The Conservation Plan currently being put into effect for St George’s Hall, Liverpool, has occasioned new research into the history of a building which, since its completion in 1855, has been universally hailed by architects and historians alike as an outstanding example of European neo-classical architecture. However, the unusual functional arrangements of the building (particularly the disposition of Crown and Civil Courtrooms either side of a Concert Hall and consequent difficulties with public access) have been subject to criticism over the past century and a half, mainly by those who have had cause to use it. This article is concerned with one part of St George’s Hall, the south front and its approaches, the form and function of which have been perhaps the most problematic aspect of the building from its conception through to the present day.

When John Newman wrote his two magnificent volumes on the buildings of Kent over thirty years ago, his great founding editor, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, described them as ‘the best of the whole series’. They were indeed exceptional volumes in the Buildings of England series, and it is very clear how well John knew Kent’s architectural monuments. One group of buildings, those of West Malling Abbey, could not, however, be examined in detail because they were within the enclosure of the Anglican Benedictine community. Part of his description of these buildings was, therefore, based on ‘inadequate photographs and pre-enclosure descriptions’ and are set in brackets in his text.

When considering the evolution of twentieth-century church-building, two topics are inescapable — the Liturgical Movement and developments in Modern architecture — and this article therefore argues that in order to appreciate the evolution of the twentieth-century Catholic parish church it is essential to take both liturgical and architectural developments into account. It focuses on such churches in Belgium because that country played a particularly important role in developing relevant theory, Belgian clergy having been founding members of the Liturgical Movement. However, the movement took more than half a century to develop fully there, during which time other initiatives also appeared, such as Domus Dei (the Belgian Diocesan organization for church-building, set up in 1952) and Pro Arte Christiana. Moreover, other factors — ecclesiastical, social, economic, political and cultural — also prove to be crucial in reaching a full appreciation of twentieth-century church-building, for instance, the impact of diocesan guidelines for church-building, and of bodies such as Catholic Action (Katholieke Actie) and Parish Action (Parochiale Actie). This article demonstrates that, despite few apparent formal similarities (if any) between churches built in Belgium before and after World War II, the developments of the inter-war period were fundamental to post-war developments in Belgian church-building.

On the map of nineteenth-century architectural historiographies in Western Europe, Belgium has so far remained a blind spot. While the country’s architectural history of the nineteenth century has already received some (if selective) international attention, with a somewhat disproportionate focus on the Art Nouveau, the historiography arising alongside of it has largely remained outside the picture. Meanwhile, considerations as to Belgium’s particular situation, which presumably influenced its architecture, equally apply to its historiography; for instance its design as a crossroads of influences, as demonstrated in research into the Belgian Catholic Gothic Revival and into nineteenth-century (architectural) history in general, among cases one could cite. While interesting because of its own particularities, Belgium also represents a type of ‘smaller European country’ created in the nineteenth century, whose architectural history has been characterized as ‘often fascinating precisely in the extent to which [these countries] present attempts to resolve the inherent contradictions between the major interpretive models and prescriptions of the English Pugin-Ruskin tradition, French Rationalism, and the more archaeological approach of the Cologne school’. The relatively limited corpus of Belgian architectural historiography — at least when compared with the historiographies of the United Kingdom, France or Germany — is an additional advantage, since it makes the field of study more easily definable and thus allows for more detailed study.

Recent research has transformed our understanding of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a phase in the wider process of the Gothic Revival. While historical writing on the Gothic Revival had previously tended to see the significance of the period between 1790 and 1820 largely in terms of its academic contribution to the later development of Victorian Gothic Revival architecture, emphasizing especially the role of antiquarian scholarship in providing a basis of archaeological accuracy upon which subsequent architects could draw, more diverse angles have been opened up within the last couple of decades. Research by Simon Bradley, Chris Brooks and others has illuminated debates on the origins of the Gothic style itself and the patriotic language underpinning them, and has added greatly to our understanding of the associations between Gothic and ‘Englishness’. Rosemary Hill has investigated the ambiguous and problematic religious connotations of Gothic. Simon Bradley has authoritatively anatomized the increasingly enthusiastic take-up of Gothic by the Anglican Church in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, and has uncovered a rich prehistory of ecclesiological principles before the foundation of the Camden Society and all its powerfully misleading retrospective propaganda.

The first executed work in architecture of François-Joseph Belanger (1744–1818) — one of the most important neo-classical architects of late Ancien-Régime France — was a bath-house for the Comte de Lauraguais. It was built in one of France’s earliest jardins anglais, which Lauraguais had laid out in the grounds of his Paris residence, the Hôtel de Brancas, on the rue de l’Université. It is one of Belanger’s most familiar works, not least because his own drawings and description survive to record it. This wealth of documentation makes it a uniquely knowable example of Belanger’s architecture in the first decade of his professional life, before the construction of the Comte d’Artois’ folie of Bagatelle, upon which much of his reputation rests.

