The sudden appearance of the sash-window on the architectural scene towards the end of the seventeenth century and the speed with which this most ingenious product of seventeenth-century building technology spread over half of the Western world in the course of the next century, have always surprised the modern observer. Yet, despite much speculation, neither the sash-window’s inventor nor the date and place of its first appearance are known.

Among the many theories that have emerged in the one and a quarter centuries since the origin of the sash-window became a subject of serious discussion in letters to the editor of Notes and Queries, several have so little foundation in fact that they can be summarily dismissed. Other theories, although equally devoid of a sound factual base, at least rise to the level of informed conjecture and as such deserve further consideration.

The building of Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire was a complicated process and the story has been told on a number of occasions. Briefly, the course of events appears to have been as follows. The future first Lord Scarsdale inherited in November 1758 and started building the new house very shortly afterwards, beginning with the north-east wing: his architect was Matthew Brettingham and designs for interior decoration had been provided by James Stuart. In December, however, Scarsdale consulted Robert Adam, inviting his comments on Brettingham’s and Stuart’s proposals and commissioning designs for garden buildings from him. After early 1759 Brettingham’s services were evidently dispensed with, Stuart having already ceased to be involved, and James Paine was engaged: he produced revised designs for the house which were exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1761 and took charge of the building of the north-west wing, his employment lasting until early in 1763. Meanwhile, also in 1759, work began on the body of the house under the supervision of the clerk of works, Abraham Swan, and Adam began to supply designs for interior decoration; and by the following summer Adam was producing further designs for the house itself to succeed Paine’s and Swan had been succeeded as clerk of works by Samuel Wyatt. Under this regime the house was completed structurally c. 1765, but the southern wings and quadrants were not built and work on the interior decoration was to continue for another fifteen years.

Connections between ideas of ‘child-centred’ primary education and the design of schools were arguably closer in post-war Britain than any period before or since. These relationships provide a commentary on the role of public architecture within a British post-war social democracy that combined the social objectives of architectural Modernism with an awareness of, and continuity with, preceding reformist movements for the advancement of public health and education. The ‘social’ aspect of the post-war school-building programme stemmed not so much from the application of labour or technology to processes of building, nor even the equitable distribution of common resources, but rather from the ability of the designer to shape and articulate processes of teaching and learning within the locus of the welfare state. Social and pedagogical ends were often pursued to the almost total exclusion of architectural self-expression. If this ‘humane functionalism’ was rooted in an understanding of the activities and experiences of learning, it was dependent on a multi-disciplinary, investigative and creative collaboration between architect and educational ‘client’.

Strawberry Hill, the house in Twickenham named, enlarged and made famous by Horace Walpole from 1748 onwards, and latterly celebrated as a herald of both the Picturesque and the Gothic Revival, has been said to be ‘one of the best documented houses of all time’ and ‘studied at least as much as it deserves’. Accounts have placed great reliance on drawings, engraved and painted views, building accounts and, of course, Walpole’s irresistible writings, whether his correspondence or his Description of 1784, which included plans made in 1781 (Figs 1 and 2). As is to be expected virtually all the documentation on the house relates to Strawberry Hill as Walpole made it rather than as he found it. Little regard has been given to the practical circumstances of Walpole’s work, notably the fact that he was not building from new. There has been no clarity on the early development of the house, particularly with respect to its shape when it was acquired by Walpole in 1747. It is well-known that he was working to improve and enlarge a humble dwelling. However, this is not enough. The form of the house in 1747 matters because it set the parameters for Walpole’s architectural adventures. The early house is important simply because, despite its awkwardnesses and oddities, Walpole did not demolish it and start again. There are site-related reasons for this, discussed by Michael Snodin below, but it is clear that he was charmed by the building and that, with knowing conceit, he used it to root his new home in a bogus antiquity. The point of investigating the early form of Strawberry Hill is not perversely to glorify a pedestrian and makeshift vernacular house at the expense of what is truly wonderful about the later house; it is, rather, to arrive at a better understanding of what was the starting point and, in some measure, the inspiration for a great accretive architectural achievement.

Plans, Sections, Elevations and Details of the Alhambra (1836–45) was a landmark work, both in the history of architectural books and in the development of colour printing. Owen Jones (1809–74) and the French architect Jules Goury (1803–34) spent six months surveying the Nasrid palace in 1834 and Jones was to make a return visit to Granada three years later to undertake further research. From its conception to final printing Jones’ Alhambra project took over a decade to complete. This work represented a huge investment in time and, of course, money, but its successful completion was to establish the name of Owen Jones as an authority upon Moorish architecture and as a pioneer in the new technique of chromolithographic printing (Fig. 1). Jones is probably best remembered today for his encyclopaedic Grammar of Ornament (1856) but, since Michael Darby drew attention to Jones’ predilection for Islamic architectural design, the Alhambra has increasingly been seen as an important contribution to the nineteenth-century taste for the Oriental. Many questions remain, however, regarding the production of this book. Using the evidence of important unpublished letters, this article investigates the circumstances behind Jones’ unusual sidestep into the role of printer.

