The old-fashioned appearance of Methven Castle, which lies five miles to the west of Perth, has encouraged historians to describe it as a country house of transitional significance. Built in 1664, it has been linked stylistically with the design of Panmure in Angus (1661) and John Mylne, the distinguished king’s master mason. It contrasted sharply with the stark classicism of two other post-Restoration houses in Perthshire, Dunkeld (1676) and Moncreiffe (1679), conceived by Sir William Bruce. Yet the muniments of the Smythe Family of Methven suggest a very different story. Since building work at Methven did not begin until 1678, it did not predate Dunkeld and Moncreiffe at all. It was the last of the three houses to be completed and what is more its owner, Patrick Smyth, was intimately acquainted with the other two houses and even employed the chief mason from Dunkeld.

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.

This article builds upon Jan Białostocki's seminal book The Art of the Renaissance in Eastern Europe by examining two merchant palaces in the port city of Kazimierz Dolny on the Vistula River in Poland but departs from his interpretation of them. Focusing on the stucco architecture and relief-sculpture of their façades, the article argues against Białostocki's traditional reading of imitation as being driven by artistic influence, and, through the study of the city's mercantile and pilgrimage context, it proposes instead that a notion of imitation that was deeply immersed in sophisticated practices of copying and reference making. It concludes that the merchant community in Kazimierz Dolny was aiming to forge a new civic identity in order to contend in a broader social, religious and economic realm that was traversed by merchants, travellers and pilgrims alike.

This article aims to reconstruct the plan of Theobalds, Hertfordshire, built between 1564 and 1585 by Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Theobalds was perhaps the most significant English country house of the Elizabethan period and in 1607 was taken on as a royal palace. It was visited by all the major court and political figures of the age, while its fame also extended overseas. Theobalds was innovative in various respects, as the article makes clear, and it had a profound impact on the architecture of its generation. Its importance is all the more extraordinary given that Theobalds was so short-lived: the house was taken down shortly after 1650 and few traces of it survive today. The assumption has been that, because the house was demolished so long ago, it could not be well understood. This article contradicts that view by reconstructing in detail the plan of Theobalds, using evidence provided by primary documents.

The eighteenth-century interiors surviving in parts of Raby Castle, Co Durham, are not well known. Though the building was extensively repaired from the 1740s to 1788, and embellished with a suite of Palladian and Rococo Gothick rooms, its subsequent remodelling, from 1844 to 1850 by William Burn, left it so conspicuously Victorian that the surviving Georgian work has been largely ignored. The immediate impression offered by Raby today is either of a medieval fortress impressively massive and surprisingly intact, or of a nineteenth-century house with a rich Jacobethan drawing-room and an immense Baronial hall. Between these two Rabys, the medieval and the Victorian, stand the architectural developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Of the earlier period little is now known, but a series of architectural drawings dating from the opening of the eighteenth century until Burn began his remodelling permit the Georgian schemes for the castle to be followed in some detail. The work of four architects may be identified: Daniel Garrett, Thomas Wright, James Paine and John Carr. Their drawings, though generally incomplete and not in good condition, are valuable as a record of the renovation and improvement of a medieval castle in the mid-Georgian age. And they reveal a surprising concern for authenticity in Gothick restoration design.

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.

In 1992 the National Trust launched a campaign to ‘Save 2 Willow Road’, a house in Hampstead built in 1938 by Ernö Goldfinger for his own use (Fig. 1). Goldfinger, born in Budapest in 1902, studied in the cosmopolitan artistic milieu of Paris in the 1920s. It was there that he met his wife, the painter Ursula Blackwell. They moved to London in 1934 and, along with other architectural émigrés or visitors helped introduce into Britain mainstream Modernist ideas from the Continent. Unlike most of the émigrés, the Goldfingers stayed on, living in their Hampstead house. The campaign leaflet describes 2 Willow Road as ‘a remarkable survival’ because it is ‘still filled with the furniture [Goldfinger] designed for it and the contemporary paintings and sculpture he and his wife collected. . . . today it retains the atmosphere of Hampstead between the wars. . . ’ (Fig. 2) This period piece of a house, this ‘modern masterpiece’ was, the reader was informed, now ‘at risk’ because the contents of the interior might be sold off. The National Trust sought to raise money to buy the property to conserve its integrated and historical ambience.

