A comprehensive glossary of medieval mouldings has never been published, a surprising fact which alone justifies the appearance of this article. The foundations for such a study were laid, of course, by the antiquarians and architectural writers of the nineteenth century. Willis (1844) analysed the medieval nomenclature of mouldings. Sharpe published surveys of full-size profiles of an unsurpassed quality, and many other splendid profile drawings are to be found in the various nineteenth-century ‘sketchbook’ publications. Paley (1847) wrote his famous manual, and the number of terms in my glossary which derive from this source is testimony to the lasting significance of his contribution. At the same time Viollet-le-Duc compiled his Dictionnaire, which incorporates invaluable information about French mouldings, albeit scattered through nine volumes. But none of these constitutes a glossary.

Inigo Jones’s position as the founder of classical architecture in England is secure. The series of buildings which he designed during his time as Surveyor of the King’s Works (1615–42), from the Banqueting House in Whitehall to the portico of Old St Paul’s Cathedral, testify to his thorough understanding and command of Italian Renaissance vocabulary, his employment of proportional systems and his ability to ensure the faithful execution of his designs.

Inigo Jones’s architectural theory has attracted much scholarly comment over the past forty years. According to the most widely accepted interpretation of his theory, Jones was a Platonist, who believed that architecture should embody perfect geometrical or numerical forms to reflect the harmonious structure of the cosmos. According to this view, Jones’s design method was strictly rational and mathematical. Plans and elevations were generated on a modular system to incorporate harmonic ratios, so that the building was ‘an organic whole, completely definable in terms of metrical relationships’. Jones’s inventive handling of Italian Renaissance architectural forms and his studious imitation of classical Roman detail were both thought to be subject to the same rigorous metrical discipline, which was ‘founded on the metaphysical belief in the universal efficacy of number’.

The south front of Wilton House (Fig. 1) and the State Apartment on the first floor of the south range are justly famous as one of the most important and influential works of English architecture to survive from the seventeenth century. The work has been described, recorded and analysed by travellers, connoisseurs and art historians since its completion shortly before 1652. Much of that analysis has been based on documentary sources with only limited investigation of the fabric. A recent comprehensive restoration of the south range has enabled a detailed reconsideration of its complex historical development.

A bound volume containing unsigned drawings has recently come to light in the Guildhall Library. It contains twenty-three drawings: seven are for St Paul’s Cathedral, the remainder being towers and steeples, many of them readily identifiable as for City of London churches. The drawings were acquired by the library in February 1886 when they were described as ‘Drawings of Plans, Elevations & Sections of St Paul’s Cathedral with some of the Churches in London erected by Sir Christopher Wren, by James Gibbs’.

The manuscript volume of plans here published for the first time forms part of the Rawlinson collection in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, in which it is listed as D. 710. The collection was bequeathed to the Bodleian by the antiquary Richard Rawlinson (1690–1755), graduate of St John’s College, Jacobite and non-juring bishop. He and his brother Thomas (d. 1725) were avid collectors of manuscripts of every kind, especially those of the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The collection is particularly rich in English history and topography, including, for instance, the Thurloe State Papers and Samuel Pepys’s papers as Secretary of the Admiralty. Although architecture does not appear to have been a major interest of either brother, the collection includes many of the surviving account-books of James Nedeham as Surveyor of the King’s Works from 1532 to 1544 (MSS C. 775–85), the engrossed accounts of Sir Christopher Wren for the building of the London City Churches after the Great Fire (MSS B. 387–89), Sir John Vanbrugh’s proposals for the ‘Fifty New Churches’ (MS B. 376. f. 351), and William Kent’s Italian notebook (MS D. 1162).

In the introduction to his Book of Architecture Gibbs avers that his primary intention is to provide the provincial gentry with models from which local craftsmen, otherwise uninstructed in designing with taste, could work. The craftsmen themselves were not expected to buy the book and few of them did. One exception was William Adam, who came to own an important architectural library. Francis Smith, by contrast, probably had few books. His name does not appear in the subscription lists of any of the pattern books of his time; and he doubtless subscribed rather to the belief that any client who wanted to go beyond his architect’s normal architectural range could be expected to provide the visual material from his own library. Smith almost certainly had a copy of Fréarťs Parallel of the Ancient Architecture and the Modern, from which almost all his orders are derived; late in life he apparently replaced it with Gibbs’s Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture. For more exotic detail he was able to call on Domenico de Rossi’s Studio d’Architettura Civile often enough for it to be likely that he had copies at least of a number of plates from the first volume.

The title of this lecture may arouse false expectations. Some of you will have come hoping for a disquisition on high theory. If you have, you will be disappointed. This talk is not about linguistics or philosophy. It is not even about architecture. Probably I should have called it ‘buildings, words and the body’ or just ‘living with buildings’. Far from uniting three lofty academic disciplines, as the title seems to do, this paper seeks to remind us of what we have lost by operating with such distinct and lofty categories. Instead of celebrating the separate natures of building, talking and thinking, it endeavours to draw attention to their inseparability. If it succeeds you will by the end be more aware of the extent to which none of these activities can happen without the others being involved. What is argued is that the making of buildings and the experiencing of buildings are both associated with distinctive mental operations and that this association is apparent in our use of language. To put it another way, we use metaphors from architecture to articulate our thoughts because the processes of design and construction and the experience of using building relate to basic mental operations and basic psychological needs. In other words, when we derive from building design the metaphor ‘plan’, as in ‘five-year plan’, or from building construction the expression ‘foundations’, as in ‘foundations of economic theory’ or from the experience of a building once constructed the concept of ’pillars’, as in ‘pillars of society’, we do so because there is a uniquely close relationship between building and thinking. It is on this relationship that I want to reflect. Since the topic is as vast as the worldwide history of architecture and thought, I will probably not get very far this evening. But I hope at least to demonstrate its importance, not just for architectural historians, but for linguisticians and philosophers as well. As I will argue, the study of architectural metaphors sheds light equally on the history of architecture, the history of language and the history of thought.

In January 1951, Colin St John Wilson, a young architect working in the Housing Division of the LCC Achitect’s Department, enthusiastically greeted the appearance of the competition conditions for a new cathedral at Coventry. The conditions did not follow the recommendations of a commission headed by Lord Harlech in 1947—that the new cathedral should be ‘in the gothic tradition’ — or the Cathedral Council’s own proposal that it should harmonize with the tower and spire which had survived the war. Wilson interpreted this as a gesture of encouragement to his generation, signifying that ‘the moderns are now entitled to enter the fray’. Writing in the Observer, Wilson pointed out that recent discussions of twentieth-century architecture had tended to minimize its expressive qualities and had fostered a highly artificial opposition between modernism and tradition. He detected an upsurge of interest in ‘a monumental and emotive expression’ among architects of his own generation, who since the war had been restricted to the essential work of housing, factory, and school building. Given the historical and emotional significance attached to the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, Wilson anticipated that the competition would produce exciting results.