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.

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.

Modern Movement metal-frame houses can be found across the United States of America from Connecticut to Hawaii. The most well known of these date from the late 1940s and 1950s, and they are often regarded as icons of twentieth-century architecture. On the whole they represented no cohesive effort or common goal, for they were usually one-off designs which neither drew from their context nor offered much towards the development of an industrial building process which the metal frame would suggest: in many ways they were ‘art objects’ and perhaps they should be appreciated for being just that. The few exceptions to this rule are to be found in Los Angeles, California.

This article considers the history of a particular architectural drawing convention, the so-called ‘laid-out wall elevation’, which first becomes significant in English practice in the early eighteenth century and was to become a standard form of interior drawing for much of the century and beyond. Concentrating on one drawing-type the discussion will raise wider considerations about the nature and role of drawings in the design process.

It is necessary to begin by defining the essential characteristics of the drawing-type under discussion and it will help in this task if the usual term ‘laid-out wall elevation’ is rejected. Drawings thus termed frequently contain no true elevations at all, but they may well combine sections, ground plans, floor and/or ceiling plans.

Previous studies of the arrival and diffusion of Palladianism in England have usually concentrated either on influential architects or on the principal building types. Enquiries have centred on the work of Lord Burlington and Colen Campbell, while Sir John Summerson’s Cantor Lectures of 1959 marked out the formal development of the classical country house, and its relation to the villa. The reception of the new style by groups of patrons has seldom seemed a rewarding approach, largely because few groups can be identified with sufficient precision to make them significant.

In Scotland, as in England, architecture was not a fully-developed profession until well into the nineteenth century. There were, of course, some able practitioners of architecture in Scotland in the eighteenth century, but few if any of them were professional architects in the sense in which their Victorian successors would understand the term. Many of them were builders before they were architects, and even those who were primarily architects might on occasion act as building contractors. Far away in London their compatriots Robert and James Adam might insist (in their dealings with a client) that ‘it is of little consequence to us, what the practice is, among professional builders. We are not builders by profession, but Architects & Surveyors, & live by those Branches’. But even in London it was with difficulty that an architect could sustain such pretensions in the 1770s. In Edinburgh it would have been impossible. Sixty or seventy years were to elapse before the posture adopted by the Adam brothers became the norm, before architectural practice in Scotland had progressed from a situation in which both design and execution were in the same hands — those of the master craftsmen — to one in which design had become the exclusive business of the architect. Those sixty or seventy years also saw the gradual emancipation of the architect from the patronage which had nurtured him in the eighteenth century, so that by the middle of the nineteenth century he had achieved the economic independence of a professional man and the social status of a gentleman.

The history of the building of New Scotland Yard (Fig. 31a), the most important public work of architecture of its date in London, is dominated by two men: the architect Richard Norman Shaw and the then Receiver for the Metropolitan Police District, Alfred Richard Pennefather. Both were at the height of their professions at the time of building. In 1887 Shaw, a senior Royal Academician, was already an acknowledged giant among Victorian architects. Of his great country houses, Dawpool, Cheshire, was completed and Bryanston, Dorset, not yet begun. Pennefather’s term of office as Receiver from 1883 to his retirement and knighthood in 1909 spanned the two stages of the Yard’s development, from its conception and the opening of the north block to the completion of the south block in 1907. He is revealed, in the Home Office papers now in the Public Record Office, as a man determined, against official prejudice, delay and opposition, to erect an architectural monument for the police worthy of its purpose - to accommodate a rapidly expanding force - and its position on one of the grandest sites in London. New Scotland Yard is perhaps as much his achievement as it is the culminating masterpiece of Shaw’s life.

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.

Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Lincoln’s Inn Fields remained one of the largest open sites in central London. It was rectangular, approximately 650 by 450 ft, although sometimes referred to as ‘The Great Square’. To church architects of those years it seemingly offered the opportunity of designing a truly impressive building, one that could be seen with advantage from all sides. Few such sites were available. It is therefore not surprising that there were many proposals to use the site for this purpose.

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.

In July 1650 the Puritans tore down the statues of the two Stuart kings, James I and Charles I, which crowned the portico on the west front of St Paul’s Cathedral in London (Fig. 1). According to one contemporary report, under the new Republican authorities the portico’s Corinthian columns, which had been erected only a few years earlier by Inigo Jones (1573-1652), were ‘shamefully hewed and defaced’. Clearly his architecture, or certain forms of it, did not enjoy immunity from the Puritan animosity directed at royalist and religious iconography during the Civil War and its aftermath. This conflict had brought to a head the underlying religious tensions and related aesthetic sensitivities that Jones had had to respect throughout his career popularizing the antique (or all’antica) style of building. The Orders had run the obvious risk of being interpreted as foreign, pagan or — worst of all — Popish, at least by Puritans, and as such they required reconciling to English sensitivities and national identity.

Since the topic of the sash-window was last addressed in this journal fourteen years ago by one of the authors it has had a surprisingly high public profile. Apart from the ongoing English Heritage and Georgian Group campaigns to promote the use and preservation of traditional sash-windows in historic buildings, several conservation courses in the country now provide for the study of the historic building crafts and their products, including wooden windows. In the Brooking Collection, based at Greenwich University, researchers and conservation practitioners have a valuable reference point for studying the development of historic building components in Britain. Sash-windows constitute the largest and most interesting part of this collection and have been the subject of successful touring exhibitions.

I have never felt quite satisfied with the conventional dating of Cecil's work at Burghley. According to the accepted scheme this can be divided into four main periods. Starting on the basis of an older building Cecil first, about 1556–61, built the existing great hall (Fig. 1) and vaulted kitchen, both of which are very Gothic in character. Secondly, about 1561–4, he constructed the elaborate classical architecture of the courtyard (Fig. 2), much of the detail of which was imported ready-made from Antwerp. Thirdly, in 1577–8 he added on to the west end of the courtyard a new west range, with a four-storeyed gatehouse. Fourthly he built, in 1585, the central feature of the north front (Fig. 4) and perhaps reconstructed the whole of the façade; and in 1587 added a spired top-storey (containing a clock) to the three-storey pavilion on the east side of the court yard.

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.

Long before its completion in 1792 James Wyatt’s restoration of Salisbury Cathedral was the subject of fierce debate within antiquarian circles. Criticism of Wyatt’s activities was at first directed at the destruction of antiquities they involved, but attention also focused on the alleged inadequacies of the Wyatt Gothic style, a criticism inspired by the new fittings and altarpiece, but above all by ‘the most conspicuous object in the whole church’, the reconstructed choir screen and organ loft.

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.

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 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).