Wooden columns surmounted by bracket sets are a key element of the great buildings of Imperial China and have received a tremendous amount of attention from scholars and architectural professionals. This article revisits the question of their symbolic function during the Han dynasty (206 bce–ce 220). In addition to their structural role, column and bracket sets fulfilled important social and cultural needs related to the representation of celestial and spiritual qualities. Understood variously as pillars of heaven, gates of heaven, the constellations, Kunlun Mountain and celestial plants, column and bracket sets engendered a rich iconography that served to bond architecture closely to the heavens.

Holland House in Kensington, then on the western fringes of London, was built in 1603–05. Its builder, Walter Cope (?1553–1614), rose as an administrator by exploiting his close association with leading statesmen. The article suggests that the building's remarkable plan and appearance may have had more complex sources than previously proposed. The house was inherited by Cope's son-in-law, the first Earl of Holland (1590–1649), and newly discovered documents throw light on the extensive architectural and decorative changes carried out for him between 1630 and 1640. It is argued that, for both owners, the house was instrumental in their social and political ambitions.

James Gibbs's church of St Mary-le-Strand has often been interpreted as an expression of his training in Rome, his Tory politics and his Roman Catholic faith. These factors, as well as the growing clout of the Palladian movement, all supposedly contributed to the architect's dismissal from the Commission for Fifty New Churches. In fact, the design was discovered slowly and by compromise, and Gibbs's dismissal was brought about by a change of monarchy, the demise of his original patrons and by the cost-cutting agenda of the new Whig regime. Rather than recent Italian sources, St Mary-le-Strand derives many of its features from the architecture of London, particularly St Paul's Cathedral. The siting of the church on the royal processional way from Westminster to St Paul's Cathedral explains many of Gibbs's design choices. Queen Anne, under whose reign the church was conceived, used the route frequently.

Studies on Irish architectural history following the Act of Union in 1801 have concentrated on public buildings. This article introduces an important new perspective to the subject by exploring John Nash (1752–1835) and his work in Ireland from 1803 to 1810. Nash is best known for the work he undertook for the prince regent, later King George IV. Relatively little is known of his other clients. However, patronage connections were singularly important to Nash and it was ultimately their high social and political profile that contributed to his career's upward trajectory. Nowhere are these connections more evident than in Ireland, where practically all of Nash's clients can be linked to his first known Irish patron, James Stewart (1741–1821) of Killymoon Castle in County Tyrone, and his wife Elizabeth née Molesworth (1751–1835). The timing of Nash's arrival in Ireland within a year of the Act of Union is also significant. Many of his Irish clients were new MPs at Westminster or representative peers elected to the House of Lords whose shared desire for personal aggrandisement found form in building works. In spite of Nash's often troubled relationships with his clients, his architectural output in Ireland was versatile and involved a variety of styles. As Nash's involvement with the prince regent grew, his supervisory role in Ireland passed to his pupils James and George Richard Pain, who in time established successful architectural practices of their own in the country. Few of Nash's Irish buildings have survived the test of time, but his legacy in Ireland is preserved in the works of the Pain brothers, whose design style remained remarkably faithful to their teaching master.

From the 1830s, the British landscape was transformed by the development of the steam-hauled railway system, which necessitated bridges, viaducts and tunnels. Of such structures, tunnel entrances feature little in serious studies of railway architecture. However, rich archival evidence exists relating to the designs of Isambard Kingdom Brunel for the tunnel portals on the Great Western Railway between London and Bristol, including numerous pencil and ink drawings in sketchbooks held by the Brunel Archive, University of Bristol, and watercolour elevations in the Network Rail Archive in York, as well as lithographs of the portals by John Cooke Bourne for his History and Description of the Great Western Railway (1846). Brunel's drawings, unique among nineteenth-century engineers, range from the classical style for Box and Middle Hill tunnels in Wiltshire, through the Gothic for Twerton in Somerset, to the Romanesque for Brislington on the edge of Bristol, his so-called ‘Tunnel No. 1’. In their variety and careful design, Brunel's portals represent an important part of Britain's railway and industrial architectural heritage.

