The importance of the Swedish architect Sigurd Lewerentz (1885–1975) to the development of the Modern Movement has only recently been recognized. Following Lewerentz’s confirmation at the age of eighteen he was a life-long Bible-reading Lutheran, the established religion in Sweden, and Lewerentz’s well known churches are testimony to his ability to design sacred space which reinterpreted the Lutheran mass. It is within this scriptural context, albeit modified by Swedish cremation policy, that this article examines probably the most famous and monumental of Lewerentz’s works, the Woodland cemetery and crematorium, Stockholm (the Skogskyrkogården).

The south front of Wilton House (Fig. 1) and the State Apartment on the first floor of the south range are justly famous as one of the most important and influential works of English architecture to survive from the seventeenth century. The work has been described, recorded and analysed by travellers, connoisseurs and art historians since its completion shortly before 1652. Much of that analysis has been based on documentary sources with only limited investigation of the fabric. A recent comprehensive restoration of the south range has enabled a detailed reconsideration of its complex historical development.

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.

The Survey of London has recently turned its attention to the Charterhouse, that extraordinary combination of medieval priory, Renaissance mansion and Jacobean almshouse and school on the northern fringe of the City. The results of the Survey’s research are due for publication shortly; here there is only space to dwell on a few of the discoveries which have been made, most of them concerning the sculptor John Colt and his role in the refurbishment of the chapel, on Laudian principles, in the mid-1630s. John Newman’s work on Laud’s impact on architecture and interiors is well-known, and we hope this will be a fitting contribution to his celebratory volume.

This article examines drawings associated with the sixteenth-century Italian architect, Galeazzo Alessi, focusing primarily on two important collections: the 112 folios held in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan for the Milanese church of S. Maria presso S. Celso and the so-called Libro dei Misteri in Varallo's Biblioteca Civica, which contains 318 drawings for the pilgrimage site of the Sacro Monte there. By comparing Alessi's handwriting and drawing style across a variety of different letters and drawings present in archives in Genoa, Milan and Varallo, it is argued that all the drawings held in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana folder and in the Libro dei Misteri must be the work of Alessi himself. The article then moves on to a discussion of Alessi's use of drawings in his practice and the developing role of the architect in the sixteenth century , which, it is argued, was increasingly defined by the ability of the architect to invent and to draw rather than to build.

In the Bank Stock Office at the Bank of England, built in 1792, Soane created an interior of a kind previously unknown in England and not found elsewhere except in a type of Byzantine church with which few English architects were familiar and which none would have regarded as an acceptable model for imitation. The building, demolished about 1925, may be described as follows (Pis ia, 2b and 9b): It was cruciform, consisting of a square central area or ‘crossing’, extending from which were two deep arms (north and south) and two shallow arms (east and west).

This article is an attempt to describe the design of the house which Richard Payne Knight built for himself at Downton on the Rock, near Ludlow, between 1772 and 1778 (Fig. 1), showing what the building might have meant to its designer. The house is in some ways familiar enough. Its place as an influential building is already established, it being the subject of a number of studies — the most important to this article being Nicholas Penny’s in The Arrogant Connoisseur — but the house is often misunderstood as a prophetic anticipation of nineteenth-century Mediaevalism. The following text is divided into three sections, examining the building stylistically, functionally and symbolically. The first shows why the reading of the house’s exterior as an exercise in Mediaevalism is unsatisfactory. The second examines the practical rationale for the irregular planning, which is the house’s most important innovation. And the third concludes by suggesting sources for the building’s imagery.

At the beginning of the 1930s three eminent artists, two architects and a painter, became involved in a fascinating project. The architects Hendricus Theodorus Wijdeveld, from Amsterdam, and Erich Mendelsohn, from Berlin, together with the painter Amédée Ozenfant, from Paris — all three of them in their mid-forties and at the peak of their careers — made plans to found an art academy at the Côte d’Azur. It was an ambitious enterprise, which progressed far beyond the stage of conceptual plans. Potential financial sponsors were secured, an appropriate building plot was bought, and articles of association were passed. Leaflets and booklets presenting information on the school’s exceptional teaching programme were translated into several languages, printed and circulated. Artists of international reputation from all disciplines were enlisted as future teaching staff and an impressive list of well known figures from the fields of science, politics, and the arts joined the advisory committee as members.

Modern Movement metal-frame houses can be found across the United States of America from Connecticut to Hawaii. The most well known of these date from the late 1940s and 1950s, and they are often regarded as icons of twentieth-century architecture. On the whole they represented no cohesive effort or common goal, for they were usually one-off designs which neither drew from their context nor offered much towards the development of an industrial building process which the metal frame would suggest: in many ways they were ‘art objects’ and perhaps they should be appreciated for being just that. The few exceptions to this rule are to be found in Los Angeles, California.

In this touching and perceptive memoir written late in his life, John Hardman Powell calls himself Pugin's pupil. He was in fact the only person who had the right to call himself that. Pugin never set up an office in the usual manner of busy mid-nineteenth-century architects. He preferred to work with a small number of close colleagues who understood his aims and could interpret his drawings. George Myers, his builder who worked from London, and John Hardman, the Birmingham metalwork manufacturer, were the principal two members of this group, and the other two were John Gregory Crace, the interior decorator, also London based, and Herbert Minton, the Staffordshire pottery manufacturer. Of these John Hardman was undoubtedly the closest friend.

