the architecture

of ruins

The Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present and Future identifies
an alternative and significant history of architecture from the sixteenth century to
the twenty-first century, in which a building is designed, occupied and i­magined
as a ruin. This design practice conceives a monument and a ruin as creative,
­interdependent and simultaneous themes within a single building dialectic,
­addressing temporal and environmental questions in poetic, psychological and
practical terms, and stimulating questions of personal and national identity, na-
ture and culture, weather and climate, permanence and impermanence and life
and death. Conceiving a building as a dialogue between a monument and a ruin
intensifies the already blurred relations between the unfinished and the ruined
and envisages the past, the present and the future in a single architecture.
Structured around a collection of biographies, this book conceives a monu-
ment and a ruin as metaphors for a life and means to negotiate between a self and
a society. Emphasising the interconnections between designers and the particular
ways in which later architects learned from earlier ones, the chapters investigate
an evolving, interdisciplinary design practice to show the relevance of historical
understanding to design. Like a history, a design is a reinterpretation of the past
that is meaningful to the present. Equally, a design is equivalent to a fiction, con-
vincing users to suspend disbelief. We expect a history or a novel to be written in
words, but they can also be delineated in drawing, cast in concrete or seeded in
soil. The architect is a ‘physical novelist’ as well as a ‘physical historian’.
Like building sites, ruins are full of potential. In revealing not only what is
lost, but also what is incomplete, a ruin suggests the future as well as the past.
As a stimulus to the imagination, a ruin’s incomplete and broken forms expand
architecture’s allegorical and metaphorical capacity, indicating that a building can
remain unfinished, literally and in the imagination, focusing attention on the cre-
ativity of users as well as architects. Emphasising the symbiotic relations between
nature and culture, a building designed, occupied and imagined as a ruin ac-
knowledges the coproduction of multiple authors, whether human, non-human or
atmospheric, and is an appropriate model for architecture in an era of increasing
climate change.

Jonathan Hill is Professor of Architecture and Visual Theory at the Bartlett School
of Architecture, University College London, where he directs the MPhil/PhD Ar-
chitectural Design programme. He is the author of The Illegal Architect (1998),
Actions of Architecture (2003), Immaterial Architecture (2006), Weather Archi-
tecture (2012) and A Landscape of Architecture, History and Fiction (2016);
editor of Occupying ­Architecture (1998) and Architecture—the Subject is Matter
(2001); and co-­editor of Critical Architecture (2007).
The Architecture
of Ruins
Designs on the Past, Present
and Future

J onatha n H i l l
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2019 Jonathan Hill

The right of Jonathan Hill to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hill, Jonathan, 1958– author.
Title: The architecture of ruins: designs on the past,
present and future / Jonathan Hill.
Description: New York: Routledge, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018056339 |
ISBN 9781138367777 (hardback: alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781138367784 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780429429644 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Architectural design. | Ruined buildings. | Monuments.
Classification: LCC NA2750 .H55 2019 | DDC 729—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018056339

ISBN: 978-1-138-36777-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-36778-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-42964-4 (ebk)

Typeset in News Gothic

by codeMantra
Contents

List of figures vii

Acknowledgements xv

Introduction 1

1 Monuments to Rome 5

2 The first ‘ruins’ 31

3 Architecture in ruins 61

4 Speaking ruins 85

5 Ruin and rotunda 113

6 Life in ruins 153

7 Wrapping ruins around buildings 203

8 Nations in ruins 255

Conclusion: a monument to a ruin 293

Bibliography 303

Index 343

v
Figures

Cover

Denys Lasdun, ‘scrapheap’ of discarded models of the National Theatre, London, in his
studio, 1970. Courtesy of Lasdun Archive/RIBA Collections.

Chapter 1

Andrea Palladio, Villa Poiana, Poiana Maggiore, c. 1555. Exterior detail. Courtesy
of Ruth Kamen/RIBA Collections. 10
Andrea Palladio, Villa Emo, Fanzolo di Vedelago, 1565. Courtesy of Jonathan Hill. 11
Andrea Palladio, Villa ­Barbaro, Maser, 1558. Interior with frescoes by Paolo
Veronese. Courtesy of Edwin Smith/RIBA Collections. 12
Andrea Palladio, Basilica Palladiana, Vicenza. Elevation and plan in I quattro libri
dell’architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), 1570. Courtesy of RIBA
Collections. 13
Andrea Palladio, ­Basilica Palladiana, 1617, and statue of Andrea ­Palladio in
Piazza Signori, ­Vicenza. Courtesy of RIBA Collections. 14
Andrea Palladio, Loggia del Capitaniato, Vicenza, 1571. Corner detail. Courtesy
of Edwin Smith/RIBA Collections. 15
William Kent, The Stone Hall, Houghton Hall, 1731. Courtesy of RIBA Collections. 20
Henry Herbert, ninth Earl of Pembroke, Water House, Houghton, c. 1732. South
elevation. Courtesy of Houghton Hall Archives. 23
Andrea Palladio, Villa Rotonda, Vicenza, 1570. Courtesy of Jonathan Hill. 26

Chapter 2

Hadrian’s Villa, Tivoli, second century AD. The Thermal Baths. Courtesy of Jonathan
Hill. 32
Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499. Illustration of ‘The Three
Doors’. Courtesy of Aldus Manutius edition/De Agostini Picture Library/
Bridgeman Images. 34
Giulio Romano, Palazzo Te, Mantua, c. 1530. Fresco in the Sala dei Giganti, detail
of the destruction of the giants by Jupiter’s thunderbolts, 1536. Courtesy of
Palazzo Te/Bridgeman Images. 36
Pirro Ligorio, Sacra Bosco, Bomarzo, 1552–1580. Courtesy of Danica O. Kus/RIBA
Collections. 36

vii
 f ig ur e s

Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia, 1682.
­Courtesy of Ashmolean ­Museum, University of ­Oxford/Bridgeman Images. 39
Claude Lorrain, Pastoral Landscape with the Arch of Titus, 1644. Courtesy
of Private Collection/Bridgeman Images. 40
Guercino (Giovanni ­Francesco Barbieri), Et in Arcadia ego, c.1621–1623.
Courtesy of Palazzo ­Barberini, Gallerie Nazionali Barberini Corsini, Rome/
Bridgeman Images. 41
Nicolas Poussin, Et in ­Arcadia ego, c. 1635. Courtesy of Louvre, Paris/Bridgeman
Images. 43
Salvator Rosa, Landscape with Arch and Waterfalls, c. 1630–1673. Courtesy
of Palatine Gallery, Pitti Palace, Florence/Finsiel/Alinari Archives reproduced
with the permission of Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Bridgeman
Images. 53

Chapter 3

Andrea Palladio with Vincenzo Scamozzi, Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza, 1585.

Courtesy of Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections. 67
William Kent, Italian Diary (‘Remarks by way of Painting & Archit’),
1714–1717, fol. 26r. Kent’s reworking of a drawing in Giulio Troili,
Paradossi per pratticare la prospettiva, 1683. ­Courtesy of Bodleian
Library, ­University of Oxford. 68
Giovanni Paolo Panini, Gallery of Views of Ancient Rome, 1758. Courtesy of
Louvre, Paris/Bridgeman Images. 69
William Kent, The Vale of Venus, Rousham, 1737–1741. Courtesy of Charles
Cottrell-Dormer. 73
William Kent, Rousham, 1737–1741. Detail of Antinous at the end of the Long
Walk. Courtesy of Jonathan Hill. 74
William Kent, Rousham, 1737–1741. Watery Walk and Cold Bath. Courtesy of
Jonathan Hill. 74
William Kent, Rousham, 1737–1741. Detail of Peter Scheemaker’s sculpture,
Dying Gladiator. Courtesy of Jonathan Hill. 75
William Kent, The Temple of the Mill and the Triumphal Arch beyond the
Gardens, Rousham, 1737–1741. Courtesy of Charles Cottrell-Dormer. 76
William Kent, Elysian Fields, Stowe, c.1735. The bust of John Locke in the
Temple of British Worthies. Courtesy of Jonathan Hill. 77
William Kent, Richmond Hermitage, 1731. Section drawn by John Vardy in
William Kent, Some Designs of Mr. Inigo Jones and Mr. William Kent,
1744. Courtesy of RIBA Collections. 79
William Kent, Arcadian Hermitage with Satyr and Shepherdess, c. 1730.
Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 79

viii
 f ig ur e s

Chapter 4

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri, 1761. Courtesy of RIBA Collections. 87

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Vedute di Roma, 1770. Great Baths at Hadrian’s
Villa, Tivoli. Courtesy of RIBA Collections. 88
Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’Architecture, 1753. Frontispiece to the second
edition, 1755. Courtesy of RIBA Collections. 92
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Le Antichità romane, 1756–1757, vol. 1. Plan of
Rome based on Forma Urbis Romae, c. 203–211 AD. Courtesy of UCL
Library Special Collections. 96
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Il Campo Marzio dell’ Antica Roma, 1762. Ichnographia,
Louis Kahn’s own copy. Courtesy of Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of
Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. 97
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, MacDonald Monument, Non-Catholic Cemetery,
Rome, 1766, with the Pyramid of Gaius Cestius in the background.
Courtesy of Jonathan Hill. 100
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Detail of MacDonald Monument, Non-Catholic
Cemetery, Rome, 1766. Courtesy of Izabela Wieczorek. 100
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Piazzale dei Cavalieri di Malta, Rome, 1766.
The enclosing wall with obelisks and monuments. Courtesy of
Izabela Wieczorek. 101
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Piazzale dei Cavalieri di Malta, Rome, 1766. The
entrance screen. Courtesy of Izabela Wieczorek. 102
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome, 1766. The front of
the altar. Courtesy of Izabela Wieczorek/Sovereign Order of Malta. 103
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome, 1766. The
elliptical oculus in the front of the altar. Courtesy of Izabela Wieczorek/
Sovereign Order of Malta. 104
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome, 1766. The
chamber and passage within the base of the altar, with the organ currently
blocking the arched opening in the altar’s rear elevation. Courtesy of Izabela
Wieczorek/Sovereign Order of Malta. 104
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome, 1766. The rear of
the altar. Courtesy of Izabela Wieczorek/Sovereign Order of Malta. 105
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome, 1766. Detail of the
rear of the altar with a side column. Courtesy of Izabela Wieczorek/Sovereign
Order of Malta. 106
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome, 1766. Detail of
the rear of the altar with the apse window. Courtesy of Izabela Wieczorek/
Sovereign Order of Malta. 107
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome, 1766. Detail of the
rear of the altar. Courtesy of Izabela Wieczorek/Sovereign Order of Malta. 108

ix
 f ig ur e s

Chapter 5

Robert Adam, Trompe l’œil showing five drawings of ruins composed as if they
are on overlapping sheets of paper, c. 1757. Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London. 116
Charles-Louis Clérisseau, Design for the Ruin Room of the monastery (now
convent) of Santissima Trinità dei Monti, Rome, c. 1766. Courtesy of
Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge/Bridgeman Images. 118
Giovanni Battitsta Piranesi, Blackfriars Bridge, London, under construction,
1766. Courtesy of RIBA Collections. 121
Robert Adam, Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro
in Dalmatia, 1764, plate 8. Elevation of the South Wall of the Palace
depicted as reconstructed and ruined. 127
Robert and James Adam, Section of the New Design for Sir Nathaniel
Curson Baronet at Kedleston/From North to South, 1760. Drawn by a
member of the Adams’ office, possibly by Agostino Brunias, with the ‘now
Lord Scarsdale’ inscription added by William Adam. Courtesy of Sir John
Soane’s Museum, London. 130
Robert Adam, Kedleston Hall, 1765. The Saloon, looking north. Courtesy of
National Trust Images/Paul Barker. 131
Robert Adam, ­Kedleston Hall, 1765. The apse and dome in the Saloon.
Courtesy of National Trust Images/Chris Lacey. 132
Robert Adam, Kedleston Hall, 1765. The South Front. Courtesy of National
Trust Images/Rupert Truman. 136
Robert Adam, Sketch for Landscaping the Park at Kedleston, 1759. Courtesy
of National Trust. 137
Robert Adam, Ruined Antique Shrine, c. ­1755–1757. Courtesy of the Trustees
of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 138
Robert Adam, Ruined ­Temple, c. ­1755–1757. Courtesy of the ­Trustees of the
Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 138
Robert Adam, Design for a Roman Ruin, c. ­1755–1757. Courtesy of the
Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 139
Robert Adam, Capriccio showing parts of a ruined colonnade with a
triumphal arch on the left, c. ­1756–1757. Courtesy of Sir John
Soane’s Museum, London. 142
Robert Adam, Capriccio showing parts of a ruined circular temple with
Corinthian capitals beside a pyramid with architectural fragments at its
base, c. 1756–1757. Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 143
Charles-Louis Clérisseau, Capriccio showing a ruined circular colonnade of
the Corinthian order with a broken and overgrown cornice. Beside it is a
pyramid and in front of that is a circular altar-sacrophagus, c. 1756–1757.
Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 143
Plan of a circular pavilion, Kedleston, early 1760s. Courtesy of National Trust/
Andrew Pattison. 144

x
 f ig ur e s

Section of a domed pavilion, Kedleston, early 1760s. Courtesy of National Trust. 145
Interior wall elevation with chimney piece, Kedleston, early 1760s. Courtesy of
National Trust. 146
Sketch of a circular pavilion on a rock with a grotto underneath, Kedleston, early
1760s. Courtesy of National Trust. 146

Chapter 6

John Soane, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1817. ­Mausoleum exterior. Courtesy of

Martin Charles/RIBA Collections. 162
John Soane, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1817. ­Mausoleum interior. ­Courtesy of
Martin Charles/RIBA Collections. 162
John Soane, Exterior, 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Courtesy of Martin Charles/
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 163
Joseph Michael Gandy, View of the Soane Tomb, 1816. Courtesy of Sir John
Soane’s Museum, London. 171
George Basevi, View of the Soane Tomb, 1816. Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London. 172
John Soane, The Dome Area with Soane’s bust, 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Courtesy Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 174
John Soane, The Breakfast Parlour, looking north, 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Courtesy of Gareth Gardner/Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 176
John Soane, The Picture Room with the panels open to the Picture Room
Recess, 14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Courtesy of Derry Moore/Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London. 178
Joseph Michael Gandy, Architectural Visions of Early Fancy, in the Gay Morning
of Youth; and Dreams in the Evening of Life, c. 1820. Courtesy of Sir John
Soane’s Museum, London. 180
Joseph Michael Gandy, Public and Private Buildings Executed by Sir John
Soane between 1780 and 1815, 1818. Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London. 180
John Soane, The Monk’s Yard, 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Courtesy of Derry
Moore/Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 183
John Soane, Pasticcio in the Monument Court, 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London/Bridgeman Images. 185
Joseph Michael Gandy, View of the Consols Transfer Office, Bank of England,
1799. Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 188
Joseph Michael Gandy, Architectural Ruins—A Vision, 1798/1832. Courtesy
of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 189
Joseph Michael Gandy, Aerial View of the Bank of England from the South-
East, 1830. Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 191
John Soane, Old Dividend Office, Bank of England, 1811, during demolition,
1925. The ruins of a built ruin; only the outer wall of Soane’s Bank survives
today. Courtesy of RIBA Collections. 192

xi
 f ig ur e s

Chapter 7

Louis I. Kahn, Piazza Campidoglio, Rome, 1951. Courtesy of Louis I. Kahn

Collection, University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical
and Museum Commission. 208
Louis I. Kahn, Bath House, Jewish Community Center, Trenton, 1955.
Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. 227
Louis I. Kahn, Fleisher House, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, 1959. Ground
floor plan. Courtesy of Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of
Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. 228
Louis I. Kahn, Fleisher House, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, 1959. Model.
Courtesy of Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and the
Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Photograph, Marshall
D. Meyers. 229
Louis I. Kahn, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, 1974. Entrance
façade of the dormitories. Courtesy of ORCH/RIBA Collections. 234
Louis I. Kahn, National Assembly Building, Sher-e-Bangla-Nagar, Dhaka, 1983.
The assembly hall seen across the lake from a dining hall courtyard. Courtesy
of ORCH/RIBA Collections. 234
Louis I. Kahn, National Assembly Building, Sher-e-Bangla-Nagar, Dhaka, 1983.
The Presidential staircase. Courtesy of ORCH/RIBA Collections. 235
Louis I. Kahn, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California.
Perspective sketch of the Meeting House, 1962. Courtesy of Louis I.
Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical
and Museum Commission. 236
Louis I. Kahn, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California, 1965.
Public plaza seen from the east and looking towards the ocean. Courtesy
of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. Photograph,
John Nicolais. 238
Louis I. Kahn, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, 1965. West end
of the central rill, looking up to the north block flanking the public plaza.
Courtesy of John Donat/RIBA Collections. 238
Johann August Arens, Roman House, Weimar, 1798. Courtesy of Jonathan Hill. 240
Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1808–1810. Courtesy of Alte
Nationalgalerie, Berlin/Bridgeman Images. 242

Chapter 8

Alison and Peter Smithson, Hunstanton Secondary Modern School, Norfolk,

1954. Interior. Courtesy of Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections. 259
Alison and Peter Smithson, Upper Lawn Pavilion, Fonthill Gifford, Wiltshire,
1962. The south façade with the well in the foreground. Courtesy of
Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections. 262

xii
 f ig ur e s

Alison and Peter Smithson, Upper Lawn Pavilion, Fonthill Gifford, Wiltshire,
1962. View through the patio window to the woods to the north, 1995,
taken after the Smithsons left Fonthill. Courtesy of Georg Aerni. 262
Alison and Peter Smithson, Upper Lawn Pavilion, Fonthill Gifford, Wiltshire,
1962. The Smithson family lunching with Reyner Banham. Courtesy of
Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections. 263
Alison and Peter Smithson, Robin Hood Gardens, London, under construction,
1970. Courtesy of Tony Ray-Jones/RIBA Collections. 267
Ernö Goldfinger, Balfron Tower, 1967, and Alison and Peter Smithson,
Robin Hood Gardens, 1972, London. Courtesy of David Borland/RIBA
Collections. 269
Alison and Peter Smithson, Robin Hood Gardens, London. The west block has
been destroyed and the east block is awaiting demolition, 2018. Courtesy
of Izabela Wieczorek. 270
Colvin & Moggridge, landscape architects for Phase 1 of UEA, 1970. Hal
Moggridge, site sketch. Courtesy of Colvin & Moggridge. 273
Denys Lasdun, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 1968. View of the ziggurats
from the River Yare. Courtesy of Richard Einzig/Arcaid Images. 275
Denys Lasdun, ‘scrapheap’ of discarded models of the National Theatre, London,
in his studio, 1970. Courtesy of Lasdun Archive/RIBA Collections. 276
Denys Lasdun, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 1968. Detail view of UEA
under construction. Courtesy of Lasdun Archive/RIBA Collections. 277
Denys Lasdun, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 1968. Panoramic view of
UEA under construction. Courtesy of Lasdun Archive/RIBA Collections. 278
Arata Isozaki, Kenzo Tange and Atsushi Ueda, Festival Plaza, Expo ’70, Osaka,
1970. A view of the west side with tiers of spectator seating. Courtesy of
Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections. 284

xiii
Acknowledgements

The Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present and Future is dedicated
to Dr Izabela Wieczorek, who makes life special, and inspired, encouraged and
supported my research.
This book developed from my teaching and research at The Bartlett School
of Architecture, UCL. I particularly thank Elizabeth Dow, my teaching partner in
MArch Unit 12, and Matthew Butcher for their stimulating and generous dis-
cussions. My colleagues in the MPhil/PhD Architectural Design programme of-
fered invaluable encouragement, especially Professor Ben Campkin, Professor Nat
Chard, Dr Edward Denison, Professor Murray Fraser, Dr Penelope Haralambidou,
Professor Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Professor Sophia Psarra, Professor Peg Rawes,
Professor Jane Rendell and Dr Nina Vollenbröker. Also at The Bartlett, I wish to
thank Professor Laura Allen, Dr Eva Branscome, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange,
­Professor Adrian Forty, Dr Jan Kattein, Chee-Kit Lai, Dr Guan Lee, Professor CJ Lim,
Professor Barbara Penner, Dr Tania Sengupta, Professor Bob Sheil, P
­ rofessor
Mark Smout and Colin Thom, Survey of London. Dialogue with an exceptional
group of MArch and PhD graduates and students has influenced the character
of this book, including Dr Alessandro Ayuso, Sophie Barks, Boon Yik Chung,
Dr David Buck, Sam Coulton, Ben Ferns, Clare Hawes, Ines Dantas, Colin
Herperger, Dr Felipe Lanuza Rilling, Ifigeneia Liangi, Aisling O’Carroll, Dr Luke
­Pearson, Natalia Romik, Wiltrud Simbürger, Elin Soderberg, Camila Sotomayor,
Quynh Vantu, Dan Wilkinson and Tim Zihong Yue. The Bartlett Architecture Re-
search Fund supported a sabbatical and contributed to image permission costs.
I appreciate the advice of the many individuals and their institutions, who
have assisted my research. These include Stephen Astley, former Curator of Draw-
ings, and Dr Frances Sands, Curator of Drawings and Books, Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London; Professor Peter Brimblecombe, UEA; Colin Harris, Bodleian
­Library, ­Oxford; Kurt Helfrich, Fiona Orsini and Suzanne Walters, RIBA D
­ rawings &
Archives Collections; Christine Hiskey, Archivist, and Dr Suzanne ­Reynolds,
­Manuscript ­Curator, Holkham Hall; Whitney Kerr-Lewis, Assistant Curator of De-
signs, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Monica Lais and H.E. Fra’ Emmanuel
Rousseau, Curator of the Magistral Libraries and Archives, Sovereign Order of
Malta, Rome; Lady (Susan) Lasdun; Jonathan Makepeace, RIBA British Archi-
tectural Library; Fiona Messham, Kedleston Hall, National Trust; Hal Moggridge,
Colvin & Moggridge Landscape Architects; Secrétariat de la Trinité des Monts,
Rome; Dr Joyce Townsend, Senior Conservation Scientist, Tate, London; William
Whitaker, Curator and Collections Manager, Architectural Archives, University of
Pennsylvania School of Design; and David Yaxley, Archivist, Houghton Hall.

xv
 ack n ow le d g em en t s

I am also indebted to Dr Ana Araujo, Architectural Association School of

­Architecture; Morag Bain; Dr Mikkel Bille, Roskilde University; Carolyn B
­ utterworth
and Dr Emma Cheatle, University of Sheffield; Ben Clement and Sebastian de la
Cour; Professor Mark Dorrian, University of Edinburgh; Paul Fineberg; ­Professor
William Firebrace, State Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart; Dr Javier García Germán,
ETSAM; Catherine Harrington; Professor Toni Kaupilla, Oslo National Academy of
Art; Dr Amy Kulper, RISD; Perry Kulper, University of M
­ ichigan; Dr Constance Lau,
University of Westminster; Professor Katie Lloyd Thomas, University of ­Newcastle;
Professor Lesley Lokko, University of Johannesburg; Dr Sandra Löschke, Univer-
sity of Sydney; Professor John Macarthur, U
­ niversity of Queensland; ­Professor
Igor Marjanovic, Washington University, St Louis; Ganit Mayslits Kassif; Profes-
sor Jules Maloney, RMIT; Catalina Mejia Moreno, University of Brighton; Tom
Noonan, University of Greenwich; Jean Oh; Ulrike Passe, Iowa State ­University;
Dr Claus Peder Pedersen, Aarhus School of Architecture; Franco Pisani; Rahesh
Ram, University of Greenwich; Neil Rawson; Dr Tim Flohr Sørensen, University of
Copenhagen; and Dr Ro Spankie, University of Westminster.
The Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present and Future is my
eighth book published by Routledge. Trudy Varcianna is consistently helpful and
I am especially grateful to Fran Ford for her continuing support.

Illustrations

Considerable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of images. The
author and publishers apologise for any errors and omissions and, if notified, will
endeavour to correct these at the earliest available opportunity.

xvi
introduction
 in t r o duc t i on

Painted Pompeiian red in allusion to the construction, destruction and redis-

covery of an ancient Roman town, the Little Study is encrusted with venerable
marble fragments and cinerary urns, which the coloured glass skylight bathes
in the golden light of Rome. Warm air rises through two brass floor grilles, fed
by the experimental furnace found among fabricated ruins in the Monk’s Yard.
The single desk fits snugly in the window to the Monument Court, observing a
sublime shadow of sulphuric soot accumulating on the assemblage of new and
old fragments. Living on site while the three adjacent houses were demolished,
constructed and rebuilt, the architect designed, occupied and imagined a building
as a ruin. Intensifying the already blurred relations between the unfinished and
the ruined, John Soane envisaged the past, the present and the future in a single
architecture.
Many societies and architects have conceived buildings as solidly stable and
resistant to the weather, nature and time. In this schema, a ruin is understood
only in terms of failure and decay. Instead, this book acknowledges that a ruin
represents potential as well as loss and identifies an alternative and significant
history of architecture in which a building is designed, occupied, and imagined as
a ruin. This design practice conceives a monument and a ruin as creative, inter-
dependent and simultaneous themes within a single building dialectic, address-
ing temporal and environmental questions in poetic, psychological and practical
terms, and stimulating questions of personal and national identity, nature and cul-
ture, weather and climate, permanence and impermanence and life and death.1
Rather than a broad historical narrative, specific architects, images and build-
ings are selected because they best represent the distinct issues and questions
in the development of this design practice. Emphasising the interconnections
between designers and the particular ways in which later architects learned from
earlier ones, this book uses the example of an evolving, interdisciplinary design
practice to show the relevance of historical understanding to design.
The Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present and Future offers
a new perspective on the Western architectural canon. Acknowledging the his-
torical and geographic relevance of the book’s themes and their influence and
limit in a global context, I discuss in detail the work of architects, landscape
­architects, painters and writers from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first
­century, ­including Andrea Palladio, Francesco Colonna, Claude Lorrain, ­Nicolas
Poussin, ­Salvator Rosa, John Evelyn, William Kent, Daniel Defoe, Giovanni
­Battista ­Piranesi, Charles-Louis Clérisseau, Robert Adam, Edmund Burke, John
Soane, J.M.W. Turner, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Ruskin, Alois Riegl,
Louis Kahn, Robert Smithson, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, Alison and

2
 in t r o duc t i on

Peter Smithson, Denys Lasdun, Brenda Colvin, Kenzõ Tange and Arata Isozaki.
This book is structured around a collection of biographies because for an individ-
ual, and notably for an architect, a monument and a ruin are metaphors for a life
and means to negotiate between a self and a society.

Note

1 Weather and climate differ in duration and scale. Unlike the weather, which we can see
and feel at a specific time and place, we cannot directly perceive climate because it is
an idea aggregated over many years and across a region.

3
 1
monuments to
Rome
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

Palladio reborn

The mutinous army of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V terrorised Rome in
1527, murdering thousands. Exacerbating the violence, many of the troops were
Protestant mercenaries opposed to the Catholic Church. The Sack of Rome led
to an exodus of patrons, painters, sculptors and architects northwards, some to
the Veneto. A prosperous city that produced the finest silk in Europe, Vicenza
had been a part of the Venetian Republic since 1404. But the wealthy Vicen-
tine scholar, dramatist and papal diplomat Gian Giorgio Trissino was suspicious
of Venice’s convoluted politics, culture and urban fabric, and aimed instead to
model his hometown on classical Rome. In a moment of serendipity, Trissino en-
countered Andrea, son of Pietro della Gondola, probably in 1537 or 1538 when
the Paduan stonemason was 30. Impressed by his protégé’s potential, Trissino
offered him a humanist education alongside the sons of Vicentine nobility at the
Accademia Trissiniana in Cricoli.1
Awarded a new name to reflect his enhanced status, Andrea Palladio vis-
ited Rome five times between 1541 and 1554, the year in which he published
­L’antichità di Roma (The Antiquities of Rome). The first compact and reliable
guide to the city’s ancient sites, it remained the standard reference for two centu-
ries, appearing in more than 30 editions by the mid-eighteenth century.2 Studying
the ruins was tortuous because many were either overgrown with vegetation or
appropriated for other uses and absorbed by later structures; the Forum was
known as the campo vaccino because it was a cow pasture. Palladio celebrates
‘the huge pleasure and the wonder that can come from a detailed understanding
of the great things in so subtle and celebrated a city as that of Rome’, but regrets
‘the wars, fires and structural collapses that have occurred over the many years in
that city and which have ruined, gutted and buried a large part of these remains’.3
Continuing this theme in the opening dedication of I quattro libri dell’architettura
(The Four Books of Architecture), 1570, he praises ‘the fragments of many an-
cient buildings, which, having remained upright until our own age as astonishing
testimony of the cruelty of the barbarians, provide, even as stupendous ruins,
clear and powerful proof of the … greatness of the Romans’, adding that the ruins
are ‘much worthier of study than I had at first thought’.4
The interdependence of the architect and the archaeologist was implicit in the
Renaissance in that surveys of revered ancient sites were a stimulus to design. Pope
Leo X appointed Raphael maestro della fabbrica—chief architect—of St Peter’s and
commissario delle antichità responsible for protecting Roman antiquities in 1514
and 1515, respectively. The pontiff’s intention was not to preserve the ruins but

6
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

to ensure that their stones were available for construction of the cathedral rather
than other new buildings. In his letter to Leo X, c. 1519, Raphael proposes to map,
record and draw the remains of the ancient city, and argues that ‘by preserving
the example of the ancients, may your Holiness seek to equal and better them.’5
But Leonard Barkan concludes that Raphael was only ‘given protective custody’
of marbles with inscriptions beneficial to ‘the improvement of linguistic culture.’6
No systematic preservation of the ruins was attempted because humanist scholars
believed that the authorial testimony of ancient texts was the more reliable record
of classical antiquity. Ancient ruins were still appropriated for new uses, denuded
of statues and quarried for stone, a practice in which even Raphael was engaged.
A Renaissance architect studied a ruin to deduce its original form. Rather
than appreciate the ‘stupendous ruins’ in their dilapidated condition and depict
them as such, The Four Books features monumental reconstructions of ancient
buildings as Palladio understood and imagined them, alongside new designs that
venerate classical antiquity. Explaining why the early sixteenth-century Tempietto,
Rome, appears among images of ancient temples, Palladio writes that since Do-
nato ‘Bramante was the first to make known that good and beautiful architecture
which had been hidden from the time of the ancients till now, I thought it reason-
able that his work should be placed among those of the ancients.’7 According to
Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood:

The power of the image, or the work of art, to fold time was neither discovered
nor invented in the Renaissance. What was distinctive about the European Re-
naissance, so called, was its apprehensiveness about the temporal instability of
the artwork, and its re-creation of the artwork as an occasion for reflection on
that instability … The ability of the work of art to hold incompatible models in
suspension without deciding is the key to art’s anachronic quality, its ability really
to ‘fetch’ a past, create a past, perhaps even to fetch the future.8

Ancient Roman sites that juxtapose diverse and contrasting forms were of little
interest to Palladio and rarely appear in his books. Hadrian’s Villa, Tivoli, second
century AD, is not discussed in The Four Books and receives only a very brief
mention in The Antiquities of Rome.9 In this regard, Palladio was typical of his
era. With the exception of Philibert Delorme’s Le premier tome de ­l’architecture,
1567, all Renaissance architectural treatises ignore Hadrian’s Villa because it
is insufficiently Vitruvian.10 In contrast to the asymmetrical baths of the Re-
public and early Empire, James S. Ackerman concludes that the later ‘Imperial
baths came closest to Palladio’s ideal’ because they ‘began to be built around a

7
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

grandiose sequence of axial spaces’. Questioning the accuracy of Palladio’s influ-

ential depictions of ancient Roman baths, Ackerman continues:

Archaeologists, knowing that the ruins were better preserved in Palladio’s time,
have been influenced subtly by his taste for order as well as by his precious in-
formation; their reconstructions favour symmetry and hierarchy, too. But surely
Palladio was more of a rationalist than the Romans.11

In the early fifteenth century, searching through the monastic library at St Gallen for
Latin manuscripts that would support his humanist beliefs, the Florentine scholar
Poggio Bracciolini came upon a manuscript copy of Vitruvius’ De ­architectura libri
decem (Ten Books on Architecture), which was written in the first century BC.
The rediscovery of the only architectural treatise to survive from classical antiq-
uity was hugely significant, emphasising the Renaissance preference for ancient
Roman texts rather than ancient Roman ruins, which often diverge from Vitruvian
principles. It is likely that the author of De architectura libri decem ‘was more of a
rationalist than the Romans’ who created many of the city’s structures.
Modelled on Vitruvius’ example, written around 1450 and first printed in 1485,
Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (Ten Books on Architecture) was the first
thorough investigation of the Renaissance architect as artist and intellectual. Em-
phasising the immaterial idea of architecture not the material fabric of building, the
Renaissance restricted the architectural imagination to the universal geometries of
ideal forms, as Alberti concludes: ‘It is quite possible to project whole forms in the
mind without recourse to the material.’12 Classical antiquity established the prin-
ciple that ideas are immaterial and that intellectual labour is superior to manual
labour. In Timaeus, c. 360 BC, Plato claims that all the things we experience in the
material world are modelled on ideal forms defined by geometrical proportions.13
Consequently, there are two distinct realms. One consists of ideal originals, which
only the intellect can comprehend, and the other of imperfect copies subject to
decay. Concerned with establishing their intellectual status, Italian Renaissance
painters, sculptors and architects promoted a concept of beauty based on geomet-
ric ideals, but undermined Plato’s argument that the artwork is always inadequate
and inferior. The term ‘design’ derives from disegno, which means drawing in
Italian, and associates the drawing of a line with the drawing forth of an idea.
Disegno allowed the three visual arts—architecture, painting and sculpture—to be
recognised as liberal arts concerned with ideas, a position they had rarely been
accorded previously. Accordingly, architecture resulted not from the accumulated
knowledge of a team of anonymous craftsmen collaborating on a construction site
but the artistic creation of an individual architect designing in a studio.

8
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

The history of the architectural book is interdependent with that of the ar-
chitect, and has been crucial to the architect’s status since the Renaissance. In
the new division of labour, architects acquired complementary means to practice
architecture—drawing, writing and building—creating an interdependent and
multidirectional web of influences that stimulated architects’ creative develop-
ment. To affirm their newly acquired status, architects began increasingly to the-
orise architecture both for themselves and for their patrons, ensuring that the
authored book became more valuable to architects than to painters and sculptors,
whose status as liberal artists was more secure and means to acquire commis-
sions less demanding.
Affirming his allegiance to Vitruvius, Palladio prepared drawings for Daniele
Barbaro’s 1556 Italian translation and analysis of De architectura libri decem and
described the ancient Roman architect as ‘my master and guide’.14 More than any
other Renaissance architectural treatise, The Four Books includes practical advice
on construction, climate and the means to combine domestic and agricultural
programmes in one building complex.15 But Palladio still remarks that ‘buildings
are esteemed more for their forms than for their materials’.16 In this vein, each of
his designs in The Four Books is an ideal and not that was actually built. Including
ideal designs and practical matters in one publication could be a means to con-
sider the dialogue between the immaterial and the material. But these relations are
not resolved in The Four Books, which more often presents two distinct realms.
When a resolution was attempted, one decision particularly undermined Palladio’s
concern to express ideal geometries in built form. Renaissance architects con-
structed in local measurements, which varied in Rome, Venice and Vicenza, and
determined the size of building materials such as bricks. As Palladio selected the
Vicentine foot as a standard measurement throughout The Four Books, the ideal
proportions of Vicentine buildings were expressed in perfect numbers, while those
of other Renaissance buildings and ancient ones too were obscured.17
In built architecture, especially the villas, Palladio explored the interdepend-
ence of the immaterial and the material with great subtlety. As a contrast to the
courtly humanism of his original patron, Palladio also appreciated the practi-
cal humanism of Alvise Cornaro, who remarked that he had learnt more ‘from
the ancient buildings than from the book of the divine Vitruvius’ and proposed
land reclamation and agricultural reform at a time when Venice’s trading em-
pire and territorial ambitions were diminishing, stimulating the construction of
rural villas.18 Referring to Cornaro’s architectural treatise, Ackerman writes that
he ‘was the only Renaissance theorist who suggested that frugal patrons might
­abandon the ancient orders and all traditional ornament in façade design, and
Palladio was the only architect of the time who accepted the challenge’.19

9
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

Andrea Palladio,
Villa Poiana, Poiana
Maggiore, c. 1555. Exterior
detail. Courtesy of Ruth
Kamen/RIBA Collections.

A rural villa was practical and poetic, and a further affirmation of ancient
Rome. Written in the first century BC and derived from georgos, the Greek term for
farmer, Virgil’s four-volume Georgics equates the virtuous management of the land
to the benign management of Rome, while his slightly earlier Eclogues evokes a
leisurely rural life.20 Written in the first century AD, Pliny the Younger’s letter to
his friend Gallus also extolls the pleasures of a relaxed rural retreat, mentioning
frescoes, fountains, fruit trees, terraces and vistas.21 Pliny’s account, like those
of Virgil, is an urbanite’s impression of the countryside, inspiring others to follow
this model.
Emphasising the interdependence of architecture and agriculture, Ackerman
notes that ‘Renaissance writers used “villa” to refer to the whole estate; Palladio
calls the proprietor’s residence “casa di villa.”’22 In most cases, modestly scaled
country residences and working farms for Venetian or Vicentine nobility, Palladio’s
villas recall the rural life evoked in classical antiquity, while their elegant but inex-
act proportions refer to the immaterial and its uncertain presence in the material
world. The Villa Emo, Fanzólo di Vedelago, 1565, consists of a central pedimented
block flanked on each side by an arcaded farm building terminated by a dovecote.
The central ramped staircase provides entry to the principal rooms and is also
a threshing surface that monumentalises the landowning family’s introduction
of grain cultivation to the surrounding fields. The exterior is unadorned, but the

10
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

Andrea Palladio, Villa Emo,

Fanzolo di Vedelago, 1565.
Courtesy of Jonathan Hill.

principal rooms and the interior of the portico are covered in Giovanni Battista
Zelotti’s trompe l’œil frescoes, in which architectural elements frame landscape
scenes, celebrating humanistic and mythological narratives on the virtues of an
agrarian life. Indicating that Palladio’s villas are creative reconstructions of ancient
precedents, the interiors of the Villa Barbaro, Maser, 1556, are covered in Paolo
Veronese’s illusionistic frescoes of Roman ruins painted a few years after the villa
was constructed. According to David Watkin, the frescoes ‘suggest that the Villa
Barbaro, as the idealised villa d’antica, represents Rome reborn.’23 Palladio did
not include painted frescoes in his designs. Although he would have expected his
clients to decorate their villas with such scenes, it is unlikely that he contributed
to their conception and he was rarely involved in the choice of a painter or a
precise theme. However, Bruce Boucher remarks that the frescoes in the sala
degli imperatori in the Villa Poiana at Poiana Maggiore, c. 1555, ‘bear such close
resemblance to Palladio’s reconstructions of ancient rooms as to suggest that here
the artists worked closely with the architect.’24

11
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

Andrea Palladio,
Villa ­Barbaro, Maser,
1558. ­Interior with
­frescoes by Paolo Veronese.
­Courtesy of Edwin Smith/
RIBA Collections.

