) by C. R. Cockerell (1788–1863) has recently come to light in the present University Library. The material consists of 153 drawings which were mounted in three elephant folios by J. W. Clark when they were acquired from Cockerell’s widow in 1887; and seventy-odd drawings contained loose in a portfolio, of which at least some were passed to the University Library from the Fitzwilliam Museum by M. R. James in 1907. Since Cockerell has always been admired not only as an architect of genius but as a draughtsman of rare quality, it is a matter for rejoicing to be able to report a substantial addition to the corpus of his architectural drawings for a building which was a turning point in his stylistic development.

Writing on Lulworth Castle in Architectural History in 1990 Mark Girouard pondered why the castle was provided with two kitchens. The only explanation he could think of was that one of them was for the preparation of royal food, which always had to be cooked separately. But we have recently found evidence of paired kitchens in several smallish and middle-sized gentry houses of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, none of which would be likely to have had aspirations to receive royal visits. There must be another answer.

These uncompromising sentiments occur in a paper entitled ‘Architecture or Building’ read before the Birmingham Architectural Association on 3 December 1909. They were made by a tall, red-haired Scotsman in his fiftieth year at the height of his architectural career. It was this firm belief, founded in Pugin and promoted by Morris and Webb, that architecture must be based in reasonable building and the straight-forward use of materials and construction — art taking care of itself — which caused Robert Weir Schultz to speak so scathingly about the architecture of his time, most of which he dismissed as mere ‘architectonics’. His own buildings may lack the individuality of contemporaries such as Voysey, Mackintosh and Prior, or the serenity and urbanity of Newton and Macartney. Nevertheless it was the very suppression of a personal style in the furtherance of a common cause, sustained throughout a practice lasting almost fifty years, that made his work so diverse in range and manner, and indeed at times original. In attempting to grow out of the particular needs of each building and its site it approaches that of Philip Webb and especially of his acknowledged mentor, W. R. Lethaby, whose writings and few, but significant, buildings were the central inspiration of Schultz’s career. Lethaby’s definition of architecture had been set down in the volume edited by Norman Shaw and T. G. Jackson, Architecture A Profession or An Art published in 1892. Those essays were written just when Schultz was commencing practice and must have shaped his own views. But Schultz’s abiding philosophy was summed up in the first paragraph of Lethaby’s essay, ‘The Builder’s Art and the Craftsman’: ‘The art of architecture is thus the co-ordination of the several crafts in the achievement of right or beautiful building; and this not only in the outer form and adornment, but in the very structure and anatomy. Architecture is the easy and expressive handling of materials in masterly experimental building — it is the craftsmen’s Drama.’

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.

Inside the rubble-walled chapel known as the Kinnoull Aisle, across the Tay from the city of Perth, stands one of the most remarkable funeral monuments ever erected in Scotland (Fig. 1). Now abandoned and desolate, the monument commemorates the life of Sir George Hay, who was created Earl of Kinnoull in 1633, the year before his death, at the end of a brilliant career as a courtier, politician and industrialist. The burial chapel (Fig. 2) was originally attached to the former parish church of Kinnoull. Like the more celebrated Montgomery Aisle and Monument at Skelmorlie, near Largs, erected in the same years, it is now freestanding; the adjoining church was demolished in the nineteenth century, probably in 1826 when a new church was erected on a different site to serve the parish of Kinnoull. Before turning to the monument itself, it is expedient to introduce the formidable statesman whose memory it enshrines.

Westwood House (Fig. 1) is a prodigy among the prodigy houses of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, in its different way as innovative and almost as remarkable as Wollaton, of whose site its commanding hilltop, two miles north-west of Droitwich in Worcestershire, is strongly reminiscent. Yet it has received comparatively little attention from historians and is correspondingly little known. This is evidently in part due to a persistent misdating and misinterpretation of its building, almost every subsequent writer having accepted unquestioned the authority of T. R. Nash in his Collections for the History of Worcestershire, published in 1781–82. Nash states unequivocally that

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.

To European travellers before the industrial age, gatehouses were an omnipresent architectural form. Whether at the entrances to cities, residences or religious houses, they signalled to the passer-by the wealth and prestige of the corporation, household or institution that they served. This article addresses the subject of gatehouse architecture in England, a kingdom in which a distinctive tradition of such buildings was ingeniously and enthusiastically developed through the Middle Ages and beyond. It aims to explain why gatehouses commanded such interest for English patrons, and the ways in which these buildings illustrate the changing practice of architecture from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries. For the purposes of the discussion, the term ‘gatehouse’ is to be broadly understood. It can refer to any entrance structure that amounts to more than simply an opening in a wall or a decorative archway. One distinctive feature of the gatehouses discussed here is that they all stand in close proximity to the building or institution they serve. In this detail they may be distinguished from the gateways or lodges characteristically erected along the perimeters of parks and estates from around 1700 onwards as points of entry to far-distant residences.

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.

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.

Batty Langley (1696-1751) is one of the most familiar and generally infamous figures of Britain's eighteenth-century Gothic Revival (Fig. 1). Following his father, he trained as a gardener and was one of the early promoters of the irregular style that prefigured William Hogarth's ‘line of beauty’. Langley's interest, however, turned to architecture and he produced numerous architectural treatises and pattern books, the majority of which were concerned with Classical architecture. This was a sensible decision since, as Eileen Harris and Nicholas Savage observe, ‘Langley had much to gain by concentrating his publishing activities on architecture, for which there was a considerably larger, more diversified, and less discriminating market.’ His most well-known publication, however, is concerned with the Gothic: Ancient Architecture: Restored, and Improved by a Great Variety of Grand and Useful Designs, Entirely New in the Gothick Mode (1741-42).

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.