First I want to set a scene — scene of some few years ago now, and I am going to do it by reading to you a letter which I wrote, signed also by Keith Murray who was later to become my partner, and which was published in the letters columns of the Architects’ Journal for 11 April 1957. It concerned a critical article — I think it was about the third that the AJ had ever embarked upon, a new venture — by that stalwart apologist of the Modern Movement, J. M. Richards. The subject of the article was a new Roman Catholic church, and J. M. R., scrupulously adhering to Modernism’s principal tenet, had first set out the function of a church, defining it as the creation of an atmosphere of ‘dignity and repose’.

During a nineteenth-century restoration of Brigham parish church, the evidence of earlier building activity was carefully observed, recorded, and described in 1878 by Isaac Fletcher, a prominent member of the parish, in a paper read there to members of the Cumberland and Westmoreland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society. The author was able to speculate on earlier phases of the church’s history, having had the advantage of witnessing various stages of the restoration, carried out under the direction of the architect, William Butterfield, and having corresponded with the rector on the physical evidence that was uncovered as a result. When the floor of the nave was excavated the foundations of an early north arcade were exposed, and these were assigned to the earliest building at Brigham, c. 1080. Citing the evidence of changes in walling material and developments in the arcade columns, bases and capitals, Fletcher decided that in c. 1150 the church was enlarged by the addition of a narrow south aisle, of the same height and width as the earlier north aisle, whose arcade columns were set at the same intervals as those of the north arcade. Another enlargement of the church was carried out in c. 1220, when a large west tower and a small chancel were built. This then is a brief account of the architectural background against which the new south aisle and chantry, founded by Thomas de Burgh, rector of Brigham, has to be considered (Fig. 1).

Inside the rubble-walled chapel known as the Kinnoull Aisle, across the Tay from the city of Perth, stands one of the most remarkable funeral monuments ever erected in Scotland (Fig. 1). Now abandoned and desolate, the monument commemorates the life of Sir George Hay, who was created Earl of Kinnoull in 1633, the year before his death, at the end of a brilliant career as a courtier, politician and industrialist. The burial chapel (Fig. 2) was originally attached to the former parish church of Kinnoull. Like the more celebrated Montgomery Aisle and Monument at Skelmorlie, near Largs, erected in the same years, it is now freestanding; the adjoining church was demolished in the nineteenth century, probably in 1826 when a new church was erected on a different site to serve the parish of Kinnoull. Before turning to the monument itself, it is expedient to introduce the formidable statesman whose memory it enshrines.

Bid Harbours open, Public Ways extend;
Bid temples, worthier of the God, ascend;
Bid the broad Arch the dang’rous flood contain;
The Mole projected break the roaring main;
Back to his bounds the subject Sea command,
And roll obedient Rivers thro’ the land;
These Honours, Peace to happy Britain brings,—
These are Imperial Works, and worthy Kings.

Fortified by Pope’s century-old call for the use of royal riches to civic ends, John Soane’s Designs for Public Improvements in London and Westminster of September 1827 culminated a summer-long campaign on the part of the 74-year-old architect to bring his works to the notice of George IV. Both were men entering their last years under the cloud of public disapproval, for the King a nearly lifelong state of affairs but for Soane the result of pointed criticism of his recently completed Law Courts at Westminster. He was determined to defend and enhance his reputation as a public architect and set about doing so with a flurry of publications produced from 1827 to 1834. Principal among these was the enlarged ‘second impression’ of 1828 of Designs for Public Improvements in London and Westminster. Dedicated to the King, this folio consists of a thirty-six-page-long descriptive text followed by fifty-five line engravings depicting a variety of Soane’s works both public and private. However, the first twenty-four plates form a distinct group presenting a coherent programme of royally sponsored public works that, I will argue, delineate Westminster as a civic space symbolic of the Crown’s historic legitimacy and continued relevance to contemporary society. This programme combines three of Soane’s recently completed public works projects, including the Law Courts, with three projected designs to constitute a royal processional route through Westminster which I shall analyze as employing narrative, expressive, and numinous symbolic modes.

