Yingzao Fashi (State Building Standards) is the oldest extant Chinese technical manual on buildings. It was compiled by Li Jie, a Superintendent of State Buildings (later Director of Palace Building) in 1100 and published by the Song sovereign in 1103 (Figure 1).

There are thirty-four chapters in the Yingzao Fashi, starting with a concise definition of the main terms used in the manual by tracing their textual origins. The main body of the book specifies the units of measurement, design standards and construction principles with structural patterns and building elements illustrated in drawings. Furthermore, it specifies standard estimates for labour works, documents material data, and lists recipes for decorative painting and coatings, etc. It embodies the greatest achievements of Chinese architecture in its day.

The evidence of inventories has played a significant role in studies of the smaller houses of Tudor and Early Stuart England; important publications on vernacular architecture and certain regional studies have, with inventories as their major source, defined the extent and nature of low- and middle-income housing in England where often much of the physical evidence is now lost or fundamentally altered. These studies have made an important contribution to our understanding of consumer culture at this period, including the amount people were prepared to spend on building materials and the permanent fixtures of their houses. Their conclusions have often been cited in more general commentaries to corroborate the famous comments of William Harrison, first published in 1577, on rising living standards as evidenced in the buildings and their appointment that he saw around him. It could also be argued that studies emanating from the United States, examining American inventories from the seventeenth century and later and sometimes in comparison with English evidence, have explored, in considerably greater depth than those who have worked with purely English material, the potential embedded in the inventories of relatively modest households for the discussion of wider issues arising from the study of buildings, concerning space, material culture and gender.

It seems a straightforward assertion that the function of a building ought to dictate its design, and that a church commissioned to accommodate liturgical and ceremonial activity would be designed to do so in the most convenient way possible. Historically the difficulty has always been to locate contemporary evidence which demonstrates just how a building was used, and to relate this convincingly to specific aspects of its design. In the case of Venice, a principal source of knowledge about ceremony comes from the extant ceremonial books of the Republic which describe, among other things, how particular buildings were used by various individuals and groups who needed to move through them and to be accommodated in them during feast-day celebrations. This information, analyzed in relation to the churches themselves, offers evidence that in several cases Ducal ceremony influenced their design.

The pattern book of the Devonshire plasterer, John Abbott II of Frithelstock (1639–1727), is a document which has attracted some attention, not just on the part of local historians interested in the rich corpus of West Country decorative plasterwork, but also from historians with a wider interest in decorative arts of the seventeenth century in England. Although the manuscript has the dates 1662 and 1665 repeated several times on the fly-leaf and end-papers, it draws on printed sources which had first appeared long before these dates. Abbott took over the trade of plasterer from his father Richard (1612–63) and his grandfather John I (1565–1635), and it has been suggested that the book may have been handed down within the family over two or more generations, which makes the dating of most of its contents particularly problematic. Abbott’s actual work is known to have survived at a number of sites in Devonshire, and his pattern book has sometimes been used in the often highly speculative business of assigning and dating the plasterwork in particular buildings; but as the substantial working notebook — more than 300 pages long — of a family of practising journeyman artists, it might also be expected to tell us something more generally about the design vocabulary and the working practices of craftsmen at this period in England.

Sir William Brereton’s description is the earliest account of Ormond Castle, Carrick on Suir (Fig. 1). It was the favourite house of Thomas Butler, 10th Earl of Ormond. Inside the building a unique decorative scheme in plaster of mid-sixteenth-century date has survived. The castle, now known as Ormond Castle, takes it name from its former owners, the powerful Anglo-Norman family of Butler, who came to Ireland in 1185 with King John. James Butler (d. 1338) was created Earl of Ormond in 1315. In the seventeenth century another James Butler, 12th earl, was elevated to a dukedom of Ormonde after the restoration of Charles II.

Since the topic of the sash-window was last addressed in this journal fourteen years ago by one of the authors it has had a surprisingly high public profile. Apart from the ongoing English Heritage and Georgian Group campaigns to promote the use and preservation of traditional sash-windows in historic buildings, several conservation courses in the country now provide for the study of the historic building crafts and their products, including wooden windows. In the Brooking Collection, based at Greenwich University, researchers and conservation practitioners have a valuable reference point for studying the development of historic building components in Britain. Sash-windows constitute the largest and most interesting part of this collection and have been the subject of successful touring exhibitions.

