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The pre-Victorian architect: professionalism & patronage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
Extract
For a long time Victorian architecture was misjudged because it was criticized in twentieth-century terms. Then teleology fell out of fashion and nineteenth-century buildings began to be judged, rather more sensibly, not as precedents -pioneers or anti-pioneers - but as products of their own environment. Perhaps we are now in danger of carrying this process too far. We are already starting to look at the artefacts of the Victorian age through spectacles which are rosily and uncompromisingly High Victorian. This article sets out to redress that particular imbalance by explaining the Victorian architectural scene in terms of its Regency foundations. Its terms of reference are limited. It is primarily concerned with the attitudes of early nineteenth-century architects and the way these attitudes were conditioned by economics and by education. It deals with two interconnecting themes: firstly the survival of Regency characteristics into the mid-Victorian period; and secondly the explanation offered by these characteristics for some of the primary attributes of Victorian architecture -qualities or weaknesses, according to taste.
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- Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1969
References
Notes
1 Goodhart-Rendel, H. S., ‘Architecture since 1834’, The Growth and Work of the R.I.B.A., ed. Gotch, J. A. (1934), p.168.Google Scholar Those visual elements in Regency architecture which can best be described as proto-Victorian (e.g. the villas of Lugar, Loudon and Lamb) are dealt with at length in Hitchcock, H.-R., Early Victorian Architecture, i (1954).Google Scholar
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84 Mrs Loudon re-edited her husband’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Villa and Farm Architecture (1850 & 1867). Lady Jersey designed the landscape and village at Middleton Park, Oxon. ( Neale, J. P., Seats, v, 1829, 2nd seriesGoogle Scholar). Lady Grenville designed the garden buildings at Dropmore ( Architectural Mag., i, 1834, p. 121 Google Scholar; Country Life, cxx, 1956, pp.772–775, 834–835, 1011, 1068Google Scholar), advised Lord Auckland on the layout of his estate at Eden Farm near Beckenham ( H. M. C. Fortescue MSS, ix, 1915, p. 164,1 Jan. 1808Google Scholar) and helped James Wyatt with his alterations to the House of Lords ( Universal Mag., vi, 1805, p.376 Google Scholar; Gent’s Mag., 1807, pt.i, p.324 Google Scholar; The Times, 23 Oct. 1806, p. 3 Google Scholar). Lady Jerningham may well have co-operated in Buckler’s reconstruction of Costessey Hall, Norfolk, during the 1820s.
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86 The Builder, i (1843), p.l. Thus following Loudon’s ambition to do for the building professions what the Mechanics’ Mag. first did for engineers, the Lancet for doctors and the Legal Observer for lawyers ( Architectural Mag., i, 1834, p. 13 Google Scholar). See also Adams, M. B., ‘Architectural Journalism’, RIBA fnl, xiv (1907), p.322 Google Scholar; Jenkins, F. I., ‘19th century Architectural Periodicals’, Concerning Architecture, op. cit., pp.153–160 Google Scholar.
87 The Civil Engineer and Architect’s Jnl, iv (1841), p. 339 Google Scholar. Briggs, M. S., The Training of the Architect (1943)Google Scholar and Sir Banister Fletcher, Architecture and its Place in a General Education (1951) are summaries, factual and eloquent respectively, of recent developments in this field.
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