On 2 March 1692, Sir Christopher Wren visited the governors of Christ’s Hospital in London, bringing with him a design for a new writing school to be erected on the Hospital’s Newgate Street site. Seven drawings for the school building survive in the Wren collection at All Souls College, Oxford. However, rather than suggesting Wren’s authorship, these drawings are customarily attributed to his pupil and long-time assistant, Nicholas Hawksmoor. It is generally accepted that Hawksmoor received delegated commissions from Wren by at least the early 1690s, but, although the draughtsmanship and stylistic evidence of the Writing School drawings suggest consistency with this interpretation, the surviving documentary evidence by no means proves Hawksmoor’s involvement. In fact, Wren’s name appears no less than thirteen times in the surviving Hospital minutes of 1691 to 1696, while Hawksmoor is never mentioned.

The Writing School designs are briefly described in most architectural histories of the period, although they are considered remarkable more for heralding a shift in architectural taste than for the building shown in the drawings or for the social and ideological impulses that impelled its creation. This article considers the Writing School in the context of contemporary debates and anxieties concerning the provision of education for the poor, and within the wider sphere of late seventeenth-century charity-school building. Wren’s involvement is considered in relation to his philanthropic interest in the charity-school movement. The article concludes with an analysis of the designs and building history of the Writing School, and, on the basis of previously unpublished eighteenth- and nineteenth-century graphic sources, discounts Giles Worsley’s suggestion that Hawksmoor added a pediment to the final design. Wren and Hawksmoor’s specific responsibilities for the conception, design and execution of the building are considered, and it is argued that, although Hawksmoor was responsible for most of the surviving drawings relating to the project, Wren directed the process, taking responsibility for all designs produced in his office and claiming authorship for the drawings produced.

One of Thomas Gray’s admired poetic gifts was the ability to convey striking visual images with a very few, aptly chosen words. As Samuel Johnson put it, Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Church-Yard ‘abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind’. The visual imagery in Gray’s poetry attests not only to his ability to use words, but also to his ability to use his eyes. Keen observation that underlies Gray’s poetic images also emerges in prose in his letters, journals, and notebooks. He wrote memorable descriptions of landscape. His discerning criticism of paintings is well known, as is his recording of extensive observations in the field of natural history.

The Georgian gothick remodelling of the east range of Clock Court at Hampton Court is well known, and its attribution to William Kent, although based only on an oblique comment by Horace Walpole,1 has never been questioned.2 What seems to have escaped the notice of modern architectural historians is that the building is no longer in its original form, a number of its most distinctive features having been destroyed in the nineteenth century, greatly to the detriment of the design (PI. ia).

Historians of the English court have become increasingly interested in the relationship between court ceremonial and the liturgy of the Chapel Royal. The Chapel Royal (which is capitalized in this article — as opposed to individual chapel buildings which are not) was the department of the royal household that attended to its spiritual needs. It is now accepted that the etiquette of the Tudor and Stuart court owed a great deal to the monarch’s public attendance at chapel, and its yearly pattern was heavily influenced by the church year. This recognition places the royal chapels in a central position in the choreography of the court. It also allows historians to view these important buildings in a new light as one of the most important ceremonial spaces in the royal houses, rather than merely an adjunct to the great outer rooms, the presence chamber and privy chamber.

The liturgical and sacramental policies of the 1630s had a direct impact upon the architecture and furnishings of English cathedrals and parish churches. Archbishop Laud, in particular, was associated with the restoration of altars, which meant the rearrangement of church interiors and the removal of pews so that communion tables could be erected at the east end of the church. There was also a concerted effort to take down seating galleries and, externally, to remove buildings and shops which encroached upon the churchyard or abutted the church. The impact of these religious policies on the architecture and the literature of the period has been the subject of detailed examination by historians such as Peter Lake, Stanford Lehmberg and John Newman. Yet the authorship of these policies remains hotly contested, with some historians seeing them as deriving directly from the king, while others have argued that the responsibility lies firmly with Archbishop William Laud. Nonetheless ‘Laudian’ provides a convenient shorthand term when discussing these differing ecclesiological strands of the period.

The words architect and architecture, derived from Greek through Latin, remind us that the architectural profession has its origins in the ancient world. Architects in a sense have always existed, in that wherever there have been buildings there has been someone to design them, but architecture has not always been a profession. It was so in antiquity, as it is today, but was not always in the intervening period. There were no doubt working masons in Greece and Rome who could put up a modest building on their own, and we know of at least one amateur architect, the Emperor Hadrian, but in general the designing of buildings was a matter for the professional man.