The Soane Museum contains a number of papers and drawings that give an insight into property disputes during the closing years of the eighteenth century and the opening years of the nineteenth. This paper discusses two cases to illustrate some of the factors that brought about differences between parties. John Soane was sometimes called upon to act as an arbitrator to resolve disputes relating to matters such as poor construction, building prices and fee disputes between architects and their clients. The Soane papers are of more interest to the architectural than to the legal historian for Soane’s conduct of Hearings and submissions is less well recorded than are the snippets of information about architects and their schemes. It is rare to find Soane’s Award or decision.

The emphasis laid on the glorious artistic past of France under the restored monarchy is a notable feature of the French architectural writings of the 1840s. The most glorious period of French architecture was then identified as being the Middle Ages, climaxing in the thirteenth-century religious architecture, much disregarded in the eighteenth century as a time of barbarous feudality and despotism. The neglect into which the medieval religious monuments had fallen in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1789 when they had been confiscated from the Church appeared intolerable and the situation required urgent action, it was thought, not least in the highest political circles. F. Guizot, an influential politician and renowned historian, believed that studying the past could only benefit modern man, providing him with examples of ‘disinterestedness and moral energy which are the strength and the dignity of man in this world’, and would thus reinforce the ascent of the bourgeoisie in a country with a restored monarchy. The artistic ambition of Guizot had ranked only second to his political aims when, in 1830, he advised the King to appoint a General Inspector of Historical French Monuments. This initiative soon developed into the Commission for Historical Monuments, which was granted its definitive status in 1837, but which in effect had been in existence since 1830. Its aim was to sort out and classify the demands from local authorities for works of restoration to be undertaken on medieval buildings. It was composed of archaeologists and architects headed by an Inspector, first Ludovic Vitet, replaced in 1833 by Prosper Mérimée with E. Viollet-le-Duc as his assistant. Thus, the merits of medieval buildings, Gothic churches in particular, were brought to the forefront of public attention at a time when popular enthusiasm had been kindled by Victor Hugo’s romantic glorification of Gothic in Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), in whose preface the author had proclaimed that it was a duty to preserve ancient monuments until the times were ripe to build modern ones. Hugo’s glorification of Gothic architecture was emblematic of French Romanticism, coloured as it was by the democratic ideals that had triumphed with the 1789 Revolution. He saw the passage from the Romanesque architecture of the early Middle Ages to the Gothic architecture of the thirteenth century as reflecting the progress of society from its theocratic, Church-dominated feudal state to a more democratic state. Gothic architecture is thus seen by Hugo as the symbol of the people’s newly-acquired status and power. Speaking of Notre-Dame in Paris, which is not pure thirteenth-century Gothic, he wrote:

Connexions in architectural style between England, France and Germany during the Gothic Revival have been analyzed by Frankl, Germann, Middleton, Muthesius and Lewis. The English architectural world, especially Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin’s writings, provided a new foundation for the German Gothic Revival that was supported by the theories of the lawyer and politician August Reichensperger (1808–95) and practised by architects such as Vincenz Statz (1818–98) and Georg Gottlob Ungewitter (1820–64). These architects either followed Reichensperger very literally, as did Statz in the Rhineland, or developed their own branch of the Gothic movement, as did Ungewitter. In Lewis’s picture of the Revival between 1840 and 1880 Reichensperger is placed in the centre; but our view is that the Gothic Revival in Germany was not a co-ordinated movement as it was in England. Although the independence of architects like Ungewitter in Hesse and Conrad Wilhelm Hase (1818–1902) in Lower Saxony is appreciated by the author, the viewing of Reichensperger’s ideas as the crucial point of the whole movement appears to be too limited. Rather it seems to be the variety of facets that determines the structure of the German Gothic Revival.

Pugin’s interpretation of the history of the medieval world shaped progressive architectural taste in the later nineteenth century. It touched on every aspect of the styles of the era, first through his application of its lessons to his own work, and then through the affirmation or the rejection of its precepts by others. Significantly the most fundamental opposition to Pugin’s historical interpretations was that expressed by his adopted Roman Catholic Church. In a coherent body of informed criticism his aspiration to a romantic recreation of a lost medieval culture was undermined by representatives of that church and, ultimately, dismissed. Two complementary articles published in the Roman Catholic periodical, The Rambler, at either end of the 1850s, constituted a firm theoretical counterblast to Pugin’s dogma, and form the main subject of this essay.

