Vitruvius Britannicus

A consortium of British architects and their patrons rebelled against the early eighteenth century's Baroque excesses and turned instead toward the Renaissance works of Andrea Palladio for inspiration. These Neo-Palladians guided the course of British architecture toward classical principles, and the Vitruvius Britannicus (British Vitruvius) reflects their vision. A sumptuous collection of magnificent copperplate engravings, it depicts great English country houses and public buildings. Published between 1715 and 1725 in a three-folio set, the Vitruvius Britannicus documents in meticulous detail many of the buildings from the previous two centuries. Its 300 illustrations include facades, ground plans, exterior elevations, and perspective views. Featured buildings include those designed by Inigo Jones, the seventeenth-century architect who introduced Palladianism to England; the work of Sir John Vanbrugh, whose innovative Classical-Revival architecture retained a Baroque flair; and contemporary designs, including those of the author, Scottish architect Colen Campbell. The popularity of this volume fostered the development of the Neo-Palladian movement, and Vitruvius Britannicus continues to influence architects and designers. Handsome and modestly priced, this new edition is an essential complement to any design library.

This magnificent volume comprises three folios, originally published between 1739 and 1771. More than 100 plates depict facades, ground plans, exterior elevations, and perspective views of grand Neo-Palladian buildings.

As the first comprehensive encyclopedic survey of Western architectural theory from Vitruvius to the present, this book is an essential resource for architects, students, teachers, historians, and theorists. Using only original sources, Kruft has undertaken the monumental task of researching, organizing, and analyzing the significant statements put forth by architectural theorists over the last two thousand years. The result is a text that is authoritative and complete, easy to read without being reductive.

This book charls the fascinating history of architectural theory from the Renaissance to the present day. Addressing its subject country by country and featuring over 850 illustrations, it offers a chronological overview of the most important architects and architectural theoreticians from Alberti to Koolhaas. Book jacket.

Despite Burlington's fame, surprisingly little has been written about him. Lord Burlington: Architecture, Art and Life presents a modern reassessment of his career, while setting him in a broader context than has usually been the case, to reflect both his interests outside architecture and to present his character in the round. Architecture is given pride of place, but his other interests, in land-owning, politics and literature, are also examined, throwing much new light on an exceptionally significant and attractive figure.

The author charts the development of architectural theory and practice from Elizabeth I to George IV. Questions of style, technology, and the social framework are resolved as separable but always essential components of the building worlds.

Many homes across America have designs based on plans taken from pattern books or mail-order catalogs. In Houses from Books, Daniel D. Reiff traces the history of published plans and offers the first comprehensive survey of their influence on the structure and the style of American houses from 1738 to 1950. Houses from Books shows that architectural publications, from Palladio&’s I Quattro Libri to Aladdin's Readi-Cut Homes, played a decisive role in every aspect of American domestic building. Reiff discusses the people and the firms who produced the books as well as the ways in which builders and architects adapted the designs in communities throughout the country. His book also offers a wide-ranging analysis of the economic and social conditions shaping American building practices. As architectural publication developed and grew more sophisticated, it played an increasingly prominent part in the design and the construction of domestic buildings. In villages and small towns, which often did not have professional architects, the publications became basic resources for carpenters and builders at all levels of expertise. Through the use of published designs, they were able to choose among a variety of plans, styles, and individual motifs and engage in a fruitful dialogue with past and present architects. Houses from Books reconstructs this dialogue by examining the links between the published designs and the houses themselves. Reiff&’s book will be indispensable to architectural historians, architects, preservationists, and regional historians. Realtors and homeowners will also find it of great interest. A catalog at the end of the book can function as a guide for those attempting to locate a model and a date for a particular design. Houses from Books contains a wealth of photographs, many by the author, that enhance its importance as a history and guide.

The Architect traces the role of the profession across the centuries and in different cultures, showing the architect both as designer and as mediator between the client and the builder.

Politics has always been at the heart of the English country house, in its design and construction, as well as in the activities and experiences of those who lived in and visited these places. As Britain moved from an agrarian to an imperial economy over the course of the eighteenth century, the home mirrored the social change experienced in the public sphere. This collection focuses on the relationship between the country house and the mutable nature of British politics in the eighteenth century. Essays explore the country house as a stage for politicking, a vehicle for political advancement, a symbol of party allegiance or political values, and a setting for appropriate lifestyles. Initially the exclusive purview of the landed aristocracy, politics increasingly came to be played out in the open, augmented by the emergence of career politicians – usually untitled members of the patriciate – and men of new money, much of it created on Caribbean plantations or in the employ of the East India Company. Politics and the English Country House, 1688–1800 reveals how, during this period of profound change, the country house remained a constant. The country house was the definitive tangible manifestation of social standing and, for the political class, owning one became almost an imperative. In its consideration of the country house as lived and spatial experience, as an aesthetic and symbolic object, and as an economic engine, this book offers a new perspective on the complexity of political meaning embedded in the eighteenth-century country house – and on ourselves as active recipients and interpreters of its various narratives, more than two centuries later.

