Four years ago Peter Draper, as your recently retired president, described his lecture as valedictory and therefore self-indulgent in its choice of topic. What a useful precedent. I hope I am not over self-indulgent to the extent of being too autobiographical, but the subject does relate to my personal experience of the practice of architectural history in the conservation of historic buildings. The history of building conservation is now developing its own quite substantial literature to which this is a small contribution. To some extent this lecture is as much about bureaucracy as about architecture, for much of my life has been spent as an official in the public service. But, so that the lecture is properly historical, most of what I will talk about happened before I was involved.

One major difference between the British and American Societies of Architectural Historians is that the American Society has always involved itself in building preservation issues, whereas the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain does not. This recognizes the different circumstances in each country. In Great Britain we have many amenity societies directed to conservation matters; most of us will belong to one or more of them and they are centres of quite extraordinary expertise. But in view of what I will say later, it is notable that in an account of a meeting in March 1941 in Washington, reported in the first volume of the American Society’s journal, Henry-Russell Hitchcock commented on the merits of the Historic American Buildings Survey, but added that selections by local groups often lacked historical perspective and ignored anything later than the Greek Revival; that there was excessive preservation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses in New England without regard to architectural merit; and that primary monuments of modern architectural history were wantonly destroyed. As concerns the latter, he cited, among others, Richardson’s Marshall Field Warehouse, and a threat to Wright’s Robie House. The representative of the National Parks Service said that 1870 was about the date limit for a building to be regarded as of interest, though the Vanderbilt House of 1895 had recently been acquired, and that attention was also being paid to groups of buildings.

Salisbury House is but one example from a significant corpus of architectural patronage carried out by a single family. In two generations, the Cecils created three great ‘prodigy houses’ among a range of notable country houses including Cranborne Manor in Dorset, Pymmes in Hertfordshire, Wothorpe Lodge near Burghley House in Northamptonshire, and Snape Castle in Yorkshire. It was William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley (1520/21-98), who from the early 1560s initiated this prolific campaign of building with Burghley House in Northamptonshire, Theobalds in Hertfordshire, and Burghley House in London. Both Thomas Cecil (1542-1623) and Robert Cecil (1563-1612) inherited their father’s passion for architecture. Even when Burghley House in the Strand was nearing completion, Thomas continued work on his remarkable Italianate villa in Wimbledon (begun 1588, demolished c. 1720), one of the most innovative houses of the period, with a three-sided plan, built on a steeply sloping hillside that prompted the composition of elaborate terraces. Like the family’s other properties, Wimbledon House was able to offer hospitality to Elizabeth I, while Hatfield House, built by Robert Cecil between 1607 and 1612, was specifically designed to entertain James I and his Queen, Anne of Denmark. In London, Robert Cecil’s architectural patronage started in about 1596 with the improvement and remodelling of Beaufort House in Chelsea, apparently in order to extend his influence into that area, although the scheme was quickly abandoned. Three years later, Robert began Salisbury House in the Strand, while in 1609 he built the first commercial centre in the West End, known as the ‘New Exchange’. From 1612, he also developed a strip of land along the west side of St Martin’s Lane as a new residential area, but did not live to see it completed.

The year 1603 was one of the British Isles’ most critical dates, due to regnal union. Scotland’s King James VI became, in addition, England and Ireland’s new King James I, and sought immediately to convert regnal into full union, building a Magna Britannia: Great Britain. He sought uniformity in all areas political and religious. That project foundered, not least due to English apprehension towards the influx of Scots promoted to major English posts. One such appointee was the King’s master of works in Scotland, David Cunningham of Robertland, whom James appointed Surveyor of the Works in England.

Cunningham seems therefore to have been a highly significant person, worthy of close study, but current research limits this. How can an architectural figure who may have built nothing be important to architectural study? Who was this Cunningham of Robertland? Why did James appoint him to the highest architectural position in his gift, not once but twice, and when each time there must have been alternative candidates? Seeking an answer to these questions opens up an exploration of the wider issue of the status and function of the master of works and the Surveyor in this period, as will be seen.

In 1849, after teaching architectural history at the Royal Academy in London for just under a decade, the architect Charles Robert Cockerell (1788-1863) exhibited ‘The Professor’s Dream’, a graphic synopsis of the history of architecture (Fig. 1). Produced in an era dominated by historicism, the drawing operates between the two poles of historical relativism, negotiating the line between accumulation and rationalization. Some nineteenth-century architects, indiscriminately collecting, understood each style to have emerged from the particular conditions of their times, considering them distinct and yet equally valid. Other architects, critically ordering, privileged one style over another, variously justifying themselves on religious, technical, moral or structural imperatives. Cockerell’s ‘Dream’ is ambiguously positioned as a place of showing and a means of knowing, speaking both of an homage to the past and a vision of progress, apparently flattening a thousand years of history but inherently offering the depth of historical experience. David Watkin, Peter Kohane and, more recently, in the context of an exhibition at the Royal Academy, Nick Savage, have interrogated the drawing, the first two paralleling it with Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), the latter framing it within a tradition of systematic charting of history, and suggesting a possible link to geological charts. While all these interpretations certainly stand, it is essential to recast them within a larger discussion of Cockerell’s understanding of history. Substantiating the different readings of the drawing — against Cockerell’s earlier drawings and surveys, within his architectural theory as expounded in his Royal Academy lectures, and in the larger perspective of the interests he cultivated since the 1820s — this essay brings to the fore the tension between ordering and experiencing, revealing how the architect was interested in the latent interstices between history and time.

