How did the restrictions imposed by eighteenth-century society help and hinder women in their fulfilment of the role of architectural patron? This article will examine the case of Henrietta Cavendish Holies Harley, second Countess of Oxford and Mortimer (1694–1755), and patron of the remarkable remodelling of Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire.

The buildings and landscaped grounds of the nineteenth-century international exhibitions were directly related to the architectural and urban design traditions of the cities in which they were built. At the same time, they possessed idealized qualities that made them innovative and distinct from other contemporary buildings. The result of collaborative planning among architects, engineers, and planning committees, the exhibitions were built to evoke ideal civic settings, their exhibition palaces, pavilions, and gardens forming exemplary complexes that synthesized both invention and tradition. The International Exhibition, the Weltausstellung, held in Vienna, Austria in 1873, was one such event (Fig. 1). Its buildings were both related to the architectural and urbanistic design traditions of nineteenth-century Vienna, and at the same time possessed idealized qualities that were inventive and progressive, marking new technological achievements.

Ever since the publication of Parentalia in 1750 it has been taken for granted that all the ‘fifty-one parochial churches of the City of London’ listed there by Christopher Wren, junior, were indeed ‘erected according to the Designs, and under the Care and Conduct, of Sir Christopher Wren’. That Wren could not personally have designed every detail of so many churches has long been recognized, and it is well known that in most cases the fittings, and in some even the architectural details, were designed by the craftsmen employed. Even if Wren ‘originated the design of every church’, ‘in many cases the working out and supervision was done by somebody else’ — generally by Robert Hooke or Edward Woodroffe, or after Woodroffe’s death in 1675, by John Oliver, Wren’s deputy as Surveyor of St Paul’s Cathedral. Of the many surviving drawings, relatively few are in Wren’s own hand. Some are clearly by Hooke, whose characteristic draughtsmanship is fairly easy to recognize, some no doubt are by Woodroffe, and some must be by the draughtsmen named in Wren’s accounts for rebuilding the churches: first William Walgrave, who in or about 1673 was paid £2 10s. ‘for taking the ground platts of 12 churches yet unbuilt’, then Henry Hunt, who received £6 10s. for thirteen similar plans in 1676/77, and finally Thomas Lane, who between 1676/77 and 1682 was regularly paid ‘for coppying the Designes of severall Churches’, then ‘for drawing the designes for severall Churches’, and finally for ‘drawing and making designes for severall Churches’.

In December 1624, the London draper and merchant adventurer, John Kendrick (Fig. 1), died leaving a large proportion of his considerable fortune to charitable causes. Like other early seventeenth-century metropolitan benefactors, he sought to attack the causes of poverty as well as to relieve its impact, and his legacies included the sums of £7,500 and £4,000, bequeathed respectively to the Berkshire towns of Reading and Newbury, to establish workhouses for the employment of the poor. Workhouses were a relatively new public institution at this date. In the wake of the dissolution of both monasteries and religious guilds in the 1530s and 1540s, and consequent decline in charitable support to the poor, urban authorities experimented with a range of measures to relieve poverty. A small number of towns and cities, including York (1567) and Chester (1577), used charitable funds and locally raised poor rates to establish workhouses to provide work and training to the poor. The workhouses were not residential and in some cases merely acted as distribution points for raw materials to be processed at home. In a parallel development, other towns and cities, including London (1555) and Ipswich (1569) established houses of correction to punish vagrants and to force them to work. Some also provided training schools for the young. The state moved quickly to endorse such measures. Legislation was introduced in 1576 requiring justices of the peace to supply stocks of wool, hemp, flax, iron or other materials to provide work for the poor and to establish houses of correction in each county for incorrigible rogues and those who refused to work. Penalties for non-compliance with the legislation were introduced in 1610.

Francis Vernon (c. 1637-77) is not a particularly well-known figure in the history of British architecture, but perhaps he should be. In 1675 he became one of the first English people to have set foot in Athens and, the following year, published what was undisputedly the first account in the English language of the city and its architecture. Vernon was a member of the recently founded Royal Society and one of a group of English and French travellers who journeyed through central Greece and Turkey in the 1670s. He was murdered in Isfahan in early 1677. Vernon's account of the time he spent in Athens was published in the Society's journal, the Philosophical Transactions, in 1676, and it included brief but illuminating descriptions of the Erechtheion, the Temple of Hephaestus and the Parthenon, the latter written over ten years before the bombing of the temple by a Venetian army in 1687. The Transactions often contained both travel writing and antiquarian material and, in this respect, Vernon's account was typical of the journal's somewhat eclectic content in its early years. Significantly, Vernon's publication predated more famous accounts of Greece from the period, such as those written by his travelling companions Jacob Spon (who released his Voyage d'ltalie, de Dalamatie, de Grèce et du Levant in France in 1678) and George Wheler, whose A journey into Greece was published in 1682. Unlike Vernon, both Spon and Wheler survived their journeys. The only European publication on Athens that preceded Vernon's was a French text of 1675 that would prove to be a fabrication. As this article will demonstrate, Vernon's initial exposure of this fabrication was one of the reasons why his account of the city became so important in English intellectual culture at the time.