In 1859 Henry Cole, director of the South Kensington Museum, as the Victoria and Albert Museum was formerly known, commissioned forty-four photographs of buildings in Rome. The study of the motives behind, and circumstances of, this commission, has led to a reconsideration of contemporary practices of architectural planning at South Kensington, for it has become apparent that these photographs were intended and used as source materials for architectural constructions then in progress under Cole’s direction. In 1975 Nicholas Taylor discussed the photographs and how they were used, but his essay was not concerned with identifying the photographs and their subjects. As a result of new research into documentation regarding the photographs, this identification is now possible, and it is hoped that this will shed some new light upon the evolution of the South Kensington ‘style’, which has been discussed at length by previous authors. As Cole’s photographic survey may be considered as something of a landmark in the early history of architectural photography, this essay will also discuss the significance of photography as a new medium for the representation of architectural source material, along with the importance of this for architectural revivalism in the 1860s.

The doors of success swing open wide,
And the entrance hall is full:
Some got in by the door marked ‘Push’
But most by the door marked ‘Pull’.

Success crowned the careers of many early Victorian church architects. With Pugin’s ardent genius behind them and the Ecclesiologist’s proselytizing articles before them, such gifted architects as Butterfield and Pearson quickly filled the entrance hall.

Artistry is one thing: another is opportunity. Although they struck out buoyantly into the main stream of advancing taste, they needed sympathetic clients. In this respect, their affairs were immeasurably improved by the welling tide of Tractarianism. Pearson took it at the flood.

In November 1882 the Royal Courts of Justice moved house, exchanging premises built by Sir John Soane along the flank of Westminster Hall (Figs 1, 2 and 3) for George Edmund Street’s Gothic masterpiece in the Strand. The new building, some sixteen years in the making, solved one problem but left another in its wake. Back in Parliament Square were Soane’s Courts, redundant and, worse, covering over a large part of Westminster Hall. Constructed in the late eleventh century, the massive Hall had been transformed three centuries later. Outside are six splendid flying buttresses (Soane had incorporated them into his cross walls) built to receive the thrust generated by Hugh Herland’s peerless hammerbeam roof, a wonder of high medieval carpentry (Fig. 4). Here was an unmissable chance to raise the profile of the ancient masterpiece, which was hemmed in by Georgian brick and masonry, and overshadowed by the modern medieval pomp of Pugin and Barry’s New Palaces of Westminster. The solution seemed simple: demolish Soane’s ranges and tidy up what was left. It was more like housekeeping than architecture and what was more it would not cost much. As for Soane’s ranges (and Vardy’s to the south), they were seen to be completely without merit.

Stanway Manor is in many ways a highly unconventional house, breaking many of the numerous ‘rules’ supposed to hold good for Elizabethan gentry houses and hence prompting questions about how it has come to have both the plan and the variety of elevational treatment that are visible today, but serving as a reminder that the adaptation into country houses of sequestered monastic remains must often have resulted, through the need to economize, in unorthodox compromise layouts. Though agreed to date largely from the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Stanway is known to have been altered on a number of subsequent occasions, several of which can be precisely dated though without necessary certainty as to what was done. The most striking of its unusual features — no doubt in large measure due to the adaptation of existing buildings of quite different character — are the elongated and irregular L-shaped plan of the main house (Fig. 1), the position of the hall at one end of the entrance front and the steady rise of floor levels in the ground-floor rooms of the south range.

The eighteenth-century garden house built by the 1st Duke of Notrthumberland at Hulne Priory, some three miles west of Alnwick Castle, has been attributed both to Robert Adam and to Capability Brown. Adam certainly worked at Alnwick, providing delicate and fanciful Gothick interiors for the saloon, library and chapel in the castle and for the record tower. He designed the Lion Bridge, which was built across the Aln in 1773, and in November 1777, he prepared designs for the Gothick tower at Brizlee in Hulne park, built by the Duke in 1781. Brown received a payment of £300 from the Duke in July 1769 for unspecified work and was still employed on landscape improvements at Alnwick in September 1772.

In architectural history, there can be no substitute for seeing a building for yourself. To my shame, after almost a quarter-of-a-century pursuing George Gilbert Scott junior, I have at long last been to see one of his unpublished but documented works and discovered that it is one of his most important and interesting — a key design in his move towards the adoption of an English Late Gothic style for which he would become known. My only consolation is that nobody else interested in Scott seems to have visited it either or realized its significance — although the building had been listed by English Heritage as being by the architect’s father, Sir Gilbert Scott.

A gift of 1,600 books from the Reverend Dr. Robert Thomlinson prompted the building of a new Palladian block to house a library and a vestry at the eastern end of the south side of the medieval parish church (now the Cathedral) of St Nicholas (Fig. 1). Sometime later, Dr. Thomlinson (died 1748), who was rector of Whickham, a prebendary of St Paul’s Cathedral and one of the Lecturers at St Nicholas, explained to the Bishop of London: