This article argues that Richard of St Victor's twelfth-century architectural drawings for his historical exegesis of Ezekiel's vision of the Temple of Jerusalem is more sophisticated than the historiography has suggested to date. In his commentary, Richard provided plans and elevations for a number of different buildings, including the Temple's gatehouse. When attempting to convey the dimensions of the gatehouse, he made a distinction between measurements taken as if along a flat plane and those that take the slope of the mountain into account, calling these planum and superficies respectively, words that indicate a strong correlation to contemporary practices in geometry. When he wished to illustrate the dimensions of a gatehouse's interior, he included a lateral section of the building, which is possibly the earliest in existence. The use of the term planum (similar in meaning to the subsequent word ‘plan’) and the appearance of a section are unusually early, although there is still no evidence that Richard's work directly influenced later architectural drawings.

In 1950, the year California returned Richard Nixon to the United States Senate, Arts and Architecture put Raphael Soriano’s Case Study House on display to the public (Fig. 1). This programme, promoted during the post-war years by John Entenza’s adventurous magazine, sought to provide exemplars for contemporary living.

In 1964 Peter Ferriday wrote that, in respect of his effects on medieval church architecture, Sir Gilbert Scott could claim to be ‘the first rapist with a timid and careful manner’ ; Scott’s meticulous and reverential reports were not in practice pursued, he argued, and while Scott made loud protestations at the destructiveness of over-restoration, he was not averse to the habit himself: ‘He was the only restorer who publicly repented and followed this by public (and profitable) public sinning.’ Such criticisms have until very recently been the hallmark of the literature on Sir Gilbert’s restorations, criticisms not merely levelled since his decease.

The German Bauhaus was as much a social experiment as an artistic outpouring. It was an educational experiment which aimed at unifying all aspects of environmental and aesthetic design in a system that provided a foundation course common to all students followed by interdependence of arts and crafts at all subsequent levels. In this way artists and craftsmen could learn a common language of expression. Mies van der Rohe called it ‘an idea’. However, it was an idea which had its origins in nineteenth-century Britain, still the leading industrial nation in the world, but rent by a cleavage between the aims and achievements of industrialists and the attitude of many artists, and in particular of architects. A strong tradition of hand craftsmanship had been revived with some feeling of revulsion, led by powerful figures like Ruskin and Morris, for the products of industrialization.

During the last quarter of the eighteenth century more buildings were erected in Russia than in any previous period of the country’s history. These ranged from palaces (both royal and private) and banks to country houses, churches and shops. On 23 August 1779 Catherine the Great wrote to her faithful correspondent and artistic adviser Baron Grimm: ‘Vous saurez en passant que la fureur de bâtir chez nous est plus forte que jamais et guère tremblement de terre n’a plus renversé de batiments que nous en elevons’.

Foreign architects were eagerly welcomed. Of varying talents and abilities to conform to the main stylistic currents, many of these have been overshadowed by the more distinguished personalities of the time and consequently have been forgotten by posterity. Such has been the fate of William Hastie, a Scotsman by origin, who played a considerable part in Russian architecture at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. There has not hitherto been any comprehensive study of him and we have to rely therefore on brief references scattered in various Russian publications on different aspects of the architecture of the period. It is not until 1967 that the first English reference to him is found in the discussion of the Bahchisarai Palace in the Crimea in the catalogue of the Cameron exhibition at Edinburgh.

Art historians usually find little evidence for the nature of communication between patrons and architects in the Middle Ages. Scholarly opinion has often placed the burden of new design with masons, but over the course of the later twentieth century this claim has been revised and nuanced. This paper uses the evidence of wills and contracts in order to answer two questions: what techniques did medieval patrons use to describe their wishes to their masons; and how prescriptive were their requirements? Its conclusions suggest that patrons, even of local or parochial projects, could make highly specific and creative demands for new works, based on critical and perceptive judgements of recently constructed buildings in their local area. It recreates the discursive and disputatious design process adopted in several parishes as they planned, contracted and executed new church buildings.