This introduction to the special collection begins with a historiographical overview of the American Renaissance. Here we will see how both popular perception and academic study of the subject have been affected by wider forces, including the advent of modernism, the emergence of the preservation movement and the increased attention given to social inequalities in public discourse today. This is the context in which the articles in the collection are situated and introduced. The final section considers aspects of the subject requiring further work, in particular the American Renaissance as a transnational phenomenon linked to the notion of the ‘Angloworld’.

This article explores the provenance of the first draft of Sebastiano Serlio’s sixth book, on dwellings, written in the 1540s. It was acquired by the Avery Library at Columbia University, New York, a century ago and published for the first time in 1978. The article proposes that the manuscript and drawings remained in the vicinity of Paris until the late seventeenth century, when they were mounted and bound into an album that may have been sold by a descendant of Jacques Androuet du Cerceau I, either in Paris or the Netherlands. It goes on to demonstrate that, in the early eighteenth century, the manuscript was owned by Francis Bird, a leading British sculptor of his day, who collaborated with leading architects including Christopher Wren, James Gibbs and, possibly, Nicholas Hawksmoor.

The architect Maxwell Fry (1899–1987) is widely recognized as one of the key protagonists in the development of Modernist architecture in Britain. Discussion of this role perhaps inevitably tends to focus on Fry's early involvement in the Modern Architectural Research (MARS) Group and his inter-war work, particularly his prestigious partnership with the Bauhaus-founder Walter Gropius. Post-war, emphasis shifts to Fry's advancement of ‘Tropical Architecture’ in former British colonies with his wife and partner, the architect Jane Drew (1911–96). Despite a string of important commissions on home soil, their post-war work in Britain has been sidelined due to a historical narrative focused on the rise of ‘New Brutalism’. This article contributes to a reassessment of Fry, Drew and Partners’ work in 1950s and 1960s Britain. It uses the Pilkington Brothers’ Headquarters (1955–65) in St Helens as a case study to examine post-war industrial patronage and how this affected the architectural approach of the project's lead designer, Maxwell Fry. In particular, it investigates his background in civic design at Charles Reilly's Liverpool School of Architecture. Furthermore, it examines Fry's reassessment of pre-war Modernist theory and practice during the mid-1950s and his response to the younger generation of MARS members, such as the Smithsons and Denys Lasdun.

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.

This article considers the position of the Anglo-Portuguese architect Edward Reynolds (1926–59) in the British avant-garde of the 1950s. In Modern Architecture: A Critical History (1980), Kenneth Frampton suggested that Reynolds's student projects at the Architectural Association in London ‘exerted a decisive influence on the development of Brutalism’. This article scrutinises that claim through the lens of Reynolds's interactions with his peers, including the so-called French House group, an informal network that included his tutors John Killick, James Gowan and Peter Smithson. Notable characteristics of Reynolds's work — chiefly the use of complex and irregular geometries to articulate patterns of activity and movement — are discussed, as are contemporary projects by other members of the group and trends such as the New Brutalism, biomimicry and the revival of pre-war strands of Modernism.

This paper discusses the origin and diffusion of a particular type of very common small house that is characterized by what has come to be known as the lobby-entry plan. It was built in great numbers in the seventeenth century in much of England, and, though superseded by more modern types, continued to be built at least until the middle of this century. The subject, the history of vernacular architecture, is not usually associated with Howard Colvin. Nevertheless, in 1961 he published an account of Haunt Hill House at Weldon in Northamptonshire, a lobby-entry house that clearly shows how artificial the boundary between vernacular and polite architecture really is, if it exists at all; and the same is shown by some of the buildings discussed below.

In 1818 the Church Commissioners instructed the three Attached Architects of the Office of Works to submit specimen designs for new churches to accommodate the spiritual needs of the rising population. The history of this Government investment in public morality has already been documented. But the stylistic contributions of Nash, Smirke and Soane have been largely overlooked since only Soane's designs were available. Recently, however, a virtually complete set of designs by Nash, and the majority of those by Smirke, were discovered in the Muniment of the Church Commissioners. Nash presented ten elevations, with ground and gallery plans, which were later attached to the versos. Smirke sent elevations and plans of six different church types. The surviving schemes by Soane appear to illustrate a series of church designs based on a single ground plan and with one section. One of these (Fig. 35a) resembles a minor Valhalla of church buildings. Both Soane and Nash colour-tinted their designs; Smirke added only a slight wash to suggest the fall of light.

Bid Harbours open, Public Ways extend;
Bid temples, worthier of the God, ascend;
Bid the broad Arch the dang’rous flood contain;
The Mole projected break the roaring main;
Back to his bounds the subject Sea command,
And roll obedient Rivers thro’ the land;
These Honours, Peace to happy Britain brings,—
These are Imperial Works, and worthy Kings.