Over the last thirty years, historical studies of building types have become something of a growth area. As well as such general surveys as Nikolaus Pevsner's History of Building Types, there are growing numbers of studies of individual types, of which the most distinguished perhaps remain Mark Girouard's Life in the English Country House and Robin Evan's study of prisons, The Fabrication of Virtue. This growth is not surprising, because the subject lends itself to the 'New Art History', and to our increasing desire to set buildings within their social and cultural contexts, as well as their stylistic and cultural ones. This book by Dr Graham is a comprehensive study of a type of building - the law court - which has, to date, remained largely unexplored. Ordering Law establishes when, why and how the trial came to be housed in purpose-built accommodation in England, and what was architecturally distinctive about that accommodation in the period leading up to 1914. The main text concentrates on examining in depth a series of well-documented individual buildings and groups of buildings, using a wide range of contemporary sources to illuminate the way in which they were designed and used. Other information gleaned about court buildings nationwide is placed in an appendix, in gazetteer form; originally drawn from the 200 or so examples listed in the Buildings of England guides, this has expanded to include over 800 entries. As a piece of scholarly research, this work draws on several disciplines and will be of interest to those studying social and legal history, as well as those with a broader interest in architectural history.

Architectural history is more than just the study of buildings. Architecture of the past and present remains an essential emblem of a distinctive social system and set of cultural values and as a result it has been the subject of study of a variety of disciplines. But what is architectural history and how should we read it? Reading Architectural History examines the historiographic and socio/cultural implications of the mapping of British architectural history with particular reference to eighteenth - and nineteenth-century Britain. Discursive essays consider a range of writings from biographical and social histories to visual surveys and guidebooks to examine the narrative structures of histories of architecture and their impact on perception adn understanding of the architecture of the past. Alongside this, each chapter cites canonical histories juxtaposed with a range of social and cultural theorists, to reveal that these writings are richer than we have perhaps recognised and that architectural production in this period can in interrogated in the same way as that from more recent past - and can be read in a variety of ways. The essays and texts combine to form an essential course reader for methods and critical approached to architectural history, and more generally as examples of the kind of evidence used in the formation of architectural histories, while also offering a thematic introduction to architecture in Britain and its social and cultural meaning.

This architectural survey covers one of Scotland's most important periods of political and architectural change when mainstream European classicism became embedded as the cultural norm. Interposed between the decline of 'the Scottish castle' and its revival as Scotch Baronial architecture, the contributors consider both private and public/civic architecture. They showcase the architectural reflections of a Scotland finding its new elites by providing new research, analysing paradigms such as Holyrood and Hamilton Palace, as well as external reference points such as Paris tenements, Roman precedents and English parallels. Typologically, the book is broad in scope, covering the architecture and design of country estate and also the urban scene in the era before Edinburgh New Town. Steps decisively away from the 'Scottish castle' genre of architectureContextualises the work of Scotland's first well-documented grouping of major architects - including Sir William Bruce, Mr James Smith, James Gibbs and the Adam dynastyDocuments the architectural developments of a transformational period in Scottish history Beautifully illustrated throughout with 300 colour illustrations a

The Rise of the Image reveals how illustrations have come to play a primary part in books on art and architecture. Italian Renaissance art is the main focus for this anthology of essays which analyse key episodes in the history of illustration from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. The authors raise new issues about the imagery in books on the visual arts by Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgio Vasari, Sebastiano Serlio, Andrea Palladio, Girolamo Teti and Andrea Pozzo. The concluding essays evaluate the roles of reproductive media, including photography, in Victorian and twentieth-century art books. Throughout, images in books are considered as vehicles for ideas rather than as transparent, passive visual forms, dependent on their accompanying texts. Thus The Rise of the Image enriches our understanding of the role of prints in books on art.

In c.1713, Sir Richard Child, heir to a mercantile fortune, commissioned Colen Campbell, to build Wanstead House, ‘one of the noblest houses, not only in England, but in Europe’. Campbell’s innovative classical façade was widely influential and sowed the seeds for English Palladianism. Its opulent interior by William Kent was equal to Kensington Palace and its extensive gardens were attributed to leading landscape designers George London and Humphry Repton. Wanstead’s glory days came to an end in 1822, when a major sale of its contents was arranged to pay off financial debts. Two years later the house was demolished, its building fabric dispersed far and wide. A large crater on an east London golf course is all that remains of this once ‘princely mansion’. Based on scholarly research, Wanstead House: East London’s Lost Palace provides the first illustrated history of the lost Georgian estate, charting the meteoric rise and fall of the Child dynasty. By restoring Wanstead’s reputation amongst the leading houses of the era, this book demonstrates that those lost in actuality, should by no means be lost to history.

Based on the author's Slade lectures given at Oxford University in 1975-76.

In Poland's Last King, Richard Butterwick reassesses the achievement of Poland's most controversial king. He shows how Stanislaw August's radical plans for constitutional reform and the renewal of Polish culture were profoundly influenced by his admiration of England, and examines the successes and limitations of the Polish Enlightenment.