… from many a hidden spring streams of riches shall burst forth.

In the period 1790 to 1847 more than two thousand Catholic churches were built in Ireland. The money to build these churches (and others later in the nineteenth century) came from affluent Catholics of the merchant, professional, and tenant-farming classes, a few aristocratic Catholics, members of the Catholic gentry, the poor of the parishes, and from members of other churches. Money was given by donations (often monthly or annually) from the affluent, and from the poor by weekly collections. Other important sources included bequests, fund-raising ventures such as raffles and concerts, and charity sermons. People from all social classes sometimes gave their time, skill, and labour towards the end of raising Catholic churches, without asking for payment.

Edmund Anscombe (1874-1948) was an important New Zealand architect, well known for his design of the 1925 New Zealand and South Seas International Exhibition (Logan Park, Dunedin) and the 1940 New Zealand Centennial Exhibition (Rongotai, Wellington), as well as for his art deco buildings in Hawkes Bay (especially Hastings), and in Wellington.

This article explores Anscombe’s contribution to New Zealand’s early twentieth-century church design by presenting new archival research and examining his distinctive use of secular imagery, notably the architectures of the house and schoolhouse. The article locates these designs simultaneously within traditions of Nonconformist architecture and within a Victorian interest in the home as productively informing a spiritual understanding of church building. While some architectural examples of this thinking were apparent in late nineteenth-century America, there are no other known examples in New Zealand. Anscombe’s use of this secular and domestic imagery in his church design enabled fashionable and theologically-informed architectures to co-exist.

Bombay of the interwar years was a city in transition. The Urbs Prima in Indus, and second city of the British Empire, became increasingly both a site of nationalist sentiment and a conduit of cosmopolitan cultural and economic currents. Its urban fabric witnessed the shift from colonial, Victorian city to moderne metropolis. Captured in A. R. Haseler’s dramatic aerial photograph from the mid-1930S (Fig. 1), the Regal Cinema stands out against the Indo-Saracenic monuments of late imperial Bombay — notably George Wittet’s Gateway of India (1924) seen at the top of the photograph, his Prince of Wales Museum (1923) — its gardens on the bottom left — and, on the right, his Royal Institute of Science (1920). Although not a government-commissioned building, to the right of the Gateway, on the waterside, is the Taj Mahal Hotel (1903), a luxurious structure intended by the Parsi industrialist, Jamsetji N. Tata, to be a location for inter-cultural relations. Extending this type of space to some degree, the Regal was built by another Parsi, Framji Sidhwa, in 1933. The cinema marked the beginning of a decade-long building boom that corresponded with a significant population increase, as more and more migrants joined the city’s growing industrial workforce.

The Art Deco styling of the new financial, residential, and commercial buildings, like the Regal, celebrated and framed a modern public culture which responded to the unique socio-political realities of interwar Bombay. ‘Public culture’, a term developed by Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, is conceptualized here as a dynamic process of indigenization, one that takes into account the global flow of ideologies through human migration and especially by mass media, one that destabilizes the ‘high-low’ binary and avoids the homogenizing terminology of ‘westernization’ or ‘Americanization’. The Art Deco cinema might be considered a crossroads where the often interpenetrating and sometimes competing narratives of commerce, nation, empire and formations of modern subjectivities intermingled: a nexus of cultural, economic, technological and political flow. The use of Art Deco is important in the context of Bombay as the style signified modernity and a particular sense of cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and yet resonated with or extended pre-existing cultural traditions in a distinctly local manner on the other.

In 1936, Nikolaus Pevsner asserted at the Royal Society of Arts in London that the Weimar Republic had produced two great modern schools of art: Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus and Bruno Paul’s Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst (Unified State Schools for Fine and Applied Art) in Berlin. Pevsner was outspoken in commending the ‘atmosphere of youth, conquest, thrill’ that pervaded the Bauhaus in emulation of the passionate and revolutionary spirit of its founder. But he was troubled by the shortcomings of its programme. By contrast, Pevsner praised the Vereinigte Staatsschulen for restoring the essential ‘balance between painting and sculpture on the one hand, and handicraft and design on the other’ (Fig. 1). Unlike the Bauhaus, Pevsner concluded, the Vereinigte Staatsschulen ‘represented a success in almost every respect’. Yet, despite its importance to the dissemination of the Modern Movement, the Vereinigte Staatsschulen has been largely forgotten in the English-speaking world, while the Bauhaus has been long been regarded as the epitome of twentieth-century modernism, and, particularly in popular culture, even of the very concept of modernity. Nevertheless the interwoven stories of the Vereinigte Staatsschulen and the Bauhaus, and of their directors, serve to illuminate the complexity of the unwritten history of the Modern Movement.

The Vereinigte Staatsschulen and the Bauhaus were, as Pevsner noted, parallel developments. Both emerged from the artistic reform movements that characterized the final years of the German Empire, and which found their culmination in the Deutscher Werkbund. The faculty of Vereinigte Staatsschulen sustained the unbroken history of its progenitor institutions, reflecting a broad and inclusive Modern Movement that echoed the often-contentious composition of the Werkbund itself. The Bauhaus faculty sought, ultimately unsuccessfully, to effect a clear and decisive break from a similar historical context. Notwithstanding its brilliant achievements, the Bauhaus ultimately represents but a single, exclusive branch of the history of the Modern Movement. The Vereinigte Staatsschulen reflects the broader currents that engendered twentieth-century modernism.