This article focuses on a recently identified and hitherto unpublished drawing of Seville Cathedral, recently located in the Bidaurreta convent (and thus described in this article as the ‘Bidaurreta drawing’). This document is of international importance as it constitutes a rare example of a medieval drawing of a Gothic cathedral, and is indeed the oldest known complete ground plan of any Gothic cathedral. It is also the only plan preserved intact that depicts any fifteenth-century Gothic building in Castile. The drawing, which this article suggests dates from the third quarter of the fifteenth century, is a modified copy of a 1433 plan of Seville Cathedral. It records the building as it was in 1433 and some of the subsequent changes, undertaken as part of a building campaign that ultimately lasted until 1506, by means of which the cathedral took on its present form: 126.18 m in length, 82.6 m in width and 30.48 m high (Figs 1-2). This article traces the reconstruction work in detail by examining the original documentary sources, many not previously discussed in English, together with the evidence of the drawing itself.

During the fifth century B.C., Greek architects perfected a method for designing Doric peripteral temples, and this procedure was used for most temples constructed during the second half of the century in mainland Greece and in its colonies. This procedure had to be determined in order to see how it was adapted to design the Parthenon. Minor modifications enabled the architects of the Parthenon to achieve greater commensurability than for any other Doric temple (Fig. 1).

To lay foundations for a Doric temple, an architect needed to know the number of columns and the overall length. Since nearly all peripteral temples of the Doric Order have six columns on their fronts, the first decision which ordinarily needed to be made was how many columns would be used on the sides, and for hexastyle temples this ranged from ten to sixteen columns. The ratio of the number of columns on the fronts to the number on the sides determined the overall form and was the single most important ratio which had to be selected. The column number ratio was reused as the ratio for the stylobate of some of the earliest stone temples (Table 1, column 2; Table 2, column 6), and it was later applied to the krepis. It was used as the ratio of the krepis for the great majority of temples constructed from c. 535 and c. 320 (Table 1, column 1; Table 2, column 4).

The paper ‘builds’ two Anglo-Saxon virtual buildings, a stone church and a timber house or small hall, using Old English vocabulary. At each phase of the construction, certain of the vocabulary is discussed, drawing on evidence from archaeology and surviving buildings, from etymology, and from contemporary translation from Latin. The aim is to investigate the potential of interdisciplinary studies in the field of Anglo-Saxon architecture and building processes.

On first consideration, it would seem highly productive to combine the forces of archaeological and semantic research to elucidate the subject of Anglo-Saxon buildings. More detailed investigation, however, often leads to disappointment, as Old English lexemes, usually occurring without elaborate explanation, are difficult to link to excavated structural remains which are not, of course, conveniently labelled with Old English technical building terms. Nevertheless, it has been found profitable to link evidence from the two disciplines in certain cases, and the aim of this article is to explore the possibilities for interdisciplinary research in this area.

We have all come here this morning, to this fine church of 1853 which he described as built ‘on a Cathedral scale and in a Cathedral style’, to honour the memory of a great man, a good man, and a wonderful — and indeed in one respect an incomparable — friend and lover of England.

Nikolaus Pevsner’s paternal grandparents were Russian — Russian Jews. Towards the end of the last century they moved west, first to Poland and then to Germany.

His father, Hugo Pevsner, built up a very successful business in furs at Leipzig, where Nika, the younger of the two sons, was born in 1902. His mother was an intellectual, the friend of writers, painters and musicians — Paderewski, for example — who gave her son, after 1918 her only surviving son, every encouragement to become an art historian. Not very long after her husband’s death in 1940, she took her own life, to escape the concentration camp.

The history of Audley End can be divided into three principal phases: the Tudor house, a conversion of the buildings of Walden Abbey, c.1538–1605; the Jacobean house, built by Thomas, 1st Earl of Suffolk, in two stages after c. 1605 and held by successive Earls until 1745, save for the period 1667–1701 when it was a Royal Palace; and the rehabilitation and later expansion of the surviving core of the Jacobean house from 1752 onwards, by Elizabeth, Countess of Portsmouth, and her successors. The aim of this paper is to give a preliminary account of some of the results of research in progress for the Department of the Environment into the first two of these phases.