This article considers the late Georgian church and argues that this huge group of buildings, involving almost all the country's major architects, has never been properly assessed by historians. This is principally a result of the opprobrium heaped on these churches by the Ecclesiologists who needed them to be marginalised in order to promote their own agenda of church design and worship, and the view that they are largely worthless lives on in places, even today. The article proposes their re-evaluation, suggesting that judging them by the standards the Ecclesiologists applied retrospectively is both illogical and inevitably destined to produce verdicts of failure. Instead, it seeks to place these buildings within the context of late Georgian society, religious attitudes and especially the period's building world. It argues that the best of them, especially the big ‘town’ churches, display a high degree of intelligent, functional planning and a fascinating exploitation of new materials and structural innovations that do great credit to their designers.

This article is intended as a companion to ‘Pugin’s Small Houses’ published here three years ago. It follows the same method, tracing the development of Pugin’s ideas about a single building type over the course of his career by way of the most significant examples. It would be impractical to discuss every church, and in assessing significance I have considered how relevant a particular building may be to the overall direction of Pugin’s thinking. Some major buildings, such as St Barnabas, Nottingham, are touched on only briefly because little or nothing followed directly from them. By the same token a relatively minor work, such as St Wilfred’s Hulme, may in this context be revealing. At times it will be necessary to discuss Pugin’s work in other building types.

Inigo Jones’s tour of Italy from 1613 to 1614 in the retinue of the Earl of Arundel has long been recognized as a turning point in the architect’s career and no account of his life has failed to mention it. But despite the fairly clear picture that has been formed of Jones’s movements in Italy, by collating the evidence of dated notes in his surviving books with that of letters referring to the progress of the Earl of Arundel, one aspect of the tour still presents a puzzle.

It has been assumed that the return journey from Italy in 1614 was made through Provence. Notes by Jones in his copy of Andrea Palladio’s I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (Venice, 1601) prove that he saw the two Roman temples at Nîmes and that he visited Arles. A sketch elevation in the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Drawings Collection shows that he went to the Pont du Gard (Pl. 7a); and a hitherto unpublished comment in his copy of Daniele Barbaro’s Commentary on Vitruvius at Chatsworth reveals that he saw the Roman theatre at Orange. But unlike many of the notes that Jones made on site in Italy, or made later recalling what he saw there, none of the Provence notes bears a date. Even the careful elevation of the Pont du Gard, which with its accompanying list of measurements would seem to be Jones’s most detailed study of an antique monument, is undated.

From our Post-Modern viewpoint in the 1990s, it is hard to deny that the nave of Lincoln Cathedral was one of the outstanding designs of its generation — not just in England, but in Europe as a whole (Fig. 1). With its colour contrasts, its linear patterns, its sense of space and its richly textured surfaces, it displays some of the most enduring of architectural values. It would be rewarding to know what contemporaries thought of it, not least Robert Grosseteste, the greatest English intellectual of the age, who was bishop of Lincoln at the time the nave was completed. While we have some understanding of Grosseteste’s concept of beauty, his views about cathedral architecture remain unknown. As art historians are well aware, theoretical definitions of beauty in the middle ages rarely seem to have had much effect in practice. Medieval schoolmen based their views on ideas inherited from classical thought and Grosseteste was no exception: ‘For beauty is a concordance and fittingness of a thing to itself and of all its individual parts to themselves and to each other and to the whole, and that of the whole to all things’. This is not a definition that comes readily to mind when contemplating the architecture of Lincoln Cathedral, a building notorious for its inconsistencies. While scholars wrestled with abstract definitions of beauty, contemporary opinion about the great buildings of the age operated at a very different level. Among epithets most favoured by chroniclers when heaping praise on works of architecture were ‘incomparabilis’, ‘varietas’ and ‘sumptuosus’. Anyone looking for these virtues in the thirteenth century would not have been disappointed with the nave of Lincoln.

The friendship between Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Robert Ashbee [Fig. 40a] has often been noticed in connection with Ashbee’s introduction to Frank Lloyd Wright: Aüsgefuhrte Bauten. The following letters, found in Ashbee’s journals, add to our knowledge of this friendship; and perhaps to a sense of its intellectual complexity.

Ashbee first met Wright at some time in late November or early December 1900. He was impressed, and wrote in his journal:

Wright is to my thinking far & away the ablest man in our line of work that I have come across in Chicago, perhaps in America. He not only has ideas, but the power of expressing them, & his Husser house over which he took me, showing me every detail with the keenest delight, is one of the most beautiful and the most individual of creations that I have seen in America. He threw down the glove to me in characteristic Chicagoan manner in the matter of Arts & Crafts & the creations of the machine.

One of the factors which has increasingly come to dominate any discussion of royal residences is the fact that there was a considerable specialization in function between them. Particular residences were used for specific purposes — those purposes may have been influenced by their geographical location, their physical arrangement or merely the monarch’s preferences. The purpose of this paper is to examine the royal lodgings at the Tower of London as used between 1216 and 1327 in exactly this way. It is an attempt to analyze the function of a residence and how that function — a highly specialized one — affected the form of the buildings and the timing of their construction.