Although British architects played a major role in the rediscovery of the Byzantine monuments of Greece in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, earlier interest in the subject has remained obscure. Four lectures, read at the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Royal Academy and the London Architectural Society from 1843 to 1857, reflect a lively interest in Byzantine church architecture in the mid-nineteenth century. Delivered by Charles Robert Cockerell (1843), Edwin Nash (1847), Thomas Leverton Donaldson (1853) and John Louis Petit (1858), these lectures constitute some of the earliest attempts in England to explore both well-known monuments such as Hagia Sophia and lesser-known churches in Greece, Turkey and elsewhere. The manuscript records of these lectures show that influential British architects were not only familiar with Byzantine monuments, but were also able to look at them from the viewpoint of the designer and the builder. Emphasising the potential of Byzantine architecture to inform new design, they paved the way for the Byzantine revival, half a century later, and for the systematic investigation of Byzantine architecture from the late nineteenth century onwards.

Between 1859 and 1866, John Chessell Buckler (1793–1894) was accused, as architect to Lincoln Cathedral, of overseeing a process of ‘scraping’ the exterior stonework of the building during its restoration. The controversy involved the leading architectural bodies of the time, with professional journals and both national and local newspapers reporting on it over the course of half a decade. In his defence, Buckler published an angry book that, rather than exonerating the author, offended many members of the architectural profession, particularly George Gilbert Scott and the Ecclesiological Society. The dispute took place during a conservative shift in attitude to the repair of historic buildings. This essay attempts to clarify what Buckler did, what was at stake for his detractors, and what the ‘scraping’ scandal reveals about the political atmosphere of nineteenth-century British architectural culture.

Art nouveau design is one of the principal markers of the identity of the French city of Nancy, which became internationally renowned as one of the most important centres for the development of this artistic style around 1900. Like other strands of the style, especially in Spain, Germany and parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire, art nouveau in eastern France has been linked to long-standing regionalist sentiments that resisted centralised Parisian control over local affairs typical in nineteenth-century France. This article examines the evolving bank architecture in central Nancy, a major facet of the introduction of art nouveau in its urban environment, to show that the construction of the city's modern character was a negotiated process that involved careful planning among financial institutions, architects and decorative artists. The design and erection of modern banks in Nancy in the first decade of the twentieth century balanced generalised architectural principles emanating from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris with the employment of highly symbolic regional naturalist motifs and architectural elements. This strategy fulfilled a variety of communicative functions to appeal to a civic populace whose identity was multivalent and shifting with the era's political climate, particularly with regard to the nearby ‘lost provinces’ of Alsace-Lorraine in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war.

When reinforced concrete was first used in Britain for framed buildings, it was treated in the same way as steel — that is, in terms of a simple grid of columns and beams. It took some time for one of the advantages of reinforced concrete to be realised, namely that it could be handled as a series of planes with walls and floor plates, which overcame the problem of intrusive beams and columns in domestic interiors. This essay explores the causes of this delay, as well as the work of the engineers who introduced architects to the architectural possibilities of reinforced concrete. In the immediate postwar years, when reinforced concrete was favoured over steel, there was a return to simple grid structures.

The delivery of stadiums — either as gifts or as concessional loans — is part of a strategy that the People's Republic of China has been implementing since the mid-1960s in its diplomatic relations with Asian, African, Caribbean and South Pacific countries. The National Stadium in Costa Rica, designed and built from 2007 to 2011, is a prime example of China's diplomatic drive through the cultural-geopolitical spaces of the ‘Third World’. It reveals the political, financial and diplomatic operations at stake, the kind of roles architects are expected to perform and the forms of architectural debate (if any) they elicit. The stadium also brought with it the visions, interests and weaknesses of specific architectural practices related to Chinese foreign-aid projects, which involved the replication of identical forms across continents. The building highlights the interrelated processes that China has developed over decades through diplomacy and financing, the construction industry, public administration, architectural know-how and global trade.