The palace at Stirling Castle, c 1538–40, the culmination of the architectural (?) career of Sir James Hamilton of Finnart, c. 1495–1540, was the most arresting achievement of the architectural patronage of King James V. Until James V had begotten an heir, the Earl of Arran, head of the Hamilton family, stood to inherit the Scottish crown and Finnart was Arran’s elder, but illegitimate, half-brother. During his brother’s minority, from 1529 to 1539, Finnart — ‘the bastard of Arran’ as he was known — was head of the house of Hamilton, one of the country’s elite, and familiar with the king. Curiously, he also displayed an unwonted interest in, and capability for, construction much remarked by his contemporaries. Of his buildings, the Palace at Stirling (Fig. 1) occupies a particular place, since this elaborate and expensive royal lodging may have been built at his own, rather than royal, expense, and gifted to his king in return for the formal grant of his enormous free barony of Avendale, and for legitimization (see below). It was a high price to pay for bastardy.

In almost every respect Weeting Castle represents a challenge. To begin with, the limited remnants of the building do not at first sight suggest that a very full mental reconstruction of the medieval building is a realistic prospect (Fig. 1). However, as this paper is intended to demonstrate, enough survives to allow not just the general form, but also a good deal of the detail to be envisaged with some confidence. The designation ‘castle’ is another hurdle, encouraging a misleading expectation that Weeting should be understood in the context of fortified residences. How it should be categorized is far from straightforward. The notice which greets visitors to the site refers to it as ‘an early medieval manor house’. As we shall see, the building has many of the characteristics of the later medieval double-ended hall house, but there are two problems about regarding it as such. The first is that we categorize it in this way only with the benefit of historical hindsight: it is not likely to have been viewed by its builders as a contribution to an ‘evolutionary’ process. The second is a danger either that Weeting comes to stand as typical of the twelfth-century development of this type, or conversely to be regarded as a ‘freak’, a building which accidentally resembles later hall houses but really has nothing to do with them. The state of our knowledge is such that we cannot say, and indeed may never be able to say how unusual Weeting was. However, that need not stop our trying to see the building in its contemporary setting both as regards understanding where the ideas might have come from and the parallels we adduce in reconstructing it.

Although a relatively young subject, the historiography of Irish architecture has had a remarkably significant impact on the manner in which particular styles have been interpreted and valued. Since the genesis of the topic in the mid-eighteenth century, specific styles of architecture have been inextricably connected with the political history of the country, and each has been associated with the political and religious affiliations of its patrons. From the mid-nineteenth century, the focus on identifying an Irish ‘national’ architecture became particularly strong, with Early Christian and Romanesque architecture firmly believed to imbue ‘the spirit of native genius’, while Gothic, viewed as the introduction of the Anglo-Norman invader, was seen as marking the end of ‘Irish’ art. Inevitably, with such a strong motivation behind them, early texts were keen to find structures that were untouched by the hand of the colonizer as exemplars of the ‘national architecture’. Scholars, including the pioneering George Petrie (1790–1866) in works such as his 1845 study of the round towers of Ireland, believed that through historical research he and others were the first to understand the ‘true value’ of these buildings and that any former interest in them had been purely in their destruction, rather than in their restoration or reconstruction. It was believed that such examples of early medieval architecture and sculpture as had survived had done so despite, rather than because of, the efforts of former ages, and, although often in ruins, the remains could be interpreted purely in terms of the date of their original, medieval, creation.

Informed by such studies, from the mid-nineteenth century a movement grew to preserve and consolidate a number of threatened Romanesque buildings with the guiding philosophy of preserving the monuments as close to their original ‘pre-colonial’ form as possible. Consolidation of the ruins of the Nuns’ Church at Clonmacnoise (Co. Offaly) is traditionally amongst the earliest and most celebrated of these endeavours, undertaken by the Kilkenny and Southeast Ireland Archaeological Society in the 1860s, setting a precedent for both the type of monument and method of preservation that was to become the focus of activity from the 1870s, and thus for the first State initiatives in architectural conservation.

