Although architects collaborate with engineers in the design of buildings, the contribution of the latter is seldom known to historians. This paper examines the design of the Snowdon Aviary at London Zoo, which is typically attributed to Lord Snowdon and Cedric Price. However, the vast majority of surviving design sketches are in the hand of Frank Newby, the structural engineer. Apart from giving clues about the way in which the design developed, these sketches leave the strong impression that Newby was taking the lead in proposing specific forms that the structure might take, because he alone was aware of the structural possibilities. The sketches raise the question: how common was this dynamic? Examples of Newby's contribution to other projects are suggested.

The parish church of St Mary the Virgin at Stone near Dartford, under construction in about 1260, is justly famous for its ambitious choir, the work of masons from the premier Gothic building in England, Henry III’s Westminster Abbey. The choir of Stone is a miniature Westminster: its generous bar-tracery windows and its lusciously carved wall arcades bring the metropolitan glamour of the abbey to a north Kent parish church on the Thames estuary (Fig. 1). Not surprisingly, this mysterious transfer has distracted attention from the virtues — indeed almost from the very existence — of the nave of the church. Only John Newman, in what is still the most incisive analysis of the whole building, gave proper weight to the nave’s elegant enrichment and noble proportions. There can be little doubt that the nave, which was built sequentially to the choir in the 1260s, belongs to the same Westminster milieu; but whereas the choir seems to depend solely on the abbey church, the nave reflects a much wider range of inspiration, from the hinterland of Westminster’s own sources, namely the architecture of southern England in the second quarter of the thirteenth century. Most importantly, the nave stands in self-conscious contrast to the choir, a contrast which offers important clues to its unnoticed significance. Despite the choir’s élan, it is the nave which ensures Stone’s place of honour in the history of English Gothic architecture.

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.

As one of the world's great centres of trade, the port of Liverpool developed a dedicated office district from an early date. In the 1780s, lettable offices were built by the Corporation near the Georgian Exchange (later known as the Town Hall), making possible the separation of home and workplace. The creation of the public square called Exchange Flags, and the erection of the first Exchange Buildings (1803–08), led to the rapid concentration of business activity in the surrounding streets. Early buildings combined offices with warehousing, but changes in the cotton trade resulted in their replacement with offices only. The first major speculative block was India Buildings (1833), and its success heralded a wave of rebuilding from the 1840s to the 1860s. Many office developers were merchants, but banks and insurance companies also incorporated lettable space into their premises. Classical styles predominated, but traditional fenestration was modified to ensure good natural lighting. The result was an exceptionally imposing business district, symbolising the immense commercial importance of Victorian Liverpool.

Architects and urban planners in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly those working in the City Beautiful style, held lofty ambitions yet struggled to carry them out. In cities such as Washington DC and Chicago, political resistance made executing their plans onerous. In the US colonies, however, they operated with greater liberty. This article follows the spatial vision of Daniel Burnham (1846–1912) from the mainland US to the Philippines. In that colonial setting, Burnham was able to realise his vision far more easily, as neither he nor the officials executing his plans were ultimately accountable to Filipinos. Forced labour, confiscated land, repurposed public money, unchecked political power and wartime social disruption all aided US architectural imperialism. Rather than regretting this, Burnham and his associates celebrated the opportunities that their undemocratic setting provided. This article treats not only Burnham but also William E. Parsons (1872–1939) and Cameron Forbes (1870–1959), who extrapolated and enforced Burnham’s plans, and Juan Arellano (1888–1960), the Filipino architect who, to his later regret, helped remake Manila in the colonisers’ image.

Collegiate gothic architecture built in the United States during the early twentieth century has generally been considered an anti-modern reaction to the rapid changes of the period. This article challenges that interpretation by analysing the collegiate gothic architecture and planning of the University of Chicago from its incorporation in 1890 up to 1918, focusing on the work of Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, which hitherto has been almost entirely neglected. In these decades, the campus changed considerably from the original 1893 quadrangular plan by Henry Ives Cobb. Archival sources are used to trace this shift, with particular attention to three major buildings designed by Charles Coolidge: the Tower Group (1903), Harper Memorial Library (1912) and Ida Noyes Hall (1916). In their architecture and planning, each of these projects set new precedents for the adaptive possibilities of collegiate gothic and changed how the campus related to its urban neighbourhood. From 1900, the university’s leaders consciously opened the campus to its surroundings and realigned it to the Midway Plaisance, the renowned public greenway designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. In doing so, the university pioneered a new campus typology, the academic avenue, which represented a positive embrace of urban life within wider debates on the American city. Through this typology, the university’s collegiate gothic architecture made meaningful connections with Chicago’s progressive civic culture, in consonance with the educational philosophy of its founding president, William Rainey Harper.

Strangely, the ideal city of the Renaissance was promoted not so much by Venus, but by Mars — not by an abstract appreciation of beauty but by the necessities of war. Here was surely one of the great ironies made by the peculiar Renaissance belief in the intrinsic power of geometry. To Filarete, Leonardo da Vinci, and others who imagined ideal cities, geometry was a comprehensive ordering system to which streets, walls, and public buildings alike might be subordinated.

During the twentieth century, diverse cultures from around the globe served as vital sources for architects who attempted to merge Modernist ideas with traditional values. Richard Neutra (1892–1970) absorbed ideas from Japan, the American Middle West and his own native Austria, and eventually his study of these regions deeply affected his work. By analysing archival sources and period publications, this article reveals that even before emigrating to the United States (1923), and throughout his career, the cultures of California, Latin America and Spain were also sources for Neutra's work. He travelled extensively throughout these regions, he researched their local customs and architecture and he deftly and purposefully incorporated vernacular elements, such as sun-shading devices, ventilation strategies and interior patios, into his own work. For his Latin American and Spanish colleagues, his work exemplified a successful fusion between their own traditions and Modernist principles.

