‘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.

Forty Hall, built in 1629 for Nicholas Rainton (1569–1646), is one of a group of Jacobean and Carolean suburban villas around London. This type of house has its antecedents in medieval secret houses and Tudor lodges, and was influenced by Italian Renaissance models. It provided a convenient escape from the bustle and squalor of the City, whilst being close enough to stay in touch with business or court, and so was popular with aristocrats and merchants alike.

Rainton was one of the latter, a wealthy London merchant who imported fine textiles, principally satin and taffeta, from Florence and Genoa. He took an active part in the corporate and political life of the City, including serving as Alderman of Aldgate Ward from 1621, Sheriff of the Ward in 1622 and Lord Mayor in 1632–33. He was also master of the Haberdashers’ Company in 1622–23 and 1632–33. His religious sympathies were firmly Puritan, and he consistently sided with Parliament in its disputes with the Crown in events leading up to the Civil War.

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.

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.

Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington (1694–1753), was a Yorkshireman, and his role in the north of England was significant, both as a designer and as an authoritative arbiter of taste. His position as Lord Lieutenant of both East and West Ridings of Yorkshire paralleled his land holdings at Londesborough near Beverley, the location of his family seat, and at Bolton Abbey, in Wharfedale. Significantly, his acceptance of a commission to supply the Corporation of the City of York, the social capital of the north, with a design for the new Assembly Rooms resulted in one of his most radical works. Burlington’s authorship of the Assembly Rooms is established, but less well known is how he also worked collaboratively in the county, alongside a group of craftsmen and gentlemen amateurs. One of these collaborators, James Moyser, can now be shown to have been responsible for the execution of Wandesford Hospital in York (Fig. 1).

The end of the Habsburg dynasty in 1700 left the Spanish empire in ruins, and the military defeats and ensuing peace treaties considerably diminished Spain’s power in Europe. The new century saw the arrival of the Bourbon dynasty and with it a greater French influence. Under the banner of the Enlightenment, monarchical rule and scientific knowledge combined in Spain to bring about a more comprehensive form of government, whose internal policies aimed at improving educational opportunities, social conditions and economic life.

The set of new rules and regulations implemented by the new monarchs in order to achieve these goals are now known as the Bourbon Reforms, and their economic implications for the River Plate region have been the subject of much research. This article intends to add to studies of the region from an urban perspective, focusing on the transformation that its capital city, Buenos Aires, experienced under the Bourbons, with the intention of revealing how the new authorities attempted to reinstate the urban layout of the city by dictating new aesthetic values at both urban and domestic levels. As will be explained, the stricter control of land and building also meant stricter control of the population, but Buenos Aires’ citizens — known as porteños — accepted this, as they rapidly learnt that submitting to constraints on their privately-financed architecture could leave them with a healthy profit.

On the map of nineteenth-century architectural historiographies in Western Europe, Belgium has so far remained a blind spot. While the country’s architectural history of the nineteenth century has already received some (if selective) international attention, with a somewhat disproportionate focus on the Art Nouveau, the historiography arising alongside of it has largely remained outside the picture. Meanwhile, considerations as to Belgium’s particular situation, which presumably influenced its architecture, equally apply to its historiography; for instance its design as a crossroads of influences, as demonstrated in research into the Belgian Catholic Gothic Revival and into nineteenth-century (architectural) history in general, among cases one could cite. While interesting because of its own particularities, Belgium also represents a type of ‘smaller European country’ created in the nineteenth century, whose architectural history has been characterized as ‘often fascinating precisely in the extent to which [these countries] present attempts to resolve the inherent contradictions between the major interpretive models and prescriptions of the English Pugin-Ruskin tradition, French Rationalism, and the more archaeological approach of the Cologne school’. The relatively limited corpus of Belgian architectural historiography — at least when compared with the historiographies of the United Kingdom, France or Germany — is an additional advantage, since it makes the field of study more easily definable and thus allows for more detailed study.

The Anglican mission church of St Philip, Grahamstown, is to this day a relatively little-known building (Fig. i). Erected at the height of Anglican missionary fervour in the 1860s, it is at first sight a small, nondescript structure the likes of which could be found throughout South Africa — indeed, the entire British empire — during the nineteenth century. On closer inspection, however, St Philip’s reveals itself to be anything but ordinary. It is one of very few buildings of its type remaining in South Africa that is entirely original in its design and almost completely unaltered in its condition. Although a number of noteworthy Anglican churches in the region survive from this period (especially those by Sophia Gray), many have been restored and/or extended. St Philip’s, however, remains today virtually the same as it was when consecrated over 140 years ago.

Architectural casts collections — the great majority of which were created in the second half of the nineteenth or the early twentieth centuries — have in recent years met with a variety of fates. While that of the Metropolitan Museum in New York has been dismantled, that of the Musée des Monuments Français in Paris has with great difficulty been rearranged to suit current tastes. Notwithstanding this limited rediscovery of architectural cast collections, they remain part of a past era in the ongoing history of architectural museums. While drawings and models have always been standard media for the representation of architecture — whether or not ever built — architectural casts seem to have become the preferred medium for architectural displays in museums during a period beginning in 1850. Indeed, until the development of photography and the democratization of foreign travel, they were the only way of collecting architectural and sculptural elements while preserving their originals in situ. Admittedly, the three-dimensional experience of full-sized architecture in the form of casts, or even of actual fragments of architecture, played a considerable part in earlier, idiosyncratic attempts to display architecture in museums, indeed as early as the late eighteenth century. Nevertheless, it was only from the mid-nineteenth century that they became the preferred medium for displaying architecture. The cult of ornament reached its climax in the years 1850–70, embodied, in the field of architecture, in the famous ‘battle of styles’ and in the doctrine of ‘progressive eclecticism’, and, in the applied arts, in attempts at reform, given a fresh impetus by the development of international exhibitions. It is not surprising, then, that the first debate about architectural cast museums should have been generated in the homeland of the Gothic Revival and of the Great Exhibition of 1851. For it was in London that this debate crystallized, specifically between the Architectural Museum founded in 1851 and the South Kensington Museum (now known as the Victoria and Albert Museum) created in 1857.

A photograph dating from the years of the Russian Civil War shows Vasiliy Pavlovich Zubov in the uniform of the Red Army: an unlikely conscript to it, given his poor eyesight (as betrayed by his thick glasses), but in fact one who served as a scribe in an artillery unit located near Moscow (Fig. 1). Another photograph, taken not long before his death in 1963, shows him in the greyish suit of the Khrushchev years: a survivor who, by becoming Russia’s greatest intellectual historian, managed to avoid playing any active part in political history (Fig. 2).

Zubov is the towering figure of Russian architectural history in the twentieth century. The most pertinent way to introduce him here is as the Russian translator of Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (Fig. 3) and as one of the two co-translators of Daniele Barbara’s commentary on Vitruvius. The former treatise is notorious for the complexities of its text, and it took a team of three scholars to produce the most recent English translation. Understanding of the latter work demands such an extensive knowledge of both Renaissance and Roman intellectual history that it is considered virtually untranslatable, and the translation on which Zubov collaborated is the only one ever published in any living language. He was also the author of an extensive commentary on Alberti’s architectural treatise (Fig. 4), much praised by those Renaissance scholars who can read Russian, while those few of his articles on Leon Battista Alberti that were published in French or Italian during his lifetime are still widely cited today.