Inigo Jones’s architectural theory has attracted much scholarly comment over the past forty years. According to the most widely accepted interpretation of his theory, Jones was a Platonist, who believed that architecture should embody perfect geometrical or numerical forms to reflect the harmonious structure of the cosmos. According to this view, Jones’s design method was strictly rational and mathematical. Plans and elevations were generated on a modular system to incorporate harmonic ratios, so that the building was ‘an organic whole, completely definable in terms of metrical relationships’. Jones’s inventive handling of Italian Renaissance architectural forms and his studious imitation of classical Roman detail were both thought to be subject to the same rigorous metrical discipline, which was ‘founded on the metaphysical belief in the universal efficacy of number’.

Much has been written in recent years on the architecture of Stowe. Mr Laurence Whistler's guidebook was first published in 1956 and two revised editions have subsequently appeared; the issue of Apollo for June 1973 was devoted to Stowe; numerous articles on the house and its gardens have appeared in Country Life, from 1905 to 1974; and a detailed history of Stowe by Mr George Clarke and the present writer published in instalments in the Stoic (Stowe School Magazine) has been completed in July 1977. For a comprehensive pictorial record before the family sold up, one can turn to Messrs Jackson-Stops's sale catalogue of 1922. However, it is felt that students of English architecture and garden design will find it helpful to have briefly set out the authorship of the various elements of the house and the garden buildings and that is what this catalogue is intended to do.

Many historians have maintained that the true pioneers of the Modern Movement were the engineers of the Crystal Palaces and railway stations. Architects are supposed to have adopted a reactionary position by adhering to masonry structures and persisting with the strict imitation of historical motifs. Recent research in nineteenth-century architectural theory, however, suggests a rather different interpretation. Many architects and architectural writers in the mid-Victorian period were deeply involved with the question of new materials; and they proposed quite a variety of solutions to the ‘iron problem'.

This paper examines the carpentry of the late medieval roof of Westminster Hall. The structure, a hammer-beam roof, is analysed from the perspective of the king's carpenter Hugh Herland. This analysis is based on drawings made in 1913 to facilitate the repair of the roof, and on the author's archaeological reconstruction of the carpentry based on those drawings. Herland's experience at Winchester in the early 1390s, immediately before beginning work at Westminster, is also considered. The paper also places the Westminster roof in the context of earlier hammer-beam roofs, particularly Pilgrims' Hall, Winchester. It concludes that the hammer-beam carpentry was crucial to the roof's structure, and that Herland intended the hall's ‘great arched ribs’ primarily as ornamental components.

Few discoveries have made more impact on the history of Roman architecture than that of the octagonal hall of Nero’s Golden House (begun c. A.D. 64), which was found early this century buried within the sub-structures of the Baths of Trajan on the slopes of Rome’s Oppian Hill (Figs 1 and 2). The hall, a large-scale domed rotunda fashioned from brick and concrete, has swiftly assumed the privileged position as the embodiment of a fundamental breakthrough in design and aesthetics. For many it represents an abandonment of rectilinear planning and post-and-lintel construction in favour of a much less inhibited handling of interior space, which was made possible by recent advances in brick and moulded concrete construction. So unexpected is the design that it has been declared a ‘revolution’ in architecture. Indeed, the supposedly advanced planning of the octagon and the chambers around it has been contrasted with the more conventional layout of other parts of the surviving wing of Nero’s Golden House in an attempt to show just how sudden the pace of change may have been.

Thus wrote Sir John Hawkins in the later eighteenth century of Edward Hatton’s New View of London, published in two octavo volumes in 1708. Despite the apparent disregard of the book by this time, Hatton (Fig. 1) has become a recognized name among historians of London and snippets from his New View have often been quoted for their up-to-date picture of the post-Fire metropolis. But although Hatton’s other writings have received brief attention, both the New View and the career of its author appear to have escaped detailed discussion.