Architecture and bureaucracy: indissociable and irreconcilable? The two spheres are often seen in opposition — the latter curtailing the former’s creative power — yet might they not also overlap, partake and occasionally coincide in their processes? Dismissing the role of bureaucracy in architecture as extraneous or detrimental seems to hinder our capacity, as thinkers and producers of architecture, to work through this relationship and explore ways of dealing with a pervasive tool of contemporary societal organisation; whereas understanding the fraught relationship might help us bridge the gap that, in many contexts, separates architecture and the communities it exists to serve. This special collection explores how architecture and bureaucracy have negotiated their stances in the twentieth century. In particular, it aims to shed light on instances where knowledge of architecture was an element in, and a product of, the machinery of bureaucracy. Beyond the notion of bureaucracy in architecture as a site of imposition and control — and the vivid sentiments of frustration and deception it prompts — lies a terrain where less contrasted, more fine-grained actions and exchanges occur. The ways in which these two spheres relate are diverse and merit scholarly attention, as the articles that follow demonstrate.

With the death of Peter Reyner Banham in March 1988 at the age of 66, the architectural world lost one of its most distinguished historians and irrepressible critics. His career, by normal academic standards, was wide-ranging and helps to explain his unconventional and, at times, idiosyncratic approach to architecture. During the war Banham very successfully studied at the Bristol Aeroplane Company’s engine division, thereby acquiring a thorough grounding in the theory and practice of mechanical engineering. An evident enthusiasm for technology was combined with a rigorous training in art history under Nikolaus Pevsner at the Courtauld Institute from where he graduated in 1952.

The Theodosian church of St Sophia was destroyed on the first day of the great Nika rebellion of January 532. Its destruction provided Justinian with the pretext, at least, to rebuild it in a more durable and more magnificent form and presented his principal architects, Anthemius of Tralles and the elder Isidorus of Miletus, with an almost unprecedented opportunity. This opportunity they seized to the full. By a daring combination of structural forms never before attempted on such a scale, they created an interior whose superb spatial qualities still excite and amaze. A partial collapse in 558, little more than twenty years after the solemn dedication in December 537, showed that they had even been a little too daring and called for a partial reconstruction. But, after this had been completed by the younger Isidorus in 563, the rebuilt church acquired substantially its present form and remained for some 800 years the largest vaulted man-made structure in the world.

When Inigo Jones designed the catafalque for James I’s funeral in 1625 (Pl. 2) what he produced was a version of Bramante’s Tempietto (Pl. 3a), that key work in the canon of Renaissance architecture which is also a kind of funerary monument, since it commemorates the martyrdom of St Peter. This derivation has already been recognized; what has not been discussed is the fact that Jones’s design draws on a recent tradition of tempietto-catafalques, and is particularly close to that designed by Domenico Fontana in 1591 for the obsequies of Sixtus V (Pl. 3b). Comparing the two, we see that Jones’s dome is derived closely from Fontana’s and his two principal statues are copied almost exactly. The idea of scrolls along the ribs of the dome comes from Fontana at one remove, from the adaptation of his design made by Sergio Venturi in 1622 for the obsequies of Paul V (Pl.3c).

The three monumental Edwardian buildings that dominate Liverpool’s waterfront stand as a testament to the city’s pre-eminence in global trade in the early years of the twentieth century (Fig. 1). These great buildings, occupying the former George’s Dock, were erected in turn for the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, the Royal Liver Friendly Society, and the Cunard Steamship Company. They were the result of a long cherished vision to enhance the city’s maritime gateway. Stridently individual in character, commercially driven, and self-advertising in intent, they have given Liverpool an identity that is universally recognizable. Familiar as a backdrop in 1930s travel posters, from films of 1960s ‘Merseybeat’ bands like the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers, or in the 1970s television sit-com ‘The Liver Birds’, they have become icons of popular culture in a way that buildings rarely achieve. This paper, which has been prompted by the recent proposal to erect a further iconic building, a ‘Fourth Grace’, examines the redevelopment of the George’s Dock and reveals how the competing demands of municipal enterprise and mercantile profit were brought together to achieve a potent symbol of imperial ambition.

As this is a valedictory rather than an inaugural lecture, it seemed legitimate to be a little self-indulgent in the choice of theme. Every medievalist at some time or other has to take an interest in the role of the pointed arch in the transformation of medieval architecture from Romanesque to Gothic and in the ways that the pointed arch form was subsequently manipulated through the later Middle Ages. It is only a short step, but one that has been taken less often than you might expect, to pursue that interest back into the early use of the pointed arch in Islamic architecture: to ask how it came to replace the semicircular arch of classical architecture and why it was used.

