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.

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.

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.

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.

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’

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.’

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.

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.

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.

Thomas Sandby (1721/3–98), who served as the Royal Academy's first professor of architecture from 1768 to 1798, shaped his students’ architectural thought. His lectures represent some of the crucial developments in viewing architecture that occurred during the period. They are vibrant expressions of how a viewer's experience of buildings informs architectural teaching and design, and demonstrate the importance of architectural experience for eighteenth-century architectural thought. This article explores Sandby's thinking, first in his own observations of buildings in his diary of a tour through Yorkshire and Derbyshire, and then in his teachings, which functioned as a kind of manual for future architects. It examines the diary and the lectures for his ideas on the effects of architecture — a building's situation, exterior, interior and decorations — in relation to the picturesque, one of the dominant concepts in his texts and drawings. Sandby's architectural thought is shown to be a relatively early statement of the picturesque applied to architecture and its setting.