My earlier article in Architectural History 43, ‘Christ Church, Streatham, and the Rise of Constructional Polychromy’, showed that James Wild’s church of 1840–42 was, in its use of coloured masonry, far ahead of its time (Fig. 1). It preceded, by about a decade, the High Victorian fashion for constructional polychromy usually associated with John Ruskin’s pronouncements on colour, contained in The Stones of Venice (1851 and 1853) and William Butterfield’s contemporaneous church of All Saints, Margaret Street (1849–59). The article argued that the interest in polychromy had, in fact, started much earlier in the century. The use of colour in ancient Greek architecture had been investigated and debated by the Institute of British Architects, under the guidance of Thomas Leverton Donaldson, in the 1830s while, in the 1840s, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin gave constructional polychromy a moral quality — an expression of honesty in construction — at the Grange and St Augustine’s Church, at Ramsgate (1845–50).

Few of Britain’s public buildings have aroused so much public discussion over so many years as the National Gallery. Ever since the building was opened in 1838 it has been criticized for its inconvenient layout and for its failure to measure up to what Sir Robert Peel called ‘the finest site in Europe’. William IV, in one of his last recorded utterances, called it ‘a nasty little pokey hole’, and since then there have always been complaints about the lack of space both for pictures and for visitors. Yet successive proposals for rebuilding or replacement have foundered again and again. The still unwritten history of the building is littered with the debris of grandiose projects abandoned and piecemeal additions and alterations adopted in their place. With yet another extension under construction it is an appropriate time to re-examine the early history of this strangely unsatisfactory yet much-loved edifice.

‘I will carry with me the best architect in Europe.’ With these bold words Robert, first Viscount Molesworth, announced to his wife his arrival in Ireland in the company of the young Italian architect and engineer Alessandro Galilei in May 1717. Lord Molesworth could not know that, twenty years later, Galilei would be indeed one of the best-known architects in Europe, after having built in Rome, to the order of Pope Clement XII Corsini (1730–40), the facade of San Giovanni in Laterano (St John Lateran), the Cappella Corsini in the same church and the facade of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini.

Galilei was born on 25 August 1691, in Florence, the eldest son of the notary Giuseppe Maria Galilei and his wife Margherita Merlini. The Galilei family could trace their lineage to the Buonaiuti, who in the fourteenth century twice held the post of ‘Gonfaloniere della Giustizia’, then the most important position in the city government. They took the surname Galilei from the last Gonfaloniere in their family, the master of philosophy and medicine, Galileo (early fifteenth century). Even into the sixteenth century, members of the family belonged to the town council. The most famous bearer of the name was without doubt Galileo Galilei (1564–1641), from whom Alessandro was not directly descended but to whom he was remotely related. Although Alessandro’s father, Giuseppe, who in 1707 and 1711 was Proconsul of Notaries, counted himself as one of the nobili, the standing of the old patrician families had been considerably reduced under the Medici Grand Dukes because they did not actually hold a landed title. Financial decline seems also to have damaged the prestige of Alessandro’s branch of the family.

Charles Fowler was born in 1792 in the small Devonshire town of Cullompton, where his family had lived for several generations. In 1807 he was articled for seven years to the architect and builder John Powning of Exeter. Powning is mentioned as Surveyor to the Cathedral, and it seems that during this time Fowler was able to acquire that understanding of construction and materials for which he was later to become well known among his contemporaries.

At the end of this time in 1814 he left Exeter for London to work as an assistant in the office of David Laing. Laing, who had been a pupil of Sir John Soane, was appointed Architect and Surveyor to the Customs in 1810 and the same year saw the completion of his Custom House at Plymouth.