The Four Books includes numerous references to the interdependence of the

urban and the rural, and the public and the private. Emphasising the ancient his-
tory of a recurring theme, Palladio remarks that ‘the city is nothing more or less than
some great house and, contrariwise, the house is a small city,’ which Alberti also
affirmed.25 Equating the design of a rural villa to that of an urban palazzo, Palladio
remarks: ‘The house of the owner must be built taking into account the household
and their status in the same way as is customary in towns.’26 To justify an influ-
ential design decision, he inaccurately claims that pediments were first employed
on private buildings in ancient Rome and then on public ones, and cites Vitruvius
in support of this argument.27 In adopting the temple pediment and the imperial
baths’ axial plan, Palladio’s villas have a civic as well as a rural character, mon-
umentalising the redirection of the Venetian Republic from the sea to the land.28

Basilica Palladiana

Venetians cultivated the myth that refugees from Rome had established the la-
goon city after the fall of the Empire. Palladio subscribes to this narrative in The
Four Books, describing Venice as ‘the sole remaining exemplar of the grandeur
and magnificence of the Romans.’29 The Sack of Rome added new impetus to

12
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

the Venetian Republic’s claim to be Rome’s heir. But Venice had not been built in
the classical image of the imperial city and Palladio encountered ambivalence; ac-
cording to Manfredo Tafuri: ‘But what was one to do when the “Roman” language
claimed to be absolute? Venice could accept his language, but only by pushing
its propositions out to her margins,’ such as Il Redentore, 1592, on Giudecca.30
In Vicenza, however, Palladio acquired projects at the heart of the city. Ap-
pointed after a succession of architects failed to convince the City Council, his
first public commission was to transform the Palazzo della Ragione, the principal
building in Piazza dei Signori, Vicenza’s main square on the site of a Roman fo-
rum.31 Rebuilt in the mid-fifteenth century, the Palazzo had acquired a two-­storey
colonnade later in the century, which then partially collapsed, initiating the search
for a new architect. Shops for merchants occupied the ground floor while the large
hall on the upper floor functioned as a law court and gave the building its name,
the Palace of Justice, which was much in use as Vicenza had a reputation as one
of sixteenth-century Italy’s most violent and unruly cities.32 Palladio began design
work after visiting Rome with Trissino in 1545. Wooden prototypes were prepared
and the design was approved in 1549. But it was only completed in 1617.

Andrea Palladio, Basilica

Palladiana, Vicenza. Eleva-
tion and plan in I quattro
libri dell’architettura (The
Four Books of Architecture),
1570. Courtesy of RIBA
Collections.

13
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

Imagining Vicenza as a Roman city, Palladio renamed the Palazzo the

‘Basilica’ and wrapped two-storey ‘porticoes’ around the existing building.33
Abutting an adjacent building on one side, Palladio’s design unifies piazzas of
differing scales on the three other sides. The openings in the porticoes adopt
a model that was known in antiquity, revived in the Renaissance by Bramante
and Raphael, and became widely known due to Sebastiano Serlio, who de-
picted it in his fourth book on architecture in 1537.34 Sometimes called a
Serlian, Palladian or Venetian window, it has a central arched opening and
a lower rectangular opening to each side. Palladio’s design cleverly accom-
modates the irregularly dimensioned bay widths of the existing building by
ensuring that the central openings are consistent and the variations are taken
up in the secondary openings.

Andrea Palladio, ­Basilica

Palladiana, 1617,
and statue of An-
drea ­Palladio in Piazza
Signori, ­Vicenza. Courtesy of
RIBA Collections.

14
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

The Basilica ‘in Vicenza’ depicted in The Four Books is not the one actually
built, but an idealised uniform design with site irregularities removed such as the
varying bay widths and the adjoining building.35 The openings in the projecting
porticoes are shown in dark shadow, as often occurs in the actual building,
which is faced in white stone quarried from nearby Piovene to accentuate the
contrast between the masonry porticos and the shadowed recesses. Also seen in
both the drawing and the building, the oculus to each side of the central arch is
a pure, unframed opening cut through stone.

Andrea Palladio, Loggia del

Capitaniato, Vicenza, 1571.
Corner detail. Courtesy
of Edwin Smith/RIBA
Collections.

15
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

The Piazza is named after the Signoria, the supreme governing body of
the Venetian Republic. Facing the Basilica on the opposite side of the square
is ­Palladio’s Loggia del Capitaniato, an addition to the residence of the capita-
nio, a senior Venetian military official and the symbol of the Republic’s authority
over Vicenza. Construction probably started in 1571 and the Loggia does not
appear in The Four Books. Four massive columns complete the façade. Unusual
for a sixteenth-century public building and especially one of such importance,
the columns are neither clad in stone nor faced in stucco but expressed in ex-
posed brickwork, which Palladio refers to as ‘Man-made stones (i.e. bricks)’,
emphasising their use in classical antiquity.36 In these two buildings facing each
other across Piazza dei Signori, Palladio designed monumental forms in mono-
lithic brick and stone and conceived ‘porticoes’—cut with stark unframed oculi—­
wrapping around a building and creating strong shadows, all principles that Louis
Kahn would adopt four centuries later. But despite these formal similarities, the
journey from Palladio to Kahn proceeds from a ruin reconstructed as a building to
a building designed as a ruin.

Vitruvius Britannicus

Published as a three-volume collection in 1711, Characteristicks of Men, Man-

ners, Opinions, Times established Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaft-
esbury, as a persuasive influence on eighteenth-century thought, influencing
Edmund Burke and Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington, in England, Jean-
Jacques Rousseau in France and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gottfried
Herder and Immanuel Kant in Germany.37 The first volume promotes the political,
moral and cultural authority of the educated elite, celebrates their moderation and
restraint and concludes that beauty follows objective, moral and universal stand-
ards that only the most cultured intellect can appreciate.38 Shaftesbury proclaims
the virtuoso to be the finest eighteenth-century gentleman, not merely a collector
but a patron and an enlightened cultural force infinitely superior to a scholar such
as Christopher Wren, a pivotal figure in the Royal Society who favoured scientific
reason rather than immutable truth.39
In the second edition of Characteristicks, 1714, Shaftesbury d
­ ismisses
the baroque designs of Wren and John Vanbrugh and suggests that ­England
needs a new architectural style.40 Following this lead, Robert Morris in
Lectures on Architecture, 1734–1736, denigrates Wren and Nicholas
Hawksmoor’s design for Kensington Palace, 1690–1705, as ‘most irreg-
ular and disproption’d’.41 Shaftesbury’s implicit support for the moral and

16
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

aesthetic virtues of restrained classicism was made explicit by Burlington’s

promotion of the early eighteenth-century architectural revival of Palladio and
his first British disciple Inigo Jones. The architect associated with disegno
was established in Italy in around 1450 and in France a century later, but
only arrived in England in the early 1600s after Jones visited Florence, Rome,
Venice and Vicenza, acquiring a large collection of Palladio’s drawings from
Vincenzo Scamozzi. Jones ensured that England was the first country outside
Italy to embrace Palladianism, translating classical precedent to a contempo-
rary context just as Palladio had reimagined ancient structures for his Venetian
and Vicentine patrons. Ackerman concludes that Palladio’s rural villa was
an engaging model because of the values that eighteenth-century England
shared with sixteenth-century Venice—a reverence for ancient Rome, an ap-
preciation of dynamic capitalism and intellectual inquiry and a distrust of
autocratic leaders—which ‘­differentiated them from the still feudal world’ of
many ­European countries:

The most apparent reason is that country life and economy in mainland Venice of
the Renaissance was much closer to that of eighteenth-century England than to
that of other European lands. In both, aristocrats and rich commoners, typically
active in the politics and commercial affairs of a metropolitan capital, acquired or
inherited—through primogeniture—large rural landholdings.42

Ackerman emphasises: ‘In both places, the country house was transformed at a
moment of far-reaching land-reform, which in Venice was based on reclamation
and in Britain on Enclosure.’43 Beginning in the seventeenth century and increas-
ing in the first half of the eighteenth century, parliamentary land enclosures en-
sured that over six million acres nationally were transferred from public to private
use, benefitting wealthy landowners but undermining the rural poor who relied
on common grazing land for a part of their livelihood. Heaths and pastures were
ordered into regular fields before any other European nation. The principal meas-
ure of wealth, status and influence, the landed estate was ‘the economic engine
of Georgian England—locus of its capital accumulation, technical innovation and
social modernization,’ writes Denis Cosgrove.44
Increasing confidence in the nation’s growing prosperity encouraged wealthy
landowners to reconfigure estates and rebuild houses in the newly fashionable
Palladian style. In the highly influential Vitruvius Britannicus, 1715–1725, Colen
Campbell celebrates Palladio as the heir to the classical tradition of ancient Rome
and illustrates his three volumes with contemporary examples of the nation’s

17
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

second Palladian revival. In the third volume, Campbell describes Burlington as

‘not only a great Patron of all Arts, but the first Architect,’ an opinion confirmed by
the subject of Campbell’s sycophancy, who signed himself ‘Burlington architec-
tus.’45 But satirising the doctrinaire Palladian revival in Gulliver’s Travels, 1726,
Jonathan Swift notes ‘the very melancholy Air’ of Lord Munodi who felt compelled
to rebuild his house according to ‘the best Rules of Ancient Architecture,’ which
the ‘Grand Academy of Lagado’ had imported from Laputa, a land that was as-
sumed to be its intellectual superior.46
Palladio’s extensive influence on architecture is primarily due to The
Four Books. The first complete English translation appeared in 1721, when
Venetian architect Giacomo (James) Leoni replaced the original woodcut il-
lustrations with his own versions engraved in copper.47 Dismissive of Leo-
ni’s publication, Burlington commissioned his own translation by Isaac Ware,
which was published in 1738 with more precise copper engravings of the
original woodcuts.
Palladio’s conjunction of rational humanism, agrarian purpose and pastoral
idyll appealed to British architects and patrons. However, the most frequently
studied and influential designs were not the actual structures but those expressed
in idealised drawings, which were replicated and repeated as required. Wealthier
than their Venetian counterparts, many British landowners commissioned houses
that were dislocated from agricultural activities and too grandiose for their settings,
incorporating a massive central block and imposing side pavilions all modelled
on Palladio.48 Only the architects and patrons who visited the buildings in Venice
and Vicenza and the less accessible rural villas in the Veneto—his most copied
designs—were able to appreciate the intimate fusion of the rational, sensual and
practical in Palladio’s built architecture.

The great man

In 1688, a confrontation with the absolutist Catholic monarch, James II, led the
dominant parliamentary grouping, the Whigs, to invite invasion, establishing
his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange as constitu-
tional monarchs with the overriding power of parliament affirmed. While the
Whigs promoted religious toleration and the collaboration of parliament and
monarch, the Tories supported the high Church establishment and the supreme
power of the crown. Tory ministers held power between 1700 and 1714, but

18
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

Queen Anne’s death and the ascent of the first Hanoverian monarch George I
returned the Whigs to power seven years after the union of England and Scot-
land. A Whig, Sir Robert Walpole is familiarly described as Britain’s first Prime
Minister, holding the position between 1721 and 1742. But the title was not
then official and his contemporaries used it pejoratively, criticising Walpole for
holding too much power and influence. Frequently satirised and mocked, in
Gulliver’s Travels he is Flimnap, the scheming treasurer of Lilliput, and in John
Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, 1728, he is simply a thief.49 Walpole’s nickname—
The Great Man—was not necessarily flattering, and even an admirer, Queen
Caroline, the wife of King George II, noted ‘that gross body, those swollen legs,
and that ugly belly.’50
At the time of Walpole’s birth in 1676, his family were well established in
northwest Norfolk, having owned Houghton since 1307. But no previous family
member had acquired such prominence and he chose to recast the estate in his
image. Walpole’s new garden was largely realised by 1720, when he decided
to demolish the existing house and commission a new one. The construction of
Houghton Hall began in 1722, soon after he became Prime Minister. Campbell
and James Gibbs provided the initial designs, Thomas Ripley supervised con-
struction and William Kent was commissioned to design the interiors of the piano
nobile in 1725.51 Celebrating Walpole’s achievement in the year that construction
was completed, Ware’s The Plans, Elevations and Sections; Chimney-pieces, and
Ceilings of Houghton in Norfolk, 1735, was the first architectural book dedicated
to a single British house.52
With his political career in London, Walpole’s visits to Houghton followed
a fixed pattern from around 1725. His summer visits were mostly private,
lasting for about a fortnight after the close of the parliamentary session in late
May or early June. In November, he entertained friends and allies at a month-
long ‘Norfolk Congress’ that combined hunting with political intrigue, social
life and cultural patronage. Walpole’s expenditure was lavish. In the vaulted
ground floor Arcade where hunting parties would gather, silver taps served
‘Hogan,’ a particularly strong beer. John Hervey, second Baron Hervey, wrote
in 1731: ‘In public we drank loyal healths, talked of the times and cultivated
popularity; in private we drew plans and cultivated the country.’53 In 1728,
a pamphlet mocked the extravagant ‘merry-making,’ equating Walpole to the
French monarch and Houghton to his ‘Palace’: ‘the two most eminent Persons
of this our Day are now hunting; one of them at Fountainblow and the other
in Norfolk.’54

19
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

William Kent, The Stone

Hall, Houghton Hall, 1731.
Courtesy of RIBA
Collections.

After climbing a flight of external stairs, esteemed visitors arrived at Kent’s

Great Door on the first floor of Houghton Hall’s east elevation, which was then
the main entrance to the house.55 Entering into the Stone Hall, they passed first
under sculptures of Neptune and Britannia and then under figures represent-
ing Peace and Plenty, emphasising Walpole’s guardianship of a prosperous sea-­
trading nation that would become the dominant European naval power within 30
years.56 The focus of Kent’s Stone Hall is John Michael Rysbrack’s bust of Wal-
pole on the north wall. Combining Roman and British iconography, it depicts the
Prime Minister in a toga adorned with the Garter Star, celebrating his election as
a Knight in 1726. England’s lineage as a former Roman colony was increasingly
recalled after 1688, implying a shared commitment to democracy and liberty.
Republican Rome was more frequently referred to than imperial Rome, indicating
the monarch’s diminished power.57 Ancient Rome offered Britain a model to sur-
pass as well as emulate. Walpole’s bust is placed slightly higher than that of the
ancient busts that line the room, including Roman emperors such as Commodus,
Marcus Aurelius and Hadrian. The Latin inscription beneath the Prime Minister’s
bust translates as ‘Robert Walpole, Prince of the British senate, who established,

20
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

dwelt in, and made famous this house’.58 His contemporaries would have known
that the title princeps senatus was conferred on the first Roman Emperor Augus-
tus, who ‘had partly redeemed himself by giving the Empire a long peace after
a century of recurring civil wars, by supporting the arts, by attempting to restore
old standards of public and private morality and respect for the gods’, writes
Philip Ayres.59 But contemporary accounts more often associated Walpole with
the corruption, intrigue and hedonism of ancient Rome than its liberty, virtue and
stoicism. Recalling ancient Rome’s class structure, only aristocratic and wealthy
Britons benefitted from the analogy of one empire to another.

The architect Earl

During his long political career, the timing and duration of Walpole’s visits seem to
confirm that the pleasures of the landscape, apart from hunting, were insignificant
to him. In 1743, one year after his retirement as Prime Minister, with all of his
extensive painting collection now displayed at Houghton, Walpole poignantly ac-
knowledged his isolation far from London as well as his estate’s dual attractions.
Prioritising the piano nobile rather than the park, he concludes: ‘my flatterers here
are all mutes, the Oaks the Beeches and the Chestnuts … Within doors we come
a little nearer to real life and admire upon the almost speaking Canvas.’60
An early eighteenth-century park typically included a collection of garden
buildings that received short, leisurely visits from the landowner’s family and
guests. But the Water House is the only garden building specifically created for
the park at Houghton. Supplying water to the Hall, it is an elegant but unu-
sual example of English Palladianism, in that it has a practical if not agricul-
tural purpose. Henry Herbert, ninth Earl of Pembroke, who his contemporaries
nicknamed the ‘Architect Earl’, is credited as the Water House’s designer. In An
Essay in Defence of Ancient Architecture, 1728, Robert Morris describes him as
one of the ‘principal Practitioners and Preservers’ of the Palladian revival in early
­eighteenth-century England.61 Pembroke was a friend of Walpole, and his most
ardent advocate was Walpole’s son Horace, who claimed in 1762 that ‘No man
had a purer taste in building than Earl Henry’, remarking that his designs, includ-
ing ‘the water-house … at Houghton, are incontestable proofs’ of this.62 Buildings
and structures credited to Pembroke include a bridge, a memorial column, four
houses—Marble Hill, Twickenham; White Lodge, Richmond; Westcombe, Black-
heath; Wimbledon House, Surrey—and the Water House.63
Indicating that he went on the Grand Tour and will have seen some of P
­ alladio’s
buildings, the words ‘My Lord Herbert came last Saturday’ were written by Mr Cole,

21
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

the English minister in Venice, in a report addressed to the Secretary of State in

London and dated 5 February 1712.64 In the same year, Pembroke met Kent in
Rome and Shaftesbury in Naples.65 Pembroke’s designs consistently adhere to an
austere Palladianism that is more restrained than that of Kent, the architect who is
most associated with the second Palladian revival even though his influences were
Roman as much as Venetian. In addition to Palladio, Pembroke was indebted to
Palladio’s associate Scamozzi. Jones was an obvious influence because, together
with John Webb, he had designed the Cube Room, Double Cube Room and South
Front at Wilton House, the ancestral home of the Earls of Pembroke.
The first building in which Pembroke had a design involvement was Pembroke
House, a villa for his own use on the Thames at Whitehall, although Campbell
claims credit for the design in Vitruvius Britannicus.66 James Lees-Milne recog-
nises similarities between the Water House and the central, porticoed section of
Pembroke House, as does John Harris, who also assumes that the Water House’s
east and west elevations may have been adapted from Campbell’s design for Burl-
ington House, while Rosemary Bowden-Smith suggests that they may have been
modelled on the side elevations of Chiswick House, which was begun in 1725 to
the designs of Burlington and Kent.67 Lees-Milne also speculates that Pembroke
may have visited Palladio’s villas in the Veneto and provided a survey drawing on
which Campbell based his Pembroke House design.68 Whatever influence Camp-
bell and Pembroke had on each other, their principal inspiration was undoubtedly
Palladio, whether his completed buildings or his designs in The Four Books.69
Emphasising the inventiveness of Roger Morris, Pembroke’s frequent architectural
collaborator, which he contrasts with both Campbell and Pembroke, John Harris
concludes with regard to the Water House: ‘Whatever may be the attraction of this
little Palladian jewel set upon a hill, it cannot be originality.’70 But I believe this
assessment to be inaccurate. Palladio reimagined ancient Roman architecture.
The Water House is, in turn, an imaginative reinterpretation of Palladio.

The Water House

Two drawings of the Water House suggest Pembroke’s skill as a designer and
draughtsman. Horace Walpole pasted them into a folio album that includes man-
uscript material for his account of his father’s painting collection Aedes Walp-
olinae, 1747, and Ware’s Plans, Elevations, Sections of Houghton.71 On one
drawing he has handwritten: ‘The Water-House in the Park; design’d by Henry
Lord Herbert, afterwards Earl of Pembroke,’ which confirms that it was designed
before Herbert acquired his father’s title in 1733.72

22
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

Henry Herbert, ninth Earl

of Pembroke, Water House,
Houghton, c. 1732. South
elevation. Courtesy of
Houghton Hall Archives.

Obscured by trees, the Water House is not visible from Houghton Hall, 400
metres away. Immediately to the west of the Hall, Walpole’s new garden recalls
the sequence of ‘rooms’ in a seventeenth-century garden. Its focus is an axial
broadwalk extending from the Hall and edged by rows of conical topiary to the
north and south. Further to each side, high hedges partly obscure the trees in two
‘wilderness’ gardens.73 At the western end of the broadwalk, the principal view
extends westwards across fields. Beech trees frame a broad avenue leading north,
which terminates at the strong vertical presence of the distant Water House.74
The land rises slightly and the trees recede so that the Water House sits in iso-
lation on a gentle brow with long views in all directions. The principal building
material in northwest Norfolk is Carrstone, a rust-coloured sandstone, while a
combination of brick and flint predominates to the east of Houghton. None of
these materials are visible on the Water House, implying that its status is more
than local. Its most prestigious building material is a Middle Jurassic sandstone
from Aislaby, near Whitby in Yorkshire, which also faces Houghton Hall. Aislaby
stone was employed in many civic buildings in London as well as Yorkshire such
as Guisborough Priory and Whitby Abbey. Due to its strength and resilience, it
was also suitable for the harbour walls at Margate, Ramsgate, Whitby and else-
where.75 The stone’s pale, buff colour and sharp delineation provide a strong
architectural contrast to the abundant trees, lush lawns, grazing animals and
game birds. This image does not fade, as the stone does not weather easily. As
in Renaissance designs, the Water House affirms the hierarchy of the immaterial

23
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

over the material through ideal geometries expressed, however imprecisely, in

materials that are comparatively resistant to decay.
Nearly 10 metres square in plan and over 12 metres high, the Water House
has four symmetrical elevations. Those to the north and south are identical to
each other, as are those to the east and west. On the ground floor, the brick-
work walls are all clad in rusticated Aislaby stone. Keystones surmount three
recessed blank arches on the north and south façades. Equally impenetrable, the
east and west façades each have a central solid timber door within an archway.
In the eighteenth century, underground pipes from the Pump House and Well
400 ­metres to the north fed the Water House. Around the water tank, which oc-
cupies most of the ground floor, a narrow staircase climbs upwards.76 The upper
floor is rendered. The east and west elevations have coupled Tuscan Doric pilas-
ters to the sides and a Venetian window at the centre. The Venetian window’s side
openings are blank; the central one is open, unglazed and protected by a stone
balustrade in front of a narrow, deep terrace. Stone balustrades run the full width
of the north and south façades, delineating two large terraces, which are enclosed
by high walls to the sides and rear. Coupled Tuscan Doric columns occupy the
edges of these façades and two single columns are towards the centre. A pedi-
ment completes each of the four façades, covering the two large terraces so that
5 metres high porticoes face north and south. Equal in size, these terraces have
different microclimates. To the south, the enclosing walls, floor and ceiling create
a sunny external room in warm weather. The north terrace is pleasant only on the
hottest days, in contrast to the benefits of a cool terrace in a Vicentine summer.
The small east and west terraces are mostly in shade, except at sunrise and sun-
set. As Walpole’s summer visits were brief, the terraces would have seen little use.
Pembroke followed Palladio’s model in locating a symmetrical room at the
centre of his design, but it is of much smaller dimensions than expected. The sin-
gle internal room on the first floor piano nobile is as high as the porticoes, but just
1.7 metres square in plan. Its four solid timber doors, one on each elevation, are
usually closed and the room is pitch black. Very occasionally, when the doors are
left open to the four terraces, dark becomes light and the originality of the design
starts to be evident. Standing in front of each façade of the Water House, it is pos-
sible to look straight through the building’s solid heavy form to the sky beyond. As
it is exactly aligned north-south and east-west, the Water House frames the dusk,
the dawn and the midday sun. In certain seasons, when the sun is at the ap-
propriate angle, the dark shadow on the ground has a sunlit oblong at its centre.
The Water House is a very particular home. In English, French and Italian,
respectively, the words window, fenêtre, finestra are all derived from the wind.

24
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

The Water House has no glazed windows because there is no inhabitant to light
and ventilate. The large ground floor room is pitch black and mostly full of water.
The small first floor room is usually dark, but occasionally full of light. The mute
and windowless base deters entry and implies that no one lives within. The broad
and deep porticoes invite inhabitation, but no one is seen there. By differing means,
both floors imply that daily life is absent. Who or what does the Water House house?

The Air House

In common with other Renaissance architects, Palladio was indebted to Hippo-

crates and conceived a villa as an aid to health. Born in the fifth century BC and
known for the treatises Airs, Waters, Places and Breaths, Hippocrates assumed
that illnesses are seasonal, varying according to the astronomical calendar and
physical environment.77 The Hippocratic tradition was acknowledged by Vitruvius
and widely disseminated in the Renaissance, notably by Alberti.78 The influence
of climate on health and the assumption that a good body and a good building
share good proportions were essential to the Hippocratic tradition, which particu-
larly emphasised the benefits of air movement, assuming that the character of a
people depends upon the air they inhale. Noting that a fierce wind or a stagnant
air was considered to be unhealthy and a delicate breeze was favoured instead,
Barbara Kenda refers:

to the ancient myth of the god Aeolus who guarded the imprisoned winds in a
cave on the island Aeolia. Mythological winds have their origin in the etymology
of the Greek word pneuma which derives from pnein, to blow, and means ‘breath’
or ‘wind’ as well as the vital spirit, the soul.

Ancient Greece conceived pneuma ‘as an essence animating the universe and the
true originator of human existence.’79 Consequently, Renaissance architects con-
ceived a building as analogous to a living being and a means to mediate between
the soul of an individual and that of the world, facilitating gentle air movement as
an aid to physical and spiritual well-being. In The Four Books, Palladio praises
the underground ‘prison of the winds’ that controls air movement in Francesco
Trento’s Villa Eolia, Longare di Costozza, 1760, near Vicenza.80 At Palladio’s hill-
top Villa Rotonda, Vicenza, 1569, cool air circulates horizontally between the four
axially located entrances and vertically between the underground chamber and a
floor grating in the central hall. As the dome’s oculus was originally open to the
sky, vertical and horizontal ventilation extended throughout the villa.81

25
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

Andrea Palladio,
Villa Rotonda,
­Vicenza, 1570. ­Courtesy of
Jonathan Hill.

The four elements were a familiar design theme in Renaissance villas. In the
second century AD, the Roman physician Galen drew an analogy between the
heart and the hearth, so that the fiery air of the vital spirit—pneuma zoticon—
originated at the centre of the body and the building. But reflecting on The Four
Books, Paul Emmons and Marco Frascari write:

Palladio chose not to include chimneys in his treatise because he represented

not the physical building but an ideal design. In the pneumatic dreamland of
Palladio’s treatise, unlike actual building, the air is always perfect so there is no
need for chimneys to expel bad air.82

Given that Palladio included fireplaces in his constructed villas and Pembroke did
not add one, the Water House can be understood as an ideal house as well as
a mythological one. The mythological narratives of classical antiquity were alive
with meaning in sixteenth-century Italy and in early eighteenth-century Britain.
Giorgio Vasari concluded that Giulio Romano’s Palazzo Te, Mantua, c. 1530,
was designed ‘more for gods than men’, possibly repeating the architect’s own
words.83 The Water House has a cold bath but no fire while the deep well con-
nects it to the earth. The first floor room is dark when the doors are shut, en-
trapping the winds. But when the doors are open, the four terraces funnel and

26
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

accentuate breezes so that the winds are set free and the Water House becomes
the Air House. Interpreted as a domestic structure as well as an ideal and a
mythological one and a dialogue between the immaterial and the material, the
Water House is a house of the elements as well as the gods and a meeting place
between mortals and immortals.
In Palladio’s sixteenth-century oeuvre and its early eighteenth-century E
­ nglish
revival, architecture’s relations with climate were a stimulus to the imagination,
fuelling practical and poetic narratives of the ideal, the mythological and the every-
day. But allegiance to Platonic ideals ensured that the effects of time, nature and
weather on buildings were deemed to be negative. As the building was analogous
to the body, the ruin was associated with dismemberment, decline and decay,
and was not a significant design theme. Following the model of sixteenth-century
Vicenza, early eighteenth-century Palladian architects and patrons reimagined the
monuments and not the ruins of ancient Rome.

Notes

1 Ackerman, Palladio, pp. 20–25; Aureli, pp. 49–50; Beltramini, pp. 9–32, 37–38;
Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, p. 128; Tavernor, pp. 16–22.
2 The full title is L’antichità di Roma di M. Andrea Palladio, raccolta brevemente da gli
auttori antichi, e moderni.
3 Palladio, in Hart and Hicks, p. 3.
4 The Four Books of Architecture is the title of Isaac Ware’s seminal English translation
of 1738, but Palladio’s treatise has also been translated as The Four Books on Archi-
tecture. Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 1, ‘Dedication’, p. 3, ‘Foreword
to the Readers’, p. 5.
5 Raphael, p. 181.
6 Barkan, pp. 37–42. Refer to Choay, ‘Alberti: The Invention of Monumentality and Mem-
ory’, pp. 99–105; Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, pp. 27–39.
7 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 4, ch. 17, p. 64.
8 Nagel and Wood, pp. 13–18.
9 Palladio, in Hart and Hicks, p. 91
10 MacDonald and Pinto, pp. 215–216.
11 Ackerman, Palladio, pp. 171–172.
12 Alberti, p. 7.
13 Plato, p. 121.
14 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 1, ‘Foreword to the Readers,’ p. 5.
15 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 1, ch. 1–10, pp. 6–16; bk. 2, ch. ­12–15,
pp. 45–68.
16 Palladio, quoted in Tavernor, p. 96.
17 Tavernor, p. 40.

27
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

18 Cornaro, quoted in Tavernor, p. 22.

19 Ackerman, Palladio, p. 22. Refer to Ackerman, The Villa, pp. 89–107; Tafuri, Venice
and the Renaissance, pp. 142–158.
20 Ackerman, The Villa, pp. 39–42; Barrell, pp. 8–9, 36–39; Jankovic, pp. 16–22, 137;
Langdon, pp. 9–13.
21 Pliny, ‘Letter to Gallus,’ translated in Castell, pp. 1–15.
22 Ackerman, The Villa, p. 89; Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 2, ch. 12, p. 45.
23 Watkin, ‘Built Ruins,’ p. 6.
24 Boucher, p. 138, refer to pp. 90–91.
25 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 2, ch. 12, p. 46; Alberti, p. 23.
26 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 2, ch. 8, p. 47.
27 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 2, ch. 16, p. 69; Vitruvius, bk. 3, ch. 5,
p. 12.
28 Aureli, p. 60; Boucher, pp. 121–122.
29 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 1, ‘Foreword’, p. 5. Refer to Tafuri, Inter-
preting the Renaissance, pp. 178–179.
30 Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, p. 10, refer to p. 129.
31 The rejected architects included Jacopo Sansovino and Sebastiano Serlio from Venice,
Michele Sanmicheli from Verona and Giulio Romano from Mantua.
32 Beltramini, pp. 43–47, 62, 67.
33 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 3, ch. 20, p. 41.
34 Published between 1537 and 1547, the seven books of Serlio’s architectural trea-
tise were posthumously published as L’architettura in 1584 and republished as Tutte
l’opere l’architettura et prospetiva in 1619. Serlio’s third book influenced Palladio’s
understanding of ruins.
35 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 3, ch. 20, pp. 42–43.
36 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 1, ch. 3, p. 8.
37 The first two volumes had already been published separately but were substantially
revised for the 1711 three-volume collection.
38 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, vol. 1, pp. 77–78, 118–119.
39 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, vol. 3, p. 207.
40 Published in the second edition, ‘A Letter Concerning The Art, or Science of Design’ was
written in 1709.
41 Robert Morris, Lectures on Architecture, p. 72.
42 Ackerman, The Villa, p. 157.
43 Ackerman, The Villa, p. 157.
44 Cosgrove, ‘Airport/Landscape’, p. 222.
45 Campbell, vol. 3, p. 1.
46 Swift, pp. 165–167.
47 The Four Books had earlier appeared in instalments between 1716 and 1720 in a dual
English and French edition, with Leoni and Nicholas Dubois providing the respective
translations.
48 Ackerman, The Villa, pp. 157–158.
49 Swift, p. 39.

28
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

50 Queen Caroline, quoted in Speck, p. 12.

51 Moore, ‘The Making of Houghton Hall’, pp. 59–63.
52 Without mentioning Gibbs and Campbell and attributing only chimney pieces
and ­ceilings to Kent, Ripley is credited as the architect and Ware as the draughtsman.
53 Hervey, 21 July 1731, quoted in Plumb, p. 88.
54 Anonymous, The Norfolk Congress, pp. 4, 3.
55 The stairs were later demolished. Refer to John Harris, ‘The Architecture of the House,’
p. 23.
56 The Stone Hall was probably inspired by Jones’ Queen’s House, Greenwich, 1635.
Refer to Cornforth, p. 17.
57 Ayres, Classical Culture, p. 10.
58 ‘ROBERTUS WALPOLE/SENATUS BRITANNICI PRINCEPS/QUI/HASCE AEDES/CON-
DIDIT INCOLVIT ILLUSTRAVIT’. Refer to Angelicoussis, pp. 24–30.
59 Ayres, Classical Culture, p. 18, refer to pp. 36–41, 55–56.
60 Walpole, quoted in Kemp, p. 135.
61 Robert Morris, An Essay in Defence of Ancient Architecture, p. xiii.
62 Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, vol. 4, pp. 228–229.
63 Horace Walpole attributes Marble Hill to Pembroke, which John Harris states is un-
certain, but Lees-Milne confirms Pembroke as the designer as does Julius Bryan, who
adds that Campbell and then Roger Morris assisted Pembroke. Since Lees-Milne and
Harris’s texts were published in 1962 and 1969, respectively, drawings in the Wilton
House archive have credited Pembroke as the designer of his villa at Blackheath, c.
1729, and Wimbledon House, Surrey, c. 1732, built for Sarah, Duchess of Marlbor-
ough. Bryan, p. 1; Bowden-Smith, p. 31; John Harris, ‘The Amateur Intervention in
Architecture’, p. 6; John Harris, ‘The Water Tower,’ p. 300; Lees-Milne, pp. 79–82;
Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, vol. 4, p. 228.
64 Cole, quoted in Lees-Milne, p. 61.
65 Connor.
66 Campbell, vol. 3, p. 48.
67 John Harris, ‘The Water Tower’, p. 300; Campbell, vol. 3, pp. 48, 23–24; Bowden-
Smith, p. 33.
68 Lees-Milne, p. 70.
69 Lees-Milne cites the influence of Palladio’s unbuilt design for Giulio Capra’s palazzo in
Vicenza. Lees-Milne, p. 87; Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 2, ch. 3,
pp. 20–21.
70 John Harris, ‘The Water Tower,’ p. 300.
71 The drawings are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Refer to Bowden-
Smith, p. 30; John Harris, ‘The Water Tower,’ p. 300.
72 Referring to Rev. J.H. Broome, Houghton and the Walpoles, 1865, Bowden-Smith
suggests that Walpole may have been involved in the design of the estate’s water supply
system and fitting out the Water House. Bowden-Smith, pp. 9–10.
73 As Walpole commissioned a new garden before a new house and chose a construction
site slightly to the east of the old house, the diagonal paths cutting through the wilder-
ness gardens no longer converge at the centre of the west elevation.

29
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

74 The Water House appears in two maps drawn in the 1730s. Bowden-Smith, pp. ­14–15;
Tom Williamson, The Archaeology of the Landscape Park, p. 35; Tom Williamson, ‘The
Planting of the Park’, pp. 42, 44–45.
75 Powell, p. 6.
76 The water tank was later removed, but my analysis focuses on the Water House’s con-
dition in the early eighteenth century.
77 It is uncertain whether Hippocrates wrote the influential treatises attributed to him.
78 Vitruvius, pp. 170–171; Alberti, pp. 9–11.
79 Kenda, ‘Aeolian Winds’, p. 3.
80 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 1, ch. 27, p. 60.
81 Kenda, ‘Aeolian Winds,’ pp. 11–13.
82 Emmons and Frascari, pp. 96–97.
83 Vasari, quoted in Mayernik, p. 142.

30
 2
the first ‘ruins’
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Lovers and monsters

As a metaphor for time, the ruin was acknowledged in ancient Rome but not
painted or constructed. However, Watkin suggests: ‘If any ancient Roman did
erect a ruin, then it surely would have been Hadrian whose Villa at Tivoli con-
tained buildings and landscapes designed to recall those in different parts of
the Empire.’1 Extensive travels and a pleasurable retreat in a sweeping setting
encouraged Hadrian’s architectural experimentation. Juxtaposing diverse and
contrasting forms and spaces, the Villa developed through an additive and
subtractive process in which a new building was often adjusted during con-
struction and occupation, and then altered in response to later buildings. The
resulting, episodic, evolving assemblage of buildings, pavilions and gardens
offered multiple, alternative journeys in which the past was resonant in the
present. Rather than direct reproductions of places he had visited, William L.
MacDonald and John A. Pinto conclude that Hadrian was interested ‘in his-
torical transference, in creative renovation of the past’ by formal, spatial and
topographical means: ‘the Villa was a place where views and arrangements
of natural and man-made forms often alluded to the mythical, literary, and
historical past.’2

Hadrian’s Villa, Tivoli,

second century AD. The
Thermal Baths. Courtesy of
Jonathan Hill.

32
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Humanist scholars understood the ruin in terms of evolving historical cycles.

In Le vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori (The Lives of the Most
Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects), 1550, Vasari remarks that art in
classical antiquity:

from a small beginning, climbed to the greatest height, and how from a state
so noble she fell into utter ruin, and that, in consequence, the nature of this art
is similar to that of the others, which, like human bodies, have their birth, their
growth, their growing old, and their death.

Vasari then celebrates ‘the progress of her second birth and of that very per-
fection whereto she has risen again in our times.’3 Implicit in any architectural
monument was its potential ruination, which could become a catalyst to future
development, as Raphael proclaimed in his letter to Pope Leo X.
Whether a building or a sculpture, the works of classical antiquity that survived
to stimulate the Renaissance were nearly always fractured, not intact, providing
fissures through which to reinterpret the past. Adding disjunction to disjunction,
the Renaissance appreciation of ancient fragments recalled the equally decontex-
tualised experience of imperial plunder in ancient Rome. Although Renaissance
artists and scholars strived to formulate complete and convincing reconstructions
of ancient artefacts, the surviving fragments offered ‘a set of enigmas with mul-
tiple answers or no answers,’ writes Barkan.4 The Renaissance appreciation of
classical antiquity drew attention to the broken as well as the complete. Even an
ancient text was more often a ‘reconstruction’ than a definitive record, according
to Heather Hyde Minor:

Classical texts underwent considerable changes over time. Renaissance book

hunters scoured libraries for forgotten manuscripts of ancient texts, making cop-
ies for scholars all over Europe. They sought out the oldest extant versions of
ancient texts, collating them in an attempt to create complete editions. With the
advent of print, these texts underwent further changes.5

In that it helped to further the ‘intoxication with ruins,’ Watkin highlights Franc-
esco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499,6 which following Alberti’s Ten
Books was the second architectural book by a Renaissance author and the first to
be printed with illustrations, establishing the multimedia interdependence of text
and image that has been essential to architectural books ever since. A fictional
narrative illustrated with pictorial drawings, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili offers an

33
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

alternative model to the analytical manifesto justified through principles and ex-
amples and illustrated with orthogonal drawings, as in Palladio’s The Four Books.
In Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, love is lost and won in a sylvan landscape among
monuments and ruins that are themselves erotic and not just locations for lust
and desire.7 Some of ­Colonna’s designs may have been invented while others
were adapted from ancient and Renaissance sites in Italy, Greece and Asia Minor.
The most impressive structures are composites. The largest consists of varied
forms mounted one on top of the other: a plinth, a pyramid, a stone cube, an ob-
elisk and finally, a winged statue ‘revolving easily at every breath of wind, making
such a noise, from the friction of the hollow metal device, as was never heard
from the Roman treasury.’8

Francesco Colonna,
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,
1499. Illustration of ‘The
Three Doors’. Courtesy of
Aldus Manutius edition/
De Agostini Picture Library/
Bridgeman Images.