Historical analysis of the 1951 Festival of Britain has tended to overlook its ideological genealogy, and also to give less consideration to the Exhibition of Architecture, Town Planning and Building Research at Lansbury in Poplar on the Isle of Dogs than to the architecture and displays at the South Bank site (Figs 1 and 2). That genealogy reflects an intersection between the formulation of colonial policy and the adaptation of Modern Movement theory and practice during the final phase of British imperialism. Consequently the purpose of this paper is to recover various aspects of this intersection, during the nearly three decades from the British Empire Exhibition of 1924. Focusing on design practice in the Empire, especially the national exhibition buildings erected at those major international expositions that led up to and culminated in the Festival of Britain, it also examines the wider representation of architectural and colonial development in professional media and public propaganda.

From the moment when in the early 1850s its patterned walls first rose above the monotonous stock-brick streets north of Oxford Street, All Saints’ Margaret Street (Fig. 1) has been recognized as a building of exceptional originality and significance. Long before its interior was finally completed for consecration in November 1859, the church was illustrated and applauded in the architectural press (Figs 2 and 4). Subsequent critics, from Eastlake and Bumpus and Muthesius to Summerson and Hitchcock, have all acclaimed it as a turning point,‘a bold and magnificent endeavour to shake off the trammels of antiquarian precedent’ which had fettered the early Victorians, ‘in many ways the most moving building of the century.’ Even so, the critics have always been puzzled by All Saints'. How did this revolutionary building come to be designed as the model church of the Ecclesiological Society, whose concern had hitherto been the strict observation of English medieval precedent ? How, indeed, does it fit into the Victorian Gothic Revival? Does it represent the influence of Rus-kin? If, as Professor Hitchcock and Sir John Summerson both conclude, its revolutionary features are due to its architect, William Butterfield, did he get the ideas through travelling, or reading, or did he invent them? Are the faults in the building, as well as its powerful inventiveness, due to naïve ignorance and an inability to co-ordinate the work of fellow artists, or to a deliberate and sadistic hatred of beauty? Finally, what is the real aesthetic effect of this building : certainly it is fascinating, but is it fascinatingly beautiful or fascinatingly hideous?

Neither the physical nor the documentary evidence for Scotland’s royal castles and palaces is anything like as extensive as that for England’s, now so magisterially surveyed in the History of the King’s Works. Nevertheless, the Scottish material is not without interest and, so far as the principal royal residences of the sixteenth century are concerned, Scotland retains a higher proportion of surviving buildings. This attempt to review the planning of the royal lodgings of the period is tentative and presents no general conclusions, but its purpose will be served if it demonstrates that Scottish practice was varied and to some extent suigeneris.

This is the first study devoted to Pugin’s small houses. Here ‘small’ is intended to describe any house which does not aspire, either in scale or style, to the country house or mansion. Where these buildings have been considered before it has been in the context of surveys of Pugin’s work in general, or of all of it that was not ecclesiastical. He has been considered primarily as a church architect and such was indeed the case for most of his career, but this perception of him has been exaggerated because he wrote little about his secular and domestic work. It was in the later part of his life, when he published less, that his ideas about domestic architecture matured.

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.

In 1755, Robert Adam was introduced to Piranesi in Rome. By the following year the relationship had developed sufficiently for Adam to become one among several of Piranesi’s patrons. This friendship was cemented by a partial dedication of volume 11 of the Antichità Romane, in 1756. And so it continued until Adam’s departure from Rome in the spring of 1757. Apart from the intellectual benefits such an encounter held for Adam, the more tangible record lay in the books of Piranesi’s etchings in his library and a chalk and ink capriccio, now in the Soane Museum. It is possible to clarify this bond between master and pupil by assessing a small group of drawings divided between two private collections, at Blair Adam and at Penicuik House. Together, they show Adam and Piranesi at work as topographic artists, and they make clear — alas — the shortcomings of Adam.

With a focus on post-war Britain (and Scotland in particular), this article contributes to the literature on the history of ’community’ by examining its apparent inverse, namely privacy. In particular, it explores the interest that emerged in 1960s Britain in a type of housing that was considered to provide enhanced privacy for residents — the courtyard house. The article begins by looking at the ways in which privacy was considered in official documentation on homes and housing in the post-war period in both England and Wales, and Scotland. It then turns to the work of the University of Edinburgh’s Housing Research Unit in the 1960s, which included not just the design and construction of housing schemes, but also social investigation of the built results. The article examines the ’urban’ housing designed in Cumbernauld and the ’rural’ counterpart in Prestonpans, both of which were intended to provide enhanced privacy for residents. It then looks at the unit’s evaluation of the completed courtyard housing built at Prestonpans as well as another survey undertaken in Dundee, both of which explored the residents’ experience of privacy. Overall, the article argues that the idea of privacy, as understood by designers and experienced by residents, played an important role in post-war housing, as part of the ambition not just to improve standards, but also to provide new choices.

The relationship between the ‘Queen Anne’ movement and the French Renaissance Revival in the late Victorian period has been insufficiently recognized. The Loire-château and ‘Queen Anne’ styles emerged together about 1870 as two different responses to one set of circumstances. Both had their roots in buildings of the previous two decades — very different buildings for the most part, though perhaps there was more common ground than is usually admitted.