On 28 February 1933, the Modern Architectural Research (MARS) Group was founded as the English chapter of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) by Wells Coates, Edwin Maxwell (Max) Fry, David Pleydell Bouverie, P. Morton Shand, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, and John Gloag. Historians have viewed its subsequent activities variously. There has been a tendency to sneer at its work in the 1930s and to praise its influence on the evolution of Modernism in the post-war years. Nonetheless, there is a consensus that, at the very least, the coming together of Coates and his allies provided, as John Summerson later recalled, ‘a focus, a point of illumination, in a cultural scene which was confused and overcast'. In reaching this conclusion, scholars have sketched in a pre-history of the Group and have established a basic chronology of earlier attempts to organize collective activity around the promulgation of a modern design or architectural culture in England. These efforts began around 1924 with a short-lived initiative by Christopher Hussey of Country Life, and were followed by the Twentieth Century Group, founded in 1930 by the Cambridge don and modernist patron, Mansfield Duval Forbes. The existing accounts of this activity are not inaccurate, but they are incomplete. Moreover, although they imply a trajectory towards the ultimate founding of MARS, they contain little consideration of how, why, or under whose direction, this process might have taken place.

The reinforced concrete specialist in Britain in the early 1900s was of recent vintage and essentially foreign (French) origin and it was as something of a ‘parvenu’ that he was criticized by British architects from the time that he became properly established. Reinforced concrete then existed as a multitude of patented ‘systems’, or methods of disposing reinforcement, controlled by patentees. Among these, the most prolific was François Hennebique’s French-Belgian system. Hennebique’s success was due not only to the system itself; it depended largely on the specialist commercial-technical organization which he evolved, and extended worldwide, to control both the design and construction of his reinforced concrete works (and which was imitated by others). When Louis Gustave Mouchel became Hennebique’s agent in Britain, from 1897–98, his business organization followed Hennebique’s model with specially trained regional engineers to execute working drawings (after initial designs by an architect or engineer), contractors ‘licensed’ to execute them in return for royalties, and nationwide expansion. By 1905, most reinforced concrete works and all framed buildings in Britain were in Hennebique’s system. It was from about this date that growing criticism of the ‘system specialist’, and of Mouchel personally, was voiced there. Three institutions were initiated, which were intended both to curtail the ‘specialist monopoly’ of reinforced concrete in Britain and to promote the knowledge and use of the material among architects in particular. These were: the RIBA Committee on Reinforced Concrete (1905–07), a journal, Concrete and Constructional Engineering (1906) and the Concrete Institute (1908).

In January 1951, Colin St John Wilson, a young architect working in the Housing Division of the LCC Achitect’s Department, enthusiastically greeted the appearance of the competition conditions for a new cathedral at Coventry. The conditions did not follow the recommendations of a commission headed by Lord Harlech in 1947—that the new cathedral should be ‘in the gothic tradition’ — or the Cathedral Council’s own proposal that it should harmonize with the tower and spire which had survived the war. Wilson interpreted this as a gesture of encouragement to his generation, signifying that ‘the moderns are now entitled to enter the fray’. Writing in the Observer, Wilson pointed out that recent discussions of twentieth-century architecture had tended to minimize its expressive qualities and had fostered a highly artificial opposition between modernism and tradition. He detected an upsurge of interest in ‘a monumental and emotive expression’ among architects of his own generation, who since the war had been restricted to the essential work of housing, factory, and school building. Given the historical and emotional significance attached to the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, Wilson anticipated that the competition would produce exciting results.

In one of the witty characterizations for which he is justifiably famous, Horace Walpole described the subject of this article — the transformation of the villa at Old Windsor owned by his friend, Richard (Dickie) Bateman — as a bout of one-upmanship between two men of taste: ‘[I] converted Dicky Bateman from a Chinese to a Goth […] I preached so effectively that every pagoda took the veil’. He later described the change of the style of Bateman’s house in terms of spiritual affiliation: Bateman’s house had ‘changed its religion […] I converted it from Chinese to Gothic’. Here as elsewhere in the early years of the Gothic Revival, Walpole serves as principal interlocutor, providing keen, if sharply biased, insights on many significant building projects in England. Walpole positions himself as a teacher and Bateman as a disciple whom he convinced to change his tastes from Chinoiserie (‘the fashion of the instant’) to the Gothic, the style ‘of the elect’. Walpole’s clever allegory of stylistic change as national and religious conversion was based in part on the fact that he provided the conduit for Richard Bentley and Johann Heinrich Müntz, two of his closest designers in the ‘Committee of Taste’, to design Gothic additions for Bateman between 1758-61. Rebuilt and expanded in the fashionable mode of Walpole’s own Strawberry Hill and by its designers, from Walpole’s perspective at least, Old Windsor as remodelled for Bateman served to reinforce his role as arbiter of the Gothic taste and Strawberry Hill as its paradigm.

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.

To contemporaries living in late eighteenth-century Dublin it was apparent that a major architectural transformation was taking place in the Irish capital (Fig. 1). Fine squares and streets of brick-parapeted terraced housing were being built faster than ever, particularly to the north-east and south-east of the city. Many of the public buildings were being either rebuilt or reclad in the garb of the latest neo-classical fashion. The explanation offered by subsequent commentators for this surge in Dublin’s development — that it was the display by the Anglo-Irish élite of the prosperity and national pride they had recently forged for Ireland, and that it arose directly from the legislative freedoms won in 1782 by ‘Grattan’s Parliament’ (named after the great Patriot leader) — still persists in recent architectural histories. Whether this interpretation is satisfactory, or whether more emphasis needs to be placed on the colonial condition of Ireland at the time, requires investigation. Recent Irish historical writing has questioned the traditional assumptions about ‘Grattan’s Parliament’, and has instead suggested that the closer system of ‘management’ begun under the viceroyalty of Lord Townshend (1767–72) represented the decisive break in late eighteenth-century Irish history. This change in colonial policy sought to return effective rule to the Westminster government and its representatives in Dublin Castle, and was achieved by regaining control over the Irish Revenue Board and by buying a loyal party in the Irish Parliament.

Architectural theorists from Alberti to Palladio thought about architecture typologically. For them buildings were identified principally by their function rather than their form. This way of categorizing architecture has long been recognized by scholars and it has been profitably applied to the study of Italian fifteenth- and sixteenth-century architecture, especially that of villas and palaces. And yet the church, together with its typological subdivisions, such as the oratory, the monastic church, and the pilgrimage church, has remained relatively neglected. As a consequence many aspects of the design of individual churches have been ignored or misunderstood. One example is the church of the Madonna delle Carceri in Prato (Figs 1 and 2). It has generally been discussed either as one of the most beautiful of fifteenth-century centralized churches, or as part of an attempt to characterize the style of its Florentine architect, Giuliano da Sangallo. Although these approaches have revealed much about how the Madonna delle Carceri’s design came into being, when the building is seen from a different perspective, that of its function as a pilgrimage church, it becomes easier to explain aspects of its form, and to suggest alternative models for its design.

Much of what we take for granted as architectural knowledge today was legitimated and codified in the early nineteenth century. Especially in the case of medieval architecture, we are bound by 200-year-old assumptions about what holds value and what counts as fact. This article explores an important founder of empirical architectural history, William Whewell, and argues that he used the methods of early Victorian science to gain authority for the nascent study of medieval architecture. Using methods characteristic of the sociology of science, I will concentrate on the social production of knowledge, not the accuracy of the knowledge produced; therefore, the question of who was right, or who was right first, will be laid aside in favour of asking how architectural knowledge was legitimated in early Victorian Britain.

St Stephen's Chapel Westminster is one of Europe's great lost buildings. An elaborate palatine chapel, work on it began in 1292 and continued until at least 1363. After 1546 it became the House of Commons and was so obscured by successive alterations that the original building had passed out of living memory by the late eighteenth century. It was then that it attracted the interest of a number of antiquaries who recorded it in the years up to and after the fire of 1834. In 1837 it was demolished. The antiquaries’ accounts provide the only records of the chapel's appearance and construction and have been much used in studies of the medieval building. This article, however, considers them as a body of work in their own right, one that casts light not only on St Stephen's but on the changing attitudes of the Romantic age towards history and the medieval past in the years which saw the transformation of the Gothic Revival and the birth of the modern idea of conservation.

It has long been accepted that St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, and the porticoed houses along the north and east sides of the Piazza, were built to the designs of Inigo Jones in the early years of the 1630s, although this has been based on little concrete evidence. There are no surviving drawings for the project, for example, and there is no mention of the architect in the surviving building accounts for the church or the houses. Jones does, however, mention Covent Garden in a note he made later in his copy of Barbaro’s Vitruvius, and attribution has been confirmed through contemporary allusions to Jones’s authorship, and John Webb’s biographical notes. Jones was the King’s Surveyor of Works, also, and the executive officer of the Commission on Buildings, initially formed in 1618, and as such appointed to implement Charles’s building proclamation of 1625. The licence granted to Francis Russell, fourth Earl of Bedford, in February 1630/31 to develop Covent Garden reflected accurately the mandate of the commission text, and so the King’s Surveyor, obviously, would have exercised control over such an extensive project. As well, Jones’s design of St Paul’s Church, its flanking gates and houses, and the arcaded buildings of the Piazza, have been aptly described as ‘a comprehensive essay in the Tuscan mood, all the way from the high sophistication of the [church] portico to the vernacular of the houses’, and as such can be seen as a continuation of his ‘Tuscan mode’ following on from the Park Gate at St James’s Palace in 1627, and the Sculpture Gallery in 1629–30.

Higher Education in Britain expanded dramatically during the 1950s and 1960s. The trigger for growth was the Barlow Report of 1946, which recommended an immediate doubling of the number of science students and an increase in the total number of student places, of which there had been c. 50,000 in 1939, to 70,000 by 1950 and 90,000 by 1955. The 1963 Robbins Report continued and accelerated this expansionist policy, proposing that half a million student places be created by 1980. In the event, although funding was less generous than Barlow had recommended, the numbers achieved were far greater, and 85,000 students were in Higher Education by 1950. The impetus for this growth, which included the foundation of seven new universities (the so-called ‘Shakespearean Seven’) and the enlargement of existing institutions, stemmed from an ambitious vision of the role of universities after the Second World War. Higher Education, and particularly scientific training, was seen as one way to maintain Britain’s position on the world stage. Equally important was the principle of widening access, and a concern to broaden the social base of university education found expression in a range of new approaches to design. Within this context, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge also witnessed significant expansion, but in a very particular way and with distinctive results on account of these universities’ collegiate structure. As elsewhere, buildings at Oxbridge for teaching and research were dependent on finance from the University Grants Committee, but the semi-autonomous colleges could draw on their own (sometimes considerable) resources when it came to building. Furthermore, college dons could exercise significantly more influence over the choice of architect than was possible elsewhere. The colleges of Oxford and Cambridge therefore provided an important environment in which new architectural ideas could be explored. An early contribution to the debate was made by the Erasmus Building, a residential block at Queens’ College, Cambridge, designed by Basil Spence in 1958 (Fig. 1). Although the history of Spence’s design is inextricably bound up with its Cambridge context, as an attempt to reformulate the collegiate ideal it also offers a foretaste of the debates that shaped the new universities in the decade that followed.

Between the design and the realization of a building there are a number of ‘drawing’ processes, either on the building site or in the workshop, which range from the setting out of the plan to the production of ‘shop drawings’ from which details are derived. Unfortunately, while the latter have survived in sufficient numbers to have attracted scholarly attention, the setting out of the ground plan leaves no trace. Nevertheless, it is that process that determines the building's basic geometry. While much scholarly effort has gone into attempting to divine the geometrical principles behind designs from Antiquity to the Gothic period, it has not always been informed by an understanding of the setting-out process. Without taking the constraints of that process into account, one is reduced to looking for geometrical relationships within the building, and of course one will find some. Clearly, there were geometrical principles behind almost all buildings, if only that they should be rectangular or symmetrical, but the difficulty is that a few simple rules can easily result in a large number of geometrical relationships within the building that were not used, and possibly not even recognized, by their designers. At the very least, therefore, we should consider how to distinguish those relationships that were actually used by the designers and builders from those that are merely epiphenomenal.

Among a rather dingy collection of monuments in the vestibule of St John’s Hackney is an altar tomb inscribed ‘Anno d 1519 Christophoro Urswyk Rectore mia’. It has a panelled four-centred arch above a small tomb chest decorated with quatrefoils (Fig. 1). The Purbeck slab covering the chest now bears Urswyck’s brass effigy and there is a brass inscription on the back panel, but this arrangement dates only from after the transfer of the tomb to the new church built in 1797. In the old church the monument stood against the north wall of the chancel, while the effigy and inscription recording Urswyck’s death in 1521 were set in the floor in front.

By the end of the sixteenth century Anglo-Netherlandish architectural interchange was a well established phenomenon. It is well known that Flemish pattern-books were extensively used in the design and decoration of major English buildings of the period. Numerous Netherlandish craftsmen were actively involved in the erection of many of these buildings and in certain cases Netherlandish building forms were directly transplanted to England. Sir Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange (1566–70), designed and built by the Antwerp mastermason, Hendrik van Passe, and closely modelled on the Antwerp Burse of 1531, provides one such case; the country house which Gresham’s agent, Richard Clough, had himself built at Bachegraig, Denbighshire, in 1567, another (Pl. 1a).

When Christopher Wren visited Paris in 1665–66, he famously returned with ‘almost all France in paper’. His friend and colleague Robert Hooke, however, was not so lucky; his collection of architectural books and prints was acquired from London. This article outlines the contents of Hooke’s architectural library and considers the general availability of architectural publications in late seventeenth-century London.