34
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Some fragments of Colonna’s design narrative were familiar, but the total
assemblage was not. In contrast to the authority accorded to an ancient Roman
structure and Vitruvius’ treatise, there were no surviving ancient gardens and very
limited literary references such as Pliny the Younger’s letter and a few agricultural
treatises. Luke Morgan concludes that:

the obscurity or almost complete absence of classical models for landscape de-
sign in the sixteenth century should be regarded as liberating in effect. With only
the slightest hints to go on, designers and writers such as Colonna developed a
garden type that was an authentic product of the Renaissance but involved little
revival or ‘rebirth’.9

Noting that the Renaissance conceived the living earth as analogous to the living
body and citing garden sculptures with water spouting from mouths, eyes and
other orifices, Morgan remarks that ‘the representation of bodily fluids in Re-
naissance landscape design foregrounds the body as a living, breathing, organic
entity, not unlike, in fact, the garden itself.’10 Quoting John Dixon Hunt—‘It is
doubtful whether any garden of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries avoided
some appeal, specific or general, to Ovid’—Morgan remarks: ‘Ovid’s poetic de-
vice, which depends on the ambiguity or contrast between a tranquil, idealized
landscape and the frequently barbarous violence of the narrative, occurs again
and again in the Metamorphoses.’11 Morgan acknowledges ‘the Renaissance gar-
den’s complexity and contradictoriness’ and concludes:

The giant, the grotesque hybrid, the monster, the ruin, and the wilderness were
thus figures of fear, yet they were all represented in Renaissance landscape de-
sign … If it is a vision of Arcadia, then it presents, surely, an image of Arcadia as
fragile and perpetually under threat. Yet perhaps this is what Arcadia has always
been—a dualistic concept that, in its reflection on an ideal, requires its opposite.
Without the threat of the dark wood, the rapacious harpy, the murderous giant,
or the entrance to hell itself, Arcadia has no definition. If so, then the monsters
and giants may be necessary to the idyll.12

Emphasising the ruin’s status as an intermediary between culture and nature and
the inevitability of human and natural decay, the first building known to have
been constructed as a ruin was the Barchetto, c. 1530, which Girolamo Genga
created as a hermitage for Francesco Maria I della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, in
his park at Pesaro.13 In the same decade, Giulio Romano incorporated ruined

35
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

elements into the Palazzo Te, notably in the dropped triglyphs in the courtyard
frieze and the collapsing columns in the frescoes of the Sala dei Giganti. Created
between 1552 and 1580, the Sacro Bosco at the Villa Orsini, Bomarzo, includes
fabricated ruins such as the Etruscan tomb and leaning house, Casa Pendente,
alongside the carved monsters and giants that populate the wooded landscape.
But these were exceptions to the rule and the ruin was still a comparatively minor
design concern in the sixteenth century.

Giulio Romano, Palazzo Te,

Mantua, c. 1530. Fresco in
the Sala dei Giganti, detail
of the destruction of the
giants by Jupiter’s thun-
derbolts, 1536. Courtesy
of Palazzo Te/Bridgeman
Images.

Pirro Ligorio, Sacra Bosco,

Bomarzo, 1552–1580.
Courtesy of Danica O. Kus/
RIBA Collections.

36
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Et in Arcadia ego

Seventeenth-century Rome had half as many people as the most populous Italian
city, Naples, and occupied less than half of the land within the Aurelian walls of
ancient Rome, which were constructed in the third century AD. But Rome was
the focus of the Grand Tour and the artistic capital of Europe. Visiting patrons,
painters, sculptors and architects admired the ancient Roman structures and texts
and drew inspiration from contemporary attempts to emulate and surpass clas-
sical antiquity. Important patrons for an ambitious artist included local nobility,
visiting gentlemen on the Grand Tour, the pope, who ruled the Papal States, and
the cardinals, who as princes of the Roman Catholic Church lived as lavishly as
secular princes.14
At the start of the seventeenth century, Italian painters focused on histori-
cal, literary, mythological and biblical themes, which were held in the highest
esteem because they referred to philosophical discourse on humanist themes.
Countryside mostly appeared as a background setting, indicating the hierarchy
of humanity over nature. Landscape painting was a minor genre because it was
assumed to merely copy nature and not offer imaginative interpretations of human
narratives as in history painting.
Northern European artists, who appreciated nature as a subject in its
own right, notably included Paul Bril, a Flemish painter who moved to Rome
in 1582 and died there in 1626. But there was no equivalent attention to
landscape in the work of an Italian at that time. Bril’s contemporaries, the
Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci and his pupil Domenichino, depicted a
more restrained and serene nature as a setting for human narratives, inno-
vatively combining landscape and history painting. Claude Gellée first visited
Rome around 1613 and lived there from 1627, settling in the area around the
Piazza di Spagna favoured by foreigners resident in Rome. Reliant on litera-
ture from classical antiquity, Claude’s chosen humanist themes indicated his
assimilation as a Roman artist, but the name by which he became known—
Claude Lorrain—emphasised his home region to the north, which was un-
der French influence but not yet incorporated into the nation. Bril and other
northern European artists resident in Rome influenced the close observation
of nature in the paintings of Claude, who depicted a composed landscape
indebted to Carracci. Bril also came under Carracci’s influence as did Nicolas
Poussin, who was born in France but spent most of his career in Rome. While
landscape paintings were a small part of Carracci and Poussin’s artistic pro-
duction, Claude focused on the genre.15

37
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

The new attention to landscape painting indicated a subtle shift in hierarchies.

Many eminent patrons, including kings, princes, popes and cardinals, commis-
sioned Claude, the best-known landscape painter of the time, together selecting
themes that were resonant to the patron and the painter. Claude portrayed human
narratives, but his figures were diminutive in comparison to those in most history
paintings. The criticism he received for his depiction of human form, which he
accepted, did not hinder the high esteem in which he was held. Rather than view
nature from an interior and as a background setting, Claude depicted people, archi-
tecture and nature within a landscape, inhabiting and sharing the same space. Re-
calling the amphitheatres of classical antiquity and the close association of gardens
and theatres in Renaissance Italy, he portrayed a pastoral landscape as a stage for
human action, with people in the foreground, a magnificent tree or classical struc-
ture just beyond them, hills, temples and trees to the sides and a wilder landscape
in the distance, whether mountains or the sea. Giving equal prominence to a tree,
a hill and a classical structure implied that they were of comparable status. More
than any other painter before him, Claude made appreciation and experience of
landscape the means to understanding, emphasising an emotional bond between
humanity and nature.16 He carefully studied and sketched the countryside of the
Roman Campagna as well as the temples and ruins of ancient Rome such as the
Pantheon, which appears in a number of his paintings. But such recognisable im-
ages were absorbed within compositions that mostly depict imaginary, not actual
places. Claude challenged the assumption that landscape painting was merely an
imitation of nature and depicted an ideal landscape instead.
References to narratives of rural life in classical antiquity such as Horace, Ovid
and Virgil validated Claude’s attention to landscape.17 Virgil’s Georgics praises the
virtues of a simple, hard country life and gives less emphasis to an idyllic, rural
existence.18 In comparison, the Eclogues evokes a blissful, bucolic life in the lush
Italian landscape, but Virgil uses a name—Arcadia—from ancient Greece to give
his vision an otherworldly as well as a familiar air.19 Depicting a pastoral ­Arcadia
of classical temples, rolling hills and relaxed inhabitants, Claude’s paintings evoke
the Eclogues rather than the Georgics, appealing to wealthy patrons who could
afford a rural life as an antidote to an urban one like their ancient predeces-
sors. In classical antiquity and again in the Renaissance, nature was conceived
as female. Representing male sensual experience, shepherds populate Claude’s
paintings not farm labourers.20 His figures are notably comfortable and content
in their landscape setting. Claude’s patrons wished to emphasise their bucolic
vision of country life, rather than the experience of those that they employed to
work the land.

38
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Poussin devised each painting as a thematic tableau with specific meanings

to be understood by the viewer, but Claude seems to have invited multiple asso-
ciations and personal responses.21 According to Filippo Baldinucci, who knew
Claude and provided the second account of his life in Notizie de’professori del
disegno, which was written before 1696 and published in 1728: ‘one sees things
from his hand which, going beyond all imagination, can by no means be de-
scribed.’22 This assumption is supported by Claude’s decision to conceive over
half of his paintings as ‘pairs’ to be seen side by side, in which contrasts are as ap-
parent as similarities and interpretations are subject to a complex inter-reading.23
Although Claude was not didactic, it is likely that there were specific mean-
ings known only to the painter and his patron and others that were widely recog-
nised. Humphrey Wine emphasises that Claude ‘employed landscape motifs or
composition as metaphor,’ like the painters who influenced him such as Carracci.
For example, ‘the twisted trees’ in Landscape with Hagar, Ismael and the Angel,
1668, ‘seem expressive of Hagar’s grief.’ The ‘difference between the Arcadians
and the Trojans is expressed by one wooded and one unwooded bank’ in Land-
scape with the Arrival of Aeneas before the City of Pallanteum, 1675. And ‘the
most striking use of landscape composition as metaphor is the gulf that divides’
the two protagonists in Claude’s final painting Landscape with Ascanius Shooting
the Stag of Sylvia, 1682, which ‘may also allude more generally to the destruction
of love or innocence of which the deer was symbolic.’24

Claude Lorrain, Landscape

with Ascanius Shooting
the Stag of Sylvia, 1682.
­Courtesy of Ashmolean
­Museum, University of
­Oxford/Bridgeman Images.

39
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Claude’s landscapes are idyllic but not timeless. They are specific to a season
and a time of day. Their temporal metaphors include the weather and weathering,
youthful beauty and old age, entire and ruined structures, gilded antiquity and im-
perial decline, hunts, myths, pilgrimages and voyages.25 Reference to the seasons
of a year and the seasons of a life suggest both a cyclical concept of time from
one spring to the next, in which death renews life, and a linear concept of time
from one year to another. A northern European painter responding to the history,
landscape and light of Rome, Claude focused on warmer seasons. His memorial
at Santissima Trinità dei Monti, the church high above Piazza di Spagna, notably
acknowledges his expertise in depicting ‘the rays of the rising and setting sun’ in
coastal and seaport scenes.26 According to Marcel G. Roethlisberger: ‘Claude’s
concern with time fits into the dazzling array of representations of time—narrative
or allegorical—which characterizes Italian and northern art of this period.’27 But
comparing Claude to his contemporaries, Roethlisberger concludes:

Since every mythological and religious theme calls up the past in the widest sense
of the term, one might argue that it is nearly impossible to imagine an oeuvre
in landscape painting without the dimension of time … but there is nothing like
the consistent recurrence of the time element that we find in Claude … the
representation of the passage of time can be taken as the leitmotif of his art.28

Claude Lorrain, Pastoral

Landscape with the Arch
of Titus, 1644. Courtesy of
Private Collection/Bridgeman
Images.

40
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

The ruin was one of Claude’s most frequent metaphorical devices.29

­Seventeenth-century painters and writers employed the ruin as an image of time
and as a mediator between nature and culture. Claude often placed ruins to the
sides of his paintings, merging with the hills and trees or closer to the centre
and covered with vegetation. Pastoral Landscape with the Arch of Titus, 1644,
depicts shepherds and grazing animals in an imaginary setting. The ruined Arch
of Titus from the first century AD is to the right and reflected in a small lake; the
trees to the left frame the view of a dilapidated aqueduct, beyond which a river
leads into the distance. In Landscape with an Old Man by the Sea, 1667, a figure
stares towards the horizon and the dying evening light, emphasising that a watery
reflection is a metaphor for mental reflection. Broken classical ruins overgrown
with vegetation and a waiting boat further indicate that the end of life is close.
In the Eclogues, Virgil emphasises the presence of mortality even in an idyllic
setting. According to Erwin Panofsky, Virgil’s Arcadia was irrelevant in ‘the Middle
Ages, when bliss was sought in the beyond and not in any region of the earth.’30

In the Renaissance, however, Virgil’s—not Ovid’s or Polybius’—Arcady emerged from

the past like an enchanting vision. Only, for the modern mind, this Arcady was not so
much a Utopia of bliss and beauty distant in space as a Utopia of bliss and beauty
distant in time. Like the whole, classical sphere, of which it became an integral part,
Arcady became an object of nostalgia that distinguishes the real Renaissance from all
those pseudo- or proto-Renaissances that had taken place during the Middle Ages.31

Guercino (Giovanni
­Francesco Barbieri), Et in
Arcadia ego, c.1621–1623.
Courtesy of Palazzo
­Barberini, Gallerie Nazionali
Barberini Corsini, Rome/
Bridgeman Images.

41
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Nostalgia is frequently derided as negative and passive. But it can instead

stimulate imaginative responses to the past that influence the present and the
future. Panofsky states that it was through Jacopo Sannazaro’s poem Arcadia,
1502, ‘that the elegiac feeling—present but, as it were, peripheral in Virgil’s
Eclogues—became the central quality of the Arcadian sphere.’32 The phrase ‘Et
in Arcadia ego’ first appeared as the title of Guercino’s painting, c.1621–1623,
in which two young Arcadian shepherds discover a ‘torso’ of a decaying masonry
surmounted by a skull, which looks up towards them so that it appears to be in
conversation, declaring ‘Even in Arcadia, I, Death, hold sway.’ Panofsky remarks
of the painting:

there is little or nothing elegiac about it … In short, Guercino’s painting turns out
to be a medieval memento mori in humanistic disguise—a favourite concept of
Christian moral theology shifted to the ideal milieu of classical and classicizing
pastorals.33

Guercino left Rome around 1623. Arriving in the city a year or two later, Poussin
dedicated two paintings to the theme Et in Arcadia ego in which figures stand
before a tomb, the first around 1630 and the second about five years later. A skull
appears in the first painting but is missing from the second, of which Panofsky
remarks:

Here, then, we have a basic change in interpretation. The Arcadians are not
so much warned of an implacable future as they are immersed in mellow
meditation of a beautiful past. They seem to think less of themselves than of
the human being buried in the tomb—a human being that once enjoyed the
pleasures which they now enjoy, and whose monument ‘bids them remember
their end’ only in so far as it evokes the memory of one who had been what
they are. In short, Poussin’s Louvre picture no longer shows a dramatic en-
counter with Death but a contemplative absorption in the idea of mortality.
We are confronted with a change from thinly veiled moralism to undisguised
elegiac sentiment.34

Rather than death inhabiting Arcadia, the painting emphasises that we may
live in Arcadia. But the tomb’s inscription reminds us that our stay will come to
an end like that of the person buried within. Panofsky concludes that Poussin’s
second Et in Arcadia ego painting ‘could lead to reflections of an almost opposite

42
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Nicolas Poussin, Et in
­Arcadia ego, c. 1635.
Courtesy of Louvre, Paris/
Bridgeman Images.

nature, depressing and melancholy on the one hand, comforting and assuaging
on the other; and, more often than not, to a truly “Romantic” fusion of both.’35
The figures and the tomb fill the canvas in Poussin’s two Et in Arcadia ego
paintings. The landscape is comparatively insignificant, although it is more prom-
inent in some of his other works. In Claude’s paintings, the figures are small but
the landscape is consistently large and worthy of painterly attention both in its
own right and as a setting for human narratives, ensuring that he was the greater
influence on the early eighteenth-century English landscape. Claude painted
when empiricism was in its infancy, but his paintings resonated with a slightly
later, increasingly secular and empiricist era that associated human understand-
ing with experience of the natural world and emphasised the pleasures of the
present more often than the eternal joy of the afterlife. The emergence of a secular
understanding of time, and the subsequent adoption of the Gregorian calendar’s
uniform timescale in place of the Julian calendar, which reflected the seasonal
rhythms of farming, gave greater emphasis to distinctions between the past, pres-
ent and future.36 Claude did not forefront an insistent memorial metaphor such as
a tomb, but the mood of his paintings is elegiac because the temporal metaphors
such as the setting sun ruined buildings and decaying vegetation are immersed
within a verdant and bucolic setting in which the figures are carefree, so that we
empathise with their pleasure and know it to be fleeting.37

43
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

The recovery of Eden

Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, the Enlightenment—the natural light of

reason—was founded on the assumption that humanity and nature are subject to
the same laws of divine reason. Derived from empeiria, the ancient Greek term for
experience, the principal British contribution to Enlightenment theory was empiri-
cism, which made reason specific rather than generic. Empirical investigation was
applied extensively, notably to the natural world and the operations of the mind.
According to Carolyn Merchant: ‘The Recovery of Eden story is the mainstream
narrative of Western culture. It is perhaps the most important mythology humans
have developed to make sense of their relationship to the earth.’38 Characterising
nature as female, as in the Biblical narrative, the influential early empiricist Fran-
cis Bacon interpreted the recovery of Eden as mankind reaffirming its God-given
dominion and thus its right to cultivate and improve nature.39 Promoting reasoned
analysis of the natural world in publications such as Sylva Sylvarum: or A Natu-
ral History, in Ten Centuries, 1627, he set the tone for investigations later in the
seventeenth century. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer identify the seeds
of self-destruction in the Enlightenment’s association of reason with the myth of
domination: ‘Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over
which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dicta-
tor toward men.’40 However, the concern for natural reason also engendered a new
respect for nature, encouraging greater attention than before to both cultivated and
uncultivated nature. With the development of modern scientific instruments such as
the microscope and the telescope, detailed observation and analysis focused more
on the properties of natural objects and less on their immediate value to humans,
although this concern was never distant. Empirical science also investigated the
relations between natural objects, which had previously been primarily measured
against a human standard. Astronomers, botanists and zoologists classified planets,
plants and animals, while geologists established the earth’s age. In 1683, Anton
van Leeuwenhoek declared ‘that there were more animals in his own mouth than
there were people in the United Provinces’ of the Netherlands.41 The discovery of
new plants, places and creatures, and a greater understanding of those already
known, stimulated appreciation of the natural world. A concern for all the earth’s
creatures is a characteristic of the Judeo-Christian tradition. But it was mostly latent
until the second half of the seventeenth century, when scientists concluded that any
natural object, however humble, could be admired if it fulfilled a purpose.
The Royal Society was founded in 1660 after Wren’s inaugural lecture, and
received a royal charter two years later with the purpose to advance scientific

44
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

knowledge through empirical investigation. Addressing its concern for the deple-
tion of natural resources due to the demands of trade and industry, the Royal So-
ciety’s first official publication, John Evelyn’s Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees,
and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesties Dominions, 1664, marked a
more sensitive attitude to the modification of nature than before, acknowledging
the effects of deforestation on climate and the need for forestry science, conserva-
tion and sustainable development.42
In a similar vein, Evelyn’s Fumifugium: or The Inconveniencie of the Aer
and Smoak of London Dissipated, 1661, was the first book to consider the city’s
atmosphere as a whole, as well as the first to recognise mitigation and adap-
tation as responses to human-induced—anthropogenic—climate change three
centuries before these principles were widely accepted. Distinguishing between
­London’s agreeable setting and the ruinous effects of its polluted atmosphere,
Evelyn advocates modern science as well as the medical tradition of ancient
Greece, which considered health and disease holistically and the interdepend-
ence of the body, soul and environment. Recalling the principle that the air—the
breath—is ‘the Vehicle of the Soul, as well as that of the Earth,’ he recounts
Hippocratic’s opinion that the character of a people depends upon the air they
inhale.43 Offering a ‘Remedy’ for the ‘Nuisance’, Evelyn suggests a number of
practical and poetic measures, including the relocation of coal-burning trades,
butchers and burials to the east of the city, so that the prevailing westerly winds
would carry the smoke away from London and the rivers and groundwater would
be unsullied.44 Emphasising the allegorical, poetic and practical significance of
his treatise, Evelyn proposes that the edges of London are to be forested with trees
and planted with fragrant shrubs so that wood could replace coal as the princi-
pal fuel and the whole city would be sweetly perfumed.45 Evelyn’s remedy—an
aromatic botanical garden—advocates good health due to the known medicinal
properties of certain plants and also promotes associations with Heaven and the
Garden of Eden.46 Noting Evelyn’s detailed, holistic attention to aesthetics, cli-
mate, horticulture, natural history and human experience, Mark Laird concludes
that ‘he reflected on how gardens gratify all five senses through tinctures, redolent
scents, delight of touch, fruit gusto, and warbling birds and echoes.’47

Things of a natural kind

Evelyn was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1661, as was John Locke seven
years later. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690, Locke describes
diverse beliefs to emphasise that ideas and values are provisional not universal,

45
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

and indicates that his travels enabled him to reach this conclusion. Dismissing
the search for ultimate truth, he accepts that there are limits to what we can know
and argues that conclusions must be in proportion to the evidence: ‘Our business
here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct.’48 Countering
the Platonist and Cartesian traditions in which knowledge is acquired by the mind
alone, Locke assumes that personality and morality develop through an evolving
dialogue between the setting, senses and mind. This environmental appreciation
led him to record the daily temperature, barometric pressure and winds for many
years.49 Wishing not to deny creativity but to moderate it, Locke concludes that
understanding grounded in experience encourages the mind to develop an exten-
sive association of ideas, which can foster good, responsible judgement.50 The
assumption that ideas and values must be repeatedly tested through experience is
fundamental to empiricism and its influence on the eighteenth-century landscape.
As physician and secretary to the first Earl, Locke attended the birth of the
future third Earl of Shaftesbury, who described Locke, his tutor, as my ‘foster-­
father.’51 Shaftesbury affirmed Locke’s appreciation of liberty and reason but tem-
pered his empiricism and egalitarianism. Unlike the tutor, the pupil acknowledged
an ideal order, reasserting Renaissance Italy and its respect for the ‘immutable
truths’ of classical antiquity: ‘Twas Mr. Locke that struck at all Fundamentals,
threw all Order and Virtue out of the World.’52
Associating contemporary Britain with ancient Rome,53 Shaftesbury poses as a
Roman senator in the 1714 frontispiece to the second edition of Characteristicks.54
Leaning on a book-laden pedestal, he stands in front of a neoclassical arch, which
frames the third, second and first natures—regular parterres, abundant orchards
and distant hills—collectively theorised in the Renaissance.55 In the sixteenth cen-
tury, a barren wilderness was considered to be brutish and deformed, and the im-
material soul, ‘as a visitor in matter,’ could not ‘be truly at home in nature,’ remarks
Ernest Tuveson.56 Recuperation in a wild landscape was not a new theme, but it
acquired enhanced meaning in the early eighteenth century when nature and moral
virtue were linked for the first time. Acknowledging an ideal order but departing
from Plato, Shaftesbury conceived nature not as debased but as a means to con-
template the divine. Expanding ideas that he had developed in the previous decade,
the second volume of Characteristicks praises weather and nature:57

HOW comfortable is it to those who come out hence alive, to breathe a purer AIR!
To see the rejoicing Light of Day! And tread the fertile Ground! How gladly they
contemplate the Surface of the Earth, their habitation heated and enliven’d by
the Sun, and temper’d by the fresh AIR of fanning Breezes!58

46
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

I shall no longer resist the Passion growing in me for Things of a natural kind;
where neither Art, nor the Conceit or Caprice of Man has spoil’d their ­genuine
­Order, by breaking in upon that primitive State. Even the Rocks, the mossy
­Caverns, the irregular unwrought Grotto’s, and broken Falls of Waters, with all
the horrid Graces of the Wilderness it-self, as representing NATURE more, will be
the more engaging, and appear with a Magnificence beyond the formal Mockery
of Princely Gardens.59

The 1714 frontispiece suggests the formality of Shaftesbury’s garden at Wimborne

St Giles, Dorset, rather than the flowing lines of the picturesque.60 But in addition to
stimulating a Palladian architectural resurgence, he influenced its landscape setting
whether or not he predicted it. Locke required a degree of critical detachment from
the natural world.61 Shaftesbury’s purpose was more profound, stimulating a newly
spiritual engagement with nature as a means to self-understanding.
Informed by Locke’s concern for everyday experience and the association
of ideas and Shaftesbury’s appreciation of wild nature and classical precedent,
Joseph Addison and Alexander Pope furthered the philosophical and literary ges-
tation of the early eighteenth-century garden. Addison published essays on ‘The
Pleasures of the Imagination,’ 1712, in The Spectator, the journal that he edited
with Richard Steele. Previously, nature was studied in paintings and books, but
Addison concluded that this appreciation was secondary to the primary pleasure
of direct experience, which could cultivate a healthy body, an alert mind and a
sociable manner.62 References to the weather’s influence on conversation, behav-
iour and health appear throughout his essays. Citing the Pantheon in Rome, he
appreciates architecture’s ability to evoke a single, vast idea, notably the divine.63
But Addison reserves his most significant praise for nature because he assumes
that it offers a multitude of ideas for association and is thus especially conducive
to the imagination. Rather than the natural world per se, he focuses on the art of
making a garden appear natural, drawing a parallel with the cultivation of natural
behaviour: ‘The fashionable world is grown free and easy; our manners sit more
loose upon us: nothing is so modish as an agreeable negligence.’64

There is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless Strokes of
Nature, than in the nice Touches and Embellishments of Art. The Beauties of the
most stately Garden or Palace lie in a narrow Compass, the Imagination immedi-
ately runs them over, and requires something else to gratifie her; but, in the wide
Fields of Nature, the Sight wanders up and down without Confinement, and is fed
with an infinite variety of Images, without any Stint or Number.65

47
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Concluding that the ‘artificial rudeness’ of a garden modelled on nature ‘gives us

a nobler and more exalted kind of Pleasure,’ Addison suggests that it can be more
widely applied: ‘why may not a whole Estate be thrown into a kind of Garden.’66
His purpose was political and social as well as cultural. A single landscape com-
position naturalised class relations, implying that the landowner’s family and
guests belonged among the lawns and the farm labourers belonged in the fields.
Ascribing the picturesque to both natural landscape and natural behav-
iour, Pope conceived buildings, gardens and paintings as means to express
good ­character: ‘A Man not only shews his Taste but his Virtue, in the Choice of
such Ornaments.’67 Echoing Shaftesbury, he praised ‘the amiable simplicity of
­unadorned nature’ and sought justification in classical precedent: ‘this was the
taste of the ancients in their gardens.’68 Rather than a direct and literal transposi-
tion, his concern for classical antiquity was intended to cultivate principles suited
to Britain. Similarly, he translated Homer to make him ‘speak good English.’69
At Twickenham, adjacent to the River Thames, Pope’s garden offered numer-
ous means to entice the visitor—meandering and formal routes, a grove of lime
trees, a circular lawn, a viewing mound, a shell temple, a vineyard, an orangery,
an obelisk, urns and statues—and varied views within and beyond the garden.
As his house and garden were on opposite sides of a road, he created a tunnel
to connect them, which became its most famous feature, the grotto begun in
around 1719. The first grottoes were caves in which shrines to the water spirits
were constructed in ancient Greece. Built on the site of a natural spring, Pope’s
grotto included a sequence of varied watery environments abundant with ver-
dant mosses. Encrusted surfaces glistened with shells, flints, crystals, corals and
fossils from many countries, either found by Pope or donated by his friends. The
lamp hanging at the centre caused light to flicker around the grotto, distorting the
size of the chambers as the flame swayed and fluctuated in the breeze.
Grottoes were popular in Italian gardens and not new to England. But Pope’s
fame drew attention to his grotto, inspiring others to construct similar spaces and
offering a poetic model for garden buildings that celebrated nature and weather. In
a letter to Ralph Allen, the noted supplier of Bath stone, Pope writes:

I told you my Grotto was finished, and now all that wants to the Completion of my
Garden is the Frontispiece to it, of your rude Stones to build a sort of ruinous Arch
at the Entry into it on the Garden side.70

But Pope’s grotto was too rigid and rectilinear to be truly picturesque in the man-
ner later developed by his friend, Kent, who visited and sketched the garden.

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Another of Pope’s friends, Burlington, funded the publication of The Villas

of the Ancients Illustrated, 1728, in which Robert Castell provided an English
translation alongside Pliny’s original Latin account of his gardens. One of Pliny’s
villas occupied a rolling site in the Tuscan Apennines, while the other took full
advantage of its dramatic coastal setting near Rome:

The Country on both Sides affords a great Variety of Views; in some Places the
Prospect is confin’d by Woods, in others it is extended over large and Spacious
Meadows … The Shore is adorn’d with a grateful Variety … Which sometimes is
soften’d by a long Calm, but is more often harden’d by the contending Waves.71

Implying a classical precedent for the eighteenth-century landscape garden,

­Castell’s commentary on Pliny’s Tuscan villa identifies a formal garden, a n
­ atural
garden and one that combines the two, ‘whose Beauty consisted in a close
­Imitation of Nature; where, tho’ the parts are disposed with the greatest Art, the
Irregularity is still preserved; so that their Manner may not improperly be said to
be an artful Confusion, where there is no Appearance of that Skill which is made
use of, their Rocks, Cascades, and Trees, bearing their natural Forms.’72

Georgic England

In a further elegy to classical antiquity, the Georgics was translated into English in
1697 and adopted as a model for early eighteenth-century Britain.73 According
to Deist philosophy, which was then influential, God made the natural world for
­human benefit and offered no further intervention, leaving it in trust to h
­ umanity.
In Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of
­Natural Philosophy), 1687, Isaac Newton concluded that material objects possess
mass and are dependent on forces of attraction and repulsion as in a mechanical
system. As nature was conceived as a machine, mankind could have been its
driver and engineer, making technical adjustments to improve performance. But
in an era that associated power and prestige with land ownership and was yet to
face the full force of industrialisation, the gentleman farmer was an appropriate
model for the enlightened management of nature and society. John Wootton’s
portrait, Sir Robert Walpole, c. 1725, depicts the Prime Minister as the model
country squire surrounded by his dogs, who boasted ‘that he read letters from his
gamekeeper before those of his Cabinet ministers,’ writes William Speck.74
Pope’s poems such as Pastorals, 1709, and Windsor-Forest, 1713, are indebted
to Virgil. But James Thomson’s The Seasons, 1730, was the most influential Georgic

49
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

poem of the eighteenth century, presenting human activity in dialogue with an evolv-
ing natural world to a greater extent than Pope’s more restrained poetry.75 Thomson
celebrates ‘profusely wild’ nature and also proclaims: ‘Ye generous BRITONS, culti-
vate the plow!’76 The Seasons’ popularity was immediate and enduring, resulting in
over 300 editions between 1750 and 1850. Here, he describes the spring:

Clear was the temperate air; an even calm

Perpetual reign’d, save what the zephyrs bland
Breath’d o’er the blue expanse; for then nor storms
Were taught to blow, nor hurricanes to rage;
Sound slept the Waters; no sulphureous glooms
Swell’d in the sky, and sent the lightning forth:
While sickly damps, and cold and autumnal fogs,
Sat not pernicious on the springs of life.77

Sharing Thomson’s sensitivity to the contrasting seasons, Kent provided four

illustrations for the first edition of The Seasons, no doubt recognising parallels be-
tween the evocative flow of Thomson’s poetry and his own developing gardening
concerns. Kent depicted seasonal shifts in nature, behaviour and architecture too.
Between ‘Spring’ and ‘Winter,’ a benign sky, a placid bay, relaxed inhabitants and
a Palladian villa are transformed into an aggressive storm, turbulent sea, cowering
figures and a rustic farmhouse.
In classical antiquity, there were two distinct attitudes to atmospheric phe-
nomena, one a theory of airborne particles expressed in Aristotle’s M
­ eteorologica,
c. 350 BC, the other a catalogue of weather signs exemplified in the Georgics. In
the early eighteenth century, scientific study of the atmosphere was in its infancy,
and both methods continued to find support. Interpreting changes in nature that
foretell impending weather such as the behaviour of insects and birds, plants and
skies, the Georgics is a weather guide as well as a weather poem, inspiring both
literary forms. Characteristic of the English Georgic tradition, attempts to resolve
scientific analysis and practical interpretation were evident in guides as well as
poems.78 One of the best-known farming guides was written by John Claridge in
1670 and republished in 1744 as The Shepherd of Banbury’s Rules To Judge of
the Changes of the Weather, Grounded on Forty Years Experience, with the subti-
tle ‘A Rational Account … on the Principles of Newtonian Philosophy.’ ­Thomson’s
‘A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton’ was published with The
­Seasons, alongside a drawing of Kent’s pyramidal monument to the scientist,
which was installed in Westminster Abbey in 1731.

50
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

The early eighteenth-century picturesque estate was conceived holistically

in social, aesthetic, agricultural and ecological terms. Although it was separate
from the farm, the park was productive as well as pleasurable, providing food
and income through forestry and hunting, which were considered gentlemanly
pursuits unlike the manual labour and muck spreading of arable farming. Noting
the attention given to parks and gardens as well as farms and fields, John Barrell
concludes that the English Georgic tradition allowed ‘its inhabitants a life of work
and play together’ and was ‘concerned to soften as much as to recommend the
hard moral lessons of Virgil’s original Georgics’ in which ‘rewards and pleasures
are always in the future.’79 Although industriousness was a virtue for rich and
poor, the prosperous were far more likely to be rewarded with recreation and
repose. The farm labourer’s day was exhausting, extending from 6am to 6pm in
summer and sunrise to sunset in winter. In the 1680s, the average life span in
England was 30, while it was still only 42 in the 1750s.80 Prosperous members
of society lived longer; Walpole died in his 60s, as did Kent.
For the landowning family and their guests, the picturesque estate was an
amalgam of the Georgics and the Eclogues, agriculture and Arcadia. Landowners
appreciated the Georgics as an effective model for their management of the land
and the nation. But, like Claude’s patrons, they celebrated the Eclogues, wishing
to emphasise their idyllic life in the park and not the daily grind of labourers toiling
in the field.

Arcadian England

Acknowledging contrasting interpretations of Et in Arcadia ego among eighteenth-

century nations, Panofsky refers to the painting Mrs Bouverie and Mrs Crewe,
c. 1770, in which Joshua Reynolds emphasised the continuing relevance of
­Guercino’s theme by placing two ladies rather than two shepherds beside a tomb-
stone with the famous inscription. Recalling King George III’s interpretation of
the painting, Reynolds remarked: ‘He saw it yesterday and said at once: Oh
there is a tombstone in the background: Ay, ay, death is even in Arcadia.’81
Panofsky states that this ‘grammatically correct interpretation’ remained familiar in
­eighteenth-century England, developing into a national ‘tradition which tended to
retain the idea of a memento mori’, an object emphasising the inevitably of death.
But it was forgotten in the rest of Europe and replaced by ‘the elegiac interpreta-
tion ushered in by Poussin’s’ painting.82
Many of Claude’s patrons were French or Italian, but as Martin Sonnabend
remarked in 2011: ‘it is no exaggeration to say that nearly all his paintings,

51
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

drawings, and—to a lesser extent—prints have been in British collections at

one time or another, or are still there today.’83 Shaftesbury owned one Claude,
while Walpole had two in his collection. Among the 22 paintings of primarily
­seventeenth-century artists who influenced the early eighteenth-century English
landscape, Thomas Coke, first Earl of Leicester, displayed seven by Claude—far
more than any other painter—in the Landscape Room at Holkham Hall, which
was built to Kent’s design on the Norfolk coast ten miles northeast of Houghton.84
Reynolds’ painting and Claude’s popularity indicate that both interpretations of Et
in Arcadia ego were present in eighteenth-century England: the inevitable men-
ace of death and the elegiac appreciation of life.
In England, more than in any other European country, the garden and the
park became the means to contemplate the passage of time, transience of life and
delights made sweeter because they were fleeting. Dependent on the ­seasons and
the weather, gardens emphasise that life and death and creation and ­ruination are
necessary to one another. Kent even intended to plant dead trees in the grounds
of Kensington Palace as an aid to temporal awareness.85 The English excused
and relished their cantankerous and contrary behaviour by reference to their
fickle and sullen weather.86 In 1745, Abbé Le Blanc expressed a widely held
­opinion: ‘It is to the fogs with which their Island is nearly always covered that the
­English owe both the richness of their pastures and the melancholic spirit of their
­temperament.’87 As Charles Baudelaire later concluded: ‘Romanticism is a child
of the North … dreams and fairy tales are children of the mist’.88

Sublime England

A Neapolitan, who arrived in Rome around 1635 when he was 20, Salvator
Rosa painted nature as threatening and raw, vibrant and alive and gnarled and
dead, in contrast to the gentler landscapes depicted by his contemporaries Claude
and Poussin. Rosa was inspired by the tradition of scholarly retreat in classical
antiquity and Christian theology, but his fulsome appreciation of wild nature was
distinct from these models and drawn from experience, as he recounted in 1662:

Oh God, when I saw some of those utterly desolate hermitages which we could
spot from the road, how many times I longed for them, how many times I cried
out for them! … I saw at Terni (that is four miles off the road) the famous falls
of the Velino, the river of Rieti; however hard to please a man may be, his heart
could not fail to be inspired by its terrifying beauty, the sight of a river hurling itself
off a precipice half a mile above and tossing its spray as high again.89

52
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Salvator Rosa, Landscape

with Arch and Waterfalls,
c. 1630–1673. Courtesy of
Palatine Gallery, Pitti Palace,
Florence/Finsiel/Alinari Ar-
chives reproduced with the
permission of Ministero per
i Beni e le Attività Culturali/
Bridgeman Images.