With the foundation of the Royal Academy in London in 1768 British artists went some way towards providing themselves with the sort of institutional basis for education and management in their professions which many of their European peers had long since enjoyed. From the outset, however, architects were poorly represented among the Royal Academicians, and it soon became apparent that the specific requirements which architects had of a professional institution were fundamentally different from those of painters and sculptors. This realization lay behind the sequential appearance between 1791 and 1834 of at least eleven separate architectural organizations in London, beginning with the Architects’ Club and culminating in the foundation of the Institute of British Architects (officially the Royal Institute of British Architects since 1866). A striking feature of several of these organizations was the reference they made to the foreign fine arts academies with which some of the architects involved had been connected during their educational travels abroad. Thus, for example, nobody was eligible for election to the Architects’ Club in the 1790s ‘unless he be an Academician or Associate of the Royal Academy in London, or has received the Academy’s gold medal for Composition in Architecture, or be a member of the Academies of Rome, Parma, Bologna, Florence, or Paris’. The fact that four of the five foreign academies listed here were Italian reflects the pre-eminence of Italy as the principal location for British architectural study abroad in the later eighteenth century. During the period of the Napoleonic Wars, when this pattern of travel was seriously interrupted, moves towards a British architectural institution nevertheless continued to be influenced by those with experience of Italian academies. Among the individuals endeavouring to found a Royal Academy of Architecture in 1810, for example, were Joseph Michael Gandy and Charles Heathcote Tatham, who had been variously involved with the academies of Rome and Bologna during the mid-1790s. After 1815 British architects reached Italy in greater numbers than at any stage in the later eighteenth century, and among the eighteen members of the Architects’ and Antiquaries’ Club in 1820 were eleven architects, no fewer than eight of whom had visited Italy within the previous four years (Edward Cresy, John Goldicutt, Joseph Gwilt, Thomas Jeans, William Purser, John Sanders, George Ledwell Taylor and John Foster). The founders of the Club stated that in their travels abroad they ‘had observed that Academies for Architecture and its connected Sciences were established in several cities, and were calculated to produce very beneficial effects. They could not resist the mortifying contrast which was presented in comparing the state of Architecture in those cities, and their native kingdom’. Among the members Goldicutt, who had won the Royal Academy’s silver medal in 1814, had been elected an honorary member of the Accademia di San Luca whilst at Rome in 1818.

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.

This note offers a glimpse of architectural education at the centre of European Modernism in the 1920s. It does this following the unusual but illuminating student career of Walter Segal (1907–85), son of the painter Arthur Segal. In homage to Segal, who, while widely cultured and fastidious for factual accuracy, nevertheless relished anecdote, this short text attempts a similar balance. As far as possible the snapshots are unretouched, left in the idiomatic (mostly spoken, and until now unpublished) words of Segal and his fellow-students. Nietzsche said that historical truth is revealed by anecdote, remarking: ‘one can sum up any historical character with three anecdotes.’ Anekdoton to the ancient Greek meant something new, unknown; something secret which is revealing. Thus, with its sharp immediacy, it taps directly into myth; in this case the deep mythic pond of architectural Modernism.

In preparation for the 1994 celebrations of the ‘Bauhaus in Tel Aviv’, the newly renovated city was painted white. To its numerous visitors, Tel Aviv boasted the largest concentration world-wide of 1930s modernist buildings (Figs. 1, 2). The impact of this ‘live museum’ was compounded by an abundance of exhibitions and festivities that promoted the Mandate period ‘International Style Architecture’ as a national heritage. This new awareness of Israel’s modern architecture provoked scholarly consideration. In particular, attention has been directed toward the architects who shaped the landscape of the Jewish population in Mandate Palestine known as the Yishuv. Scholars, however, have not adequately questioned the relationship forged by architectural historians between Modern Architecture and Zionism. This paper challenges the uniform treatment of this juncture by exposing distinctions between the different Zionist ideologies embedded in the architectural production of the 1930s. I will illustrate such ideological tension by focusing on the work of Erich Mendelsohn in Palestine on the one hand and on the Tel Aviv architectural circle — known by the Hebrew word for ‘circle’, Chug — on the other.

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).

In 1953 Rudolf Wittkower referred to proportion as ‘a problem that to-day is perhaps more on artists’ and architects’ minds than at any time during the last 150 years’. Indeed, from the end of the Second World War until the late fifties, proportion aroused exceptional interest among artists and architects. Why, we might ask, at a time of prevailing modernist ideology, was the historically rooted and rather esoteric subject of proportion of absorbing interest to many architects, and why should that interest have vanished towards the end of the fifties?