After the Second World War, economic development across Western Europe resulted in the spectacular transformation of cities into large and densely populated urban agglomerations. Although the underlying driving force of demographic change had already become apparent in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, it now manifested itself on an unprecedented scale and at an increasing speed. In most Western European countries the Roman Catholic Church’s leadership responded to this with massive church-building campaigns, suggesting that it viewed architecture as a critical means by which to re-establish a religious presence within these urban agglomerations. To this end, many dioceses established administrative structures dedicated to the planning, financing and designing of religious infrastructure.

These bodies have been little studied hitherto, but this article argues that they played an instrumental role in the post-war Catholic revival, by establishing a dense pastoral network within the newly urbanized areas. Moreover, they fostered a new culture of ecclesiastical patronage, as the scale and urgency of the task required new operational and managerial structures for building, fund-raising and mobilizing congregations to support this massive undertaking.

Few questions have more exercised historians of eighteenth-century British architecture over several generations than that of the authorship of the design of Holkham Hall in Norfolk. The house, built between 1734 and 1765, is the quintessential domestic example of English Palladianism at its most Neoclassically extreme. Almost every feature of Holkham's exterior elevations replicates motifs to be found in Antiquity, transmitted through Andrea Palladio or other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources, whilst inside not a single painted god, hero or saint complicates the clearly defined surfaces of the damasked walls or coffered ceilings. As a result, Holkham is a building of high international importance since, as John Summerson put it in describing the roots of later eighteenth-century Neoclassicism, it was in earlier eighteenth-century England that ‘the first categorical revolt against the Baroque and the first architectural statements of the new attitude are to be observed’.

Commencing in the late 1760s, cork models of classical monuments in Italy were purchased by wealthy British collectors while on their Grand Tour. Initially commissioned by tourists with specific antiquarian and architectural interests, the models were an expression of the collector's knowledge of classical history and of their Neoclassical sensibility. Models soon appeared in the Society of Antiquaries of London and the British Museum, in the private displays of Charles Townley and John Stuart, Earl of Bute, and in George III's royal collection. In the early 1800s, architect John Soane began purchasing models from the secondary market for his house museum. Interest in cork architectural models waned during the Nineteenth Century. Descendants of the original owners transferred them to public institutions, while museums that had at first enthusiastically welcomed the donations or made their own purchases, relegated the models to storage. In the twentieth century the majority of the models were discarded or lost. This paper explores the reasons for the enthusiastic acquisition of architectural cork models and their subsequent demise.

The cloistered charm of Oxbridge arguably traces its architectural roots to medieval monastic forms. The pattern of buildings — gateway, chambers and studies, master’s lodge, chapel, hall, and library, all arranged round one or more courts — is vividly portrayed in Loggan's 1688 view of Jesus College Cambridge, which was actually established in the redundant building of the Benedictine nunnery of St Rhadegund in 1497 (Fig. 1).

The architectural historian Roderick Gradidge, referring to the 1900s, wrote that ‘in architecture there have never been such opportunities for younger men as there were at the turn of the century’. Arnold Mitchell is an architect typical of those who took advantage of such opportunities, a man (women were yet to have the chance) who saw the economic and aesthetic potential for new architecture, both nationally and internationally. Understanding the nature of architectural practice should not be reliant solely upon knowledge of the stellar architects of any given period. It depends upon integrating others, one or two rungs down the ladder but who achieved success in their own sphere, into the corpus examined, in order to achieve a fuller understanding of the profession.

It is a general law of Islamic architecture that elements and features that evolved for a structural reason come, with the passage of time and refinement of the forms, to be transformed into decorative features; that is, non-structural embellishments or modifications of the forms begin to appear. The same process is common to other schools of architecture, but a specific characteristic of Islam has been its propensity to draw upon previous sources and to develop them as a specifically Islamic idiom or theme. It is also a characteristic of Islamic art that an ambiguity often remains as to whether certain forms were meant to be fully decorative or purely architectonic; there are many instances where they represent a mixture of the two. The shouldered arch is an interesting example of this characteristic evolutionary approach, and this paper reviews the chronology of its use and development in the areas most populated and influenced by the early expansion of Islam: Iran, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Egypt. The study seeks to trace the development of the decorative form of the shouldered arch and its use as an articulating device, and to suggest the influences in its evolution. It focuses on the Saljuq (1040–1194) and Mongol or Ilkhanid (1220–1336) periods, while including mention of other contemporary dynasties and cultures of relevance.

The last two decades have seen important scholarly research published on medieval wood sculpture. The exhibitions held in Siena (1987), Lucca (1995–96) and Pisa (2000–01) allowed the status of these studies to be examined and permitted investigation into crucial aspects of style and attribution. Furthermore, all these contributions note the liturgical role and function of these works of art. Nevertheless, they only suggest the issue of the relationship between wood sculpture and architecture, which is the topic of the present article. If stone sculpture is often conceived with specific settings inside churches in mind — like lunettes or pillars — being strongly connected with architecture, the same cannot be said for sculpture in wood. In fact, function and practical usage have always been recognized as the main characteristics of wooden statues, and these qualities make it much more difficult to ascertain their original setting.