Rosa was a successful artist in his lifetime, but he acquired his high reputa-
tion in the eighteenth century when his depictions of rugged landscapes with an
isolated human presence appealed to patrons stimulated by growing accounts of
the sublime. Few English collectors purchased Rosa’s art in his lifetime, but he
became popular later; Shaftesbury owned two of his paintings and Walpole had
four.90 Shaftesbury’s praise ‘for Things of a natural kind’ recalls Rosa even more
than Claude:

Even the Rocks, the mossy Caverns, the irregular unwrought Grotto’s, and broken
Falls of Waters, with all the horrid Graces of the Wilderness it-self, as representing
NATURE more, will be the more engaging, and appear with a Magnificence be-
yond the formal Mockery of Princely Gardens.91

Written in the first century AD, Dionysius Longinus’ Peri Hupsous (On the Sub-
lime) refers to oratory not nature. Combining the pleasant and the frightening,

53
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

the contradictory pleasures of the sixteenth-century garden ‘may have ­resembled

those of the sublime,’ according to Morgan.92 But sublime nature did not r­eceive
extensive praise until the late seventeenth and early eighteenth c­ enturies. To
reach Italy, many Grand Tourists experienced both a sea voyage and a ­journey
across the Alps. Battered but resilient, a mountain was equated to a ­majestic,
­monumental ruin and became a subject of awe, reverence and spiritual
­appreciation. In ­addition to Rosa’s art, early literary evocations of sublime nature
­include Thomas Burnet’s Telluris Theoria Sacra (The Sacred Theory of the Earth),
1681–1689; John Dennis’ account of his 1688 journey in which he equates
mountains to wondrous, terrifying ruins, published in Miscellanies in Verse and
Prose, 1693; Defoe’s An Historical Narrative of the Great and Tremendous Storm
Which ­Happened on Nov. 26th, 1703, 1704; and Addison’s ‘The Pleasures of
the Imagination,’ 1712.93
Avalanches, earthquakes, fires and storms stimulated the eighteenth-century
obsession with ruins. The Great Storm caused havoc on land and at sea, sinking
hundreds of vessels and killing thousands of people. But amidst the devastation,
Defoe ascribes its ‘wonderful effects’ to divine intervention and acknowledges
‘that pleasure may be mixed with terror, and astonishment!’94 Just 15 years after
his account of the Great Storm, Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe, 1719, tied his
protagonist’s fate to the sea, emphasising its overriding importance in the psyche
of an island nation engaged in trade across waters that cover seven-tenths of the
Earth. Seven years earlier, Addison remarked that:

of all the Objects that I have ever seen, there is none which affects my Imagina-
tion so much as the Sea or Ocean. I cannot see the Heavings of this prodigious
Bulk of Waters, even in a Calm, without a pleasing Astonishment; but when it is
worked up in a Tempest, so that the Horizon on very side is nothing but foaming
Billows and floating Mountains, it is impossible to describe the agreeable Horror
that rises from such a Prospect.95

The sublime was an established concept well before Edmund Burke’s ­Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757, but
his achievement was to compile a system that provided a coherent argument
for the sublime. Transforming the analogy of a body to a building, he empha-
sises ­sensations rather than proportions. Undermining the classical ­tradition that
­prioritises harmonious, formal beauty, Burke equates the sublime with darkness,
vastness and even deformity. While the beautiful is merely pleasant, the sublime is
magnificent.96 Its pleasure derives from initial terror and subsequent reassurance:

54
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

‘When danger or pain presses too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight,
and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and certain modifications, they
may be, and they are delightful, as we everyday experience.’97 Furthering the fas-
cination for uncultivated nature, Burke not only identifies the sublime with deso-
late and expansive landscapes that are subject to the drama of natural forces; but
he also attributes it to human constructions, stimulating artistic and architectural
speculations on the sublime. Distinguishing between the natural and the man-
made, he concludes: ‘Designs that are vast only by their dimensions, are always
the sign of a common and low imagination. No work of art can be great, but as
it deceives; to be otherwise is the prerogative of nature only.’98 In response to
Burke’s recognition of the imagination’s sublime potential, Immanuel Kant argues
in Critique of Judgement (1790) that humanity’s ability to remain rational in the
presence of terrifying phenomena is itself sublime.99
The end of the Enlightenment and beginning of romanticism are sometimes
associated with the violent aftermath of the French Revolution in 1789, which
undermined faith in reason and reasonableness. But the limits of reason were
debated throughout the eighteenth century. The industrial revolution in the sec-
ond half of the eighteenth century is also cited as a catalyst for the romantic
appreciation of nature. But the nation’s citizens had experienced London’s intense
pollution at least a hundred years earlier and wild landscapes were appreciated
decades before the focus of production shifted from agriculture to industry.
Rather than distinct and sequential, the Enlightenment and romanti-
cism were evolving and interdependent philosophical traditions evident in the
­eighteenth-century landscape. One reasoned with nature and remained detached
and the other combined the rational and the irrational to eulogise nature as a
means of spiritual self-revelation. Together, they conceived a dynamic world, cher-
ished a mythical past, appreciated life more than the afterlife, promoted personal
liberty and the potential of the imagination and stimulated a fascination for ruins.

Notes

1 Watkin, ‘Built Ruins,’ p. 5. Refer to MacDonald and Pinto, pp. 6–23.

2 MacDonald and Pinto, pp. 195, 60.
3 Vasari, pp. 21–22.
4 Barkan, pp. 127–128, refer to pp. 119–133.
5 Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words, p. 108.
6 Watkin, ‘Built Ruins,’ p. 5. Refer to Lefaivre, p. 23; Macaulay, pp. 15–16.
7 The first part of Colonna’s title—Hypnerotomachia—derives from three Greek words,
hypnos, eros and mache, which respectively mean sleep, love and strife, so that they

55
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

roughly translate as the ‘strife of love in a dream’. The second part—Poliphili—refers to

the principal character, Poliphilo, who has a restless night after being rejected by his
love, Polia. An English translation appeared as The Strife of Love in a Dreame, 1592,
but its influence was limited due to a mediocre translation and poor image quality.
8 Colonna, p. 24.
9 Morgan mentions the agricultural treatises of Cato, Varro and Columella. Morgan, p.
15; refer to pp. 175–176, n. 58
10 Morgan, p. 89.
11 Hunt, Garden and Grove, p. 42; Morgan, p. 5. Refer to Brunon, p. 7.
12 Morgan refers specifically to Sacro Bosco. Morgan, pp. 168, 171.
13 Morgan, pp. 135–163, 171–172; Watkin, ‘Built Ruins,’ pp. 5–6.
14 Brindle, p. 91; Scott, pp. 15–18.
15 Langdon, pp. 9, 65; Whiteley, p. 57; Whitfield, pp. 83–84; Wine, pp. 11–12, 63.
16 Askew, ‘Introduction’, p. 9; Roethlisberger, ‘More Drawings by Claude Lorrain,’ p. 412.
17 Eight of Claude’s works specifically refer to themes taken from Virgil, of which six
belong to the period between 1672 and his death in 1682. Wine, p. 47, refer to
p. 31.
18 Ackerman, The Villa, pp. 39–42; Barrell, pp. 8–9, 36–39; Jankovic, pp. 16–22, 137;
Langdon, pp. 9–13.
19 The name derives from a bare, rocky region of the Peloponnese peninsular. Panofsky,
‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, pp. 299–300. Refer to Ackerman, The Villa, pp. 39–42.
20 Lagerlöf, pp. 6–9, 35; Wine, p. 29.
21 Puttfarken, pp. 201–227; Roethlisberger, ‘The Dimension of Time in the Art of Claude
Lorrain,’ p. 91; Wine, pp. 55–56.
22 Joachim von Sandrart wrote the first account in 1675. Baldinucci, quoted in
­Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain. The Paintings, vol. 1, p. 56.
23 Roethlisberger, ‘The Dimension of Time in the Art of Claude Lorrain,’ pp. 83–84;
­Russell, p. 67; Wine, p. 38.
24 Wine, pp. 21, 52.
25 Roethlisberger, ‘The Dimension of Time in the Art of Claude Lorrain,’ p. 88.
26 Dedication by Claude’s nephews, Jean and Joseph, translated and quoted in Langdon,
p. 157.
27 Roethlisberger, ‘The Dimension of Time in the Art of Claude Lorrain,’ p. 88.
28 Roethlisberger, ‘The Dimension of Time in the Art of Claude Lorrain,’ pp. 88, 73.
29 Chiarini, pp. 20–23; Damisch, pp. 38–39; Langdon, p. 21; Roethlisberger, ‘Claude
Lorrain: Some New Perspectives,’ pp. 47, 78.
30 Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego,’ p. 302.
31 Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego,’ pp. 302–303.
32 Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ p. 304.
33 Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego,’, pp. 309–310.
34 Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego,’ p. 313.
35 Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego,’ pp. 318–319. Refer to Clark, pp. 93–97.
36 Following continental Europe, in 1752 Britain and its colonies introduced the Gregorian
calendar in place of the Julian calendar. Before 1752, New Year’s Day was 25 March

56
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

rather than 1 January. For example, a date that would have been classified as 3 March
1715 in 1752 would have been 3 March 1714 before then.
37 Panofsky does not discuss Claude in his essay ‘Et in Arcadia Ego.’
38 Merchant, p. 2. Refer to Karsten Harries, ‘Building and the Terror of Time,’ p. 59.
39 Bacon, ‘Novum Organum,’ pp. 52–447. Refer to Merchant, pp. 74–75.
40 Adorno and Horkheimer, p. 9, refer to p. xvi.
41 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World, pp. 174, 243, referring to Dobell.
42 Clarence C. Glacken also mentions Sylva and the French Forest Ordinance of 1669,
initiated by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister to Louis XIV. John Croumbie Brown, French
Forest Ordinance of 1669; Evelyn, Sylva, pp. 112–120; Glacken, p. 485. Refer to
Emmons, ‘Architecture before Art,’ pp. 277–280.
43 Evelyn, Fumifugium, pp. 18, 11–13.
44 Evelyn mentions A Discourse on Sympathetic Powder, 1658, in which Kenelm Digby
was probably the first person to attempt an explanation to the detrimental effect of
atmospheric pollution on health, noting that the airways to the lungs are narrowed in
pulmonary diseases. Evelyn, Fumifugium, pp. 3, 28, 34–37.
45 Evelyn, Fumifugium, pp. 47, 49.
46 Evelyn’s enduring fascination for horticulture led him to cultivate an analogy between
the domestic and urban scales, avidly tending his garden at Sayes Court, Deptford,
which included an arbour and medicinal plants, like his proposition for London. ­Evelyn,
‘An Abstract of a Letter’, p. 559, reporting on the winter of 1683. Refer to Jenner,
pp. 544–546.
47 Laird refers to Evelyn’s Elysium Britannicum: or, The Royal Gardens, which Evelyn be-
gan in 1653 but never completed due to its vast scale. It was only published in 2001.
Laird, p. 329.
48 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 1, ch. 1, p. 46. Refer to
Porter, Enlightenment, p. 9.
49 Locke, ‘A Register of the Weather for the Year 1692,’ p. 1919. Refer to Jankovic,
pp. 35–36; Nebeker, p. 11.
50 The chapter ‘Of the Association of Ideas’ appears in the fourth edition of 1700, although
it was written somewhat earlier. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
bk. 2, ch. 33, pp. 394–401. Refer to Ballantyne, ‘First Principles and Ancient Errors,’
pp. 144–145; Forty, Words and Buildings, pp. 208–209; Hunt and Willis, ‘Introduc-
tion,’ pp. 37–38; Taylor, pp. 159–176; and Tuveson, p. 75.
51 Shaftesbury, quoted in Ayres, ‘Introduction,’ p. xiv.
52 The Cambridge Platonists such as Henry More—author of An Antidote Against A ­ theism,
1652, and The Exploration of the Grand Mystery of Godliness, 1660—­informed
­Shaftesbury’s understanding of classical antiquity and spiritual appreciation of nature.
Shaftesbury, The Life, p. 403.
53 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, vol. 1, p. 118.
54 The second edition is dated 1714, but it actually appeared in 1715.
55 Hunt, Greater Perfections, pp. 32–33.
56 Tuveson, p. 11.
57 The Moralist, A Philosophical Rhapsody was written in 1705 and published in 1709.

57
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

58 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, vol. 2, p. 94.

59 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, vol. 2, p. 101.
60 Leatherbarrow, p. 353.
61 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 1, ch. 1, p. 46; bk. 2, ch. 2,
pp. 119–121.
62 Addison, in Addison and Steele, vol. 2, 21, 23 and 25 June 1712, no. 411,
412, 414.
63 Addison also ascribes this attribute to mountains. Addison, in Addison and Steele,
vol. 2, 26 June 1712, no. 415.
64 Addison, in Addison and Steele, vol. 1, 17 July 1711, no. 119.
65 Addison, in Addison and Steele, vol. 2, 25 June 1712, no. 414.
66 Addison, in Addison and Steele, vol. 2, 25 June 1712, no. 414. Refer to Cosgrove,
Geography and Vision, p. 1; Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape,
p. 15.
67 Pope, 30 April 1736, quoted in David Morris, Alexander Pope, p. 208. Refer to Hunt,
‘Landscape Architecture’, pp. 366–367; Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe,
pp. 16–17.
68 Pope, 1713, quoted in Hussey, ‘Introduction,’ p. 21. Refer to Jackson, The Necessity
for Ruins and Other Topics, p. 4; Jackson, ‘The Necessity for Ruins,’ pp. 89–102.
69 Sir William Trumball, in Pope, The Correspondence, vol. 1, pp. 45–46.
70 Pope, quoted in Brownell, p. 144.
71 Pliny, ‘Letter To Gallus,’ translated in Castell, pp. 1–15.
72 Castell, p. 116–117. Refer to Giles Worsley, ‘Taking the Ancients Literally: ­Archaeological
Neoclassicism in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain,’ 1988, unpublished conference ­paper,
quoted to Ayres, Classical Culture, p. 126.
73 The translator was John Dryden.
74 Speck, p. 12. Refer to Edwards, Moore and Archer, p. 104.
75 Barrell, p. 7; Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque, p. 228; David B. Morris, Alexander
Pope, pp. 116–119, 123–125, 130.
76 Thomson, The Seasons, p. 10.
77 Thomson, The Seasons, p. 20, refer to pp. 8–15.
78 Curry, p. 161; Golinski, p. 72; Jankovic, pp. 153–155.
79 Barrell, pp. 36–37.
80 Jeremy Black, Eighteenth-Century Britain, p. 13.
81 Reynolds, quoted in Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego,’ p. 295.
82 Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego,’ pp. 310, 318.
83 Sonnabend, p. 17.
84 Shaftesbury, Second Characters, pp. 139, 157; refer to Manwaring, pp. 17, 65.
85 Hussey, The Picturesque, p. 130; Kames, vol. 2, p. 335; Price, An Essay on the
Picturesque, pp. 186–187; Walpole, The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening,
p. 59; Michael Wilson, William Kent, p. 221.
86 Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, p. 10.
87 Abbé (J. B.) Le Blanc, Lettres de Monsieur Abbé Le Blanc, rev. ed., 1751, quoted in
Coffin, The English Garden, p. 3.

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88 Baudelaire, ‘What is Romanticism?’, p. 53.

89 Rosa, 1662, quoted in Scott, p. 139, refer to pp. 36, 70–71, 139, 223–224.
90 Manwaring, p. 65; Scott, p. 225.
91 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, vol. 2, p. 101. Refer to Scott, p. 225.
92 Morgan, p. 168. For further early precedents for the sublime, refer to Eck, Bussels and
Delbeke, ‘Introduction,’ pp. 1–10.
93 Dennis, p. 139.
94 Defoe, An Historical Narrative of the Great and Tremendous Storm, pp. 49–50. Refer
to Nicolson, pp. 38–43; Wheeler, pp. 419–427.
95 Addison, in Addison and Steele, vol. 3, 20 September 1712, p. 489.
96 Burke genders the sublime as masculine, beauty as feminine. Burke, pp. 39–40,
72–73, 102–104, 144–147, 124. Refer to Perry, pp. 110–112.
97 Burke, pp. 39–40.
98 Burke, p. 76.
99 Kant, part 1, pp. 94–117. Refer to Crowther, p. 52; Wiedman, pp. 25–26.

59
 3
architecture in
ruins
 ar chi t e c t ur e in r uins

Villa and ruin

The early eighteenth century is associated with a significant transformation in

the English landscape when the picturesque came to the fore. As a counter-
point to an austere Palladian villa or pavilion, found or fabricated ruins were a
feature of many estates, offering contrasting temporal metaphors. Rather than
attempt to transcend materiality in the universal geometries of ideal forms, an
alternative design strategy celebrated broken and decayed structures. On the one
hand, the eighteenth century continued to characterise the immaterial as timeless
and distinct from the material, and on the other, it discovered the immaterial in
the material. Associating self-understanding with the experience of objects and
places subject to the weather, the eighteenth century conceived the immaterial
as temporal and experiential not only in the actual absence of matter—material
decay—but also in the perceived absence of matter seen through mist and rain.
A found or fabricated ruin acknowledged the effects of time and place, emphasis-
ing symbiotic relations with its ever-changing immediate and wider contexts and
celebrating the creative influence of natural as well cultural forces. In a signifi-
cant design innovation, the picturesque instigated a more intense, profound and
temporal dialogue with nature. Adopting the ruin as its emblem, the picturesque
stimulated a burgeoning environmentalism with a subtle debt to earlier centuries
and a profound influence on subsequent ones.
In drawing greater attention to the conditions that inform self-­understanding,
the early eighteenth century fundamentally transformed the visual arts, its ob-
jects, authors and viewers. In Britain, the architect associated with disegno
was in its infancy when another appeared alongside it, exemplifying a new
type of design and a new way of designing that valued the ideas and emo-
tions evoked through experience. Although the pleasures and liberties of the
picturesque were limited to the educated and prosperous, notable principles
were established. Rather than refer to universal ideas, forms and proportions,
design could draw forth ideas that were provisional, changeable and dependent
on experience at conception, production and reception. Rather than follow an
inflexible vision, the garden was designed in detailed response to site conditions
and creative adjustments were made during construction. Rather than being
conceived according to the rules of geometry in a distant studio, the garden was
designed the way it was experienced, by a figure moving across a landscape
and imagining future movements while special attention was given to drawings
that explored the relations between site and experience. Kent represented his
garden designs—and often his garden buildings, too—in perspectives, but he

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depicted his building designs in orthogonal drawings. In his letter to Pope Leo X,
c. 1519, Raphael associated the picture with the painter and the plan with
the architect, confirming an opinion earlier expressed by Alberti.1 However, the
heightened value given to experience in the eighteenth century made this dis-
tinction less convincing.
The new design practice focused first on gardens and not on grand buildings,
because they were more clearly subject to time and the changing natural world.
Rather than a complete and timeless object, a garden building was understood
as an incident in an environment with which it conversed. At first, this innovative
and lyrical design practice was specific to the garden and the park, but it soon led
to a much wider engagement with the natural world.

Factual fiction

Combining painterly and literary aspirations, the early eighteenth-century land-

scape was conceived according to ut pictura poesis (as with painting, so also
with poetry), a concept that originated in classical antiquity and acquired con-
temporary resonance due to philosophical and literary advances, such as Locke’s
concern for the association of ideas and its influence on morality. Addison recom-
mended that his readers maintain a diary, extending a literary practice favoured
by Evelyn and Locke, who placed great emphasis on empirical methods that led to
personal development.2 People have written about themselves for millennia, but
the formation of modern identity is associated with a type of writing that Michel
Foucault describes as a ‘technology of the self,’ a process of ­self-­examination by
which moral character and behaviour are constructed and maintained in con-
junction with other social forces.3 Objectivity may be an aspiration, but no diary
is entirely truthful and the diarist must inevitably edit and reinvent life while
reflecting upon it, altering the past as well influencing the future. According to
Paul de Man:

We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its conse-
quences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical
project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer
does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus
determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium?4

Addison and Steele encouraged diary writing, a conversational literary style and
engagement with contemporary culture, but their attempt to direct the course of

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English literature was undermined by a new development they did not foresee. In
valuing direct experience, precise description and a sceptical approach to ‘facts,’
which needed to be repeatedly questioned, the empirical method gave greater
emphasis to the distinction between fact and fiction, creating a fruitful climate in
which the everyday realism of a new literary genre—the novel—could prosper as
‘factual fiction.’5 In contrast to the epic or romance, which incorporated classical
mythologies, the novel concentrated on the lives of everyday people in eighteenth-
century society and the individualism they professed. Empirical description and
analysis was applied to the novel, which emphasised specific times, peoples
and places and sought justification through a combination of reasoned explana-
tion and intuitive experience. The uncertainties and dilemmas of identity were
ripe for narrative account. Countering Locke’s call for moderation and restraint,
subjectivity was exploited for its creative literary potential. Focusing on the fate
of individuals, the early diaries (autobiographical fictions) developed in parallel
with the early novels (fictional autobiographies), in which the author claimed
merely to be the narrator. According to Inger Sigrun Brodey: ‘As architects had
to pose as archaeologists, pretending to have discovered, rather than built, such
“authentic” monuments, authors too pretend to have discovered what they actu-
ally write.’6 Often described as the first English novel, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe, 1719, is a fictional autobiography, as is Defoe’s other famous novel Moll
Flanders, 1722. In each case, the principal character is complex and conflicted
and one voice among others in a changing society.7
Defoe describes Moll Flanders as ‘a private History’ and Roxana, 1724, as
‘laid in Truth of Fact’ and thus ‘not a Story, but a History,’ a claim echoed by other
novelists throughout the eighteenth century.8 History’s uncertain status supported
authors’ claims that the first novels were in fact histories. In the sixteenth ­century,
history’s purpose was to offer useful lessons; accuracy was not necessary. In
subsequent centuries, empiricism’s emphasis on the distinction between fact and
fiction began to transform historical analysis, diminishing the pre-eminence of
ancient literary sources in favour of tangible, verifiable evidence. Rather than
Vasari’s attention to individual achievements, the modern historian employed a
methodical, comparative method to characterise changing cultural, social, po-
litical and economic processes in which the deeds of specific protagonists were
contextualised. But the transformation from one type of history to another was
gradual. Many eighteenth-century histories inherited some of the rhetorical ap-
proach of earlier histories and were not so distinct from novels, implying that the
truth does not always depend on facts alone.9

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The eighteenth century instigated the simultaneous and interdependent

emergence of new art forms that were creative and questioning responses to
empiricism’s detailed investigation of subjective experience and the natural
world: the English novel, the analytical history and the picturesque landscape.
Kent and his patrons probably read the first novels because the authors such
as Defoe and Swift were well known to them. Kent prepared a sketch of the
‘Exorcism of Don Quixote’s Library’, c. 1725, and contributed an illustration
to a 1738 Spanish edition of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don ­Quixote, 1605–1615,
which is often described as the first European novel.10 Self-­reflection trig-
gered fractured narratives, alternative scenarios and myriad ­digressions in
the garden as well as the novel, although the landscape designer emphasised
classical mythologies alongside current events. Conveying new thoughts and
values as well as the contemporary meaning of the ideas, forms and mythol-
ogies of classical antiquity, the picturesque garden was both a novel and a
romance, two genres that sometimes merged in eighteenth-century fiction.11
Equally, the picturesque garden was equivalent to a history, questioning and
reimagining the past in classical reconstructions, antique sculptures and
­Mediterranean trees.
As ancient Rome was a model for Georgian Britain, classical forms were of
contemporary relevance and simultaneously ancient and modern. For an early
eighteenth-century architect or patron, classical buildings in an Arcadian setting
would have conjured associations with the architecture and landscape of ancient
Rome—including those depicted by seventeenth-century painters—translated
and improved for a different time and site. But for many visitors, a picturesque
estate that now seems quintessentially English would also have seemed shock-
ingly new.
Kent designed according to the genius loci, a principle that originated in
classical antiquity. In eighteenth-century England, the genius of the place was
made as much as found: the fusion of new ideas, forms and spaces with those
already in place, which were sometimes the results of earlier migrations. The
picturesque came to fruition in England, but given its precedents in classical an-
tiquity, Chinese landscape drawings and seventeenth-century continental paint-
ings and compatibility with French and German rococo and varied development
internationally, it cannot be described as exclusively English. The hybridisation of
historical and geographical references is characteristic of the picturesque. Indeed,
its diverse origins were appreciated in the eighteenth century and in subsequent
centuries because of their association with liberalism.

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A technology of the self

Many ideas and individuals influenced the gestation of the early eighteenth-­
century picturesque, but Kent was its principal exponent. Born in Yorkshire in
1685, the son of a joiner, Kent had little formal education but his drawing skill
was soon recognised. Supported by various patrons, he left London in 1709 to
study in Italy, remaining there for ten years. Kent travelled widely but spent most
of his time in Rome, where he studied under the painter Giuseppe Chiari, who
he referred to as ‘my master.’12 Chiari was a pupil of Carlo Maratti and both were
indebted to the mature Raphael. An early patron encouraged Kent to be ‘Raphael
secundus’, but he was no more than a capable painter.13 Aware of his friend’s
hedonism, ­humour and greed, Pope later concluded that ‘he must expect not to
imitate ­Raphael in anything but his untimely end.’14
Kent briefly encountered Shaftesbury in 1712 and met Burlington two years
later, to whom he remained close throughout his life. In 1714, Kent began a
visual and textual diary, ‘Remarks by way of Painting & Archit.’, which records
his journeys around Italy.15 Equivalent to a diary, the process of design, from one
drawing to the next iteration and from one project to another, is itself an autobi-
ographical ‘technology of the self’, formulating a design ethos for an individual
or a studio. De Man concludes that the autobiography ‘veils a defacement of the
mind of which it is itself a cause.’16 Having changed his name from Cant, Kent
continued a means of reinvention that Palladio had favoured in which the archi-
tect designs the architect.
The opening pages of Kent’s diary refer to his travels with Coke.17 Given
the liveliness of Kent’s drawings and his friends’ frequent references to his he-
donism, the diary is at first a surprisingly sober account of buildings, paintings
and gardens. Sometimes written in English, at other times in Italian, it includes
small drawings and diagrams in the margins and text. Arriving in Venice on
22 July, Coke and Kent first visit Palladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore, 1565. L
­ eaving
the city on 18 August, Kent separates from Coke’s party at Padua and pro-
ceeds to Vicenza, where he stays just one day. Kent admires Palladio’s Teatro
­Olimpico, 1585, which he illustrates with a tiny plan that identifies the elliptical
seating, empty stage and perspectival street scenes. Elsewhere in the city, he
refers merely to ‘several other palaces’, offering no mention of Palladio’s Villa
Rotonda.18
The most evocative descriptions refer to gardens. At the Medici villa at
­Pratolino, north of Florence, Kent acknowledges ‘a very fine Situation & very
fine Grotos adorn’d with Shells & pietrified stone work with pretty water works a

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 ar chi t e c t ur e in r uins

Andrea Palladio with

Vincenzo Scamozzi, Teatro
Olimpico, Vicenza, 1585.
Courtesy of Architec-
tural Press Archive/RIBA
Collections.

Galatea coming out of her Grotto drawn by Delfini.’19 At the Palazzo Te, he ad-
mires the collapsing columns in the frescoes, remarking that the ‘Room ye Giants
a fighting with ye gods ye finest of all Julio Romanos works,’ and notes that ‘in
grotta at end of ye garden are very fine grottesque.’20 Kent is also known to have
admired the Renaissance gardens at the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati and must
have been a frequent visitor to the gardens of the Villa d’Este, Tivoli, and the Villa
Borghese, Rome.21 His earliest surviving design for a garden building appears in
a 1715 letter to an early patron. Remarking that his design should be ‘agreeable
to our climate,’ Kent was already considering how he could translate his Italian
experiences to a different culture and setting.22
Later in his Italian diary, he excitedly mentions ‘in ye church of St J­ uliano ye
first proof of my painting in fresco’ and turns his attention to artistic techniques: ‘to

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 ar chi t e c t ur e in r uins

William Kent, Italian

Diary (‘Remarks by way
of Painting & Archit’),
1714–1717, fol. 26r. Kent’s
reworking of a drawing in
Giulio Troili, Paradossi per
pratticare la prospettiva,
1683. ­Courtesy of Bodleian
Library, ­University of Oxford.

paint a tempera one egg with white & yolk to-gether & tow eggs of water, after put
stalk of fig leaves, or lemon pel.’23 The most impressive section is the final one,
which contains delicate illustrations of perspective techniques in line and wash.24
Kent refers to two guides, Giulio Troili’s Paradossi per pratticare la ­prospettiva,
1683, and Pietro Accolti’s Lo inganno de gl’occi, Prospettiva p
­ ratica, 1625,
which respectively consider perspective in terms of paradox and deception. In his
diary, Kent copied numerous drawings and quotations from Troili, who was an
expert in quadratura, a specialism of Bologna where Carracci had also worked.
Meaning ‘squaring’ in English, quadratura is a technique to devise and represent
complex spaces on a two-dimensional surface. In frescoes, it was often used to
create the illusion that illustrated architectural elements were part of the built
architecture. Adding to the deception, the painted architecture sometimes framed
a view of painted nature and the light was convincingly depicted.
In the Roman studio of Maratti’s former pupil Benedetto Luti, Kent met Giovanni
Paolo Panini.25 Panini had trained as a quadraturista and stage designer under
Ferdinando Galli Bibiena, an architect and the author of L’architettura civile (Civil
Architecture), 1711, who was born in Bologna and a pupil of Troili. In place of the
single central vanishing point in conventional stage design, Bibiena innovatively ad-
vocated the scena per angolo, which permitted multiple, oblique perspectives and a
resultant, multidirectional spatiality that was suggestive of alternative scenarios and

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 ar chi t e c t ur e in r uins

Giovanni Paolo Panini,

Gallery of Views of Ancient
Rome, 1758. Courtesy of
Louvre, Paris/Bridgeman
Images.

journeys.26 In 1711, Panini moved to Rome. Regarded as an important artist in his

lifetime, his paintings were already being sold in London auctions in 1724. Panini
was admitted into the Accademia di San Luca in 1719, which Federico Zuccari
had founded in 1577 to gather together the most eminent architects, painters and
sculptors, and he later became its Principal. Panini became a member of the French
Academy in Rome in 1732 and was subsequently its Professor of Perspective and
President. Ruins were familiarly depicted in the background of paintings, but Panini
placed them in the foreground. More than any painter before him, ruins were the
subjects of his art. Employing techniques of baroque stage design, Panini depicted
low, oblique vanishing points, the angled sidelight of a setting sun and diminutive
figures to accentuate the ruins’ grandeur.27 Elisabetta Cereghini concludes that Kent
would later apply his knowledge of the quadraturisti to garden designs:

Instead of devising a space based on a single perspective line, along which the
eye of the spectator travelled from a fixed viewpoint in a formally organized se-
quence (as in the Baroque garden), Kent adopted a technique based on the
use of oblique perspectives comprised of two or more axial lines converging from
points outside the ‘scene’, which no longer corresponded with the line of vision of
the spectator. This prompted the spectator to seek out viewpoints independently
rather than be confined to any single perspective prescribed by the architect.28

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As his sketchbooks are lost, Kent’s diary only gives a partial impression of his
time in Italy, covering just a few years and focusing on his travels rather than
his studies in Rome. He mentions many painters in his diary, including Carracci,
Domenichino, Guercino, Maratti, Raphael, Titian, Veronese, Antonio da ­Corregio,
Pietro da Cortona and Luca Giordano.29 Kent also admired Rosa, Poussin and
Claude, who he had an opportunity to study in the 1720s when William Caven-
dish, second Duke of Devonshire, acquired Claude’s Liber Veritatis for the l­ibrary
of his London residence, Devonshire House, which was close to Burlington
House, where Kent resided after his return to England in 1719.30 Keen to expose
imitations that began to appear in the 1630s, Claude prepared a complete cata-
logue of his sold works, with each painting recorded in a corresponding drawing
in Liber Veritatis. The opportunity to study Claude in detail was timely because
Kent was soon to acquire his first garden commissions.

More than picturesque

Meaning ‘in the manner of painters’ and suggesting a method of laying on paint
in bold and irregular strokes to depict not simply a detailed copy of nature but
something closer to the experience of nature, the term ‘picturesque’ was first ap-
plied to paintings and only later to gardens.31 William Shenstone mentions Kent’s
‘picturesque gardening’ in ‘Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening,’ 1764, while
Henry Home, Lord Kames, in Elements of Criticism, 1762, and Horace ­Walpole
in The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, 1771, remark that Kent’s gar-
dens are composed like paintings.32 For eighteenth-century advocates of the
picturesque, garden design’s status as an art depended on its relations with land-
scape painting.33 But in the opening line of Observations on Modern Gardening,
Illustrated by Descriptions, 1770, Thomas Whately writes that ‘GARDENING, in
the perfection to which it has been lately brought in England, is entitled to a place
of considerable rank among the liberal arts. It is as superior to landskip painting,
as a reality to a representation.’34 Later, he adds that paintings ‘must be only used
as studies, not as models’ for gardens.35
The picturesque is a deceptive term because it emphasises one aspect of
the eighteenth-century garden to the detriment of its other qualities such as the
importance of the senses and the seasons to design, experience, understanding
and the imagination. The association with painting is relevant, but references to
­open-air theatres and other settings for human discourse and action are as impor-
tant. Whether a woodland glade or a curving hillside, many of Kent’s garden draw-
ings show nature in the form of a stage, recalling the amphitheatres of classical

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antiquity and the close association of gardens and theatres in Renaissance Italy
and Claude’s paintings. The roles of actor and spectator were interchangeable
in Kent’s gardens, as they were when actors and spectators danced together at
the end of Jones’ court masques, which were also indebted to Italian gardens
and a further influence on Kent. Frequently incorporating ruins, the landscapes
depicted in Jones’ masques conform to a classicised Bril, who was coming under
­Carracci’s influence when the architect made his last visit to Rome in 1614.36
The picturesque garden is more than a painting or a play in that it is ex-
perienced not in a concentrated time period but in motion and over days and
seasons, linking appreciation of the changing natural world to journeys in self-­
understanding. In classicism, the gaze and the body follow the same path. But
in the picturesque, they diverge. The eye is drawn to a distant object, but the
path is not direct or singular. Immersion within a garden stimulates a questioning
attitude to vision in which self-reflective viewers perceive themselves viewing and
observe others doing the same, so that their experiences are both personal and
social. The picturesque draws attention to the problems as well as the pleasures
of vision, which is no more than ‘intelligent guesswork’ ‘from limited sensory
evidence,’ writes Richard Gregory. Consequently, informed by memory, ‘percep-
tions are hypotheses. This is suggested by the fact that retinal images are open
to an infinity of interpretations.’37 What we see is affected by what we touch,
feel, taste, smell and hear. Even when the garden visitor is static, physical and
perceptual movement is implicit, because any previous or subsequent journey is
understood in relation to other potential journeys and is but one part of a complex
and changeable whole in which the past, present and future collide.

England in ruins

Celebrating the history, landscape and climate of an island nation in which in-
cessant rain, strong winds and frequent frost damage stimulate decay, the ruin
provided a dialectical means to negotiate between culture and nature and was
synonymous with the fluctuating fate of the nation. Enveloping vegetation nat-
uralised and affirmed the ruin, equating architecture to an enduring geological
formation. But nature was also a means of architecture’s destruction. Evoking
life and death in a single object, the ruin of a building was linked to the ruin of a
person or a place as well as their potential for survival and renewal.
Few classical ruins survived from the Roman occupation, but gothic ruins
were familiar because, beginning in 1536, the Dissolution of Monasteries had
disbanded religious houses and transferred their assets to the English monarch

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Henry VIII, leading to the sale or destruction of many buildings. Some monaster-
ies were turned into houses while others were scavenged for building materials.
A playwright before he became an architect, John Vanbrugh conceived archi-
tecture for dramatic effect. In 1709, anticipating picturesque theory later in the cen-
tury, he argued that the medieval remains of ‘ancient Woodstock’ manor should be
retained for their historical association and visual impact when seen from ­Blenheim
Palace, then being constructed for John Churchill, first Duke of M
­ arlborough. To-
gether, the ruins and their setting ‘wou’d make One of the Most Agreeable Objects
that the best of Landskip Painters can invent.’38 Clearly unappreciative, Sarah,
Duchess of Marlborough, dismissed Vanbrugh’s request as ‘ridiculous.’39
Pope’s design for the 1745 frontispiece to his An Essay on Man, 1733–1734,
depicts a seated figure surrounded by broken and overgrown structures of ancient
Rome, which are means to contemplate morality and mortality. Pope imagined the
future decline of his poetry, recognising ‘that time would inevitably render his dic-
tion obscure, his allusions uncertain, his topical references impenetrable,’ writes
David B. Morris.40 But Pope also acknowledged the creative association of the ruin
with the fragment and the recuperative potential of ruination and decay: ‘See dying
vegetables life sustain, / See life dissolving vegetate again: / All forms that perish
other forms supply.’41 While he was preparing An Essay on Man, Pope remarked:
‘I have many fragments which I am beginning to put together.’42 According to
Morris: ‘Unlike other poems which begin in such a piecemeal fashion, An Essay
on Man never completely loses the fragmentary nature of its origin. As Pope’s
frontispiece reminds us, fragments are the natural setting of the philosophical
mind.’43 An Essay on Man was indebted to Bacon, who appreciated ­‘Aphorisms’
that ‘representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to enquire farther.’44
Pope advocated classical references in architecture, landscape and litera-
ture. But in 1721, in conjunction with Allen Bathurst, first Earl of Bathurst, he
designed the first purpose-built gothic ruin in England, King Alfred’s Hall deep
within the woods of his friend’s Cirencester estate. A few years later, Bathurst and
Pope were delighted when a visiting antiquarian assumed it to be a genuine his-
torical relic.45 Adding to this fascination in New Principles of Gardening, 1728,
Batty Langley suggests the fabricated classical ruin as a garden monument and
includes illustrations based on Jakob von Sandrart’s views of Rome, 1685, to
support his proposition for:

Ruins of Buildings, after the old Roman Manner, to terminate such walks that end in
disagreeable Objects; which Ruins may be either painted upon Canvas, or actually
built in that Manner with Brick, and cover’d with Plaistering in Imitation of Stone.46

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 ar chi t e c t ur e in r uins

William Kent, The Vale

of Venus, Rousham,
1737–1741. Courtesy of
Charles Cottrell-Dormer.

The ruin and the multiple perspectives came to dominate the picturesque
because they refer to temporal experiences, the choices open to individuals
and the effects of nature and chance upon art and life. One of Kent’s signifi-
cant design skills was to create a subtle dialogue between a garden structure
and a setting so that each visitor seems to discover them for the first time,
concealed and then framed by nature. At Rousham in Oxfordshire, he created
an intimate garden in which distinct spaces, dense planting and varied routes
provide contrasting areas of light and shadow, and erotic love and mortal
decay are the principal themes. Kent and his client General James Dormer
owned several copies of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and many of Kent’s py-
ramidal buildings were based on illustrations in Colonna’s book.47 In 1738,
Kent remarked that even though Dormer had severe ‘Goute he is still bronzo
mad.’48 A statue—probably of Antinous, Hadrian’s lover who was deified after
his death—terminates the Long Walk as it opens onto the Vale of Venus.49 The
serpentine rill in the Watery Walk leads to the Cold Bath and the Grotto, which
was associated with Proserpina, the abducted wife of Pluto, the ruler of the
underworld who presided over the afterlife.50 Kent had originally wanted Peter
Scheemaker’s sculpture Dying Gladiator to be mounted on a sarcophagus, an
emphatic reference to Dormer’s declining health, who died in 1741 just as
the garden was completed.
Addison imagined an estate as a garden, but Horace Walpole remarked that
it was Kent who ‘leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden.’51 To
the west, he constructed a ha-ha, a sunken ditch, to separate lawns from fields

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 ar chi t e c t ur e in r uins

William Kent, Rousham,

­1737–1741. ­Detail
of ­Antinous at the end of the
Long Walk. ­Courtesy of
­Jonathan Hill.

William Kent, Rousham,

1737–1741. Watery Walk
and Cold Bath. Courtesy of
Jonathan Hill.

