The architecture of C. R. Cockerell was remarkable for its vigorous eclecticism and its freedom from the shackles of convention. His brilliance was based upon a depth of assimilation and a range of observation not known in an architect since ‘old Sir Wm Chambers’. Chambers was Cockerell’s idol and, like Chambers, he left for posterity a daunting mass of papers. Without a single building to his credit these would establish Cockerell as an important architectural writer and theorist. The astonishing variety of his interests is clearly displayed in the diaries which at present belong to Mr and Mrs B. J. Crichton of Plas Trefor, Isle of Anglesey - lineal descendants of S. P. Cockerell.

As one of the world's great centres of trade, the port of Liverpool developed a dedicated office district from an early date. In the 1780s, lettable offices were built by the Corporation near the Georgian Exchange (later known as the Town Hall), making possible the separation of home and workplace. The creation of the public square called Exchange Flags, and the erection of the first Exchange Buildings (1803–08), led to the rapid concentration of business activity in the surrounding streets. Early buildings combined offices with warehousing, but changes in the cotton trade resulted in their replacement with offices only. The first major speculative block was India Buildings (1833), and its success heralded a wave of rebuilding from the 1840s to the 1860s. Many office developers were merchants, but banks and insurance companies also incorporated lettable space into their premises. Classical styles predominated, but traditional fenestration was modified to ensure good natural lighting. The result was an exceptionally imposing business district, symbolising the immense commercial importance of Victorian Liverpool.

It seems a straightforward assertion that the function of a building ought to dictate its design, and that a church commissioned to accommodate liturgical and ceremonial activity would be designed to do so in the most convenient way possible. Historically the difficulty has always been to locate contemporary evidence which demonstrates just how a building was used, and to relate this convincingly to specific aspects of its design. In the case of Venice, a principal source of knowledge about ceremony comes from the extant ceremonial books of the Republic which describe, among other things, how particular buildings were used by various individuals and groups who needed to move through them and to be accommodated in them during feast-day celebrations. This information, analyzed in relation to the churches themselves, offers evidence that in several cases Ducal ceremony influenced their design.

The relationship between the ‘Queen Anne’ movement and the French Renaissance Revival in the late Victorian period has been insufficiently recognized. The Loire-château and ‘Queen Anne’ styles emerged together about 1870 as two different responses to one set of circumstances. Both had their roots in buildings of the previous two decades — very different buildings for the most part, though perhaps there was more common ground than is usually admitted.

It is the aim, in this article, to identify the reasons why certain designs for courthouses in early-nineteenth-century Ireland remained unexecuted, and to do so by analysing surviving drawings and placing them in the political context at this time of Irish local government and of the efforts of Westminster politicians to institute reform. The funding and erection of courthouses were managed by grand juries, an archaic form of local government which gave few rights to smaller taxpayers and was widely perceived as an unaccountable institution associated with the ancien régime. In addition to hosting court sittings, courthouses were used by these grand juries for their private meetings and functions. By exploring the agendas and pretensions of these bodies, and by looking at the fluctuating availability of funding sources that were needed to initiate building work, I will argue through a series of Irish case studies that a renewed focus on elite patronage and its associated politics allows a new insight into courthouse building, which places less emphasis than is often the case on, for example, the role played by the changing legal profession in the architectural development of the courthouse.

In nineteenth-century Ireland, courthouses demarcated the visible and tangible presence in the urban landscape of the law and state-sanctioned justice. Laws passed by the Irish parliament and then, after its abolition in 1800, by the Westminster government, were enforced in assize courthouses by travelling judges on established ‘circuits’, visiting each city or county town twice a year (in the spring and summer). These judges travelled with great splendour through the countryside, and were welcomed by a high sheriff at the county border and escorted with military pageantry, ritual, and procession to their destination.

Strangely, the ideal city of the Renaissance was promoted not so much by Venus, but by Mars — not by an abstract appreciation of beauty but by the necessities of war. Here was surely one of the great ironies made by the peculiar Renaissance belief in the intrinsic power of geometry. To Filarete, Leonardo da Vinci, and others who imagined ideal cities, geometry was a comprehensive ordering system to which streets, walls, and public buildings alike might be subordinated.

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).

This study focuses on two little-known mid-nineteenth-century pamphlets which proposed radical changes to the ways in which large public and administrative buildings were planned. Although one author went to some lengths to remain anonymous, the other was soon to become recognized and respected as a major critic and historian of architecture. These ideas were thus by no means the fantasies of peripheral dreamers. Indeed, they were possible, practical solutions to current problems which used both proven and emerging technologies. Both authors advocated deep, top-lit, single-storey, ‘universal’, undifferentiated and continuous space as the best way to plan museums, libraries and offices, supported by clearly articulated reasoning. In so doing, they advanced arguments more usually associated with the open planning and ‘free’ plans of twentieth-century Modern architecture; they anticipated ideas put forward independently over three-quarters of a century later. The authors appropriated strategies already rehearsed in contemporary buildings that had been conceived for commercial, horticultural and industrial uses. They also understood how new technologies of construction and servicing developed outside the fields of public and representational buildings could help make the spaces in these types comfortable and environmentally acceptable.