Fortified by Pope’s century-old call for the use of royal riches to civic ends, John Soane’s Designs for Public Improvements in London and Westminster of September 1827 culminated a summer-long campaign on the part of the 74-year-old architect to bring his works to the notice of George IV. Both were men entering their last years under the cloud of public disapproval, for the King a nearly lifelong state of affairs but for Soane the result of pointed criticism of his recently completed Law Courts at Westminster. He was determined to defend and enhance his reputation as a public architect and set about doing so with a flurry of publications produced from 1827 to 1834. Principal among these was the enlarged ‘second impression’ of 1828 of Designs for Public Improvements in London and Westminster. Dedicated to the King, this folio consists of a thirty-six-page-long descriptive text followed by fifty-five line engravings depicting a variety of Soane’s works both public and private. However, the first twenty-four plates form a distinct group presenting a coherent programme of royally sponsored public works that, I will argue, delineate Westminster as a civic space symbolic of the Crown’s historic legitimacy and continued relevance to contemporary society. This programme combines three of Soane’s recently completed public works projects, including the Law Courts, with three projected designs to constitute a royal processional route through Westminster which I shall analyze as employing narrative, expressive, and numinous symbolic modes.

The third Earl of Burlington is generally recognized as the moving power behind the flourishing of neo-palladian architecture in Britain during the first half of the eighteenth century, but his own architecture has been said to be marred by a peculiar stiffness and academicism. This accusation, however frequent, is rarely qualified with any precision; the alleged academicism has been generally explained in terms of Burlington’s strict dependence upon a very limited number of sources, namely Palladio and Inigo Jones, whose authority, according to some scholars, was always sought by the Earl. Such a treatment does not do justice to Burlington, who was in fact a highly original architect using the classical language of architecture in a way which can only be described as innovative. The striking and often jarring quality of his architecture is achieved by producing large surfaces of bare, smooth, astylar wall interrupted only by neatly cut out fenestration and by juxtaposing pure volumes, untrammelled by decoration, so as to achieve a typical staccato quality — first noted by Rudolph Wittkower; and, finally, by avoiding any chiaroscural and textural treatment of the façade. The final product is an architecture which it will be suggested is of a logical clarity unparalleled until the surge of neo-classicism, much later on in the century. Rather than dry ‘academicism’, it will be argued that this new type of architecture represents a clear and deliberate development of Burlington’s aesthetics into a coherent architectural system which consciously selected, and rejected, common Renaissance practices.

The relationship between any building and its surroundings has always been an intriguing issue in the history of religious architecture. Studies on this subject usually treat the environmental conditions at the time of the building’s inception and their influence on its design. A somewhat neglected aspect is later urban requirements, which often affect the present appearance of old churches. In many cases, urban developments caused substantial modifications in the original structure of important churches, yet scholars tended to consider these changes as distracting from the artistic merits of the initial design. Stripping the building of these additions in order to discuss its original structure thus became a basic assignment for historians of religious architecture. In many cases, however, alterations originating in the development of urban needs became essential constituents in the present structure of old churches and in their daily functioning. Accordingly, they deserve to be studied as new architectonic creations.

John Stow the historian, writing in the 1590s about his own neighbourhood, described ‘a frame of three fayre houses, set up in the year 1590 on the high streete’, that is, what was then part of Aldgate High Street but soon to be called Leadenhall Street, ‘between Billiter lane and Lyme streete’, that is, on the south side. The way from the Royal Exchange to Aldgate along Cornhill and Leadenhall Street is one of the most ancient principal ways of the City. The site of the three houses, now of an office building called Baltic House, lies almost opposite the church of St Andrew Undershaft.

The history of English medieval architecture is so well explored a subject that it is easy to forget how much we do not know about the buildings of medieval England. What survives is only a part of what once existed, and the accepted story might be materially different if (to give only three examples) Winchcombe Abbey had been preserved instead of Gloucester, Oseney instead of St. Frideswide's, Oxford, Nottingham Castle instead of Windsor. We shall never know whether the surviving sample is truly representative, and there are many problems in the history of English Gothic whose solutions lie buried in the ruins of our dissolved abbeys and demolished palaces. Chief among the latter was the palace of Westminster, for five centuries the principal residence of cur medieval kings and the centre of their government. All that now remains of its many and often magnificent buildings are the great hall, the crypt of St. Stephen's Chapel, and the Jewel Tower, the last now admirably restored and displayed by the Ancient Monuments Department of the Ministry of Works.

One of the two wealthiest men of his generation in England, Richard Beauchamp, thirteenth Earl of Warwick, served under three Lancastrian kings: he had been tutor to the young Henry VI, ambassador to the Council of Constance, variously Captain of Calais and of Rouen, and he had, of course, fought in the service of the kings of England in France. In 1437 he was made Lieutenant-General and Governor of France and Normandy, leaving for France in August of that year and it was during this trip, two years later, that he died, in 1439, in Rouen, aged fifty-eight. He had made a good first marriage in 1397 to Elizabeth, only daughter and heir of Thomas Berkeley, followed by an excellent second in 1423, to Isabel, daughter of the Earl of Gloucester and eventually sole heir to the Despencer fortune, and also widow of Richard’s cousin and namesake the Earl of Worcester (who had died in 1422).