It was Howard Colvin who, whilst going through the accounts, fragments and miscellanea at the Public Record Office, as well as the plans, in the late 1950s stumbled over the two halves of MPF 146 and suggested to Mr Noel Blakiston, then supervising the preparation of a catalogue of the PRO’s early maps, that the two should be reunited.

‘When one meets most famous men, it is with a certain sense of disappointment; they so frequently appear to be less than their work, but Adshead seems greater.’ Perhaps this comment by the late Christian Barman explains why the importance of Stanley Davenport Adshead (1868–1947) may be underestimated in the current reassessment of early twentieth-century English architecture. His work as an architect is limited in extent, and as a planner, his achievement was more in preventing change than in causing it. He did not have the reputation as a teacher enjoyed by his self-promoting colleagues C. H. Reilly (1874–1947) and A. E. Richardson (1880–1964), but they and many other notable figures acknowledged his influence and guidance. In the Edwardian classical revival, Adshead introduced a scholarly approach to architecture appropriate to the needs of the time, and as a teacher and practitioner of planning, his attention to the visual qualities of places was exceptional.

In 1945, Janet Vaughan, a distinguished haematologist, became Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, her Principalship lasting until her retirement in 1967. Described in her obituary as ‘a woman of extraordinary vitality and not a little impatience’, Vaughan — awarded the DBE in 1957 — played a key role in steering the college through a period of major change in British Higher Education. Not least amongst the changes was a significant growth in the number of students at university across the country, which resulted in numerous, often high-profile, construction projects. Somerville, which had been founded in 1879 as the University of Oxford's second college for women, was not untouched by this development, and at Vaughan's retirement party, her colleague, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Dorothy Hodgkin, referred to the several new buildings completed during the previous two decades. The college's post-war building campaign had begun modestly with two small infill developments by Geddes Hyslop in 1948–50 and 1954–56.

The later eighteenth century was a period when, as a result of increasingly eclectic and picturesque taste in the use of the classical language of architecture, young British architects were effectively compelled to spend some years studying in Italy if they wished to reach the forefront of their profession. The importance of this first-hand experience of Italy is attested by the physical and financial hardships many architectural students were prepared to endure in order to gain it, as well as by the fact that the pattern of travel continued unabated in the face of political hostilities in which Britain was periodically engaged within Europe. During the Seven Years War of 1756–63, for example, when the British found themselves at enmity with the French, the Austrians and, after 1762, with the Spanish, no fewer than eight British architects nevertheless travelled on the continent and did so relatively unimpeded. In fact there was at least one British architectural student present in Italy in every year between 1740 and 1797. This consistent pattern of travel was brought to an enforced end, however, when the Italian peninsula itself became the setting for overt military action after Napoleon had invaded Piedmont in April 1796. While five British architectural students managed to reach Italy during the brief peace which followed the conclusion of the Treaty of Amiens in March 1802, one finding it possible to travel ‘through the heart of France without the least molestation’, the deterioration of Anglo-French relations after Trafalgar in 1805 left the peninsula largely inaccessible to the British until the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo on 18 June 1815.

In his life of Ronald Knox Evelyn Waugh wrote that, when Knox went up to Balliol in 1906, the chapel ‘was stark new in its disastrous deformation of Butterfield’s original structure.’ Waugh’s date was wrong by thirty years, but the story of the ‘deformation’ is a complex one.

The original fourteenth-century chapel had been replaced with a new one in about 1522–36. Its most remarkable feature was its stained glass. It was refurnished in the 1630s, with panelling, a screen, two painted windows by Abraham van Linge, a wooden pulpit and a brass lectern. In 1685–89 new wainscoting, a ceiling with painted beams, and a black-and-white marble floor were provided. A. W. N. Pugin’s scheme of 1843 for rebuilding the college included a new chapel. The scheme came to nothing, chiefly because of the opposition of the Master, Richard Jenkyns.

Conventional knowledge has long credited five architects with varying degrees of responsibility for the design of Lancing College Chapel; the main personae being Richard Cromwell Carpenter (1812–55), his pupil William Slater (1819–72), Carpenter’s son Richard Herbert Carpenter (1841–93), Temple Lushington Moore (1856–1920) and Stephen Dykes Bower (1903–94). Of these Richard Herbert Carpenter is usually cited as the key individual, being identified as the one who originated the executed design. However, recent research has shown that while R. H. Carpenter played an important role in converting an architectural dream into structural reality, it was the less well-known William Slater who was responsible for conceiving much of what Carpenter later developed. This paper recounts the results of these researches, reconsiders the origins of the designs, and sketches their evolution during the nineteenth century.

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.

The Great Pagoda in Kew Gardens is the most important surviving chinoiserie building in Europe. Restoration of the building in 2017–18 was attended by extensive documentary and forensic research, which revealed two markedly different eighteenth-century schemes of decoration undertaken by the architect William Chambers in 1761 and 1784. Both schemes were characterised by the use of innovative and experimental building materials and the application of a varied colour palette which can be shown to have close affinities with temporary, ephemeral buildings. With so few surviving contemporary examples for reference, colour and building materials appear as important characteristics of chinoiserie architecture. The discoveries at Kew demonstrate that these elements were fundamental to the style, which was never constrained by any fixed set of rules. Chambers drew on no single source for the building, but instead imaginatively adapted the Chinese style in a structure of great virtuosity.