Inigo Jones’s position as the founder of classical architecture in England is secure. The series of buildings which he designed during his time as Surveyor of the King’s Works (1615–42), from the Banqueting House in Whitehall to the portico of Old St Paul’s Cathedral, testify to his thorough understanding and command of Italian Renaissance vocabulary, his employment of proportional systems and his ability to ensure the faithful execution of his designs.

In January 1929, John Summerson, then just twenty-five, wrote a pre-emptive article on James William Wild, ‘An Early Modernist’, for The Architects’ Journal. The focus of the piece was Wild’s ‘unusually interesting’ Christ Church, built at the top of Brixton Hill in Streatham, London, in 1840–42. Of this he said:

The notorious tale which surrounds the competition of 1856–57 for the British government offices is part of the mythology of the Gothic Revival. In the saga of the so-called ‘Battle of the Styles’, it has generally been regarded as the fiercest skirmish, fought between the perfervid Gothic architect, George Gilbert Scott, and Lord Palmerston, the Liberal prime minister and a staunch classicist. However, the actual politics of the design was not this fabled, clearcut Liberal-versus-Conservative schism, nor was the heart of the architectural question — Scott’s Gothicism — unambiguous. The real complexities of the story were defined by two great, imbricated cultural forces which matured in the 1850s: the Reform movement in political life and the High Victorian movement in architecture. These established the environment in which unexpected political alliances could be made — most notably that between Palmerston’s chancellor of the exchequer, W. E. Gladstone, and Scott — and in which an exceptionally broad-based architectural theory could be forged, and then tested to its breaking point.

Firstly there is the unity in things whereby each thing is at one with itself, consists of itself and coheres with itself. Secondly there is the unity whereby one creature is united with the others and all parts of the world constitute one world.

The Tempietto, the tiny monument commemorating St Peter’s martyrdom by the side of the church of S. Pietro in Montorio (Figs 1 & 2), has been praised as a model of perfection and a landmark in the history of architecture ever since its completion in the early sixteenth century. None the less some aspects of Bramante’s achievement remain obscure because they cannot be appreciated without knowing the dimensions that he intended, a knowledge which so far has been incomplete.

On 28 December 1698 Tobias Bachope signed the masonry contract for one of the most notable buildings in the history of early eighteenth-century architecture in Scotland, Hopetoun House near South Queensferry in West Lothian. The house is really two buildings: a supremely elegant and mature work by Sir William Bruce, sometime Master of the King’s Works in Scotland, built between 1699 and 1702, and a showy baroque façade replacing Bruce’s original front which was contrived by William Adam and the first Earl of Hopetoun from about 1721 and built between then and 1746.

Historians are paying greater attention to the libraries of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century architects. As Christy Anderson, Hilary Ballon, and Claude Mignot have shown, libraries provide rich, often untapped sources of both bibliographical and biographical information. A book list or a personal inventory can reveal not only what an architect read, but also how he defined himself intellectually. Like a self-portrait, a library is both an intensely personal statement and an outward show of how its owner wishes to be perceived.

This article describes the library of François Blondel, based on a newly discovered catalogue held in the Minutier Central of the Archives Nationales. The catalogue was prepared by the bookseller, Arnoult Seneuze, and forms a separate part of the general inventaire après décès, drawn up by the Parisian notary, Charles Dupuis, at the request of Blondel's heirs: his widow, Louise Boucher, and his son, Nicolas Blondel, abbe de Thenailles.

In July 1972 the Hon. John Baring, owner of The Grange, Northington, Hampshire, held an auction to strip the house of all its saleable fittings: the staircase, doors, fireplaces and marble cladding were all removed. He then proposed to demolish the building, one of the earliest Greek Revival country houses in Europe, but the public outcry was so considerable that in 1975 it was taken into guardianship by the Department of the Environment. The house remained roofless and derelict until 1979–80 when the Department commissioned an independent architect, Donald Hankey, to restore the roof and exterior of the main east block and conservatory. The restoration presented a unique opportunity to examine the building in detail, revealing a great deal about the original seventeenth-century mansion, and how it had been converted to a Greek temple. The following account concentrates on the structural changes which took place in the main east block and in the conservatory. Some new information has also come to light about the gardens. The nineteenth-century extensions to the west of the house are omitted because they were demolished between 1972 and 1979, before restoration began.