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 ar chi t e c t ur e in r uins

William Kent, Rousham,

1737–1741. Detail of Peter
Scheemaker’s sculpture,
Dying Gladiator. Courtesy of
Jonathan Hill.

but maintain their visual connection. Recalling Claude, Kent moulded the slop-
ing site and planted trees to frame views from the enclosed lawns and glades
to the open fields beyond the ambling curve of the River Cherwell to the north.
An inhabited eye-catcher in a nearby field, the Temple of the Mill was based
on an earlier cottage, which Kent’s additions give the impression of a partially
ruined medieval monastery transformed into a house, with two arched side but-
tresses supporting broken stumps of roughly hewn stone. Further to the west,
he realigned the road to reveal Heyford Bridge, which partly dates from the
thirteenth century. Emphasising General Dormer’s military campaigns, a further
eye-catcher, the Triumphal Arch, is silhouetted on a distant ridge to the east.
Recalling an ancient Roman tradition but with a pointed profile, it confidently
combines the classical and the gothic, which the victors of 1688 understood to
be their dual political and cultural heritage.
In ‘Of the Seasons’, the final chapter in Observations on Modern Garden-
ing, Whately argues that gardens must be designed for the weather’s ‘transitory
effects’ and those that are more predictable: ‘The seasons thus become sub-
jects of consideration in gardening … Different parts may thus be adapted to
different seasons; and each in its turn will be in perfection.’52 Just as each sea-
son has its particular pleasures, so do the seasons of a life. One of Rousham’s

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 ar chi t e c t ur e in r uins

William Kent, The Temple of

the Mill and the Triumphal
Arch beyond the Gardens,
Rousham, 1737–1741.
Courtesy of Charles
Cottrell-Dormer.

principal themes—the cycles of life and death—is explicit in the iconography

of garden monuments, tangible in plants and trees and apparent in sculptures
and buildings as they decay and stain, accumulating lichen and moss. The
hunched figure and discarded sword of the Dying Gladiator refer to impending
death, and the sculpture slowly ages as it accumulates a covering of living
vegetation. In 1750, two years after Kent’s death, John Macclary, wrote to the
General’s heirs, enticing them to visit Rousham while the garden was most
verdant and thus on the cusp of decay. By then Rousham’s steward, he was
previously its gardener, responsible for implementing Kent’s abundant planting
instructions:

In one of the noblest Green Serpentine Walks, that was ever seen, or even made,
view narrowly as you walk along, and youl perhaps see, a greater veriaty of ever-
greens, and Flowering Shrubs, then you can posably see in any one walk in the
World, at the end of this walk stands a four Seat Forrist Chair, where you set down
and view what, and where, you have walked a long, their you see the deferant
sorts of Flowers, peeping through the deferant sorts of Flowers, peeping through
the deferant sorts of Evergreens, here you think the Laurel produces a Rose, the
Holly a Syringa, the Yew a Lilac, and the sweet Honeysuckle is peeping out from
every Leafe, in short they are so mixt together, that youd think every Leafe of the
Evergreens, produced one flower or a nother’.53

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 ar chi t e c t ur e in r uins

William Kent, Elysian Fields,

Stowe, c.1735. The bust of
John Locke in the Temple of
British Worthies. Courtesy
of Jonathan Hill.

Just as the daily weather was part of a larger weather pattern, the ­eighteenth-
century garden was a means to engage the social as well as the self. History, pol-
itics, love and death were all represented and discussed among garden glades. A
member of a leading Whig family and, like Dormer, once a general in the Duke of
Marlborough’s army, Richard Temple, first Viscount Cobham, conceived Stowe—
the grandest early eighteenth-century English garden—as a political and cultural
statement. In Kent’s Elysian Fields, which is named after the paradise dedicated
to the heroes of classical antiquity, the Grotto provides sylvan, watery views from
its dark, damp interior. Nearby, the Temple of British Worthies is reminiscent of
a semi-circular Roman shrine, with a pyramid at its centre and busts of Whig
heroes such as Bacon, Locke and Pope to the sides. On the rear elevation of the
Temple of British Worthies, a stone carving extols the exemplary virtues of Signor
Fido. Only at the end of the inscription is it apparent that the subject of such
praise is a dog.

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Villains also featured in Stowe’s Elysian Fields, which was indebted to one
of Addison’s essays in The Tatler. Comparing temples discovered on an imagi-
nary woodland walk, he writes that the elegant ‘Temple of Virtue … was planted
on each side with laurels, which were intermixed with marble trophies, carved
pillars, and statues of lawgivers, heroes, statesmen, philosophers, and poets.’ In
contrast, the poorly built ‘Temple of Vanity’ ‘stood upon so weak a foundation,
that it shook with every wind that blew’ and ‘was filled with hypocrites, pedants,
free-thinkers, and prating politicians.’54 Kent’s pristine Temple of Ancient Virtue,
c. 1736–1737, was one of the first attempts to precisely recreate a British copy
of an ancient classical building, the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli. The adjacent Temple
of Modern Virtue was built as a gothic ruin and housed a headless sculpture of
Walpole, who Cobham opposed when he was a government minister, implying
Britain’s moral decline under the prime minister. The two Temples suggest distinct
hierarchies—the pristine above the ruined and the classical above the gothic—but
it is more accurate to understand their relations as dialectical. As a young man on
the Grand Tour in Rome, Addison had observed ‘Buildings the most magnificent
in the world, and Ruins more magnificent than they.’55 At Stowe as at Rousham,
there was a desire to draw inspiration from classical and medieval cultures. The
Temple of British Worthies includes busts of King Alfred and the Black Prince, and
James Gibb’s Temple of Liberty, c. 1748, is gothic, which was associated with
the north and not the south and nature more than culture, emphasising an island
nation’s historical independence.
Recognising the value of his Italian experience to his English reputation, Kent
scattered Italian terms and phrases throughout his letters and was happily known
as ‘Signor,’ ‘Giuglielmo,’ ‘Kentino.’ In January 1720, barely a month after return-
ing to England, he complained that his ‘Italian constitution’ could not endure the
winter weather of ‘this Gothick country.’56 But his remark was largely in jest,
given his enthusiasm for gothic. Teasingly, Pope even called Kent a ‘wild goth,’
alluding to his northern upbringing.57 Kent’s enthusiasm for gothic was expressed
in his long-held admiration for Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, 1595, an
Elizabethan poem that recalled the epic narratives of classical antiquity but fea-
tured chivalrous medieval knights rather than ancient Greek heroes. Most likely
introduced to the poem by Pope, Kent reportedly acquired ‘his taste in Gardening
from reading the picturesque descriptions of Spenser.’58 Depicting scenes from
The Faerie Queene, Francesco Sleter’s murals decorated the interiors of two of
Kent’s pavilions at Stowe—the Temple of Venus and the Hermitage—and Kent’s
32 illustrations for a new edition of Spenser’s poem emphasised his fascination
for the gothic alongside the classical.59

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William Kent, Richmond

Hermitage, 1731. Section
drawn by John Vardy
in William Kent, Some
Designs of Mr. Inigo Jones
and Mr. ­William Kent,
1744. Courtesy of RIBA
Collections.

William Kent, Arcadian

Hermitage with Satyr and
Shepherdess, c. 1730.
Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London.

Concern for a primitive life in nature generated a fashion for the hermit
and the hermitage as a place of play and display. Completed in 1731 to Kent’s
design, the Richmond Hermitage—a Greek cross in plan—contained a central
octagonal room culminating in a dome and oculus, which was furnished with
comfortable couches and incorporated arched niches with busts of British he-
roes such as Locke and Newton. A section shows two elegant side rooms, one
with a decorative tent and the other with an elaborate bookcase.60 In contrast,

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the exterior, similar to the Stowe Hermitage, was faced in roughly hewn stone
and placed low on its site without a plinth or steps. In one of Kent’s design
sketches for the Richmond Hermitage, c.1730, a grove of trees frames a rustic
building, which has the inscription ‘Arcadia’ carved above the keystone. In the
foreground, a satyr kneels before a shepherdess who may be Queen Caroline,
wife of George II, who commissioned the building. In a 1738 engraving of the
Richmond ­Hermitage, the exterior is more ruinous, with the rear pediment sig-
nificantly broken. A contemporary observer described the building as ‘a heap of
stones thrown into a very artful disorder, and curiously embellished with moss
and shrubs,’ and representative of ‘rude Nature.’61 The exterior’s archaic primi-
tivism may refer to the dialogue between artifice and nature that Kent observed
in Italy, notably in the work Raphael and his pupil Guilio Romano, or it may
suggest a crude classicism of the north in contrast to that of the south. Alter-
natively, Hunt suggests that the Hermitage’s ruined façade, rough stonework
and sunken appearance ‘all implied a more’ gothic and ‘British ancestry, which
the ­politico-philosophical message of course underlined,’ concluding that the
­Hermitage ‘announced, as do all ruins, the determining effects and contributions
of nature and chance rather than art.’62
The term ‘ruin’ is derived from the Latin ruina and ruere, meaning to fall
or collapse. But by the eighteenth century, its connotations were more complex
and positive. The concern for ruination came to fruition due to empiricism’s
detailed observation of life and death in plants and creatures, the attention to
subjective experience and fragmented identity in an increasingly secular society,
the heightened historical awareness in the Enlightenment’s concern for origins
and archaeology and the value given to nature, time and the imagination in the
picturesque and romanticism. The temporal appeal of ruins is subtle and com-
plex because they ‘are emblematic of both transience and persistence,’ writes
Wu Hung.63 Diminishing objects physically, ruination was understood to ex-
pand architecture’s metaphorical potential, triggering reflections on the past and
the future: ‘for imperfection and obscurity are their properties; and to carry the
imagination to something greater than is seen, their effect,’ concluded What-
ely in 1770.64 In the early eighteenth century, whether in a painting, a novel
or a garden building, the unfinished and the fragmented were means to both
stimulate and question the author and invigorate and challenge the reader or
the viewer’s imagination. The ruin draws attention to what is absent and was
once whole, and implies a possible return to that condition. Alternatively, the
ruin is a precursor to innovation and change. In revealing not only what is lost,
but also what is incomplete, the ruin indicates that the present situation is not

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inevitable and implies an alternative future. Relating the present to a particular

past—imagined or real—the ruin can evoke a lost idyll that will never be re-
peated, transfer gravitas and authority from one era to another or imply that the
successes of today will surpass those of yesterday. A hybrid of architecture and
landscape and nature and culture, the ruin represents the unfinished as well as
the undone, growth as well as decay, potential as well as loss and the future as
well as the past.

Notes

1 Raphael, p. 188; Alberti, p. 34. Refer to Carpo, pp. 17–19.

2 Beginning in the late sixteenth century and increasing by the 1640s, devout Christians,
especially Protestants, prepared diaries in which they assessed their daily spiritual pro-
gress. Webster, p. 50.
3 Foucault mentions ‘four types of technologies’ that ‘hardly ever function separately’:
technologies of production, sign systems, power and the self. Foucault, ‘On the Gene-
alogy of Ethics,’ p. 369; Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self,’ pp. 18–19.
4 De Man, p. 69.
5 Davis, p. 213. Refer to Watt, p. 62.
6 Brodey, p. 117.
7 Bellamy, p. 193; Downie, pp. 30–45; Guilhamet, pp. 198–200; McKeon, pp. 2–3;
Watt, p. 63.
8 Defoe, Moll Flanders, p. 3; Defoe, Roxana, p. 21.
9 Garnham, pp. 1–10; Hawes, pp. 64–67.
10 Richietti, pp. 15–18; Savage, ‘Kent as Book Illustrator,’ pp. 430, 436.
11 Scott Black, ‘Romance Redivivus,’ p. 247.
12 Kent, letter to Burrell Massingberd, 24 November 1714, quoted in Michael Wilson,
­William Kent, p. 252. Refer to Brindle, pp. 91, 95, 105, n. 30; Cereghini, p. 320;
John Harris, William Kent, p. 4; Hunt, William Kent, p. 11; Jourdain, p. 30; Mowl,
pp.­  29–30; Sicca, ‘The Making and Unmaking of John Talman’s Collection of D ­ rawings’,
pp. 43–44; Sicca, ‘On William Kent’s Roman Sources,’ p. 136; Michael Wilson, William
Kent, pp. 12, 252.
13 Burrell Massingberd, draft letter to Kent, 5 July 1714, quoted in Mowl, p. 46.
14 Pope, quoted in John Harris, William Kent, p. 2.
15 The diary continues into 1715 and briefly mentions 1717. Kent, ‘Remarks by way of
Painting & Archit.’, ff. 1–36.
16 De Man, p. 81.
17 Listing all his master’s expenses, including over 70 while they were in Venice, Edward
Jarrett, Coke’s treasurer and valet, provided an alternative account of their journey with
a slightly different chronology. Jarrett, ‘Account of Thomas Coke’s Grand Tour’. Refer to
James, p. 189.
18 Kent, ‘Remarks by way of Painting & Archit.,’ f. 13.

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19 Kent, ‘Remarks by way of Painting & Archit.,’ f. 3.

20 Kent, ‘Remarks by way of Painting & Archit.,’ f. 14.
21 Brindle, p. 100; Hunt, William Kent, p. 26; Sicca, ‘On William Kent’s Roman Sources,’
p. 140.
22 Kent, letter to Burrell Massingberd, 12 October 1715, quoted in Hunt, William Kent,
p. 140.
23 Kent refers to his principal painting commission in Rome, the ceiling of San Giuliano del
Fiamminghi, a baroque church designed by Antonio Maria Borioni, one of Gian Lorenzo
Bernini’s assistants. Kent, ‘Remarks by way of Painting & Archit.’, f. 24.
24 Kent, ‘Remarks by way of Painting & Archit.,’ ff. 25–36.
25 Panini is sometimes referred to as Pannini. Cereghini, p. 320.
26 Mayor, ‘The Bibiena Family,’ pp. 35–37.
27 Marshall, p. 140; Rykwert, The First Moderns, p. 110; Wixom and Linsey, p. 263;
Wunder, p. 54.
28 Cereghini, p. 320.
29 As well as painting on his own, Annibale Carracci collaborated with his brothers
­Agostino and Ludovico, who Kent mentions. Kent, ‘Remarks by way of Painting &
Archit.,’ f. 5.
30 John Harris, ‘Architectural and Ornamental Draftsman’, p. 155; John Harris, ‘­William
Kent’s Drawings at Yale,’ pp. 143–144; John Harris, William Kent, p. 13; Hunt,
­William Kent, pp. 41–42; Kitson, p. 29. Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain. The Paintings,
vol. 1, p. 37.
31 The first French reference to the picturesque appears in Roger de Piles’ codification
of pictorial order Cours de peinture par principes, 1708, which was translated into
­English as The Principles of Painting, 1743.
32 Shenstone, quoted in Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe, p. 26; Kames, vol. 2,
p. 327; Walpole, The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, pp. 43–44.
33 The term ‘landscape’ initially referred to land managed and cultivated by an agrarian
community. Expanding its meaning, by the sixteenth century it also referred to a picture
of nature and in the eighteenth century it was further applied to a prospect of actual
nature.
34 Whately, p. 1.
35 Whately, p. 147.
36 Peacock, pp. 174–177, 314–322.
37 Gregory, p. 5, 10. Refer to Harrison, p. 215.
38 Vanbrugh, pp. 231–232.
39 Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, quoted in Vanbrugh, p. 232.
40 Morris refers to Pope’s satirical poem The Dunciad, which was first published
a­ nonymously in 1728 and appeared in its complete, expanded form in 1743.
­
David B. ­Morris, Alexander Pope, p. 275.
41 Pope, An Essay on Man, quoted in David B. Morris, Alexander Pope, pp. 174–175.
42 Pope, 6 December 1730, quoted in David B. Morris, Alexander Pope, p. 165.
43 Pope, An Essay on Man, 1745 frontispiece, quoted in David B. Morris, Alexander
Pope, p. 165.

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44 Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 1605, quoted in David B. Morris, Alexander

Pope, p. 165, refer to pp. 166–172.
45 Batey, Alexander Pope, pp. 47–48; David B. Morris, Alexander Pope, pp. 157–159.
46 Langley, pp. 193, xv. Refer to Watkin, ‘Built Ruins’, pp. 8–9.
47 Brindle, p. 109, no. 145; Gordon, pp. 71–72.
48 Kent, letter to Burlington, 28 November 1738, quoted in Tipping, p. 209.
49 In an unpublished analysis of Rousham written in 1902, Frances Elizabeth Cottrell
­Dormer refers to the statue as Antinous, implying that the family accepts this attribu-
tion. It has also been suggested that the statue is of Apollo or Mercury. Cottrell Dormer,
p. 38. Refer to Coffin, ‘The Elysian Fields of Rousham,’ pp. 416–418; Hunt, ‘Verbal
and Visual Meanings in Garden History,’ p. 179; Mowl, p. 241; William White, letter to
Sir Clement Cottrell, quoted in Gordon, p. 65; William White, letter to General ­Dormer,
29 November 1739, quoted in Müller, p. 185; William White, quoted in Gordon,
p. 102; Michael Wilson, William Kent, p. 214; Woodbridge, p. 289.
50 ‘Letter from John Macclary’, 1750, in Batey, ‘The Way to View Rousham by Kent’s
Gardener,’ pp. 127–132.
51 Addison, in Addison and Steele, vol. 2, 25 June 1712, no. 414; Walpole, The History
of the Modern Taste in Gardening, p. 43.
52 Whately, pp. 245, 242–243.
53 Clary is sometimes referred to as MacClary or Macclary, his original surname, which
he shortened when he realised that Clary was the surname of a seventeenth-century
landowner at nearby Steeple Aston. ‘Letter From John Macclary,’ in Batey, ‘The Way
to View Rousham by Kent’s Gardener,’ p. 129. Refer to Buck, pp. 132–136; Hunt,
‘Landscape Architecture,’ p. 382.
54 Addison, vol. 4, The Tatler, 21 January 1709, no. 123, pp. 131–133. Refer to
­Woodward, ‘Catalogue’, p. 19; John Martin Robinson, Temples of Delight, pp. 86–87.
55 Addison, quoted In Nicolson, p. 319.
56 Kent, 30 January 1720, quoted in Hunt, William Kent, p. 51.
57 Pope, quoted in Batey, Alexander Pope, p. 103.
58 William Mason, The English Garden, 1811, quoted in Batey, Alexander Pope, p. 103.
59 Thomas Birch’s 1751 edition of Spenser’s poem was published three years after Kent’s
death.
60 Kent, Some Designs of Mr. Inigo Jones and Mr. William Kent, p. 33.
61 Caleb D’Anvers (a pseudonym for Nicholas Amhurst) or Henry St John, first Viscount
Bolingbroke, 1735, quoted in Hunt, ‘Landscape Architecture,’ p. 374.
62 Hunt, William Kent, pp. 64–65.
63 Wu, p. 21.
64 Whately, p. 131. Refer to Hetzler, pp. 51–55; Simmel, ‘The Ruin’, pp. 256, 262.

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 4
speaking ruins
 sp e ak in g r uins

Architetto veneziano

The fascination for ruins developed through a dialogue between disciplines

and nations. Painters informed philosophers, writers stimulated ­architects
and Italy inspired Grand Tourists. The influence of British empiricism on
­eighteenth-century European thought was extensive, stimulating a­ ppreciation
of nature and its relations with architecture. The principal texts of Locke,
­Shaftesbury, Burke, Kames and Whately were translated into French and
­German soon after they first appeared in English. But just as Kent was the
principal exponent of the early eighteenth-century picturesque, Giovanni
­Battista Piranesi was largely responsible for the fascination for ruins coming
to fruition as a design practice.
Styling himself architetto veneziano, Piranesi emphasised that he was first
an architect, even though he built little and a Venetian even when in Rome.
In Venice, he had studied Palladian architecture with Matteo Lucchesi (his
uncle) and Giovanni Scalfarotto, who were colleagues in the Magistrato della
acque, the state organisation responsible for Venetian sea defences, and thus
conscious of parallels with the monumental public structures of ancient Rome.1
Piranesi acquired an understanding of Roman history from his elder brother,
a Carthusian monk, and studied etching and perspective with Carlo Zucchi.
Within this cultural milieu, he was aware of the influence of the Venetian Carlo
Lodoli and the Neapolitan Giambattista Vico, who were indebted to ‘their com-
mon master, Francis Bacon,’ writes Joseph Rykwert.2 Lodoli advocated ancient
Roman architecture, rational ornamentation and the English landscape garden.
Equally appreciative of ancient Rome, Vico exemplified a newly analytical at-
tention to history and also recognised imagination as a means to understand
the past in Scienza nuova, which was first published in 1725 and revised in
1730 and 1744. Cultural exchange with Vienna ensured the impact on Venice
of Fischer von Erlach’s comparative compendium Entwurff, Einer Historischen
Architectur, 1721, which includes detailed archaeological reconstructions and
his own designs.
More than any other eighteenth-century Italian city, Venice successfully en-
couraged cultural tourism, developing a strong trade in the veduta and capriccio,
of which Piranesi became a skilled exponent. Rather than distinct, these two
techniques—the documentary record of an existing site and the imaginary juxta-
position of diverse architectural and archaeological forms—were creatively interde-
pendent. The capriccio’s popularity was partially indebted to Hypernerotomachia

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Poliphili, 1499, which was published in Venice, where its author Colonna was
a resident. Referring to the Venetian ‘tradition of ruins in a landscape,’ Peter
Murray remarks that one of Colonna’s woodcut illustrations, depicting receding
layers of broken arches and columns among lush vegetation, ‘explains a lot about
­Piranesi.’3 Two centuries after Colonna, Marco Ricci and Canaletto were influen-
tial in Venice, while Panini was the most noted exponent of the capriccio in the
first half of the eighteenth century.
Piranesi studied stage design with Giuseppe and Domenico Valeriani, who
admired Bibiena, Troili’s pupil and Panini’s tutor. One of Piranesi’s most in-
fluential drawing series, the Carceri, were begun in 1745, first published in
1750 and reissued in 1761, considerably reworked. Employing diagonal stair-
cases to accentuate multiple, oblique perspectives, the Carceri were indebted
to Bibiena, Filippo Juvarra and baroque stage design in general, in which a
prison scene was a familiar theme. Allowing forms to collide, wrap and frame
one another, Piranesi depicted huge arches, massive buttresses and circular
openings in dark, dramatic shadows. Such impressive skill led him to boast
to Pope Clement XIII: ‘It is as easy for me to engrave a plate as it is for Your
Holiness to give a benediction.’4

Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Carceri, 1761. Courtesy of
RIBA Collections.

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Una nouva architettura antica

Piranesi first visited Rome in 1740, aged 20, as a draughtsman accompanying the
Venetian Ambassador’s delegation to Pope Benedict XIV, and soon studied engraving
and etching there with Giuseppe Vasi.5 Making his intentions clear, he incised the
graffito ‘Piranesi 1741’ into Hadrian’s Villa, which received far more antiquarian, archi-
tectural and artistic attention in the eighteenth century than before. In 1747, Piranesi
made Rome his permanent base and frequently returned to Hadrian’s Villa, preparing
preliminary sketches for vedute that emphasised the grandeur of both massive archi-
tecture and brooding, entangled vegetation. In the 1750s, he began to survey the site
with the assistance of Robert Adam and Charles-Louis Clérisseau, among others. In
1765, a further graffito highlights the labour required: ‘G. B. Piranesi restudied these
ruins to discover and draw the plan … an almost impossible task because of the great
exertion and suffering it entailed.’6 Piranesi converted a small ruin—a tomb—into
his living quarters for extended visits as he was preparing a substantial account of
the Villa, which was unfinished at his death.7 Piranesi’s decision to live on site was
practical, but it also indicated the poetic potential of an inhabited, monumental ruin.
Continuing Piranesi’s work, his son Francesco published the impressive 1:1000 plan
of Hadrian’s Villa in 1781, which covers six sheets with a total length of over three
metres.8 Piranesi’s analysis of the site surpassed all previous attempts, establishing
him as its most influential interpreter and advocate.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Vedute di Roma, 1770.
Great Baths at Hadrian’s
Villa, Tivoli. Courtesy of RIBA
Collections.

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If Watkin is correct in speculating that Hadrian conceived his Villa as a ruin,

its eighteenth-century admirers observed a ruin of a ruin, doubling its signifi-
cance. According to Palladio, the ancient Roman ruins’ primary purpose was
to facilitate drawn and built reconstructions. But Piranesi appreciated ruins as
ruins. And more than anyone else, he stimulated the principle that a building can
be designed and constructed as a ruin. Recalling the title of Giuseppe ­Bibiena’s
Architetture e prospettive, 1740, Piranesi’s first publication, Prima parte di ar-
chitetture e prospettive, (First Part of Architectures and Perspectives), 1743,
consists not of diligent reconstructions of ancient monuments but works of the
imagination inspired by ancient ruins, in which he remarks: ‘these speaking ruins
have filled my spirit with images that accurate drawings, even such as those of
the immortal Palladio, could never have succeeded in conveying, though I always
kept them before my eyes.’9 Most of the plates illustrate intact buildings but the
first—the title page—depicts ruins, the catalyst to Piranesi’s architectural imag-
ination. A broken, leaning stone tablet is inscribed with the publication title and
name of the author and surrounded by ruined structures partially covered with
vegetation. When Piranesi later expanded Prima parte, he included more images
of ruined buildings than intact ones, indicating an increasing emphasis.10 An-
other drawing series, first published in 1747 and expanded in later editions, the
Grotteschi depict skeletons among ruins, emphasising that associations between
human, architectural and societal decay and renewal was a recurring theme of
Piranesi’s oeuvre.
Publications on ancient monuments had been familiar since the Renaissance,
but the actual physical structure was usually considered to be less important than
its narrative and iconography, and was frequently depicted without accuracy, con-
text and dimensions. Adding further ambiguity, as ‘eighteenth-century definitions
of “monument” were broad enough to include buildings, sculptures, texts and or-
dinary objects, there was little consensus on what kind of monuments were most
worthy of publication,’ writes Maria Grazia Lolla. Referring to Johann Joachim
Winckelmann’s Monumenti antichi inediti (Unpublished Ancient Monuments),
1767, she remarks:

What made a monument into a monument worth publishing were its literary allu-
sions and what set his collection above other similar repositories were the author’s
insights into the literary content of monuments and his superior command of the
literature of the ancients.11

Galvanising an alternative approach, the Enlightenment’s concern for empirical

evidence stimulated archaeological investigations and questioned the reverence

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for classical literary sources, which were dismissed as lacking in analytical pre-
cision. While Renaissance humanists prioritised literary sources because they
trusted individual written opinion, antiquarians favoured material remains,
whether a building or a coin, because they valued public testimony. An intact
material remnant was considered to be a reliable record because it ‘could serve as
a primary source, unchanged from past to present,’ while a surviving ancient text
was most likely a copy of a copy, writes Minor.12
As ancient sites were recorded in lavish volumes, archaeological research
and print culture were increasingly interdependent, stimulating each other. The
book-buying public for these volumes was a wealthy, classically educated elite.
The price of a book in relation to an average income was significantly higher
than today, and profusely illustrated, architectural and archaeological books were
particularly expensive. Illiteracy as well as finance limited the readership; school
attendance was minimal and many people could not read.
In studying ancient sites as well as ancient texts, Piranesi employed
­archaeological rigour and humanist scholarship, a combination that was not
unusual among educated architects and patrons but rarely achieved with
such accomplishment.13 The size and complexity of his later publications
required the skills of a number of people, including engravers and printers,
and the degree to which other writers may have assisted him is disputed. But
such collaborations did not diminish Piranesi’s authorship, because as Minor
notes: ‘This was a working method used by scholars all over Europe in the
1700s.’14 Piranesi treated ancient structures and texts ‘as incomplete material
objects’ to be appreciated and appropriated. His publications are ‘marked by
an insistence that everything is a fragment,’ even modern images and texts,
which can be disassembled and reassembled with earlier material to construct
something that is new as well as old.15 Piranesi conceived the four volumes
of Antichità romane (Roman Antiquities), 1756, as a detailed archaeological
record as well as a stimulus to the contemporary architectural imagination,
encapsulating his concern for tradition and innovation in the phrase ‘una
nouva architettura antica.’16 In his dedication to Giovanni Gaetano Bottari,
dated 20 July 1748, in Antichità romane, Piranesi praises ‘the vastness of
a profound and sublime literature,’ probably referring to Longinus’ treatise on
the sublime, which he had studied in Venice after it was translated into Italian
in 1733.17 Through his connections with the French Academy in Rome, it is
likely that Piranesi also read Abbé Jean-Baptiste Du Bos’ Réflexions critiques
sur la poésie et sur la peinture, 1719, which applied Longinus’ appreciation
of the sublime to the visual arts.18

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Piranesi’s working method was focused and thorough. In preparation for a new
image, he carefully studied and sketched his subject in differing weather and light
conditions, including moonlight. In the preface to Antichità romane, he writes:

When I first saw the remains of the ancient buildings of Rome lying as they do in
cultivated fields or gardens and wasting away under the ravages of time, or being
destroyed by greedy owners who sell them as materials for modern building, I
determined to preserve them forever by means of engraving.19

Piranesi’s depictions of ancient Rome are the most eloquent and memorable exam-
ples of the genre, fuelling travellers’ expectations and informing actual experiences
of ancient sites. Arriving in Rome for the first time, viewers saw not only what was
before them, but also recalled the images that stimulated their visit, and were led
to compare one to the other. Emphasising how widely disseminated images enter
collective memory, Goethe remarked after his first visit to Rome in 1786: ‘Wherever
I go I find something in this new world I am acquainted with; it is all as I imagined,
and yet new.’20 William Beckford commented on the Pantheon in 1780: ‘I was very
near being disappointed, and began to think Piranesi and Paolo Panini had been a
great deal too colossal in their view of this venerable structure.’21 In 1795, the diarist
Joseph Farington recalled the visit to Rome of his friend, the neoclassical sculptor
John Flaxman: ‘and when he came among the ruins of ancient building he found
them on a smaller scale, and less striking than he had been accustomed to suppose
them after having seen the prints of Piranesi.’22 Unable to prevent further decay,
Piranesi represented a ruin at a specific moment in time, preserving its image while
the actual ruin continued to age. But the structures he depicted were often distorted
from reality. Just as Palladio’s drawn reconstructions of ancient sites had inspired
architects and patrons to reimagine ancient Roman architecture for a new era and a
new setting, the desire to recall and repeat Piranesi’s sublime images led architects
to build designs that referred not just to ancient Rome but Piranesi’s ancient Rome,
creating their own versions of his dramatically ruined forms.

Forms from other forms

The Enlightenment’s concern for origins and analysis sometimes led to con-
flicting conclusions. In the mid-eighteenth century, continental journeys and
archaeological investigations drew increasing attention to the ruins of ancient
Greece, stimulating a critical reappraisal of their elemental Doric grandeur.
Viewing the Vitruvian origins of architecture through Enlightenment eyes,

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Marc-Antoine Laugier concluded that the primitive hut is perfect because it

follows the reason inherent in nature and humanity alike, which he depicted
in idealised form as four tree trunks supporting a pediment of branches in the
frontispiece to the 1755 second edition of Essai sur l’architecture, 1753.23
Asserting the primacy of ancient Greece, Laugier concluded that its architec-
ture possessed a simplicity and truthfulness that was lost in ancient Rome.
Adding impetus to this theme in a somewhat less didactic manner, ­Winckelmann
praised ‘the noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’ of Greek architecture in
Geschichte der Kunst des Altherthums (History of Ancient Art), 1764.24
Winckelmann’s attempt to organise ancient art into historical eras according to
formal criteria was a milestone in the development of art history, but his bias to-
wards ancient texts and ancient Greece limited the effectiveness of his treatise.

Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai

sur l’Architecture, 1753.
Frontispiece to the second
edition, 1755. Courtesy of
RIBA Collections.

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Challenging the assumption that ancient Greek architecture was superior

to that of ancient Rome and a better model for eighteenth-century architecture,
Piranesi published Della magnificenza ed architettura de’ Romani (On the
­Magnificence and Architecture of the Romans), 1761, in direct response to
Allan Ramsay’s anonymous essay ‘Dialogue on Taste’ in The Investigator, 1755,
and especially Julien-David Le Roy’s Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de
la Grèce, 1758. While Le Roy argued that early Greek architecture developed in
perfect isolation, Piranesi concluded that it depended on cultural exchange and
had been open to improvement. Following Pierre-Jean Mariette’s critical review
of Della magnificenza in the Gazette Littéraire in 1764, Piranesi published a
three-part riposte in 1765, beginning with Osservazioni di Gio. Battista Piranesi
sopra la Lettre de Monsieur Mariette. The second part, Parere sull‘architettura
(Opinions on Architecture) involves a dialectical debate between two contrast-
ing architects. Piranesi includes a quote from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to em-
phasise his opposition to a perfect, originating model and justify his support for
creative reinvention instead: ‘Nature, the great renewer, ever makes up forms
from other forms.’25
Piranesi was indebted to other theorists who critiqued the classical
canon. Notably, Claude Perrault measured ancient Roman buildings and,
identifying no consistent proportions, questioned the absolute authority of
the architectural orders in Ordnance des cinq espèces de colonnes selon la
méthode des anciens (A Treatise on the Five Orders of Columns in Archi-
tecture), 1683.26 Instead of a formulaic and consistent language, Pirane-
si’s study of ancient sites acknowledged the variety and invention of ancient
Roman architecture and its divergence from Vitruvian principles, offering a
catalyst to e­ ighteenth-century innovation. In reaching this conclusion, he was
also influenced by Venice’s cosmopolitan heritage as a trading Empire, which
combined appreciation of ancient Rome and other cultures, preparing him to
respect complexity and diversity. Piranesi admired Venetian and other Ital-
ian Renaissance architects who, rather than emphasise a singular origin in
ancient Greece, acknowledged the varied influences of differing regions in
pluralist combination. Contending the primacy of ancient Greece, Piranesi
emphasised an alternative lineage derived from Etruscan architecture, which
recalled Alberti’s Ten Books as well as the influence of Lucchesi and Bibiena.27
Ancient Greece constructed columns and lintels, while Etruscan architecture
employed massive stone vaults and walls. Continuing in ancient Rome, ar-
chaic and rustic expression was appreciated as a metaphor for the city’s hon-
esty, directness and strength. Reaffirming this heritage, Alberti appreciated ‘a

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certain rugged air of antique severity,’ while his Florentine contemporaries set
semi-circular arches in massive rusticated walls as in the early and influential
example of Michelozzo di Bartolomeo’s Palazzo Medici, c. 1444.28 The term
opera rustica first appeared in print in Serlio’s fourth book on architecture,
1537, which includes a ‘Diagram of the different kinds of rustic work.’29 In
the Villa Madama, Rome, c. 1516, and Palazzo Te, 1530, respectively, Raph-
ael and Guilio Romano conceived the wall as a three-dimensional sculpted
element and contrasted finely chiselled and roughly hewn stone to emphasise
the dialogue between artifice and nature. These qualities are less evident in
Palladio’s designs, but rusticated walls and arches appear at the centre of the
principal façade of Villa Pisani, Bagnolo di Lonigo, 1542. Representative of
his later villas, roughly hewn stone is relegated to the rear façade of Villa Fos-
cari, La Malcontenta, 1560, while columns and a pediment sit at the centre
of the front façade.30
Piranesi’s preference for ancient Roman architecture and its Etruscan heritage
led him to emphasise massive walls and arches and not elegant columns and
lintels. He employed a number of strategies to emphasise and exaggerate the
monumentality of ancient Roman architecture. Often choosing a low viewpoint,
Piranesi illustrated sturdy components and materials, either depicting an ancient
structure under construction or in partial ruin. Usually ignoring familiar building
materials such as brick and concrete, he depicted ruins of solid stone and not just
a layer of marble cladding. Exposing the construction sequence that was previ-
ously concealed within a structure, ruination was a means to excavate and reveal
temporal layers and not simply destroy them. Rather than empty, he dotted the
ruins with figures that reflect the diversity of eighteenth-century life, diminutive
against the architecture’s vast scale. Reflecting the grandeur of his subject, he
produced prints of size and complexity unmatched by his predecessors or con-
temporaries. Piranesi concluded that a monumental ruin exemplified the majesty
and emotive power of architecture more eloquently even than a complete building
because it indicated not only the destructive force of nature, but also heroic resist-
ance to decay and the continuing relevance of ancient forms, which he depicted
as broken and denied of absolute authority, and thus a greater stimulus to the
imagination.
Ruination is evident in the method as well as the subject of Piranesi’s
images, as he innovatively combined engraving and etching with dry point,
burnishing, rubbing and scraping. The older technique of engraving requires
a sharp, hard, metal implement to incise lines into a softer metal surface. In
etching, a metal plate is first covered with an acid-resistant wax. The artist

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scratches lines into the wax to complete a drawing before the plate is dipped
in acid, which cuts into the exposed metal surface. After the remaining wax
is cleaned away, the plate is next covered with ink and then wiped clear so
that only the incisions contain ink. A high-pressure printing press transfers
the inked lines to paper. Piranesi appreciated ‘copper, as this is the metal
that resists the injuries of time.’31 But each plate can only be used a limited
number of times until it starts to wear and fade and the printed lines become
crude. As the plates eroded, Piranesi sometimes reworked the incisions so
that further prints could be made, darker than the originals, until the plates
were no longer viable.
Piranesi’s practices as an archaeologist and an etcher-engraver were anal-
ogous in that they both excavated a material surface, one to better reveal or
reconstruct a structure that had succumbed to ruination and the other to generate
an image of such a site. As these techniques and processes were well known in
the eighteenth century, the conjunction of memorialisation and ruination in the
subject and the method of Piranesi’s etchings were understood and appreciated.
As a monument to an artist, ink printed on paper may outlast a copper plate or a
marble structure, or perish like a life or a reputation.

A past, present and future Rome

Ancient Roman ruins appear in many of Piranesi’s etchings, but none was more
thoughtfully considered than the Forma Urbis Romae, c. 203–211 AD. A plan
of ancient Rome, with the outlines of streets, squares and buildings incised into
a grid of 150 marble slabs at 1:240 scale, was originally displayed on a wall of
the Forum Pacis and held in place by iron clamps. The surviving fragments were
rediscovered in 1562, and Giovanni Battista Nolli was commissioned to reas-
semble and display them on the walls of the Capitoline Museum’s main stairway
in 1741, a process in which Piranesi was involved.32 As the remains of a once
entire artefact, the Forma Urbis is analogous to a single ruin, while as a collec-
tion of excavated ruins it is comparable to the scattered remains of the ancient
city. In its exhibited state, it is a juxtaposition of gaps as well as a juxtaposition
of fragments. The viewer is tempted to interpret the surviving fragments and,
guessing what is missing, reconstruct or make anew the gaps, the relationship of
one element to another and the whole plan. Eyes roam backwards and forwards,
and up and down and between the fragments and the gaps in a manner analo-
gous to the way a body occupies a building or a city, forming an understanding
through movement.

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 sp e ak in g r uins

Giovanni Battista P
­ iranesi,
Le Antichità romane,
1756–1757, vol. 1. Plan
of Rome based on Forma
Urbis Romae, c. 203–211
AD. Courtesy of UCL Library
Special Collections.

Depicted in Antichità romane, the Forma Urbis influenced Piranesi’s Il

Campo Marzio dell’Antica Roma (The Field of Mars of Ancient Rome), 1762,
an erudite, bilingual publication in Italian and Latin dedicated to one ancient
site. Located outside the original city boundary, the Campus Martius was
named after Mars, the god of war, and as Palladio remarks: ‘Here they used
to have musters and other military events.’33 Although subject to flooding in a
low-lying bend of the Tiber, the flat plain was deemed suitable for large public
buildings. The river meanders diagonally across the Ichnographia, Piranesi’s
master plan of the site, which features contrasting monumental structures and
includes more of the city than is normally associated with the Campus Martius.
Piranesi appreciated Palladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, which appears
to rise directly from the water. Referring to Campo Marzio, Pier Vittorio Aureli
remarks: ‘It is not difficult to imagine what sort of spectacle would be produced
when the area flooded—hundreds of monumental complexes would emerge
from the water like islands.’34
Piranesi collaborated on a reduced version of Nolli’s epic Nuova pianta de
Roma, 1748, and benefitted from the research.35 But it is likely that Campo
Marzio is a critique of the city depicted in Nolli’s plan in which irregular, urban
blocks are confined within a pattern of streets and squares and absorbed into the
city as a whole.36 In Campo Marzio’s aerial Scenographia, the ancient structures

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 sp e ak ing r uins

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Il

Campo Marzio dell’ Antica
Roma, 1762. Ichnographia,
Louis Kahn’s own copy.
Courtesy of Louis I. Kahn
Collection, University of
Pennsylvania and the
Pennsylvania Historical and
Museum Commission.

are shown in their ruined state and entangled by vegetation. But all superfluous,
later buildings are removed so that the ruins stand in juxtaposed magnificence,
affirming Piranesi’s urban concept.
Piranesi chose not to include some monumental structures in the
­Ichnographia such as the Aurelian Wall, AD 270, and incorporated others from
differing times such as the Mausoleum of Hadrian and the earlier Amphitheatre of
Statilius Taurus, which was constructed in Augustus’ era and destroyed in Nero’s
reign. In conclusion, Susan M. Dixon remarks: ‘These chronological inconsist-
encies, these anachronisms, would have been known by any reader of Il Campo
Marzio, for they are narrated in the accompanying text.’37 Wary of criticism, his
opening dedication identifies two specific influences on the reimagined Campo
Marzio: ‘Before anyone accuses me of falsehood, he should, I beg, examine the

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ancient (Marble) plan of the city … he should examine (the Villa) of Hadrian at
Tivoli’.38 Palladio ignored Hadrian’s Villa, but Piranesi applied it to the ancient
city. Depicting a city of juxtaposed, monumental forms, Campo Marzio is an
imaginary reconstruction of past Rome, a critique of present Rome and a propo-
sition for future Rome.39
Assembled on six panels that together measure 1.35 × 1.17 metres, the
Ichnographia appears as if it has been excavated and exhibited like the Forma
Urbis, presenting the illusion of an incised plan held in place by metal clamps
on an imaginary wall, with shadows indicating the marble’s broken edges.40
Continuing the illusion, a part of the Ichnographia copied from the Forma Urbis
is drawn in the same manner as one that is conjectural. But the Ichnographia’s
status as a new work is evident in Piranesi’s dedication to Robert Adam, who had
encouraged the plan’s development.
It is likely that Piranesi’s model was the Forma Urbis as it appeared in 1741
as much as the ancient city it depicts. The juxtapositions within and between the
surviving fragments inspired him, as did their means of display. The fracture and
excavation of the ancient plan ensured that the once complete forms incised into
its surface were broken instead. The Ichnographia depicts entire forms, but each
has a distinct composition and scale and an ambiguous, fractured juxtaposition
with its neighbours, so that the whole design can be understood as a ruin as well
as a construction.

Piranesi as architect

Due to the fame and influence of his images, Piranesi’s fascination for ruins is
usually associated with his activity as an engraver and an author, but it is also
evident in his other practices to differing degrees. Serving a thriving trade stim-
ulated by the Grand Tour, Piranesi was a dealer in antiquities. Created for Sir
William Hamilton and named after his nephew, George Greville, second Earl of
Warwick, the monumental Warwick Vase is nearly two metres high and about
two metres in diameter. In his catalogue, Vasi, candelabra, cippi, sarcophagi,
tripodi, lucerne, ed ornamenti antichi, 1778, Piranesi claims that the Warwick
Vase is ‘the perfection of the arts in the age of Hadrian.’41 It includes fragments
excavated from Hadrian’s Villa around 1770, but they constitute less than a
third of the total object. Despite the contemporary fascination for ruins, collectors
preferred the appearance of entire rather than broken artefacts, and Piranesi
imaginatively assembled new and antique fragments—salvaged or excavated

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from ancient Roman sites—into a convincing, seamless whole with no distinc-

tion between ancient and modern. The Warwick Vase does not display the for-
mal, spatial and temporal juxtapositions apparent in Piranesi’s engravings and
publications.
In 1761, Piranesi relocated his studio and showroom from a site oppo-
site the French Academy in Palazzo Mancini to a more prestigious setting, the
­Palazzo Tomati, close to the Convent of Santissima Trinità dei Monti, the church
high above Piazza di Spagna. A visitor’s description in 1770 indicates that
­Piranesi’s sensibility for fragments and ruins continued in his home, which was
also known as his museo and juxtaposed the numerous objects, books, images,
antiquities and artefacts of his domestic and working life: ‘The Cavalier’s house
is really the most Curious thing that Ever was Seen, I really Wonder it does
not Tumble down, the Landlord with reason has Entered a Protest in Case of
Accidents.’42
As an architect, Piranesi built little. In the non-Catholic cemetery in Rome,
he designed the funerary monument to his friend James MacDonald, a Scottish
Baronet who died of malaria in 1766, aged just 24, after travelling to Naples
earlier that year with the novelist Laurence Sterne. In ­mid-eighteenth-century
Rome, Catholic funerary monuments were mostly placed in churches, while an
open-air burial was reserved for other faiths, including Protestants. ­According
to Pinto, the monument’s ‘location and context’ informed the design, which
recalls ancient Roman ‘milestones and columnar markers’ and stands just
50 metres from the Pyramid of Gaius Cestius that Piranesi depicted a num-
ber of times.43 The austere monument consists of a square travertine plinth
supporting a plain, reused Roman column, which is encircled by two tabulae
­ansatae—votive tablets with dovetail handles—that form a projecting stone
band divided into two. From a distance, the two halves appear the same, but
on closer inspection there is a clear hierarchy. One tablet contains the dedi-
cation, while the other is blank, so that the viewer faces the inscribed tablet
and sees the looming Pyramid beyond, which is incorporated into Piranesi’s
design as a backdrop. The MacDonald monument’s square plinth and circular
column are in dialogue with the larger funerary monument, evoking the ge-
ometric purity of ideal forms. Piranesi’s design continues the ancient tradition
in which a broken column symbolises death, doing so in an abstract rather
than a literal manner as the top of the column is smooth not rough. A broken
column to a broken life, the MacDonald monument combines ancient and
modern elements to stand as a pristine, new ruin alongside an ancient ruin.

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

MacDonald Monument,
Non-Catholic Cemetery,
Rome, 1766, with the
Pyramid of Gaius Cestius in
the background. Courtesy of
Jonathan Hill.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Detail of MacDonald Monu-
ment, Non-Catholic Ceme-
tery, Rome, 1766. Courtesy
of Izabela Wieczorek.

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It is possible that Piranesi received few building commissions because he was

not Roman, but this had not hindered many architects from the Italian peninsular.
Promoting a fellow Venetian, the wealthy Rezzonico family were among his prin-
cipal patrons. In 1758, Cardinal Carlo Rezzonico became Pope Clement XIII. Six
years later, he commissioned Piranesi to design the new sanctuary at San Giovanni
in Laterano, Rome, but the project was not constructed. Also in 1764, the Pope’s
nephew Monsignor Giambattista Rezzonico, Grand Prior of the Knights of Malta and
later a Cardinal, asked Piranesi to redesign Santa Maria del Priorato, which was
completed in 1766, like the MacDonald monument a short walk away. After his
death on 9 November 1778, Piranesi was buried in his only completed building.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Piazzale dei Cavalieri di
Malta, Rome, 1766. The
enclosing wall with obelisks
and monuments. Courtesy
of Izabela Wieczorek.

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Piazzale dei Cavalieri di
Malta, Rome, 1766. The
entrance screen. Courtesy of
Izabela Wieczorek.

Nolli’s plan of Rome depicts the Order’s complex of buildings immediately to

the south of the Tiber on the Aventine Hill at the periphery of the city. An avenue of
seventeenth-century laurel trees leads north to frame the distant dome of St Peter’s.
Further within the complex, the existing church is on the site of Piranesi’s replace-
ment. Piranesi also designed the expansive entrance forecourt, the Piazzale dei
Cavalieri di Malta, which is defined by a high wall on three sides. Commemorative
monuments and obelisks rise above the wall as massive sculptural elements, mak-
ing adjacent people seem diminutive. Although they are symmetrically disposed,
the monuments and obelisks recall the tombs along the Via Appia in ancient Rome
and the wall of sarcophagi and urns close to the Villa Corsini, which all appear
in Antichità romane.44 In comparison to the muscular structures surmounting
the wall, Piranesi’s new entrance screen on the north side of the square is crisply
ornamented, planar and flat. Its arched, central gateway meets the southern end
of the avenue of trees, revealing and celebrating the view of St Peter’s for those
permitted to enter. No other properties are accessed from the forecourt and there
are no other openings in the three sides of the surrounding wall.45 Together, the
entrance screen, empty forecourt, blank wall and overscaled monuments generate
an austere, silent and expectant grandeur equivalent to an empty stage.
As the new church was built on the site of an earlier one, Piranesi considered
exposing and exhibiting the diverse ruined fragments uncovered during construc-
tion, but they do not appear in the completed design.46 The planar surface and flat-
tened ornamentation of the church façade is reminiscent of the entrance screen.47
In contrast, the interior is sculptural, notably the altar. From the entrance to the altar,
the successive changes in floor level are reminiscent of Venetian churches and not

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Santa Maria del Priorato,
Rome, 1766. The front of
the altar. Courtesy of Izabela
Wieczorek/Sovereign Order
of Malta.

Roman ones, which emphasise spatial continuity instead. Also unusual in Rome,
the raised high altar sits significantly forward of the apse. Noting a disregard for
structural and spatial coherence ‘in the Roman tradition,’ Rudolf Wittkower writes:

Piranesi, by contrast, breaks the traditional continuity because he has primarily

the subjective optical experience of the beholder in mind. Once again this points
to Venice, to Palladio and to Longhena who were intent on scenographic relation-
ships from space to space.48

Upon entering the church, the visitor is drawn to the altar, which is illuminated
by ‘the large window in the centre of the apse, an utterly un-Roman feature,’ con-
tinues Wittkower.49 As the roof lantern is small, the apse window is the principal
light source, but it is at first unseen, concealed behind the altar it illuminates.
Clerestory windows also light the church, but the two bays closest to the altar are
left blank to accentuate the light from the apse window. Facing the congregation,
the base of the altar consists of superimposed forms reminiscent of ancient sar-
cophagi with a central, elliptical oculus and reliefs depicting the Madonna and
the Lamb of God. Completing the composition, an upper sarcophagus supports
an exuberantly sculptural depiction of The Apotheosis of St Basil of Cappadocia
drawn to heaven on a globe surrounded by angels and putti.

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Santa Maria del Priorato,
Rome, 1766. The elliptical
oculus in the front of the
altar. Courtesy of Izabela
Wieczorek/Sovereign Order
of Malta.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Santa Maria del Priorato,
Rome, 1766. The chamber
and passage within the base
of the altar, with the organ
currently blocking the
arched opening in the altar’s
rear elevation. Courtesy of
Izabela Wieczorek/Sovereign
Order of Malta.

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Within the base of the altar, the elliptical oculus leads to a small chamber
and a low, narrow passage decorated with a Maltese cross that terminates in a
lintel and an arched opening in the altar’s rear elevation. Piranesi’s preparatory
drawings are ambiguous in that they alternatively show the oculus as light or
dark.50 Photographs consistently depict the oculus as a black void, and an organ
currently blocks the arched opening in the rear elevation of the altar. But if the
organ is absent, light from the apse window passes within and through the altar
so that the oculus illuminates St Basil from below, accentuating his elevation from
earth to heaven. Emitting an easterly morning light, the low altar oculus mirrors
the one high above the doorway in the entrance façade, which casts a westerly
evening light.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Santa Maria del Priorato,
Rome, 1766. The rear of
the altar. Courtesy of Izabela
Wieczorek/Sovereign Order
of Malta.

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The strong east light invites the viewer to visit the rear of the altar, which is
comfortably forward of the curved apse wall. In juxtaposition to the public front of
the altar, which is encrusted with figures and seen in silhouette and shadow, the
apse window brightly illuminates the rear of the altar, revealing the pure, monu-
mental globe resting on the equally bare sarcophagus and stepped drum. Accord-
ing to Manfredo Tafuri, the altar equates to the dialogue between two contrasting
architects in Parere sull‘architettura in which ‘the author does not take sides, but
offers instead an agonising dialectic.’51

The light coming from the apse directly illuminates the back of the altar, accentu-
ating its hallucinating geometricism … As the hidden face of the altar, as a con-
cealed aspect to be discovered, in contrast with the triumphal exhibition of the
recto, the verso of the altar of the Priorato reveals completely the internal dialectic
of Piranesi’s ‘virtuous wickedness’. What is given as evident, as an immediate
visual stimulus from a common point of view, reappears purified, rendered pure
intellectual structure, on the reverse side, on the hidden side.52

Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Santa Maria del Priorato,
Rome, 1766. Detail of the
rear of the altar with a side
column. Courtesy of Izabela
Wieczorek/Sovereign Order
of Malta.

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 sp e ak ing r uins

The church is small, but such a prestigious commission would have sug-
gested marble decoration. Piranesi chose stucco instead, and an account book
indicates that the altar was completed to his satisfaction.53 Studied close from
the sides, the stucco decoration seems to continue around the altar. Piranesi’s
innovation is only apparent when the altar is seen fully from the rear in the
direction of the light, maybe as though the sun had bleached the stucco orna-
mentation and rendered the forms abstract. But the ornamentation does stop
consistently. The figures of Saint Basil, the angels and the putti are sculpted
in equal detail on all sides and the supporting decorative corbels continue
around the base of the altar. The globe is bare, and the ornamentation stops
sharply on the sides of the upper sarcophagus so that its rear face is blank.
Beneath, the sequential layers of stucco ornamentation on the stepped drum
do not stop suddenly in a hard vertical line but come to a halt in differing
ways. Some cease abruptly, while others break off in ‘mid-sentence’ or peter
out gradually. The lines inscribed into the altar’s monochromatic stucco sur-
face recall those incised in metal or wax and printed on paper in Piranesi’s
best-known medium. The altar is open to question and imaginative interpre-
tation. Is it nurtured or bleached by the light, sculpted or etched, unfinished
or ruined?

Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Santa Maria del Priorato,
Rome, 1766. Detail of the
rear of the altar with the
apse window. Courtesy of
Izabela Wieczorek/Sovereign
Order of Malta.

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 sp e ak in g r uins

Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Santa Maria del Priorato,
Rome, 1766. Detail of the
rear of the altar. Courtesy of
Izabela Wieczorek/Sovereign
Order of Malta.

Tafuri associates Piranesi with ‘the concept of architecture as ambiguous

­object … The observer becomes more and more the user who gives meanings to
the object or to the series.’ Identifying the origin of the ambiguous object in the
picturesque and citing the influence of William Kent, John Soane and N
­ icolas Le
Camus de Mézières, he concludes: ‘Architecture, from absolute object, becomes
in the landscaped context, relative value: it becomes a medium for the description
of an edifying play.’54 Tafuri’s remarks have a critical edge: ‘the disappearance of
the object hasn’t been replaced by a critical behaviour … The critical attention is
absorbed by involving the observer in a sort of mere game.’55 Observing ­Piranesi’s
ruinous world, Tafuri concludes that the eighteenth century condemned architec-
ture to ambiguity and incoherence—‘a universe of empty signs is a place of total
disorder’—that came to define ‘the entire Modern Movement.’56 But we should
not mourn the loss of a universal symbolic language with stable, specific ­meanings
that need no discussion. Ambiguity allows the imagination to roam, to ‘insensi-
bly lead to subjects, far distant perhaps from the original thought,’ as Whately
remarks of ruins.57 Rather than the ‘total disorder’ of ‘empty signs,’ P
­ iranesi em-
phasises the potential of his imagination and that of viewers to ­construct multiple,
alternative meanings, some personal and others shared.
As an engraver, an author, a restorer and an architect, Piranesi appreciated
the diversity of ancient architectures as an invitation to the contemporary imag-
ination. Responding to the stagnant economy and limited demand for grandeur

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and innovation in the Rome of his era, Piranesi concludes in Prima parte: ‘there
seems to be no recourse than for me or some other modern architect to explain
his ideas through his drawings.’58 Undoubtedly, Piranesi’s principal influence is
due not to the publications he authored, the objects he restored or the struc-
tures he designed, but the ruins he engraved, stimulating in others the desire
to construct a building as a monumental ruin. Understanding Piranesi’s work
collectively, however, it is possible to see the scalar and the thematic connections
between the illusion of entirety in a restored object, the juxtaposition of reconfig-
ured structures in a new plan of old Rome, the accumulation of fragments in a
publication dedicated to the imagination and the dialogues between emblematic,
unfinished, abstract and absent elements in a building. Piranesi suggests that the
whole is a ruin even if the forms are complete, and implies a design strategy that
combines ruination and construction, composed and fractured spatial relations,
broken remains and entire forms.

Notes

1 As the biographical details of Piranesi’s early life are uncertain, this is a plausi-
ble ­summary. Bevilacqua, ‘The Young Piranesi’, pp. 13–21; Cellauro, ‘Carlo Lod-
oli’, pp. 213–216; Cellauro, ‘New Evidence’, pp. 285–286; Consoli, pp. 195–210;
­Kantor-Kazovsky, pp. 145–146, 247–258, 260–261, 275–276; Mayor, Piranesi,
pp. 1–6; ­Naginski, pp. 182–190; Rosenfeld, pp. 74–79; Pinto, Speaking Ruins,
pp. 45–49; Robison, pp. 9–15; Rykwert, The First Moderns, pp. 316–317.
2 Rykwert, First Moderns, p. 312.
3 Colonna, p. 238; referred to in Murray, p. 17.
4 Piranesi, quoted in Jacques-Guilluame Legrand, ‘Notice historique sur le vie et les
­ouvrages de J.-B. Piranesi,’ 1799, manuscript, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, and
translated in Rykwert, The First Moderns, p. 375.
5 Ambassador Francesco Venier was an early pupil of Lodoli. Cellauro, ‘New Evidence,’
pp. 279–287; Consoli, pp. 195–210; Rosenfeld, pp. 74–79.
6 Piranesi, quoted in Pinto, ‘Piranesi at Hadrian’s Villa,’ p. 467.
7 McCarthy, p. 672; Pinto, ‘Piranesi at Hadrian’s Villa,’ pp. 466–475; Pinto, Speaking
Ruins, pp. 150–155.
8 The plan is entitled Pianta delle fabriche esistenti nella Villa Adriana. MacDonald and
Pinto, pp. 246–265; Pinto, ‘Piranesi at Hadrian’s Villa,’ pp. 468–471.
9 Piranesi, ‘Original Text,’ p. 117. Refer to Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni
Battista Piranesi, p. 45; Wilton-Ely, Piranesi as Architect and Designer, p. 4.
10 Robison, pp. 12–14, 65–112; Wendorf, pp. 166–168.
11 Lolla, pp. 432, 434, refer to pp. 436–437.
12 Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words, p. 112.

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 sp e ak in g r uins

13 Kantor-Kazovsky contends that Wittkower’s 1938 essay ‘Piranesi’s ­Architectural

Creed’ ignores Piranesi’s debt to humanism and associates him with the Enlighten-
ment as a precursor ‘of modern rationalism and functionalism’ as well as romanti-
cism. ­Kantor-Kazovsky, pp. 13–17, 20–21, 70–71, 78, 121; Wittkower, ‘­Piranesi’s
­Architectural Creed,’ p. 240. Refer to Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument,
pp. 42–43; Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words, pp. 109–112; Yourcenar, ‘The Dark Brain of
Piranesi,’ pp. 88–128.
14 Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words, p. 64, refer to pp. 54–55, 60–63.
15 Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words, pp. 9, 80–91.
16 Piranesi, Antichità romane, quoted in Pinto, Speaking Ruins, p. 8.
17 Piranesi, Antichità romane, translated by Pamela Stewart and quoted in Rosenfeld,
p. 87.
18 Rosenfeld, pp. 89–90; Rykwert, The First Moderns, p. 385.
19 Piranesi, Antichità romane, quoted in Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista
Piranesi, p. 35.
20 Goethe, Italian Journey, p. 104. Refer to Connerton, pp. 72–73; Cooper, pp. 107–108.
21 Beckford, vol. 1, p. 189. Refer to Cooper, p. 114.
22 Farington, p. 444. Refer to Cooper, p. 113.
23 Essai sur l’architecture was first published in English as An Essay on Architecture,
1755. Vitruvius, pp. 38–39, refer to pp. 13–16, 102–106; Laugier, pp. 128–129.
Refer to Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise, p. 105.
24 Kantor-Kazovsky emphasises Laugier and Winckelmann’s debt to Pierre Jean Mariette’s
Traité des pierres gravée, 1750. Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art, pp. 327–339.
Refer to Kantor-Kazovsky, pp. 30–35.
25 Ovid, Metamorphoses, quoted by Piranesi and translated in Pinto, Speaking ­Ruins,
p. 89. Refer to Kantor-Kazovsky, pp. 204–205; Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words,
pp. ­125–142; Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, pp. 26–28; Wilton-Ely,
Piranesi as Architect and Designer, pp. 87–89.
26 Translated into English in 1708. Refer to Kantor-Kazovsky, pp. 232–242.
27 Alberti, pp. 158–159. Refer to Kantor-Kazovsky, pp. 146–147, 155, 176–177;
­Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words, pp. 10–11; Wittkower, ‘Piranesi’s Architectural Creed,’
pp. 236–238.
28 Alberti, p. 192.
29 Serlio, quoted and discussed in Kantor-Kazovsky, pp. 156–161, pl. 41.
30 Kantor-Kazovsky, pp. 167–168.
31 Piranesi, c.1756–1757, quoted in Minor, ‘Engraved in Porphyry,’ p. 130, refer to pp.
129–132; Robison, pp. 24–32; Rosenfeld, pp. 56, 84–85; Wendorf, pp. 176–177.
32 Bevilacqua, pp. 25–26; Connors, pp. 79–80; Dixon, ‘The Sources and Fortunes of Pira-
nesi’s Archaeological Illustrations’, p. 473; Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words, pp. 102–105.
33 Palladio, in Hart and Hicks, p. 68.
34 Aureli, pp. 137–138.
35 Bevilacqua, pp. 22–24; Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words, pp. 53–54.
36 Aureli, p. 138; Connors, pp. 74–78; Dixon, ‘The Sources and Fortunes of Piranesi’s
Archaeological Illustrations,’ p. 473.

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 sp e ak ing r uins

37 Dixon, ‘Illustrating Ancient Rome,’ p. 120.

38 Piranesi, Campo Marzio, translated in Pinto, Speaking Ruins, p. 144.
39 Tafuri, ‘The Wicked Architect,’ pp. 29–38. Refer to Aureli, pp. 114, 138.
40 The same illusion of a plan incised into marble and held in place by metal clamps
appears in Piranesi’s plan of Hadrian’s Villa, 1781.
41 Piranesi, Vasi, candelabra, cippi, sarcophagi, tripodi, lucerne, ed ornamenti antichi,
translated in Pinto, Speaking Ruins, p. 130, refer to pp. 127–129.
42 Thomas Jenkins, letter to Charles Townley, 12 December 1770, quoted in Bignamini
and Hornsby, vol. 1, p. 319. Refer to Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words, pp. 1–4.
43 Pinto, Speaking Ruins, p. 92.
44 Körte, pp. 16–33; Wilton-Ely, Piranesi as Architect and Designer, pp. 95, 115–117.
45 A short passageway off the forecourt leads to a further gated entrance to the Order’s
complex of buildings.
46 Diario Ordinario, 1765, referred to in Pinto, Speaking Ruins, p. 76.
47 Wilton-Ely, ‘Quella Pazza Libertà di Lavore a Capriccio’, pp. 63–69.
48 Baldessare Longhena designed Santa Maria della Salute, Venice, which was begun in
1631 and completed later in the century. Wittkower, ‘Piranesi as Architect,’ p. 255,
refer to p. 253.
49 ‘Noting many “north Italian parallels,”’ Wittkower mentions the window behind the altar
in Filippo Juvarra’s Church of Sant’Uberto, Venaria Reale, near Turin, 1729. Wittkower,
‘Piranesi as Architect’, p. 255.
50 Stampfle, p. 49, pl. 51, p. 111, pl. A5, refer to pp. xi, xv, xxiv–xxv, xxxii; Wittkower,
‘Piranesi as Architect’, p. 252.
51 Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, p. 28.
52 Tafuri, ‘The Wicked Architect,’ pp. 48–49. Refer to Kirk, pp. 268–269.
53 The stuccatore was Tommaso Righi. Refer to Pinto, Speaking Ruins, pp. 77–81; Small;
Wilton-Ely, Piranesi as Architect and Designer, pp. 86–119; Wittkower, ‘Piranesi as
Architect’, pp. 250–251.
54 Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, pp. 84, 82.
55 Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, pp. 94–96.
56 Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, p. 19; Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture,
p. 84. Refer to Tafuri, ‘The Wicked Architect,’ pp. 39–43, 53–54.
57 Whately, p. 154.
58 Piranesi, ‘Original Text,’ p. 117.

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 5
ruin and rotunda
 r uin an d r o t un da

Robert Adam of Dowhill

Scotland’s leading architect in the first half of the eighteenth century, William
Adam, also established the nation’s largest building firm and was a supplier
of building materials with warehouses in Leith, Edinburgh’s port. But in an
era before industrialisation, land ownership remained the principal indicator
of status, wealth and influence, and he came from just a minor landed family.
Professional and commercial success enabled William to purchase an estate
near Kinross in 1731 within a day’s journey from Edinburgh, to which he
added a new house later that decade. In 1740, he acquired the adjacent
Dowhill Castle to the north, adding both land and history to his estate. Em-
phasising his enhanced status, William associated his family with his estate
by renaming it Blair Adam, while his second son styled himself ‘Robert Adam
of Dowhill’ after he inherited the northern section of the estate on his father’s
death in 1748.
Built on a hill overlooking Loch Leven, the oldest part of Dowhill Castle was
an early sixteenth-century square tower.1 Sketched in pen and ink when Robert
Adam was just 16, Capriccio of a partially ruined tower on a small island or
isthmus, 1744, depicts a similar Scottish scene with a square castellated tower
and a single arched bridge connecting the island to the land.2 Ruins featured in
many of Adam’s sketches at this time. He also copied works by Ricci, Rosa and
Gaspar Dughet among others, developing his drawing skill and appreciation of the
picturesque interdependence of architecture and landscape in which Kent was
so accomplished.3 On a tour of England in 1750, Adam visited the gardens at
Richmond that Kent had created for Queen Caroline and sketched the Hermitage
there. Admiring the design, he acquired Kent’s sketch Arcadian Hermitage with
Satyr and Shepherdess, c. 1730.
William Adam’s most prestigious commission was to extend Hopetoun House
for Charles Hope, first Earl of Hopetoun, in 1721. Malcolm Bruce designed the
original building, having introduced classical architecture to Scotland in the
1690s along with James Smith. Aged just 20 when his father died, Adam and
his elder brother John continued their father’s practice, including further work at
Hopetoun House. William Adam owned an extensive architectural library, which
‘presented the Adam brothers with a conservative view of Italian classicism,
glossed by that of France,’ Scotland’s historical ally, writes A.A. Tait.4 Scotland
was an architectural backwater in comparison to England; its classical buildings
were mediocre and few in number. Despite the union of 1707, baroque architec-
ture and ­Palladianism were slow to spread northwards.

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 r uin and r o t unda

Bob the Roman

By 1754, the practice’s success enabled Adam to accumulate capital of £5,000

and cover anticipated expenditure of over £800 a year while on the Grand Tour.
Leaving Edinburgh on 3 October 1754, he arrived in London a week later, where
he spent over a week meeting friends and acquaintances, including Pembroke’s
collaborator Roger Morris. Travelling to France and then Brussels, he joined the
party of the Hon. Charles Hope, second son of the first Earl of Hopetoun and
brother of the second earl. Together, they proceeded on to Italy.5
Arriving in Florence on 30 January 1755, Adam was very fortunate to
meet Clérisseau. As a reward for winning the prestigious Prix du Rome in Paris,
­Clérisseau had enrolled at the French Academy in Rome in 1753, where he stud-
ied with Panini, who focused such attention on ruins. Appreciating its importance
to his future career, Adam’s response to the meeting was immediate and enthusi-
astic. In a letter to his brother James, he remarks: ‘I have found a gentleman who
I am to carry to Rome with me, who will put me on a method of improving myself
more in drawing and architecture than I ever had any ideas of.’6 In another letter,
he praises ‘Clérisseau who draws in architecture delightfully in the free manner I
wanted.’7 A diary entry indicates that Adam’s fascination for ruins preceded his
visit to Italy, acknowledging ‘a most valuable and ingenious creature called Cléris-
seau who draws ruins in Architecture to perfection.’8 Travelling south together,
they arrived in Rome on 25 February 1755. Within a month, Adam wrote to
his sister Peggy: ‘I am antique mad … I hope to invent great things … that’s my
ambition.’9 Intoxicated with the ancient city, he soon chose the nickname ‘Bob
the Roman.’10
Travelling with an aristocrat helped Adam present himself as a gentleman on
the Grand Tour, but he left Hope’s party soon after their arrival in Rome.11 Hope
was 45 in 1755, while Adam was 27 and closer in age to a typical Grand Tourist.
A gentleman on the Grand Tour travelled with a tutor and servants. General ar-
chitectural and artistic knowledge was a part of the curriculum, which may have
included instruction in drawing. Occasionally, an aristocrat such as Pembroke
designed buildings, but it was more typical for a wealthy traveller to acquire
understanding and expertise necessary to a patron rather than an architect, af-
firming Shaftesbury’s conception of the virtuoso as an enlightened influence on
culture and society.12 The Grand Tour was an invaluable and exclusive education,
but its pleasures were not exclusively refined, as Pope waspishly remarked: ‘Led
by my hand, he sauntered Europe round, / And gather’d ev’ry Vice on Christian
ground.’13

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 r uin an d r o t un da

Robert Adam, Trompe l’œil

showing five drawings of
ruins composed as if they
are on overlapping sheets of
paper, c. 1757. Courtesy of
Sir John Soane’s Museum,
London.

According to Frank Salmon, ‘the standard itinerary’ for a gentleman on the

Grand Tour emphasised ‘movement between Italian cities at different times of the
year to take advantage of climatic conditions and to witness particular festivals.’14
In contrast, a visiting artist or architect travelled less due to the need to limit ex-
penditure and acquire specific artistic skills. Possible sources of income included
offering drawing lessons, acquiring antiquities for sale or acting as a guide and an
agent for a patron who wished to establish an important collection. Painters and
sculptors were more likely than architects to obtain commissions for work while in
Italy. For architects, connections made with potential patrons were most beneficial
on their return to Britain, which might lead to a commission for a house to display
a collection acquired on the Grand Tour. To gain recognition, British architectural
students entered competitions such as the Concorso Clementino organised by the
Accademia di San Luca in Rome. But gentlemen did not enter professional com-
petitions and Adam avoided them. Despite their disparity in wealth and standing,
the term ‘Grand Tour’ is applicable to both types of traveller, because their shared
purpose was to acquire knowledge and status that would prove invaluable on
their return home, one as a patron and the other as a practitioner.

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 r uin and r o t unda

In Rome, Adam formulated both an architectural style and a cultured per-

sona, so that they would appear synonymous and inseparable. His dilemma was
to further his architectural studies in private while appearing as a fashionable and
enlightened gentleman in public. Adam resided at Casa Guarnieri, a reputable
address near Piazza d’Spagna. In October 1756, while planning a trip to Frascati,
he mentioned that he would take ‘my Clerisseau, my Chariot, my Cook, and my
Valet de Chambre alongst with me.’15 Concerned that his evident skill would
reveal his professional status, Adam remarked soon after arriving in the city:

If I am known in Rome to be an architect, if I am seen drawing or with a pencil in

my hand, I cannot enter into genteel company who will not then admit an artist
or, if they do admit him, will very probably rub affronts on him in order to prevent
his appearing at their card-playing, balls and concerts.16

Warning his family and friends to ‘avoid putting the word Architect on the back of
letters’, he asked instead that they address their correspondence to ‘Robert Adam
Esquire’ or ‘Robert Adam Gentilhomme Anglois.’17
Adam began to compile a collection as soon as he arrived in Rome, em-
phasising his status as a gentleman to Grand Tourists and Italian residents. The
collection was profitable, in that many pieces were acquired and later sold. But its
principal purpose was to underpin his architectural credentials when he returned
to Britain, establishing a catalogue to inspire and furnish future designs:

I must write Johnnie and Jamie after and tell them how I am getting models
made of all the Antique ornaments of freezes, cornishes, vases etc. in plaster,
which I am to send to Scotland. How I am employing painters, drawers etc. to do
the fountains, the buildings, the statues and the other things that are of use for
drawing after and for giving hints to the imagination of us modern devils. How I
am buying up all the books of architecture, of altars, chapels, churches, views of
Piranesi, and all the gates, windows, doors and ornaments that can be of service
to us. In short how I intend myself to send home a collection of drawings of Cléris-
seau’s, my own, and our myrmidons which never was seen or heard of either in
England or Scotland before.18

Instructed in landscape drawing by Jean-Baptiste Lallemand, Adam remarked

that Laurent Pécheux’s lessons in figure drawing were ‘absolutely requisite …
without which an Architect cannot ornament a building. Draw a Basrelievo
or a Statue.’19 For two years, he studied with Clérisseau, his principal tutor,

117
 r uin an d r o t un da

sketching ancient buildings and Renaissance ones, too. Of Casa Guarnieri, he

remarked: ‘I have got my friend Clérisseau lodged in the next room to mine
where we are very convenient as we sit and draw in one and others’ rooms or
amuse ourselves as is most agreeable to us.’20 Maybe reflecting on his enjoyable
experiences there, he later contrasted the British to the French: ‘Accustomed by
habit, or induced by the nature of our climate, we indulge more largely in the
enjoyment of the bottle.’21

Clérisseau’s ruin rooms

Referring to Clérisseau’s obsession and principal source of income, Adam re-

marked that ‘to draw his ruins by which he lives.’22 Clérisseau depicted known
ruins and settings, known ruins in imaginary settings and imaginary ruins in
imaginary settings drawn from his extensive knowledge of actual places. His
most distinctive commission was to transform a room at the Monastery of Santis-
sima Trinità dei Monti, the church high above Piazza di Spagna where Claude is
buried. Drawn in black ink, brown wash, gouache and watercolour, Clérisseau’s
design sketches for the walls and ceiling of the trompe l’œil ‘Ruin Room’ were
executed with little adjustment and much admired by Piranesi. Entered off a
long, wide internal corridor, Clérisseau’s design depicts an antique temple that
has settled into a state of gentle ruination and partial reconstruction, fit for the

Charles-Louis Clérisseau,
Design for the Ruin Room of
the monastery (now
­convent) of ­Santissima
Trinità dei Monti, Rome,
c. 1766. Courtesy of
­Fitzwilliam Museum,
University of Cambridge/
Bridgeman Images.

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 r uin and r o t unda

inhabitation of a hermit in a benign climate, with warm shadows cast by a pale

blue sky. The physical window in the west wall provides the only natural light
and an actual majestic view across rooftops towards the dome of St Peter’s,
which was of architectural and religious significance to the friars who occupied
the room. Everything else is a painted illusion. In the afternoon sun, the con-
trasting glare of the window fuses with the soft, painted light of the interior. The
entrance door and window shutters appear as though they are made of rough
timber boards and crude iron hinges. The ceiling is a crumbling coffered vault
with gaping holes and exposed timbers. On the south wall, a parrot perches on a
timber beam beneath which a broken wall provides a view onto nearby trees. An
arched opening on the east wall frames a high building on a distant hill. As the
west wall permits an actual urban vista and is otherwise painted to appear solid,
the room’s hilltop setting seems to be at the edge of the city and the country. A
bunch of lemons on the north wall and a vase of flowers on the east wall imply
that someone is still in residence. On the south wall, the bookcase includes a
volume by Isaac Newton, alluding to the inhabitants’ occupation. According to
Thomas J. McCormick:

It is not surprising that mathematicians of the caliber of Le Sueur and Jacquier

should have commissioned Clérisseau to paint such a room for them. Their inter-
est in mathematics and in architecture led Jacquier to measure the Colosseum,
and both to collaborate on a study of the dome of St. Peter’s. So Clérisseau’s
plausible re-creation of the architecture of an ancient temple would appeal to
them as it did to Winckelmann.23

Clérisseau first met Cardinal Alessandro Albani, the leading patron and collec-
tor, in February 1755, enabling Adam to see him soon afterwards. Albani most
likely introduced Clérisseau to Winckelmann that year, two years after the German
art historian’s arrival in Rome and another two before he became the Cardinal’s
­librarian. In a letter dated 29 January 1757, Winckelmann remarks that ‘a French
architect is my good friend but he has disassociated himself from his nation in
order not to feel ridiculous.’24 Winckelmann described Clérisseau as ‘the best ar-
chitect’ in 1763 and appreciated his assessment of History of Ancient Art, 1764,
offering to adjust the next edition accordingly.25 Winckelmann helped Clérisseau
to acquire the commission for the Ruin Room, as well as an unexecuted design
for the noted antiquarian Abbé Filippo Farsetti at Santa Maria di Sala near Venice,
which Clérisseau conceived as a landscape of ruins reminiscent of his sketches
of Hadrian’s Villa. Writing to Clérisseau in 1767 after he had returned to Paris,

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 r uin an d r o t un da

Wincklemann praised the design’s authenticity and appreciated its dialogue be-
tween entire and ruined elements, remarking that it:

seemed to me the portrait of an antique monument rather than a composition in

the same manner. I very much hope for you and for him that the noxious modern
air that you are going to breathe does not invade your new productions … I see
again always with new pleasure and even with illusion the large model of the ruin
which will be at the end of the vista from the house.26

Winckelmann’s support and Albani’s friendship with Clérisseau led to the con-
struction of a ruined temple at the Villa Albani, Rome, to Carlo Marchionni’s
design in c.1760. Situated in an isolated section of the garden and housing
an aviary, the ruined temple had a roughly hewn rusticated base from which a
spring emerged. The square fluted columns on the side porticoes recalled the
Ceremonial Precinct at Hadrian’s Villa. But Marchionni’s principal model was the
fourth-century Temple of Clitumnus near Spoleto in central Italy, which Adam
had drawn in 1755.27 Its pediment severely broken, the replica was even more
ruinous than the ancient Roman original.

