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.

Inside the rubble-walled chapel known as the Kinnoull Aisle, across the Tay from the city of Perth, stands one of the most remarkable funeral monuments ever erected in Scotland (Fig. 1). Now abandoned and desolate, the monument commemorates the life of Sir George Hay, who was created Earl of Kinnoull in 1633, the year before his death, at the end of a brilliant career as a courtier, politician and industrialist. The burial chapel (Fig. 2) was originally attached to the former parish church of Kinnoull. Like the more celebrated Montgomery Aisle and Monument at Skelmorlie, near Largs, erected in the same years, it is now freestanding; the adjoining church was demolished in the nineteenth century, probably in 1826 when a new church was erected on a different site to serve the parish of Kinnoull. Before turning to the monument itself, it is expedient to introduce the formidable statesman whose memory it enshrines.

Westwood House (Fig. 1) is a prodigy among the prodigy houses of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, in its different way as innovative and almost as remarkable as Wollaton, of whose site its commanding hilltop, two miles north-west of Droitwich in Worcestershire, is strongly reminiscent. Yet it has received comparatively little attention from historians and is correspondingly little known. This is evidently in part due to a persistent misdating and misinterpretation of its building, almost every subsequent writer having accepted unquestioned the authority of T. R. Nash in his Collections for the History of Worcestershire, published in 1781–82. Nash states unequivocally that

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.

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.

The Townshend Archive at Raynham Hall, Norfolk, which is currently being catalogued by the Norfolk Record Office, contains some interesting material not only for social and political historians, but also for their architectural counterparts. Apart from important new information on the extensive building activities of the 2nd Viscount Townshend at his seat, Raynham Hall, during the period 1703 to 1732 (which in itself merits publication) another set of documents has emerged which throw light on the building of an equally intriguing country house, Ramsbury Manor.

At first sight Tredegar House seems sui generis (Pl. 4). There is nothing else like it in Wales, nor does any obvious English parallel come to mind. The quadrangular plan with corner pavilions distinguishes it from the double-pile houses of the 1670s and 1680s, while the lavish external decoration is difficult to match in the relatively sober elevations characteristic of British domestic architecture of the same period. What we have, in fact, is a great country house of the 1670s designed with something of the love of architectural ornament that was typical of the ‘artisan mannerist’ houses of twenty years earlier. At Tredegar the ornamental vocabulary is not quite what is usually described as ‘artisan mannerist’, but we may nevertheless suspect the hand of an artisan rather than that of a gentleman architect such as Hooke, May or Pratt.

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.

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.

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.

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).

From his emergence on the cultural scene in the 1920s until his death in 1983, Kenneth Clark was one of the most influential figures in the history of British art and design, and his legacy remains strong. Clark’s life and work were entirely dedicated to communicating about art and transforming public understanding regarding its production and enjoyment. His first book, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste, investigated, condemned and elevated the status of Georgian and Victorian England’s enthusiasm for the Middle Ages. Written in the mid-1920s, it was published with Constable in 1928 when he was only twenty-five years old. By investigating the circumstances under which the book came to fruition and its importance in relation to Clark’s persistent interest in the Victorians — and John Ruskin in particular — a richer understanding of Clark’s ideas and beliefs can take shape.

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 coffered dome designed by Philibert de L’Orme (1514–70) for the chapel of the Château d’Anet in northern France between 1549 and 1552 is a masterpiece of stereotomy — the stone vaulting technique characterised by the custom cutting (or dressing) of a vault’s components or voussoirs. The dome was executed by first individually dressing its large voussoirs, so that they would fit one another precisely, and then dry assembling them like the pieces of a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. The spiralling ribs that form the coffers added a layer of complexity to the work, for they are embedded in the voussoirs; thus the exact shape and position of the rib sections belonging to each voussoir had to be calculated precisely before dressing to ensure that, after assembling, they would form the correct pattern over the vault’s surface. The dome’s execution method continues to baffle historians, in particular with regard to the transfer of the complex pattern formed by the ribs on to the templates used by the stonecutters to shape the voussoirs. Based on a new 3D laser scan of the dome and on the analysis of late medieval and early modern stereotomic practices and theories, this article offers a new interpretation of the methods that de L’Orme adopted at Anet and of their significance within the panorama of sixteenth-century architectural practice and theory.

In the high summer of 1675 building work finally began on the new Cathedral of St Paul, after nine years of drawings and deliberation by its architect, Dr (and by then Sir) Christopher Wren. The history of those nine years does not need recapitulation, but the reader may be reminded that after the making of several distinct designs and the First and Great Models Wren had become secretive and had privately obtained the sanction of King Charles II to make ‘some Variations, rather ornamental than essential, as from Time to Time he should see proper’, that a royal warrant had notwithstanding been issued on 14 May 1675, approving the set of drawings now consequently known as the Warrant design, and that by a process of metamorphosis which can be only partly retraced, Wren distilled from that pragmatic but generally unloved design another, now known as the Definitive, on which work finally began.

This article examines the relationship between architecture in painting and rhetorical theory, proposing that fictive buildings are often a powerful form of visual rhetoric aiming to entice the viewer and showcase the artist's skill. Illustrating the potential of a rhetorical approach for the interpretation of architecture more widely, the article focuses on Altichiero da Zevio's fresco cycle in the Oratory of St George in Padua (c. 1379–84), suggesting that his structurally inventive and intricately decorated architectural settings can be interpreted through the rhetorical tropes copia and amplificatio. It argues that fourteenth-century Padua was an environment particularly receptive to rhetorical theory, and suggests that viewers would have experienced Altichiero's fictive buildings as a visual equivalent of the persuasive strategies employed in contemporary textual composition. The analysis highlights the rhetorical messages of architectural forms, underscoring the porosity between two and three-dimensional buildings for a more integrated consideration of architecture and its communicative powers.