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What is the secret of beauty in architecture? Critics have puzzled over this for centuries, not least Victorian architectural writers. This study focuses on four Victorian critics - George Aitchison, Benjamin Webb, Beresford Hope and Coventry Patmore - and charts their responses to this question.
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Is architecture in a state of crisis? Or are the critics simply in a state of confusion? Either way, the problems of architecture today are rooted in the history of architectural ideas. Those ideas—from the Picturesque to the Modern Movement; from the Neo-Classicism and the Gothic Revival to New Brutalism and Post-Modernism—form the basis of this original and highly readable book. Ranging widely over English architecture during the last two hundred years—Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian, Modern—The Dilemma of Style explores the way in which generations of architects and theorists have searched for a key to the conundrum of style. Richly illustrated and densely argued, with scores of quotations and hundreds of references, this is not another history of English architecture: it is almost an encyclopaedia of architectural ideas. This challenging book confronts one of the central problems of architectural theory: the nature—and necessity—of style.
William Burges (1827-81) was arguably the greatest of all Victorian architects. But he was more than just the creator of a modest number of fabulous, and fabulously expensive, buildings. He dreamed of hundreds more, designed dozens, and in addition created some of the most remarkable furniture and jewellery of all time. He was an art-architect. Rich, clever, well connected and short lived, he was uncompromising, profoundly learned, skilled in every process of design and explosively inventive. A brilliant talker, pungent critic and hilarious companion, he was one of Victorian London's great eccentrics and networkers, though he was bewitched by the Middle Ages. The great buildings that he comp...
The story of the decline of the British aristocracy is relatively well documented, but this text examines the new plutocracy who challenged it in the years that led to the Belle Epoque of King Edward VII. It explores where its members resided, what they spent their money on and how they lived down, or up to, their parvenu wealth.
Over the past 200 years, many thousands of undergraduates have been initiated into membership of Apollo - the Masonic lodge of the University of Oxford. These have included such diverse figures as Oscar Wilde, Osbert Lancaster, Samuel Reynolds Hole, Cecil Rhodes, Edward, Prince of Wales and his brother Leopold, Charles Canning, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Godfrey Elton and Roger Makins.Drawing on archives held in the Bodleian Library, this book is the first serious attempt to set the story of Apollo in the context of Oxford life and learning as well as its wider social and political diaspora. From the devastating numbers lost in the First and Second World Wars, as well as those decorated for bravery, to the significant number of Olympians who were members of the lodge, it also charts the lodge's charitable work, its changes of location, social events and adaptation to twenty-first-century life in Oxford.Illustrated with archival material, portraits and Masonic treasures, this is history in a minor key, but a minor narrative with major implications, documenting the remarkable numbers of Oxford freemasons with distinguished careers in government, law, the army and the Church.
This study of the Greek revival opens with the rediscovery of Greece, involving the figures like Hell Fire Dashwood, Twitcher Sandwich and the Dilettanti Society. Their propagation of the Neo-Classical theory is explained and the expression of that theory in Greek Revival architecture covered.
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For a period of thirty years in the mid-nineteenth century James Pennethorne was more intimately involved with the planning and building of London than any other major architect. A pupil of John Nash, he took over his teacher's practice and became government architect for the first half of Victoria's reign. He was responsible for the planning of new streets, the laying out of parks, and the design of important public buildings such as the Public Record Office, the west wing of Somerset House, and the Duchy of Cornwall office. It is therefore almost impossible for Londoners to avoid coming into contact with some aspect of his work. This study throws fresh light on some of the main architectural issues and controversies of the time. Even more important, it contributes to an understanding of the complicated relationship between government and architects, and of the forces which created the London of the nineteenth century and of today. The book therefore makes a contribution to the history of urban planning, and to urban and architectural history in general, in addition to offering an important new assessment of Pennethorne himself.