To breath the antient air

Soon after he entered Rome, Adam met Clérisseau’s friend Piranesi, whose stu-
dio was then opposite the French Academy’s base in Palazzo Mancini. According
to John Wilton-Ely, French support for the primacy of ancient Greece encouraged
Piranesi to ‘swiftly abandon his former contacts with the French Academy in
Rome … in favour of visiting architects from Britain … with their more pragmatic
viewpoint.’28 In the summer of 1755, Adam recounted a journey with ‘Signor
Piranesi and Monsieur Clerisseau to see the ancient thermae or baths of Cara-
calla, the ruins of which are most magnificent,’ and they also visited Hadrian’s
Villa together.29 Adam characterised Clérisseau, Piranesi and Pécheux as his
‘three friends cronys and Instructors’ but identified contrasting temperaments30:

Without Clerisseau I should have spent several years without making the progress
I have done in one fourth of the time. The reason is evident, the Italians have at
present no manner of taste, all they do being more French than anything else.
­Piranesi who may be said, alone to breath the Antient Air, is of such dispositions as
barrs all Instruction; His Ideas in locution so ill ranged, His expressions so furious &
fantastick. That a Venetian hint is all can be got from him, never anything fixt, or
well digested. So that a quarter of an hour makes you Sick of his Company.31

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 r uin and r o t unda

Giovanni Battitsta P
­ iranesi,
Blackfriars Bridge, ­London,
under construction,
1766. Courtesy of RIBA
Collections.

But Adam and Piranesi continued to be friends and colleagues, sharing many
interests. For example, their appreciation of scenographic effects was indebted to
baroque theatre, including Bibiena’s innovations, which influenced the develop-
ment of the picturesque notably due to Kent’s studies in Rome. British admiration
led Piranesi to be recognised as ‘a most ingenious architect’ and elected an hon-
orary Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1757, to his considerable pleasure.32
Acknowledging the support and appreciation he had received from British archi-
tects and patrons, Piranesi remarked in 1778 that if he had lived outside Italy he
would have chosen London.33 According to Salmon, the ruin studies:

of British architects visiting Italy for a few years and seeking a vocabulary of
form for their working careers at home were not the same as for those long-term
Roman residents, such as Piranesi, and few seem to have entered fully into the
intellectual antiquarianism of eighteenth-century Rome.34

But in June 1755, Adam wrote to his sister Peggy that Piranesi:

is become immensely intimate with me & as he imagined at first that I was like
the other Englishes who had love for Antiques without knowledge, upon seeing
some of my Sketches, & Drawings, was So highly delighted that he almost ran
quite distracted, & says I have more genius for the true noble Architecture than
any other Englishman ever was in Italy.35

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 r uin an d r o t un da

Emphasising Piranesi’s genuine respect, an inscription to Adam appears among

the monuments along the Via Appia in the frontispiece to the second volume of
Antichità romane, 1756. In June 1755, Piranesi mentioned that he would ded-
icate his next plan of ancient Rome to Adam. Visiting his friend in April 1757,
Adam saw the Ichnographia in preparation, and in a letter to his sister Helen
described the various dedications to him:

To Robert Adam Britain, Patron of Architecture, This plate of Campus Martius

is dedicated by John Batista Piranesi. Then on a frieze above is a medal, where
Fame points to a piece of architecture and leans on my shoulder in the attitude of
going off to proclaim my praises. Round the medal is this inscription: Robert Adam
Architect, Member of the Academy of St Luke at Rome and of Florence and of
the Institute of Bologna—all in Latin. In another medal Piranesi has put my head
and his own joined, forming a Janus or double-faced head, with both the names
of the dedicator and the dedicated on it, but this was not finished when I saw it.36

With only minor revisions to this account, the dedications appear in Campo
Marzio, which Adam supported with a generous advance payment towards its
publication.37 Further dedications in the title page and Scenographia also refer to
Adam, who asked to be mentioned in the preface too. In a subsequent visit just
before leaving the city, he was happy to read ‘many very handsome compliments
as to the extraordinariness of my genius and the unblemished probity of my
character that envy durst not dare attack.’38 Adam corresponded with Piranesi
after he left Rome and appreciated their continuing association. According to
Damie Stillman:

Before his arrival in Rome and his encounter with Piranesi, Adam was already
excited by antiquity and grandeur; Piranesi heightened this excitement, but he
did not create it. Similarly, a number of the ideas propounded by Piranesi in the
mid-1760s were anticipated by Adam or were developed concurrently … Yet
if Adam was the beneficiary of Piranesi’s influence, he was also important to
­Piranesi. For Adam was a practicing—and highly successful—architect whose
work demonstrated the merit of a good part of Piranesi’s theory.39

Piranesi subscribed to Adam’s major publications Ruins of the Palace of the Em-
peror Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia, 1764, and The Works in Architecture
of Robert & James Adam, which was published in five sequential parts between
1773 and 1778 when it appeared as a single volume, with a further volume pub-
lished in 1779. Piranesi contributed four engravings of Syon House to The Works.

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 r uin and r o t unda

Mostly written by James Adam but overseen by his elder brother, the preface
to the 1773 edition was indebted to James’ unfinished and unpublished 1762
essay on architectural theory, which was prepared while he was in Rome and
influenced by Piranesi.40 Acknowledging their respective status, James remarked:
‘You may assure Bob, I shall pardon him for superior merit. I am much less
ambitious than Caesar, I am contented to hold second place.’41 The Works em-
phasises Jones’ role in stimulating a classical revival in English architecture, but
concludes that the Palladian model is too literal and restrictive, stifling architects’
invention.42 Instead, the brothers state that reverence for ancient Rome should
inspire a comparable spirit of invention in contemporary architecture:

The great masters of antiquity were not so rigidly scrupulous, they varied the
proportions as the general spirit of their composition required, clearly perceiving,
that however necessary these rules may be to form the taste and to correct the
licentiousness of the scholar, they often cramp the genius and circumscribe the
ideas of the master.43

In contrast to the assumed lack of creativity of Jones and Wren, they write that:

Vanbrugh understood better than either the art of living among the great … But
his lively imagination scorned the restraint of any rule in composition; and his
passion for what was fancifully magnificent, prevented him from discerning what
was truly simple, elegant, and sublime.44

For all the brothers’ criticism of formulaic designs, there were limits to their taste.
They appreciated creative invention within the formal vocabulary of ancient
Rome, and Vanbrugh was chastised for diverging too far from this model.
Once again indebted to Piranesi, the brothers appreciated the monumental
vaults, domes and apses of Roman architecture in the second to fourth centuries
AD. The Works promoted a massive, windowless architecture more appropriate to
public buildings than private houses:

The frequent, but necessary, repetition of windows in private houses, cuts the
façade into minute parts, which render it difficult, if not impossible, to preserve
that greatness and simplicity of composition, which by imposing on the imagina-
tion, strikes the mind.45

Designs that feature such massive, monumental expression in plan, section and
elevation include the Assembly Rooms, Bath, c. 1765, but the idea was original in
mid-eighteenth-century Britain and no such public buildings were constructed.46

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The Works depicts designs for major public and private buildings as entire struc-
tures. But Adam’s appreciation of ancient sites stimulated a concern for the ruin as
well as the reconstruction. Fabricated ruins were admired in early eighteenth-­century
Britain and known to Adam before he arrived in Rome, as in Kent’s ­Richmond
­Hermitage. But Piranesi undoubtedly deepened his fascination for the ruin as a model
for design. Many of Adam’s Italian design sketches depict ruined buildings, and a
significant number combine intact and ruined forms within a single structure.47
Stimulated by the Enlightenment’s concern for origins, major excavations
began at Herculaneum in 1738 and at Pompeii in 1748. Founded in 1732, the
Society of Dilettanti resolved ‘That a Roman dress is thought necessary for the
President of the Society’ in 1741, and financed Robert Wood’s visit to the ancient
Roman city in modern-day Syria that led to The Ruins of Palmyra, 1753.48 Mir-
roring the need for precision in the natural and biological sciences, archaeological
investigations stimulated demand for accurate, measured drawings as a means
to compile detailed records and aid comparative analysis within and between
ancient sites. Wood lived on the floor below Adam at the Casa Guarneri. But in
1757, influenced by Piranesi, Adam described Wood’s ‘taste’ as ‘hard as Iron
and false as Hell,’ implying that he lacked any feeling for the creative expression
of ancient Roman architecture and its relevance to contemporary architecture.49
As the Society of Dilettanti turned its attention to ancient Greece, two of its mem-
bers, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, published The Antiquities of Athens,
vol. 1, 1762, in which Stuart argues that ‘all the most admired Buildings which
adorned the Imperial City, were but imitations of Greek Originals.’50 In the 1775
frontispiece to The Works, Greece appears below Italy to emphasise its status as
the root of classical architecture.51 But Adam had little interest in the post and
the lintel construction of ancient Greece and did not visit Athens, which remained
under Ottoman control. Ancient Rome was by far the greater influence on his
architecture. Again following Piranesi’s example, he acknowledged the Romans’
debt to the Etruscans, further undermining the influence of ancient Greece.52
Beginning with Jones and continuing with Burlington, British architects and
patrons had identified Palladio as the heir to ancient Rome and the faithful inter-
preter of its architecture. But surveying ruins studied by Palladio such as the Baths
of Caracalla and Diocletian, Adam questioned the accuracy of his drawn reconstruc-
tions. In a letter to James Adam in September 1756, he remarked that Palladio was
‘most faulty in many things and very unjust over his measurements, not so much in
the plans as in the sections and elevations’. Damningly, he concluded that Palladio
had ‘done many things by fancy where there were remains enough to point out the
truth’.53 In April 1757, just before he left Rome, Adam remarked of one survey:

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my Baths are now all completed and to be sure it has cost me a deal of trouble
and plague. Now I must begin to write the description of it, being determined, in
imitation of Scotch heroes, to become author, to attack Vitruvius, Palladio and
those blackguards of ancient and modern architecture, sword in hand.54

His dismissive criticism of Palladio was tinged with self-promotion. Questioning

Palladio’s invention as an architect and accuracy as an archaeologist, Adam im-
plied that he instead was the rightful heir to ancient Rome. Despite such criticism,
Adam’s mostly open-minded approach allowed him to not only prioritise ancient
Rome, but also learn from the Renaissance and Baroque as well as Palladio and
Palladianism.
An early and influential publication, Antoine Desgodtez’ Les Edifices antiques
de Rome, 1682, had helped to disprove the assumption that ancient Roman
architects adhered to a system of precise and consistent architectural proportions.
But contrary to its subtitle—dessinés et mesurés trés exactement—Desgodtez’
study was criticised for inaccurate measurements and misleading reconstruc-
tions. Employing Clérisseau and four assistants, Adam proposed a new edition to
­surpass Desgodtez. Work began in 1755, but was curtailed after a year due to
the vast scale of the endeavour.55 In early 1757, Adam wrote elegiacally of his
time at the Casa Guarnieri:

I am sorry to think of leaving this place where I have lived so happily with many
agreeable and good friends, unmolested by kirk or state, esteemed and respected
by all good people and hated and envied by the wicked and villainous only; mas-
ter of myself, with a proper mixture of application and amusement and constant
improvement in my own business in the most elegant and lordly way.56

Leaving Rome in May 1757, Adam was still determined to undertake a substan-
tial archaeological project before he returned to Britain, selecting the Emperor
Diocletian’s Palace on the Dalmatian coast because it was in good condition, little
known and easily accessible in the Venetian territories of the eastern Adriatic.
Arriving there on 22 July 1757, he was pleased to see ‘how little justice former
descriptions and unskillful drawings had done to it.’57 Proclaiming the profession-
alism of his survey, Adam remarked:

we were just five weeks at Spalatro and (during that time) four people were
constantly at work, which is equal to twenty weeks of one person. Mr Wood was
but 15 days at Palmyra and had but one man to work for him—judge then the
accuracy of such a work!58

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Adam’s team included Clérisseau, Agostino Brunias and Laurent-Benoît Dewez. Not-
ing that they were British, French, Italian and Belgian, respectively, Pinto ­concludes:
‘Such an international cast of characters provides an indication of how Rome
­functioned as an entropôt for the exchange of ideas about art and architecture.’59
Clérisseau’s contribution was substantial. He helped to measure and draw
Diocletian’s Palace, sketch perspectives, supervise engravers and prepare the
subsequent publication. In the introduction to Ruins of the Palace of the ­Emperor
Diocletian, Adam writes that he ‘prevailed on’ Clérisseau, ‘whose taste and knowl-
edge of antiquities I was certain of receiving great assistance in the ­execution
of my scheme, to accompany me in this expedition.’ But the ‘French artist’ is
acknowledged as an agreeable, educated companion and not a significant
­contributor.60 Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian is credited to one
author: Robert Adam. After Adam aborted his early written draft, his first cousin
William ­Robertson, the eminent historian and principal of the Edinburgh Univer-
sity from 1762, completed the introduction without credit, while Adam supplied
the commentary on the plates. The text is written in the first person as though
Adam is the author, and he undoubtedly retained overall control of the publication
that carries his name. Its premise is clearly stated:

The buildings of the Ancients are in Architecture, what the works of Nature are
with respect to the other Arts; they serve as models which we should imitate, and
as standards by which we ought to judge: for this reason, they who aim at emi-
nence, either in the knowledge or in the practice of Architecture, find it necessary
to view with their own eyes the works of the Ancients which remain, that they may
catch from them those ideas of grandeur and beauty, which nothing, perhaps,
but such an observation can suggest.61

The publication’s purpose was to establish Adam’s reputation as an expert in an-

cient Roman architecture and an architect capable of convincingly furthering its
legacy. Earlier, eighteenth-century architects had focused on the civic and religious
architecture of classical antiquity and Adam was the first to prepare a detailed
study of an ancient Roman house for a British readership. As a grand, imperial res-
idence, the Palace offered an enticing model for aristocratic patrons who wished to
draw analogies between ancient Rome and modern Britain. That Adam was known
to be preparing such a book was already advantageous, and he was busy with
commissions by the time it was published with an impressive list of subscribers.
In comparative engravings, the same elevation is depicted in reconstructed
and ruined states, one above the other on a single plate, as in the South Wall of

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the Palace.62 The ruins are shown without all the later structures then on the site, Robert Adam, Ruins of
and the reconstructions are also creative interpretations. Adam implies that these the Palace of the Emperor
drawings—the reconstruction and the ruin, in both instances presented without a Diocletian at Spalatro in
setting—can be understood as designs ready to be translated to a British context. Dalmatia, 1764, plate 8.
Elevation of the South Wall
of the Palace depicted as
To breath the antient air in Britain reconstructed and ruined.

Early in his career, Adam identified a potential rival in William Chambers, who
was a less innovative designer but became the principal threat to his pre-­
eminence among British architects. Half a decade Adam’s senior, Chambers
arrived in Rome five years earlier and was also tutored by Clérisseau, although
they did not become close. In 1751, a year into his studies in Rome, Chambers
prepared a design for a mausoleum in Kew Gardens in response to the premature
death of Frederick, Prince of Wales, who he had met before leaving Britain. A wa-
tercolour perspective shows the mausoleum as an intact rotunda surrounded by
four obelisks with no hint of decay.63 It is unclear if a watercolour section, dated
1752, depicts the mausoleum as a future ruin or a fabricated one, because the
rotunda’s interior is unaffected by age while the exterior is broken and over-
grown with vegetation. In 1759, soon after his return to Britain, Chambers built
a ruin indebted to ancient Rome in the gardens at Kew belonging to Augusta,
Frederick’s widow. The Ruined Arch has a practical function in that it facilitates
two paths, one under the arch and the other above it. Also at Kew, Chambers
designed an approximation of a ten-storey Great Pagoda, 1762, adorned with
dragons. The dialogue between Europe and China began in the early seventeenth
century when Jesuit priests encountered Confucian scholars at the imperial court

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in Beijing, which led to the introduction of linear perspective to Chinese drawings

and paintings. Trade with China ensured that ideas and artefacts spread from
one continent to another and Chinese gardens were cited as an inspiration for
picturesque landscapes.64 As an employee of the Swedish East India Company,
Chambers twice visited Canton in the 1740s before he became an architect, and
he later authored Designs of Chinese Buildings etc., 1757, and A Dissertation on
Oriental Gardening, 1772, falsely assuming that Chinese gardens included ruins.
A linear conception of time predominates in Western philosophy, although there is
some awareness of a cyclical conception of time, as in the seasonality of farming
guides. Familiarly conceived in terms of dualisms and the new replacing the old,
Western philosophy comprehends a temporal and physical distinction between a
monument and a ruin. But this is meaningless in traditional Chinese philosophy,
which understands contraries as interrelated and mutually supportive and time as
cyclical in terms of birth, life and death.65 Wu Hung notes: ‘There was indeed an
unspoken taboo against preserving and portraying architectural ruins: although
abandoned cities or fallen palaces were lamented in words, their images, if actu-
ally painted, would imply inauspiciousness and danger.’66 Accordingly, ‘the an-
cient Chinese perception of ruins’ did not rely on the conception ‘of ruins in the
European Picturesque tradition, but instead depended on the notion of erasure:
frequently it was the “void” left by a destroyed timber structure that stimulated a
lament for the past’.67 Plants and rocks rather than ruined buildings appeared in
Chinese paintings and gardens; appreciation of a withered tree represented decay
not in terms of ‘finality’ but as ‘a chain of perpetual transformation.’68 Chambers’
error may have been genuine, probably because he misinterpreted rundown struc-
tures as deliberate creations, but his appreciation of Chinese gardens furthered
the cult of ruins, which he extended to wasteland, suggesting that quarries and
excavations ‘could easily be framed into vast amphitheatres, rustic arcades, and
peristyles’ or ‘might be converted into the most romantic scenery imaginable, by
the addition of some planting, intermix’d with ruins.’69 Paradoxically, cultural and
commercial exchange between Europe and China introduced the Western concep-
tion of ruins to Chinese art and architecture, ‘which ceased to be a self-contained
cultural system and was brought into a global circulation of images.’70
Writing to James Adam in July 1756, Adam was already concerned that his
significant debt to Clérisseau would undermine his reputation in Britain, and sug-
gested that they should pay his tutor a retainer to keep him preoccupied:

The travelling scheme you see keeps him distant some years so that he can
neither interfere nor eclipse the first flash of character and after that is over he
comes secretly like a thief in the night and no one regards him.71

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In August 1756, Adam repeated his concern that Clérisseau’s arrival in ­Britain
‘would be the worst of politicks for my character, as Chambers and etc would not
be idle in saying he can do nothing by himself it is Clerisseau that does all.’72
Having accepted an annual retainer of £100, Clérisseau agreed to wait in Italy
until his tutorship was required again, which occurred when James Adam ar-
rived in 1760 for a three-year study.73 On his return to Britain in January 1758,
Adam’s collection included artworks, books, drawings and ‘all the antique orna-
ments that I am to use in my architecture’, while he also brought along his two
principal draughtsmen in Rome, Brunias and Dewez.74 Adam chose to settle in
London not Edinburgh because England’s wealthy, aspirational and appreciative
patrons offered greater scope for his ambitions.
Descended from a Norman family, the Curzons had lived at Kedleston since
the twelfth century and were the grandest Tory family in eighteenth-century
­Derbyshire. In 1749, aged 23, Nathaniel Curzon made a month-long trip to
France, Belgium and the Netherlands, but there is no indication that he visited It-
aly despite his fascination for classical antiquity.75 He succeeded his father as MP
for Derbyshire in 1754 and inherited Kedleston on his father’s death in November
1758, becoming the fifth Baronet. Curzon admired Holkham Hall, which was only
then nearing completion to Kent’s design, although construction had commenced
in 1734. Kent had died in 1748, and Curzon commissioned Holkham’s supervis-
ing architect Matthew Brettingham Sr to design a new house at Kedleston, replac-
ing a Queen Anne design. Palladio’s unbuilt drawing for the Villa Mocenigo, which
concludes the second of The Four Books, inspired Brettingham’s design for a
central block with four pavilions at its corners as at Holkham.76 Just two of Kedle-
ston’s pavilions were built. In 1759, Brettingham supervised the construction of
the family pavilion, while James Paine was responsible for the subsequent kitchen
pavilion. Recounting their first meeting in December 1758, Adam remarked that
Curzon had been ‘struck all of a heap with wonder and amaze’ by his drawings:

Everything he converted to his house and every new drawing he saw made him
grieve at his previous engagement with Brettingham. He carried me home in his
chariot about three o’clock and kept me to four o’clock seeing all said Brettingham’s
designs and asked my opinion. I proposed alterations and desired he might call them
his fancies. I went back on Saturday evening at six o’clock and sat two hours with
him … I revised all his plans and got the entire management of his grounds put into
my hands, with full powers as to temples, bridges, seats and cascades, so that as it
is seven miles round you may guess the play of genius and scope for ­invention—a
noble piece of water, a man resolved to spare no expense, with £10,000 a year,
good-tempered and having taste himself for the arts and little for game.77

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Robert and James Adam,

Section of the New Design
for Sir Nathaniel Curson
Baronet at Kedleston/From
North to South, 1760.
Drawn by a member of
the Adams’ office, possibly
by Agostino Brunias, with
the ‘now Lord Scarsdale’
inscription added by William
Adam. Courtesy of Sir John
Soane’s Museum, London.
In 1760, Adam was given responsibility for the design of the house as well as
the park.78 Construction was mostly complete by 1765. Entering Kedleston Hall from
the north, the columned Marble Hall—top-lit and over 12 metres high—leads to the
Saloon, where the view to the south is secondary to the view up towards the coffered
dome, which is nearly 13 metres in diameter and culminates in a circular oculus
about 19 metres from the floor. This sequence is clearly expressed in Adam’s North
to South Section through the Marble Hall and Saloon, which was drawn in 1760 and
dedicated to Sir Nathaniel Curzon, who was ennobled as the first Baron Scarsdale
on 9 April 1761. Listing Scarsdale as a subscriber, Adam’s Ruins of the Palace of
the Emperor Diocletian distinguishes between two important rooms, the atrium and
vestibulum, which were models for the Marble Hall and Saloon, respectively:

From the Porticus we enter the Vestibulum which was commonly of a circular
form; and in the Palace it seems to have been lighted from the roof. It was a sa-
cred place, consecrated to the Gods, particularly to Vesta (from which it derived
its name) to the Penates and Lares, and was adorned with niches and statues.
Next to the Vestibulum is the Atrium, a spacious apartment, which the Ancients
considered as essential to every great house. As the Vestibulum was sacred to
the Gods, the Atrium was consecrated to their Ancestors, and adorned with
their images, their arms, their trophies, and other ensigns of their military and
civil honours. By this manner of distributing apartments, the Ancients seem to
have had it in view to express, first of all reverence for the Gods, who had the
inspection of domestic life, and in the next place, to testify their respect for
those Ancestors to whose virtues they were indebted for their grandeur.79

Keen to encourage visitors, Curzon built an inn on his estate and prepared a
1769 guidebook, in which he acknowledges the Saloon’s principal influences,

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describing it as the ‘Dome of the Ancients, proportioned chiefly from the Pantheon
at Rome and from Spalatra,’ meaning the vestibulum there.80
Commissioned by Hadrian in the second century AD on the site of an earlier
circular building from Agrippa’s reign, the Pantheon was first a temple to all the
Roman gods and then converted into a Christian church in 608 AD.81 The di-
ameter of the dome and height of its apex are both around 43 metres, while the
central oculus is approximately 10 metres in diameter and open to the elements.
When Raphael chose to be buried there in 1520, no other famous person was en-
tombed in the Pantheon and it was still subject to flooding from the Tiber. Raphael
stimulated other eminent architects, painters and sculptors to be commemorated
there, and niches were introduced throughout the circumference of the church in
1731, appearing in Panini’s many depictions of the interior.82 The Pantheon that
Adam observed in 1755 soon after arriving in Rome was, therefore, a monument
to ancient Rome, the Roman Catholic Church and individual achievement:

The greatness and simplicity of parts fills the mind with extensive thoughts,
stamps upon you the solemn, the grave and the majestic and seems to prevent
all those ideas of gaiety or frolic which our modern buildings admit and inspire.83

Robert Adam, Kedleston

Hall, 1765. The Saloon,
looking north. Courtesy of
National Trust Images/Paul
Barker.

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Robert Adam,
­Kedleston Hall, 1765.
The apse and dome in the
Saloon. Courtesy of National
Trust Images/Chris Lacey.

In the Saloon—Kedleston’s Pantheon—the four doorways facing north, south,

east and west are each surmounted by a pediment. Between the doorways, tall
alcoves recall Curzon’s precedents, the Pantheon and Diocletian’s vestibulum.
Each alcove terminates in a hemispherical vault with a curved diamond-shaped
pattern that diminishes in size vertically, accentuating the alcove’s height and
directing the viewer’s attention upwards. More elaborate than the one proposed in
Adam’s North to South Section, the decorative pattern is derived from the Temple
of Venus and Rome in the Roman Forum, which Palladio depicts as the ‘Temples
of the Sun and the Moon’ in The Four Books.84
Holkham’s Statue Gallery displays ancient Roman sculptures from the first
and third centuries AD, including Ceres, goddess of the harvest; Diana, goddess
of the hunt; Faunus, god of the forest; and Neptune, god of the sea. Adam’s
North to South Section indicates that a comparable display was intended for
the Saloon. Rather than ancient Roman originals, the inserted statues were
mostly contemporary copies or plaster casts of well-known antique sculptures,
depicting Urania, Venus and Antinous, among others.85 As ancient statues
were usually copies, modern ‘secondary copies’ were also valued for their direct
association with classical antiquity.86 A large statue was located in each of the
four alcoves and smaller figures were placed in the eight niches between the al-
coves and the doorways. When the Saloon was altered in 1788–1789, the stat-
ues were transferred to the Marble Hall and the Great Staircase and supplanted

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by bronzed altars, two of them stoves. The niches were blocked in and replaced
by elaborate wall sconces, and the doorcases remade.87 Introduced at around
the same time, the chairs and benches were appropriate to the grand balls
that played an important part in prosperous eighteenth-century society, which
the Saloon’s wooden sprung floor further emphasises. Combining the festive
and the funereal, Adam’s design for the benches was based on the monumen-
tal sarcophagus of Agrippa and may have been a tribute to Piranesi, as the
­sarcophagus also appears alongside a dedication to Adam in Campo Marzio.88
Adam’s North to South Section focuses on one of the four large paintings of
ancient Roman ruins, which are located above each of the doors and beneath the
cornice and dome. The paintings recall the earlier practice of depicting ancient
­Roman ruins, as in Veronese’s frescoes at Palladio’s Villa Barbaro, emphasising that
Kedleston Hall, ‘as the idealised villa d’antica, represents Rome reborn.’89 Images
of ancient ruins acknowledge the demise of an ancient civilisation, offer a model to
emulate and surpass and prophesy the inevitable ruin and future adoration of the
present civilisation. But the ruins depicted at Kedleston and the Villa Barbaro are
not equivalent because the ruin meant more in the eighteenth century than before,
alluding to time in varied and complex ways in an era when ruins were fabricated as
often as found. Depicting figures casually strolling among the ruins, the painter was
William Hamilton, who Adam had sponsored to visit Rome and study with ­Antonio
Zucchi, one of his regular collaborators. As they were painted a decade or so after
the construction of the Saloon and the statues departed soon afterwards, ­Adam’s
original arrangement shown in the North to South Section was short-lived.90
­Another frequent collaborator, Biagio Rebecca, completed the smaller, horizontal
grisaille panels, which are placed between the large paintings and depict scenes
from English, mostly medieval, history.91 Rather than changeable, the paintings
and panels are integrated into the architecture and follow the curve of the wall.
The paintings’ lavish frames are part of the interior decoration while the panels are
indented into the wall surface. References to medieval ­England and ancient Rome
indicate a desire to draw inspiration from the two cultures and combine them, too.
But in comparison to the smaller monochrome panels, the paintings’ substantial
size and vibrant colours establish a clear hierarchy in which the classical is pre-­
eminent. Kedleston represents the ambition to forge a new classical civilisation in
which the former Roman colony would become the new Rome.
The dome has octagonal coffers with central rosettes inspired by the Basilica
of Maxentius, Rome.92 Diminishing in size as they near the oculus, the coffers
give the dome surface depth and accentuate its height so that the viewer is drawn
upwards, as in the alcoves. The dome, oculus and single external door recall the

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Pantheon. But Salmon suggests that the Saloon recalls a Roman ruin as much as
an entire ancient structure:

With its central oculus, external glazed door to the south and north door to the
top-lit Entrance Hall, the forms of the Saloon at Kedleston are enlivened and given
variety by the way in which the light falls across them. It is arguable that one of
the most important lessons architects like Adam learned from drawing great frag-
ments of Roman opus caementicum structures was how to manipulate building
mass and to handle spatial composition under changing conditions of light.93

The Saloon can be understood as a designed ruin comparable to Clérisseau’s Ruin

Room but in painted and physical form, recreating the light patterns of actual ruins.
Accentuating the play of light and shadow, the Saloon’s modelled surfaces are dec-
orated in gilt and scagliola, a highly polished composite of plaster and marble, and
float in off-white plaster that evokes an overcast English sky, across which the oculus
casts a rotating circle of light on sunny days. The alcoves, dome and oculus draw the
eye upwards, while the dialogue between the distinct elements and pale plaster ‘sky’
keeps the eye on the move from foreground to background and side to side, e­ liciting
a fragmented and questioning experience comparable to the e­ ighteenth-century ap-
preciation of the ruins’ allegorical potential. Referring to this oscillation between
‘the gaze and the glance,’ Peter de Bolla identifies a mode of viewing that com-
bines ‘two regimes—of the picture and of the eye,’ which he respectively charac-
terises as ‘the appreciation of high cultural artifacts’ and ‘the phenomenology of
seeing.’94 Noting the increasing type and number of spaces for public display in
mid-eighteenth-­century Britain, which included assembly rooms, theatres, galleries
and estates, de Bolla conceives the Saloon in terms of a viewer who perceives him
or herself ­simultaneously viewing and being viewed. In conclusion, he locates the
self-­reflective viewer within ‘a culture of visuality in which seeing and being seen
were crucial indices to one’s social standing, to one’s self definition’.95
The resulting experience is picturesque. Even when the viewer is static, phys-
ical and perceptual movement is implicit, because any past or future journey is
understood in relation to other potential journeys and is but one part of a complex
and changeable whole. In 1756, Adam described Italy as:

the most intoxicating Country in the world, for a pictoresque Hero, would you
have agreeable smiling prospects, they are here in abundance. Would you dip
into wild caverns, where glimmering light aggravate the horrid view of Rocks &
Cavitys & pools of water. Here there are many of them, such indeed as my wildest
imagination had never pictured to me.96

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Adam acknowledged ‘Kent’s genius for the picturesque.’97 But he believed

that he:

could carry that affair to a greater length than Kent and his disciples have yet
brought it, as I have greater ease in drawing and disposing of trees and buildings
and ruins picturesquely which Kent was not quite master of, as all his trees are
perpendicular and stiff and his ruins good for nothing.98

As this acerbic criticism acknowledges, Kent’s garden ruins were small and not for
daily use, unlike those that Adam proposed.
Kent’s interiors, gardens and garden buildings are all picturesque. The juxta-
position of rooms and routes that he designed for the piano nobile at Houghton
Hall, Norfolk, c. 1725, includes the austere, monumental and monochrome
Stone Hall, the vibrant, crimson and gold Saloon and the Great Staircase covered
in trompe l’œil depictions of mythological hunting scenes, which has a Doric
temple at its centre that is seemingly a garden monument transferred to an in-
terior. But Kent’s publications do not explain his theory of design.99 One of The
Works’ significant achievements is to articulate a theory of the picturesque in
which the design and experience of a building is equated to that of a landscape:

Movement is meant to express, the rise and fall, the advance and recess, with
other diversity of form, in the different parts of a building, so as to add greatly to
the picturesque of the composition. For the rising and falling, advancing and re-
ceding, with the convexity and concavity, and other forms of the great parts, have
the same effect in architecture, that hill and dale, fore-ground and distance, swell-
ing and sinking have in landscape: That is they serve to produce an agreeable and
diversified contour, that groups and contrasts like a picture, and creates a variety
of light and shade, which gives spirit, beauty and effect to the composition.100

Adam applied the landscape analogy to the design of a building’s setting, façades
and interior surfaces. A free interpretation of the Arch of Constantine, Kedleston’s
South Front expresses the picturesque movement described in The Works as do the
undulating interior surfaces of the Saloon, from which the South Front’s symmetrical,
curved stairs lead down to the park. Adam combined axial and oblique approaches
to aid anticipation and stimulate surprise: ‘the more you keep the people from seeing
the more their imaginations have occasion to work’.101 To the west of the Saloon, the
State Apartment includes a number of family portraits, including Nathaniel Hone’s
The First Lord and Lady Scarsdale walking in the grounds of Kedleston, 1761, fur-
ther emphasising the connection between the house and park.102

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Robert Adam, Kedleston

Hall, 1765. The South
Front. Courtesy of National
Trust Images/Rupert Truman.

In Rome, Adam sketched numerous designs for picturesque ruins in land-

scape settings, combining and reworking ones observed on his travels. He no
doubt enjoyed the appreciation of sublime ruins in Kames’ Elements of Criticism.
But given that Adam depicted and designed gothic and classical ruins, he must
have disagreed with his friend’s conclusion that a gothic ruin ‘exhibits the triumph
of time over strength; a melancholy, but not unpleasant thought: a Grecian ruin
suggests rather the triumph of barbarity over taste; a gloomy and discouraging
thought.’103 The ruins that Adam designed in Britain were sometimes intended
to establish an imaginary medieval prehistory of an estate. Remains of the Old
­Castle of Osterly in Middlesex, one of the seats of Robert Child Esq, 1774,
is a proposal for a ruin intended to appear as though it preceded Adam’s new
house.104 Adam designed ruins to use as well as admire. Intended to house
the estate’s domestic offices, the design for a partially ruined castle at Brampton
Bryan, 1777, for Edward Harley, fourth Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, was the larg-
est inhabited ruin that he proposed.105 On a smaller scale, Design of a ruinous
bridge for the Garden at Sion, 1768, is illustrated in The Works.106
Reflecting the further division of labour into specialisms since Kent’s era, Adam
designed garden buildings but left landscape design to others. One of his design
sketches from Rome, dated 1757, imagines a dilapidated Pantheon on a hill, with
a substantial building surmounted by a dome in a distant vale to the right.107

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In 1759, Adam prepared designs for garden buildings in the park at Kedleston. His Robert Adam, Sketch for
panoramic proposal in watercolour and pen and ink has a Pantheon at its centre Landscaping the Park at
108
as also on the crest of a hill. The details of the sketch are small and unclear. Kedleston, 1759. Courtesy
The Pantheon has a portico and seems to be intact, but the dome has a flat top, of National Trust.
which may suggest that it terminates with an oculus open to the sky. Two smaller
eye-catchers are on the hills to the left and right, and there is a substantial building
with a spire, possibly a stable block, in low ground to the extreme right. According
to Leslie Harris:

The view seems to be taken from a point just beyond the ha-ha to the south west
of the house, looking west-north-west. On the far right can be seen the palatial
stables … with Harepit Hill above, crowned with a clump of trees.109

In Rome, Adam prepared two small design sketches of vaulted chambers and a
large coloured sketch design of a ruined rotunda, which have sometimes been
associated with Kedleston. The first small sketch, in pen and ink, has Adam’s
French inscription in ink: ‘Une Cote du Temple Ruiné, et restoré avec les/ ­fragmens
antiques.’ Charles James Richardson, an assistant to Sir John Soane when he
acquired Robert and James Adam’s extensive drawing collection in 1833, added
the inscription ‘Adams’ in pencil. The second small sketch, in pencil and pen and
ink, has Adam’s inscription ‘Un Autre temple frequenté par un Hermit / et par oui
il et converté a Chappelle.’ Correcting Adam’s French, Clérisseau crossed out part
of the inscription—‘oui il et converté a’—so that it concludes ‘par lui Changé en
Chappelle’. Richardson added the name ‘Adams’ in pencil.

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 r uin an d r o t un da

Robert Adam, Ru-

ined Antique Shrine,
c. ­1755–1757. Courtesy
of the Trustees of the
Victoria and Albert Museum,
London.

Robert Adam, Ruined

­Temple, c. ­1755–1757.
Courtesy of the
­Trustees of the Victoria and
Albert Museum, London.

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 r uin and r o t unda

Robert Adam, Design

for a Roman Ruin,
c. ­1755–1757. Courtesy
of the Trustees of the
Victoria and Albert Museum,
London.

