This study focuses on two little-known mid-nineteenth-century pamphlets which proposed radical changes to the ways in which large public and administrative buildings were planned. Although one author went to some lengths to remain anonymous, the other was soon to become recognized and respected as a major critic and historian of architecture. These ideas were thus by no means the fantasies of peripheral dreamers. Indeed, they were possible, practical solutions to current problems which used both proven and emerging technologies. Both authors advocated deep, top-lit, single-storey, ‘universal’, undifferentiated and continuous space as the best way to plan museums, libraries and offices, supported by clearly articulated reasoning. In so doing, they advanced arguments more usually associated with the open planning and ‘free’ plans of twentieth-century Modern architecture; they anticipated ideas put forward independently over three-quarters of a century later. The authors appropriated strategies already rehearsed in contemporary buildings that had been conceived for commercial, horticultural and industrial uses. They also understood how new technologies of construction and servicing developed outside the fields of public and representational buildings could help make the spaces in these types comfortable and environmentally acceptable.

This article examines the relationship between architecture in painting and rhetorical theory, proposing that fictive buildings are often a powerful form of visual rhetoric aiming to entice the viewer and showcase the artist's skill. Illustrating the potential of a rhetorical approach for the interpretation of architecture more widely, the article focuses on Altichiero da Zevio's fresco cycle in the Oratory of St George in Padua (c. 1379–84), suggesting that his structurally inventive and intricately decorated architectural settings can be interpreted through the rhetorical tropes copia and amplificatio. It argues that fourteenth-century Padua was an environment particularly receptive to rhetorical theory, and suggests that viewers would have experienced Altichiero's fictive buildings as a visual equivalent of the persuasive strategies employed in contemporary textual composition. The analysis highlights the rhetorical messages of architectural forms, underscoring the porosity between two and three-dimensional buildings for a more integrated consideration of architecture and its communicative powers.

In the high summer of 1675 building work finally began on the new Cathedral of St Paul, after nine years of drawings and deliberation by its architect, Dr (and by then Sir) Christopher Wren. The history of those nine years does not need recapitulation, but the reader may be reminded that after the making of several distinct designs and the First and Great Models Wren had become secretive and had privately obtained the sanction of King Charles II to make ‘some Variations, rather ornamental than essential, as from Time to Time he should see proper’, that a royal warrant had notwithstanding been issued on 14 May 1675, approving the set of drawings now consequently known as the Warrant design, and that by a process of metamorphosis which can be only partly retraced, Wren distilled from that pragmatic but generally unloved design another, now known as the Definitive, on which work finally began.