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.

Domed rotundas have fascinated and challenged architects and engineers for the last two millennia. Examples can be found throughout the world, most commonly in religious and commemorative buildings, but also in the palaces and bath complexes of ancient Rome and in more recent government and legislative buildings. In modern times technological advances have allowed new and increasingly ambitious kinds of rotunda to be built — markets and exchanges, greenhouses and conservatories, concert and exhibition halls, sports arenas. The roots of this latter development lie in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and one of the pioneering buildings still survives in the unexpected setting of the Royal Pavilion gardens at Brighton.

The Brighton Pavilion has always been mainly associated with two people: George, Prince of Wales (the Prince Regent), who commissioned it, and John Nash, the architect who gave it its present exotic appearance. But it is easy to forget that the most distinctive features of the Nash exterior — the Indian-style domes and minarets — took their stylistic character from a building that was completed before he became involved with the Pavilion. This was the royal stables, designed by William Porden for the Prince, built in 1804–08, and now an arts complex.

The Hawkfield Lodge was one of three emblematic buildings that Sir Thomas Tresham (1543–1605) erected as visible signs of the invisible tenets of his Catholic faith. Tresham was not only a wealthy Elizabethan landowner, with several productive manors and estates in Northamptonshire, but also a prominent Catholic recusant. Construction of all three lodges on two of his estates at Rushton and Lyveden began following his release, in 1593, from a twelve-year period spent primarily at his house in Hoxton, a period in effect an exile from his two family seats that had resulted from his recusancy. The Hawkfield Lodge at Rushton, however, no longer exists, unlike the Warrener's Lodge there (known today as the Triangular Lodge) and the New Bield at Lyveden. Its absence would be of little consequence if the two extant lodges were without the richly emblematic form and ornamentation that have been studied in detail. But it appears to have been a building of a very similar kind, and its construction is well documented. That the masons completed it at least to the level of the roof is clear from the careful reading of the interwoven building accounts that were produced for both the Warrener's and Hawkfield lodges by Tresham's steward at Rushton, George Levens, which include descriptions of the building work, and the payments made for it, and constitute a full volume of the Tresham Papers held at the British Library. Focusing on various details given in these accounts, this article reconstructs the Hawkfield Lodge and presents architectural drawings of its hexagonal ground plan (Fig. 1) and of its reflected ceiling plan or, in other words, the arrangement as seen from below of its elaborate ceiling (Fig. 2). By comparing the plan to those of the two extant lodges (Figs 3 and 4), it also makes clear their symbolic relationships.

The chapel in Dublin Castle, built between 1807 and 1815, was one of the most impressive ecclesiastical Gothic buildings of the pre-Pugin revival in the British Isles. It was commissioned by the viceregal establishment following the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland in 1801, and was closely associated with Church of Ireland objectives for post-Union Protestantism in Ireland. This essay investigates the patrons’ ambitions for the chapel, and discusses its design and execution by Francis Johnston, successor to James Gandon as the foremost architect of public buildings in Ireland. Reviewing the chapel within the context of the Union, the essay argues that the viceregal administration and the Church of Ireland were concerned to assert their authority and define their values, and that these were expressed in Gothic revival architecture which grafted progressive appreciation for medieval models onto Georgian taste, and in a comprehensive and unprecedented scheme of ecclesiastical sculpture. Ireland's political position within the Union was ambiguous, but it is argued here that the rebuilt chapel projected both unionist and imperialist gestures, and that, culturally, it was an expression of Britishness.

In a section of a chapter on the historiography of Gothic architecture in the formerly Byzantine-ruled territories of the eastern Mediterranean entitled ‘Perspectives and Future Directions’, Tassos Papacostas summed up the relative lack of impact that this traditionally marginal field of medieval artistic production has had on wider arthistorical discourses. In asking why ‘western’ medievalists should ‘bother to look’ at Gothic buildings in the East, he argued that these buildings are of interest to them primarily from the point of view of the cultural, technical and financial processes involved in the transfer of western artistic idioms and models to lands hitherto steeped in an altogether different architectural and artistic tradition. However, it is also the case that, while the prevalent trend in the study of medieval architectural monuments in the eastern Mediterranean prioritizes the local context and how it affected the artistic process, this need not preclude the possibility that at least a few of these buildings could challenge long-held assumptions about western European developments and open new perspectives on them, if approached with the right questions in mind.

Walter Sykes George (1881–1962) (Fig. 1) was a remarkable Anglo-Indian architect. Obituaries in Indian and British journals cast him as a ‘Renaissance’ man: an artist, Byzantine archaeologist, architect, town planner, philosopher, historian, public intellectual, humanist, Modernist, even an Indian nationalist. He features prominently in one recent history of modern architecture in India, a rare accolade for an ‘Anglo-Indian’ architect — an architect born in Britain who practised and lived for much of his life in India.

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.

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.

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.