It was Winckelmann who first suggested that the definitive characteristics of the art of a country lie primarily in its climate and geography. The climate of Greece shaped the customs and habits of the Greeks and it was those same customs and habits which gave rise to the norms and very nature of Greek art. It is a notion such as this which lies behind any attempt to link national characteristics with a national identity in architecture — that idea and, in my own case, a desire to pay tribute to the inspirational character and energy of Nikolaus Pevsner as a speaker and teacher, has tempted me to borrow his title — ‘the Englishness of English Architecture’ — and to tackle the notion from an Irish point of view.

The Gothic Revival occupies a central place in the architectural development of the Church of England in the nineteenth century, both at home and abroad. Within the expanding British colonial world, in particular, the neo-Gothic church became a centrally important expression of both faith and identity throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. From a symbolic and communicative perspective, the style represented not only a visual link to Britain, but also the fundamental expression of the Church of England as an institution and of the culture of Englishness. As such, it carried with it a wide range of cultural implications that suited the needs of settler communities wishing to re-established their identity abroad. Expansion during this period, however, was not only limited to the growth of settler communities but was also reflected in growing Anglican missions to the non-Christian peoples of annexed territories. The two primary organs of the Church of England in the field, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the Church Missionary Society (CMS), actively employed the revived medieval style throughout the Empire as missions were solidified through infrastructure development. As a popular style with direct connotations to the Christian faith, revived medieval design became increasingly popular with Anglican missionaries abroad in the period between the early 1840s and the end of the century. Not only did its origins in ecclesiastical buildings make it attractive, but it was also stylistically distinctive, and set apart as a sacred style from both secular and ‘heathen’ structures.

… from many a hidden spring streams of riches shall burst forth.

In the period 1790 to 1847 more than two thousand Catholic churches were built in Ireland. The money to build these churches (and others later in the nineteenth century) came from affluent Catholics of the merchant, professional, and tenant-farming classes, a few aristocratic Catholics, members of the Catholic gentry, the poor of the parishes, and from members of other churches. Money was given by donations (often monthly or annually) from the affluent, and from the poor by weekly collections. Other important sources included bequests, fund-raising ventures such as raffles and concerts, and charity sermons. People from all social classes sometimes gave their time, skill, and labour towards the end of raising Catholic churches, without asking for payment.

The large sculpture of the crucifixion created at Rushton Hall, Northamptonshire, for Sir Thomas Tresham is a remarkable survival (Fig. 1). Sir Thomas was a highly controversial personality of the Elizabethan age, notorious as a leading Catholic dissenter against the Protestant religious settlement. Rushton Hall in Northamptonshire was his ancestral country seat. Religious imagery from the Elizabethan period is rare, but it is quite exceptional to find a surviving religious sculpture made for an English Catholic.

When Inigo Jones introduced Italian architectural ideas into Britain, he also brought a new kind of roof structure that facilitated the construction of large scale spaces. The unsupported ceilings of the Banqueting House and St Paul’s, Covent Garden, were both over 50 ft and although similar spans had been built before, they had relied upon quite different structural methods which created a distinct architecture. The roofs of Westminster Hall and those of many lesser halls, like those at the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, used either arch or hammer-beam forms whose open structures dominated the rooms. These structures were quite unsuited to providing flat ceilings or roofs which, when required, had relied upon massive tie beams. Instead of this rather crude structural method, Inigo Jones supported his flat ceilings and roofs by using the much more efficient trussed roofs which were in use in Italy at the time and were shown in the drawings of Palladio and Serlio. These structures allowed large spans to be constructed with timbers of smaller scantling, particularly for the tie beam which no longer needed to carry the full weight of the roof and which no longer needed to be built in a single length. It might be argued that the use of this new structural form was essential to the development of the new classical style of architecture in England but, although he was the first architect to use it on any scale in Britain, the influence of Inigo Jones on its subsequent use and development is questionable because of the interruption to building by the Civil War and the re-discovery of the form by others thereafter.

The Albion Mill was built during the years 1783–86 on the Surrey bank of the Thames at the foot of Blackfriars Bridge. Designed to grind corn on a large scale, the mill was outstandingly the most advanced industrial building of its day and the first to be planned, from the start, to incorporate the newly invented Boulton & Watt double-acting rotative engines. The mill was also one of Samuel Wyatt’s major works and one to which he devoted a great deal of attention as architect and builder and as the principal promoter of the undertaking. By good fortune many of his letters relating to the mill have survived and can be studied in the Boulton & Watt Collection at the Birmingham Reference Library and in the Tew MSS at the Assay Office, Birmingham. Letters on the mill written by Matthew Boulton, John Rennie and James Watt also exist in these collections. There are structural drawings in the Reference Library; several views of the mill were published as engravings, and in the Public Record Office drawings can be seen of two schemes by Wyatt for rebuilding the mill after its destruction by fire in 1791. All these sources have been used in the present paper.

Monuments of the Timurid period, erected in Iran and in Turan between 1370 and 1506, display inscriptions in Arabic and Persian which contain the names of ninety artisans, nearly all of which are followed at the end of the line by the Muslim lunar date. Many of the names are followed by occupations and about half by the addition of a nisbah, or place of birth. The occupations include master workman, architect, builder, carpenter, cabinet maker, stone carver, painter or decorator, tile cutter, mason working with mud brick, blacksmith and potter. In many cases the names were preceded by expressions of humility, such as ‘poor servant’ or ‘weak slave’ and followed by terms of religious piety.

On the second of September 1895, the anniversary-day of the battle of Sedan — the decisive victory of the Prussians over Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 — the consecration of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche took place in Berlin (Fig. 1). Like many other nineteenth-century churches the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche was as much a political as an ecclesiastical monument: a fortress against the destructive forces of anarchy and socialism — this is the German emperor’s own statement — and, needless to say, an expression of the national spirit. Such intentions on the part of the leading forces of the German monarchy had their impact on the choice of the style for this imperial memorial. This style had to fulfil several conditions: it had to look genuinely German, it had to be decently religious and it had to recall the imperial past of the medieval Empire. Franz Schwechten’s building is one of the last great examples of nineteenth-century eclecticism in Berlin. Combining Gothic rose-windows with Romanesque towers, it is a rehearsal of the so-called Rhenish transitional style, which was so much cherished by the newly-founded German empire and especially by the emperor Wilhelm II himself. The church was largely destroyed in the Second World War. Its original effect must have been rather like Hollywood: at the end of one of the most elegant nineteenth-century boulevards of the modern capital stood a monument looking like a Rhenish medieval church — St Peter’s at Sinzig or St Mary’s in Gelnhausen. Oberhofmeister Ernst von Mirbach, who was the leading force behind the project, wrote in 1897: ‘Die Kirche ist im spätgermanischen, dem sogenannten Übergangsstil entworfen. “Germanisch” und nicht mit dem falschen Worte “Romanisch” sollte man den Stil bezeichnen, welcher sich bei germanischen Volksstämmen eigenartig und grossartig herausbildete und in deutschen Gauen seine lieblichste und vollendetste Blüte erreichte.’ [’The church is in the late Germanic, the so-called transitional style. One should describe it as German and not use the inappropriate term Romanesque for this style, which was formed particularly and most splendidly by the German people and reached its fullest and most beautiful flowering in the German-speaking lands.’]

It is clear that any explanation of the course taken by English country house design at the time of its first vigorous growth in the sixteenth century cannot be founded on a simple iconographical basis. A detailed knowledge of the processes by which the houses were constructed is essential to an understanding of their finished appearance and, as in any other age, due regard must be had to the characters of the individual personalities involved. In recent years, such an approach has considerably advanced our comprehension of the country houses, principally in the north Midlands, associated with Robert Smythson. Although at present the evidence is wanting for a biographical study of similar importance for any other part of the country, an examination of the documentary sources for a particular region could well prove fruitful in establishing a comprehensible picture of aesthetic control and design which may have a more general application.