Redrawn with more finesse and design detail, the two vaulted chambers re-
appear at each side of a ruined rotunda in the large coloured sketch design, which
is drawn in pencil, pen and ink and watercolour. Pencil inscriptions similar to
those in the small sketches—‘Temple Ruiné et restoré avec les fragmens antiques’
and ‘Une Cote du Temple Ruiné frequenté par un Hermit,’ respectively —are seen
beneath the left and right chambers. Richardson added the pencil inscription
‘Original Sketch by Robert Adam Architect.’
A doorway connects the rotunda to the left chamber, while none is evident
between the rotunda and the right chamber. The room to the left is domestic in char-
acter with a fireplace and high glazed window, while the one to the right has an altar-
piece covered by a cloth, which is surmounted by a painting and flanked by niches.
According to A. A. Tait: ‘The Janus-like pavilion presented, as it were, the options
open to the architect concerned with the past. He could remodel in the antiquarian
style … or simply fling past and present together … to create a modern space.’110
The scale at its base emphasises the coloured sketch design’s creatively am-
biguous status between architecture and archaeology. Recalling Piranesi’s layered
dissections of ancient Roman constructions in ruin, the sketch can be understood
as an elevation or a section, and it is likely that Adam intended this ambiguity. The
sketch’s upper parts seem to be in elevation, as the outer edges of the brickwork
dome and vaults are drawn and coloured in a similar manner to the arched open-
ings in the walls of the Rotunda. As an elevation, the sketch can be understood
as a sequence of indented alcoves, which frequently appear in Adam’s designs
for external and internal walls, offering picturesque movement, ‘the rise and fall,

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the advance and recess.’111 But the layered roof construction and the continuous
dark shadow between the sloping roofs and vaulted chambers suggest a section,
as do the foundations. Reinforcing the assumption that the sketch is a section, the
inscriptions indicate that the two vaulted chambers were once ruined and later en-
closed and made habitable; both are in good condition and have stone floors. Only
the largest of the three spaces, the rotunda, remains a ruin with rough, cracked
walls and an uneven, earth floor. The arched openings in the rotunda and the left
chamber frame views onto trees, which also appear at the edges of the composi-
tion, emphasising the design’s natural setting. The varied tree types include tall,
angular cypresses of Mediterranean origin. No one is seen in the side chambers,
but three brightly clothed figures, possibly in Roman dress, one seated and two
standing, occupy the ruined rotunda, which is partially covered in vegetation and
dramatically lit, casting strong shadows even though the pale sky has soft, billowing
clouds. Stephen Astley speculates that the seated figure is ‘an architect, drawing
an antique fragment uncovered by his assistants.’112 A comparable seated figure
appears in the frontispiece to Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian.113 But
an alternative interpretation is that the figures reside here, and that Adam proposed
a combination of ruined and internal rooms within one structure. The figures’ loca-
tion and the respective size of the three rooms imply that the ruined rotunda is the
most important of the three chambers and possibly the most conducive to inhab-
itation, notably when offering shade and ventilation in a hot Roman summer and
also because it has no defined purpose and thus more space for the imagination.
In 2002, the coloured sketch was associated with the design of The Ruin at
Mowbray Point in Hackfall Park, Yorkshire. John Aislabie created the gardens at
nearby Studley Royal between 1722 and 1742. His son William incorporated the
medieval ruins of Fountains Abbey into Studley Royal for picturesque effect and
then developed Hackfall as a further counterpoint to the formality of his father’s
garden in the 1760s and 1770s. Conceived as an eye-catcher and a banqueting
hall, The Ruin stands on a ridge that affords long easterly views across the Yorkshire
countryside. Below, on the steeply wooded hillside leading down to the River Ure,
William Aislabie inserted winding paths, follies, waterfalls, pools and a stone seat
dedicated to Kent. According to The Landmark Trust, which commissioned The
Ruin’s restoration: ‘Weight of circumstantial evidence—which includes Adam work-
ing at nearby Newby Hall from 1766 points overwhelmingly to this watercolour
having directly inspired The Ruin, which building accounts suggest was completed
by 1767.’114 Alastair Rowan also associates the sketch with Mowbray Point and
suggests that Diocletian’s Palace influenced its central rotunda.115 It is possible that
the coloured sketch inspired The Ruin, which when seen from the Vale of Mowbray

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to the east appears to have a broken rotunda and two smaller open side vaults that
each lead to a separate room. But it is unlikely that Adam was directly involved in
the commission, as the Ruin has three rooms of nearly equal size and a diminutive
central rotunda and is much smaller than the design in the coloured sketch.
When Adam acquired the commission to design Kedleston Hall, his attention
was diverted from the garden buildings, which receded further from realisation as
construction costs led Curzon to delay completion of the interior of the house. In
The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Arthur T. Bolton describes
the coloured sketch as ‘a design of a great Roman ruin to be erected at Kedleston,
possibly in connection with the bridge’. Identifying an ancient Roman inspiration
for the design, he remarks that its ‘central feature is a brick hemi-cycle of the
­Minerva Medici type’, a building dedicated to nymphs and associated with the
water supply. Identifying the coloured sketch design as an elevation and not a
section, Bolton assumes that it was drawn in 1761 because he associates its
chronology with one of Adam’s designs that year, a watercolour of the bridge at
Kedleston.116 In Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh and Rome, 1962,
John Fleming confirms Bolton’s attribution of the coloured sketch design to Cur-
zon’s estate but not the date and exact location, describing it as a Design for an
ornamental ruin in a park, adapted for Kedleston, 1758, by Robert Adam.117

With all his designs for garden temples ready to hand he was able to ‘tickle up’
an amusing ruin in no time and produced an imposing cavernous structure,
­reminiscent of the Serapaeum at Hadrian’s Villa, though incorporating his ‘temple
ruiné et fréquenté par un hermit’ and his ‘temple ruiné et restoré avec les frag-
ments antiques’.118

Thomas J. McCormick associates Adam’s two small sketches of vaulted chambers

with Clérisseau’s Ruin Room, and repeats the assumption that they were later adapted
for the design of a ruin at Kedleston.119 But there is no documentation to irrefutably
associate the coloured sketch with the estate, and Leslie Harris, for many years the
archivist there, does not mention it in his guides to the Hall and park. Indicating that
the association is now uncertain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, first listed
the coloured sketch as Design for a Roman Ruin, Capriccio, pen, ink on pencil with
watercolour. Formerly identified as a design related to Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire,
and later removed any mention of Curzon’s estate.120 The association with Kedleston
cannot be proved due to lack of direct evidence. But it still may be true. I believe that
there is enough circumstantial evidence to once again assert the connection between
Kedleston and Adam’s drawings in Rome, notably the coloured sketch design.

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In Italy, Adam sketched many perspectives and numerous plans, sections

and elevations. But very few drawings he made there are equivalent in ambition,
as carefully crafted and so obviously a design proposition as his coloured sketch,
which is a similar size to his North to South Section of Kedleston. Approximately
10 metres in diameter and 14 metres high from the floor to the oculus, its rotunda
is of comparable dimensions to Kedleston’s Saloon and also has recessed niches
on each side of a central doorway.
Although they are similar in spirit, none of Hamilton’s four paintings of ruins
inserted in the Saloon are the same as the one that Adam depicted. In the North to
South Section, the large capriccio of ancient ruins above the Saloon’s east doorway
shows to the right a grand, ruined colonnade with a straight and a curved row of
columns, a broken cornice and overgrown vegetation and a circular urn decorated
with carved figures in the foreground. A small colonnaded building is to the left and
further in the distance. Between them, there is a pyramid very similar to that of Gaius
Cestius in Rome, in front of which two figures gesture. The capriccio is clearly based
on a sketch that Adam prepared in Italy, c. 1756–1757,121 which he extended
horizontally to insert the pyramid from another of his sketches.122 The capriccio
and two sketches are very similar to another capriccio, c. 1756–1757, attributed to
­Clérisseau, which includes the ruined colonnade to the right and the pyramid to the
left. Clérisseau depicts the ruined colonnade as circular, suggesting that the inspira-
tion may have been the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli that he and Adam often sketched.123

Robert Adam, Capriccio

showing parts of a ruined
colonnade with a trium-
phal arch on the left,
c. ­1756–1757. Courtesy of
Sir John Soane’s Museum,
London.

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r uin and r o t unda

Robert Adam, Capriccio

showing parts of a ruined cir-
cular temple with Corinthian
capitals beside a pyramid
with architectural fragments
at its base, c. 1756–1757.
Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London.

Charles-Louis Clérisseau,
Capriccio showing a ruined
circular colonnade of the
Corinthian order with a
broken and overgrown cor-
nice. Beside it is a pyramid
and in front of that is a
circular altar-sacrophagus,
c. 1756–1757. Courtesy of
Sir John Soane’s Museum,
London.

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 r uin an d r o t un da

In the early 1760s, Adam prepared various versions of an unexecuted design

for a Grotto or Rock Room at Kedleston, in which a small circular temple sits
above a rocky hill with a cave-like or arched opening at its base.124 A sketch sec-
tion suggests that the diminutive temple is actually a cupola to an underground
room, which is modelled on the left-hand chamber in the coloured sketch design.
A related interior wall elevation with a chimney piece incorporates cinerary urns
and a dado based on Roman sarcophagi, which Scarsdale annotates: ‘This may
do very well for the inside finishing of the Rock room.’ In a related plan of a
circular pavilion, not drawn by Adam or his office and more likely prepared at
Kedleston, Scarsdale comments: ‘This Room will finish much the better in ye
Manner of the left hand room in Mr Adam’s design for a ruin. With the addition
of the Sarcophagus in the Dado.’ In a further annotation on the same drawing, he
remarks: ‘The Lower room may be a kind of Grotto.’

Plan of a circular pavilion,

Kedleston, early 1760s.
Courtesy of National Trust /
Andrew Pattison.

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Section of a domed pavilion, Kedleston, early 1760s. Courtesy of National Trust.

145
 r uin an d r o t un da

Interior wall elevation with

chimney piece, Kedleston,
early 1760s. Courtesy of
National Trust.

Sketch of a circular pavilion

on a rock with a grotto un-
derneath, Kedleston, early
1760s. Courtesy of National
Trust.

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These words suggest that Curzon was shown the coloured sketch design.
Given that actual and imagined ruins appear more often than entire structures
in Adam’s Italian drawings, and ruined rotundas are especially common, it is
quite likely that one of his finest designs for a habitable ruin—the coloured sketch
design—was considered for Curzon’s estate.125 Adam’s 1759 panoramic sketch
of the park at Kedleston focuses on a Pantheon, and James Adam confirmed that
ruins were proposed there. In Florence in 1761, he acquired antique marbles that
would be ‘excessively saleable in London, particularly should Bob have any ru-
ined temples to adjust such as he proposed for Sir Nathaniel’s garden’.126 If they
had both been constructed at Kedleston, the Saloon in the Hall and the Pantheon
in the Park would have stimulated an evocative dialogue on the character, condi-
tion and potential of a habitable ruin, so that one would have been the mirror of
the other and either its past or future.

Notes

1 Altering this relationship, the water level of Loch Leven was lowered in the 1830s.
Astley, p. 5.
2 This is the earliest dated drawing in the multiple-volume Drawing Collection of Robert
and James Adam at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, which includes 8,000 office
drawings and 1,000 drawings from the brothers’ Grand Tours. Soane acquired the
majority of the drawings for £200 in 1833 and purchased others at various times in
his life. Drawing Collection of Robert and James Adam, vol. 56/14; Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London. For details of Soane’s purchase of the Adams’ drawings, refer to
Sands, Robert Adam’s London, pp. 4–5.
3 Tait suggests that the artist Paul Sandby, who moved to Scotland in the mid-1740s,
may have encouraged this appreciation. Tait, ‘Reading the Ruins,’ p. 527.
4 Tait, Robert Adam, p. 7. Refer to Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’ p. 6.
5 John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, pp. 108–112; Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’
p. 58.
6 Adam, letter to James Adam, quoted in Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’ p. 16.
7 Adam, letter to William Adam, 31 January 1755, quoted in McCormick, p. 23.
8 Adam, diary entry, January 1755, quoted in McCormick, p. 23.
9 Adam, letter to Peggy Adam, 5 March 1755, quoted in Eileen Harris, The Country
Houses of Robert Adam, p. 7.
10 Adam, summer 1756, quoted in Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’ p. 4.
11 Graham, pp. 84–85.
12 Shaftesbury, Chacteristicks, vol. 3, p. 207. Refer to Li, pp. 110–112.
13 Pope, The Dunciad, p. 41.
14 Salmon, p. 29, refer to p. 27.
15 Adam, letter to Nelly Adam, 23 October 1756, quoted in McCormick, p. 52.

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16 Adam, quoted in John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 140, refer to
pp. 158–159.
17 Adam, quoted in John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 2.
18 Adam, letter to Peggy Adam, 1755, quoted in Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’ p. 20. Refer
to Yarker, unpaginated.
19 Adam, letter to Peggy Adam, 18 June 1755 (misdated 1754), quoted in Stillman,
‘Robert Adam and Piranesi,’ p. 197.
20 Adam, letter, quoted in Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’ p. 16.
21 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 1, plate 5, p. 48.
22 Adam, letter to James Adam, 11 September 1756, quoted in McCormick, p. 117,
refer to pp. 117–120.
23 McCormick, p. 110.
24 Winckelmann, quoted in McCormick, p. 99.
25 Winckelmann, letter to Caspar Füssli, 26 November 1763, quoted in McCormick,
p. 100, refer to pp. 103, 114–116.
26 Winkelmann, letter to Clérisseau, 1767, quoted in McCormick, pp. 112–114.
27 Stephen Astley, in Woodward, ‘Catalogue,’ p. 25.
28 Wilton-Ely, Piranesi, Paestum and Soane, p. 21.
29 Adam, quoted in Tait, The Adam Brothers in Rome, p. 64.
30 Adam, letter to Jenny Adam, 5 July 1755, quoted in McCormick, p. 28.
31 Adam, letter to James Adam, 19 October 1755, quoted in McCormick, p. 34. Refer
to Stillman, ‘Robert Adam and Piranesi’, p. 198.
32 Hugh Thompson, assistant secretary of the Society, 7 April 1757, quoted in Murray,
p. 46.
33 Piranesi, in Wilton-Ely, Piranesi, p. 7, refer to p. 55.
34 Salmon, p. 45.
35 Adam, letter to Peggy Adam, 18 June 1755 (misdated 1754), quoted in Stillman,
‘Robert Adam and Piranesi,’ p. 198. Refer to John Fleming, Robert Adam and his
Circle, p. 207; Wilton-Ely, ‘Amazing and Ingenious Fancies,’ pp. 221–222.
36 Adam was elected accademico di merito of the Accademia di San Luca in 1757, as
was Piranesi in 1761. Adam, letter to Helen Adam, 9 April 1757, quoted in John
Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 231. Refer to Salmon, p. 32; Stillman, ‘Rob-
ert Adam and Piranesi,’ p. 198.
37 Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’ p. 20.
38 Adam, quoted in John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 231.
39 Stillman, ‘Robert Adam and Piranesi,’ pp. 202, 206.
40 John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, pp. 315–319; Tait, Robert Adam,
pp. 112, 114.
41 James Adam, quoted in Oresko, p. 33.
42 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 1, preface to part 5, p. 56.
43 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 1, preface to part 1, p. 46.
44 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 1, preface to part 5, p. 56. Refer to Adam and
Adam, The Works, vol. 1, preface to part 1, pp. 46–47.
45 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 1, preface to part 4, p. 54.

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46 Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’ pp. 26–27.

47 For example, Drawing Collection of Robert and James Adam, vol. 55/98, 99,105,
107, 116; Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.
48 Quoted in Lionel Cust and Sidney Colvin, History of the Society of Dilettanti, 1898,
and repeated in Ayres, Classical Culture, p. 61.
49 Adam, 1757, quoted in Salmon, p. 43.
50 James Stuart, The Antiquities of Athens, 1762, quoted in Tait, Robert Adam, p. 108.
51 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 1, preface to part 1, p. 44.
52 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 2, preface, p. 58.
53 Adam, letter to James Adam, September 1756, quoted in John Fleming, Robert
Adam and his Circle, p. 218.
54 Adam, 9 April 1757, quoted in John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 218.
55 John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, pp. 170–171; Salmon, p. 38.
56 Adam, Spring 1757, quoted in Tait, The Adam Brothers in Rome, p. 107.
57 Adam, quoted in John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 238. Refer to Iain
Gordon Brown, Monumental Reputation, p. 24.
58 Then named Spalato and now Split, Adam called the city Spalatro. Adam, quoted in
John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 240.
59 Pinto, Speaking Ruins, p. 260.
60 Adam, Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian, ‘Introduction,’ p. 2.
61 Adam, Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian, ‘Introduction,’ p. 2. Refer to
John Fleming, ‘An Adam Miscellany’, pp. 103–107; Tait, Robert Adam, p. 104.
62 Adam, Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian, plate 8. Refer to Iain Gordon
Brown, Monumental Reputation, pp. 38–39; Salmon, p. 41.
63 McCormick, pp. 19–21; Woodward, ‘Catalogue,’ p. 22.
64 Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque, p. 181; Wu, pp. 13–19.
65 Denison and Ren, pp. 15–20; Zhu, pp. 11–40, 217.
66 Wu, p. 94.
67 Wu, p. 23.
68 Wu, p. 41.
69 Chambers, pp. 130–132. Refer to Harris, Sir William Chambers, pp. 36–37;
Di Palma, pp. 230–234.
70 Wu, p. 95.
71 Adam, letter to James Adam, 24 July 1756, quoted in McCormick, p. 51.
72 Adam, letter to James Adam, 11 September 1756, quoted in McCormick, p. 52.
73 Clérisseau came to London in 1771 and worked with Robert Adam for a few years.
McCormick, pp. 147–161.
74 Adam, letter to James Adam, 4 September 1756, quoted in John Fleming, Robert
Adam and his Circle, p. 362, n. 227.
75 Leslie Harris, ‘Kedleston and the Curzons,’ pp. 9–10; Leslie Harris, Kedleston Hall,
p. 7.
76 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 2, ch. 17, p. 78.
77 Adam, letter to James Adam, 11 December 1758, quoted in John Fleming, Robert
Adam and his Circle, pp. 257–258.

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78 Adam, letter to James Adam, 24 July 1760, referred to in Stillman, The Decorative
Work of Robert Adam, p. 66.
79 Adam, Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian, p. 8.
80 Scarsdale, Catalogue of His Pictures, Statues etc. at Kedleston, 1769, p. 2, quoted
in De Bolla, p. 201.
81 In the eighteenth century, the Pantheon was incorrectly attributed to the first century AD
rather than the reign of Hadrian. As a church, it was known as Santa Maria della R­ otonda
as well as Santa Maria ad Martyres. Dixon, ‘Piranesi’s Pantheon,’ pp. 60, 67–68.
82 Panini sometimes omitted other elements, including Raphael’s tomb. Pasquali,
pp. 38–43; Thomas, pp. 26–27; Wixom and Linsey, pp. 265–266; Wrigley and
Craske, ‘Introduction,’ p. 3.
83 Adam, letter to Mary Adam, 1 March 1755, quoted in John Fleming, Robert Adam
and his Circle, p. 145.
84 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 4, ch. 10, pp. 36–37. Refer to Eileen
Harris, The Country Houses of Robert Adam, p. 44; Leslie Harris, Kedleston Hall,
p. 7; Salmon, p. 47; Stillman, The Decorative Work of Robert Adam, p. 68.
85 The sculptors were Richard Hayward and Joseph Wilton. Curzon acquired the plaster
casts from Matthew Brettingham Jr. Leslie Harris, ‘The Catalogue,’ pp. 58–59; Leslie
Harris, ‘Kedleston and the Curzons,’ p. 12.
86 Nagel and Wood, p. 279.
87 Leslie Harris, Kedleston Hall, p. 34; Stillman, The Decorative Work of Robert Adam,
p. 110.
88 Leslie Harris, Kedleston Hall, p. 36; Wilton-Ely, ‘“Amazing and Ingenious Fancies,”’
pp. 228–229.
89 Watkin, ‘Built Ruins.’ p. 6.
90 According to Leslie Harris, Hamilton’s ruin paintings were painted in 1787 and ‘re-
placed an earlier series of paintings by Morland, after Rubens’. But the National Trust,
which now owns Kedleston, dates them as 1775–1778, and records their location in
the Saloon in 1778. Leslie Harris, ‘The Catalogue,’ p. 62; www.nationaltrustcollec-
tions.org.uk/object/108799/108800/108801/108802 (retrieved 6 June 2017).
91 Leslie Harris writes that they depict ‘the Dukes of Northumberland and Suffolk entreating
Lady Jane Grey to accept the crown; Edward the Black Prince serving the French king
(then his prisoner) at supper; Elizabeth, widow of Sir John Grey, imploring Edward IV to
restore her husband’s lands; Eleanor sucking the poison from her husband Edward I’s
wound.’ A Curzon notebook dated 1768 and a Hamilton watercolour of the same year
refer to an alternative, probably unexecuted proposal for Persian, Turkish and ­Venetian
scenes. Leslie Harris, Kedleston Hall, p. 35; Leslie Harris, ‘The Catalogue’, p. 62.
92 Leslie Harris, ‘The Catalogue,’ pp. 58–59; Leslie Harris, Kedleston Hall, p. 7.
93 Opus caementicum is Roman concrete. Salmon, p. 47.
94 De Bolla, p. 212, 9; refer to pp. 10–11, 119, 182–183, 213–214.
95 De Bolla, p. 69.
96 Adam, 1756, quoted in Tait, Robert Adam, p. 136.
97 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 1, preface to part 1, p. 47.
98 Adam, quoted in Eileen Harris, The Country Houses of Robert Adam, p. 179; and in
John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 229.

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99 William Kent, The Designs of Inigo Jones, Consisting of Plans and Elevations for Pub-
lick and Private Buildings, 1727, and William Kent, Some Designs of Mr. Inigo Jones
and Mr. William Kent, 1744.
100 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 1, preface to part 1, p. 46. Refer to John Fleming,
Robert Adam and his Circle, pp. 315–319; Hausberg, unpaginated prepublication
manuscript; Tait, Robert Adam, p. 136.
101 Adam, letter to his mother, 13 November 1756, quoted in John Fleming, Robert
Adam and his Circle, p. 363. Refer to Eileen Harris, ‘Discord and Dissonance in
­Robert Adam’s Interiors,’ p. 94; Middleton, ‘Soane’s Spaces’, p. 32.
102 Leslie Harris, Kedleston Hall, p. 39.
103 Kames, vol. 1, p. 448.
104 Held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; refer to Rowan, Robert Adam,
pp. 82–83, plate 54, cat. 108. Related drawings of Osterley are in the Drawing Col-
lection of Robert and James Adam, vol. 21/1–2; Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.
105 Drawing Collection of Robert and James Adam, vol. 37/59; Sir John Soane’s M
­ useum,
London. Refer to Sands, ‘Adam’s Ruined Megastructure.’
106 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 2, no. 4, plate 7.
107 Held in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York; refer to John Fleming, Robert
Adam and his Circle, plate 73.
108 Leslie Harris, ‘The Catalogue,’ p. 75.
109 Referring to the extensive, meandering Long Walk to the west and south of the house,
Leslie Harris states that the three ‘eye-catchers’ in the sketch are ‘all of them indicated
on the circuit walk shown in Adam’s rough plan of the pleasure grounds, and on the
(George) Ingham survey of 1764’. But Adam did not draw landscape plans as he left
landscape design to others. Jonathan Hill in conversation with Dr Frances Sands, Cu-
rator of Drawings and Books, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 21–22 June 2017;
Leslie Harris, ‘The Catalogue’, p. 75.
110 Tait, Robert Adam, pp. 33–34. Refer to Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’ p. 25; Rowan,
Robert Adam, p. 33.
111 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 1, preface to part 1, p. 46.
112 Astley, in Woodward, ‘Catalogue,’ p. 23.
113 Adam, Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian, plate 1.
114 Colin Briden, an archaeologist working for The Landmark Trust made the association.
The Landmark Trust, ‘The Ruin, Hackfall, Grewelthorpe.’
115 Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’ p. 25.
116 Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, vol. 1, p. 244; refer to p. 74,
n. 63a, p. 243. Drawing Collection of Robert and James Adam, vol. 40/41; Sir John
Soane’s Museum, London.
117 John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, pp. 266, 278, plate 80.
118 Adam’s coloured sketch is also reminiscent of a number of his other sketches at
Hadrian’s Villa, including the rotunda of the larger baths. John Fleming, Robert
Adam and his Circle, p. 258. Refer to MacDonald and Pinto, pp. 236–239; Pinto,
Speaking Ruins, pp. 146–149; Wilton-Ely, ‘Amazing and Ingenious Fancies’,
p. 225.
119 McCormick, pp. 110–112.

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 r uin an d r o t un da

120 http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O69102/design-adam-robert (retrieved 20 April 2015);

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O69102/design-for-a-ruin-design-adam-­r obert
­(retrieved 8 May 2017).
121 Drawing Collection of Robert and James Adam, vol. 56/90; Sir John Soane’s M ­ useum,
London. A similar but simpler view appears in vol. 56/85.
122 Drawing Collection of Robert and James Adam, vol. 56/78; Sir John Soane’s M ­ useum,
London.
123 Drawing Collection of Robert and James Adam, vol. 56/120; Sir John Soane’s
­Museum, London. Refer also to another Clérisseau sketch, vol. 56/69.
124 The location may have been at Little Ireton, which was incorporated into the Kedleston
estate in 1721. Astley, in Woodward, ‘Catalogue’, p. 23; Leslie Harris, ‘The Cata-
logue’, pp. 69, 84–85.
125 Drawing Collection of Robert and James Adam, vol. 55/76–119, vol. 56/59–145
vol. 57/1–162; Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.
126 James Adam, 1761, quoted in John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 278.

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 6
life in ruins
 li f e in r uins

Forget not Piranesi

The child of a bricklayer and a poor and uneducated family that he never men-
tioned, Soan invented Soane. Reflecting his ambition, he continued the renaming
tradition of Palladio and Kent, even correcting all his earlier signatures to match his
chosen surname.1 In 1768, aged 15, he entered the office of George Dance the
Younger who was that year one of only four architect founder members of the Royal
Academy of Arts, which acquired a prestigious royal charter at its inception while
even the Royal Society had to wait two years. The Royal Academy’s first President
was the painter Joshua Reynolds and its first Treasurer was Chambers. The two
female founder members, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, were rare examples
of women achieving such status in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.2
The Royal Academy chose to present annual exhibitions, appoint 40 eminent
Academicians for life and provide a free artistic education for a period of up to ten
years with admittance judged on the submission of a portfolio of drawings.3 Soane
entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1771 while he continued to work for Dance,
and then moved to Henry Holland’s office the following year. In 1776, at his second
attempt, he won the Royal Academy gold medal for students of architecture with a
design for a Triumphal Bridge. While working on the design, he had declined the
offer of a Greenwich boating trip with friends, which led to the accidental drowning
of James King. A non-swimmer too, Soane acknowledged his good fortune and sad
loss. At the Royal Academy in 1777, he exhibited a tribute to his friend, a grand
mausoleum with space for 84 coffins and 24 urns, the first of many such designs.
In an era increasingly preoccupied by origins and memorials, Soane’s concern for
funerary monuments even surpassed that of his contemporaries.4
In 1774, with the financial support of the Society of Dilettanti, the Royal
Academy established a three-year travel scholarship, which included £60 annual
subsistence and £30 travelling expenses to and from Italy. Award of the scholar-
ship rotated between students of painting, sculpture and architecture. In 1777,
it was the architectural students’ turn to compete, open only to former gold med-
allists, and Soane was successful. Before setting out, he prepared his first book
Designs in Architecture, 1778, beginning a lifelong fascination with publishing.5
Offering guidance on his journey, Chambers gave Soane a copy of a letter he had
prepared for another pupil in 1774:

Seek for those who have most reputation, young or old, amongst which forget not
Piranesi, whom you may see in my name; he is full of matter, extravagant it is
true, often absurd, but from his overflowings you may gather much information.6

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While Chambers was ambivalent, Soane’s Triumphal Bridge was indebted to

­Piranesi’s Ponte Magnifico in Prima parte di architetture e prospettive, 1743.
Dance encouraged Soane’s interest in Piranesi, having studied in Rome at the
same time as James Adam. Soane met Piranesi in the summer of 1778 shortly
before the Venetian’s death in November that year, and no doubt admired the com-
pelling fusion of home, studio and museum at Palazzo Tomati. The ‘tutor’ indicated
his respect for the ‘pupil,’ offering four engraved views of the ancient Roman mon-
uments and ruins: The Pantheon, The Arch of Constantine, The Arch of Septimus
Severus and The Tomb of Cecilia Metella.7 Piranesi’s appreciation of the diversity
and invention of ancient Roman architecture and its debt to differing eras and
regions in pluralist combination was invaluable to Soane as it had been to Adam.
Visiting many of the sites that Adam had seen 20 years earlier, Soane trav-
elled throughout Italy, viewing Renaissance, Palladian, mannerist and baroque
buildings as well as ancient Roman ruins, including the imperial baths and
­Hadrian’s Villa, and the ancient Greek ruins at Paestum.8 Soane’s close friend and
travelling companion John Patterson, whose family were wool traders, noted with
frustration that while Britain had a prosperous and respected mercantile class,
‘business is despised by the nobility in Italy.’ Another of Soane’s contemporaries
Thomas Jones noticed that contemporary Romans divided Grand Tourists into
three classes. At the top were the ‘Cavalieri or Milordi Inglesi,’ who travelled with
servants and tutors; next were the ‘Mezzi Cavalieri’ or half gentlemen; and then,
at the base, were the artists.9 While Adam had aspired to the first category, Soane
was closer to the third, even with the status of his Royal Academy scholarship.
But among the Grand Tourists, social boundaries were less defined, allowing
Soane to later remark: ‘This was the most fortunate event of my life, for it was the
means by which I formed those connexions to which I owe all the advantages I
have since enjoyed.’10 Soane’s most eminent potential patron was Frederick
­Hervey, Bishop of Derry. On becoming fourth Earl of Bristol in December 1779,
Hervey offered the young architect commissions to transform The Downhill, his
house in County Down, Ireland, and design a new mansion at Ickworth, ­Suffolk.11
After just two years in Italy, Soane returned home earlier than intended, missing
the last year of his scholarship. But the projects came to nothing.

The climate of London

In 1806, Soane, by then an eminent practitioner, was elected Professor of Archi-

tecture at the Royal Academy, replacing his friend and former employer Dance.
Appointed from among the Academicians, the Professors were expected to present

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lectures, which were principally intended for students but also open to the public,
receiving wide attention and press reviews. Dance avoided giving any lectures in
the seven years of his professorship. But Soane relished the challenge, presenting
two series of six lectures, the first beginning in 1809, the second in 1815 and
also gave some lectures more than once.12 He illustrated his talks with large,
elaborate drawings prepared by his pupils at his expense, which offered the audi-
ence a virtual Grand Tour as the Napoleonic Wars restricted travel to Italy.
The Enlightenment concern for specialised knowledge allowed art, sci-
ence and morality/ethics to emerge as three independent value systems within
­European society, each with its own specific concerns so that they did not inter-
fere with each other.13 The foundation of the Royal Academy was part of this pro-
cess. But in practice, the transition was neither immediate nor universal. During
Soane’s studies, the Royal Academy was housed in temporary accommodation
in old Somerset House, but in 1780, it moved to a purpose-design accommoda-
tion in Chambers’ new Somerset House, remaining there until 1837. On leaving
the Strand, the visitor passed into the high entrance portico, which framed the
expansive central courtyard beyond. To the left was the entrance to the Royal
Society, which promoted the sciences. To the right was the entrance to the Royal
Academy, which promoted the arts. Their proximity encouraged the members of
one institution to attend the meetings and lectures of the other so that scientific
theories informed artistic practices and vice versa.
Common attitudes and allegiances united artists and scientists. The term
‘romanticism’ is sometimes applied pejoratively, suggesting disengagement from
contemporary concerns and retreat to the natural world. Claiming to heal the
rupture of culture from nature, the romantic imagination may instead conflate
the inner journey into the mind with the outer journey into the world, and thus
misrepresent nature, further its commodification and prevent critical engage-
ment with the natural world. But this was rarely the case in early nineteenth-­
century London, when collaborations and conversations between painters, poets,
­scientists and architects indicated their mutual respect and overlapping concerns.
Rather than discard reason, the search for understanding led the romantic mind
to cultivate a dialogue between the rational and irrational. Valuing intellect as well
as emotion, invention as well as history, time as well as place and industry as
well as nature, romanticism was promoted in science as well as art, which were
not then opposed in the way they have sometimes subsequently been. Acknowl-
edging the union of nature and culture, romanticism recognised a responsibility to
them both. Rather than the myth of objective expertise, the romantic scientist was
not external to nature and neither were the romantic painter, poet and architect.

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Humphry Davy climbed the Lake District with William Wordsworth in 1805,
while three years later, as Professor of Chemistry, he invited Samuel Taylor
­Coleridge to lecture on ‘Poetry and the Imagination’ at the Royal Institution, which
was founded in 1799 to complement the more theoretical concerns of the Royal
Society. Identifying the seeds of romanticism within Georgic England, Davy ad-
mired Thomson’s The Seasons, which inspired his own poems on natural energy,
drawing parallels between the scientific and artistic minds:

The perception of truth is almost as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty;

and the genius of Newton, of Shakespeare, of Michel Angelo, and of Handel, are
not very remote in character from each other. Imagination, as well as reason, is
necessary to perfection in the philosophical mind. A rapidity of combination, a
power of perceiving analogies, and of comparing them by facts, is the creative
source of discovery. Discrimination and delicacy of sensation, so important in
physical research, are other words for taste; and love of nature is the same pas-
sion, as is the love of the magnificent, the sublime and the beautiful.14

In his preface to the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads, which he and Coleridge first
published in 1798, Wordsworth considers the convergence of poetry and science
with Davy as the likely model:

If the labours of Men of Science should ever create any material revolution, direct
or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive,
the Poet will sleep no more than at present, but he will be ready to follow the
steps of the Man of Science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will
be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of Science itself.
The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as
proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed…15

It was not unusual for a Royal Academician to also be a Fellow of the Royal
Society, as in the case of Soane and the sculptor Francis Chantrey. A member of
the Royal Institution since at least 1807, Soane presented two lectures there in
1817 and three more in 1820, which were very popular and included many of
the illustrations from his Royal Academy lectures. In 1825, he became a member
of the Athenaeum, one year after it was founded with Michael Faraday as the first
Secretary. Two years later, Soane was elected a Fellow of the Medico-Botanical
Society of London, which had been established in 1821 with the purpose to
study, collect and cultivate medicinal plants.16

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Soane’s close friend, the painter Joseph Mallord William Turner, conversed
with a number of eminent scientists, including Mary Somerville, Davy and
­Faraday, who presented his seminal research on electromagnetic induction to the
Royal Society in 1831. Turner had a first edition of Somerville’s Mechanism of
the Heavens, 1831, and admired her experiment on the magnetising properties
of certain colours of light, notably violet and indigo.17 She, in turn, admired his
paintings. Aware of the earth’s magnetic force, in 1842 Faraday conducted an
experiment into terrestrial electromagnetic induction in the Thames at ­Waterloo
Bridge, stimulating romantic fascination for scientific understanding of the earth’s
forces. Faraday offered Turner advice on colour formation and admired the
­painter’s depictions of sea storms, hanging one—most probably an engraving or
a copy—in his study as Davy’s successor at the Royal Institution. It is likely that
Faraday and Turner first became acquainted due to their mutual friendship with
the physician James Carrick Moore and his eldest daughter Harriet, who gave
the painter a nickname he enjoyed: ‘Mr Avalanche Jenkinson.’ Sharing Turner’s
concern for the detailed observation of nature, Faraday describes such a sublime
natural event:

Rarely is it seen in the commencement, but the ear tells first of something strange
happening, and then looking, the eye sees a falling cloud of snow, or else what
was a moment before a cataract of water changed into a tumultuous and heavily
waving rush of snow, ice, and fluid, which, as it descends through the air, looks
like water thickened, but as it runs over the inclined surfaces of the heaps below,
moves heavily like paste, stopping and going as the mass behind accumulates
or is dispersed.18

Burke ascribes the sublime to human constructions as well as natural forces,

and the technological sublime has been especially evident since industrialisa-
tion. John Ruskin cites ‘cloudiness’ as a ‘characteristic’ of ‘modern landscape’
painting and eulogises Turner’s skill in this regard.19 But Ruskin distinguishes
between the clouds of nature and industry. Recalling the Hippocratic opin-
ion that the character of a people depends upon the air they inhale, Ruskin
extends the biblical affiliation of human misadventure with environmental
retribution, associating ‘the storm-cloud of the nineteenth century’ with the
spiritual abstinence of the modern world.20 However, a Londoner throughout
his life, Turner’s reaction to the polluted air of the world’s largest industrial city
was fascination rather than repulsion. Its light and colour effects especially
intrigued him, extending to the city the romantic concern for colour’s emotive

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impact. Noting the smog’s predominantly yellow tinge, Peter Brimblecombe

concludes:

that fine smoke particles in the atmosphere could absorb the blue wavelengths
from the sunlight above the fog in such a way that the fog at ground level was
illuminated by a yellow light … It is also possible that the colour might have been
the result of tarry compounds present in fog droplets.21

Representing a myriad of colours alongside dominant yellows, The Thames above

Waterloo Bridge, c. 1830–1835, depicts the city as a heady haze.22 Buildings,
barges, figures and fumes are all absorbed into a single atmosphere in which
divisions between the natural and man-made are indistinct. Here, the city is the
smog. Immersed in the hybridised atmospheres and energies that defined early
nineteenth-century London, which nature and industry had together created,
Turner offered an early image of anthropogenic climate change.
Laying the foundations of a new science in the spirit of this romanticism,
Luke Howard’s On the Modification of Clouds, 1803, provided the first systematic
and widely accepted investigation of atmospheric formations.23 Recognising that
clouds form as water vapour cools and condenses, Howard employed Latin termi-
nology in line with other classificatory systems of the natural world. Illustrating his
research with evocative watercolours, he ordered clouds according to their visual
resemblance to wisps of hair (Cirrus), a bulbous heap (Cumulus), sheets layered
together (Stratus) or subcategories that were combinations of these basic cloud
types. Ruskin and Turner praised Howard as did Goethe, who admired his schema
because it relied on observation, indicating the union of art and ­science and the
interconnectedness of the human and natural worlds. Goethe even composed a
poem to Howard’s research, which was included in a later edition of On the Mod-
ification of Clouds. Howard soon focused on the ways in which the city creates its
own clouds, extending the implications of Evelyn’s earlier research.24 The Climate
of London appeared in two volumes in 1818 and 1820 and as an expanded
edition in 1833 with On the Modification of Clouds as the introduction. Howard
did not dismiss the weather signs tradition of the farming guide, but considered
the new science to be a superior alternative, which borrowed Aristotle’s term even
though its focus was quite different, leading to the formation of the Meteorological
Society of London in 1823.25 But in the first volume of The Climate of London,
Howard acknowledged that the climate and weather continued to defy prediction:
‘Meteorology … is yet far from having acquired the regular and consistent form
of a science.’26

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The art and the profession of architecture

During his lifetime, Soane witnessed significant intellectual, commercial and

industrial developments that stimulated the further subdivision of existing prac-
tices and the proliferation of new ones. Since the Renaissance, architects’ ar-
tistic status had been less assured than that of painters and sculptors. While
the architectural drawing is seen in relation to other drawings and a building,
the painting and the sculpture are unique and need not refer to an external
object, thus appearing further removed from the material world and closer to
the ­immaterial world of ideas. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought
further uncertainty. The reclassification of the arts into fine arts as opposed to
utility—notably poetry, music, painting, sculpture and architecture—was prob-
lematic for architects, and Immanuel Kant concluded that architecture’s aes-
thetic potential was even less than that of a garden.27 Associated with utility,
the design disciplines that proliferated due to industrialisation were categorised
as applied arts at best. According to the Renaissance conception of disegno, a
form was synonymous with an idea. But painters and sculptors discarded the
term ‘design’ once it became associated with collective authorship, industrial
production and forms made without an idea in mind. Among the three original
visual arts, only in architecture did the term ‘design’ remain in regular use. In
public discourse, design was increasingly associated with the newer design
disciplines, which sometimes led architectural design to be misunderstood be-
cause the older and newer meanings of design were both evident in the dis-
course and practice of architects.
Affirming disegno, Alberti stated that a design must be built exactly according
to ‘the author’s original intentions’ and the architect should not visit the con-
struction site.28 His advice was impractical; architects regularly monitored con-
struction and sometimes performed contractual roles. In response to unethical
building practices in a booming economy, Soane’s support for a clear distinction
between the professional architect and the building contractor was influential
in the foundation of the Institute of British Architects, which was established in
1834 and received a royal charter three years later, indicating national approval
of a professional body intended to regulate architectural practice to the benefit of
consumers and practitioners. Soane was invited to be the Institute’s first Presi-
dent, which alongside his role as Professor at the Royal Academy would have
affirmed his conception of architecture as an art and a profession. But he was
unable to accept the offer because Royal Academicians were not allowed to join
other artistic societies.29

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Monuments to the honour of great men

Significantly, Soane’s first realised design was a tomb for Miss Elizabeth Johnston
in the churchyard of St Mary Abbots, Kensington, London, 1784. Concern for or-
igins and memorials drew Soane to appreciate ancient precedent in tomb design
as in all architectural matters.30 Offering advice to students of architecture in his
first Royal Academy lecture, he remarks:

We must be intimately acquainted with not only what the ancients have done, but
endeavor to learn (from their works) what they would have done. We shall thereby
become artists, not mere copyists; we shall avoid sterile imitation and, what is
equally dangerous, improper application.31

Ancient Romans did not allow mausoleums in their houses, but believed that
their ancestors had done so.32 After the death of the art collector Noel ­Desenfans
in 1807, Soane designed a small chapel and mausoleum for three ­sarcophagi to
the rear of 38 Charlotte, now Hallam, Street in London’s ­fashionable West End,
where Desenfans had lived with his wife Margaret and Sir Francis B
­ ourgeois, a
painter and a Royal Academician. Bourgeois and ­Margaret jointly inherited the
house, but Bourgeois alone acquired the valuable art c­ ollection. Many of the
paintings were purchased for Stanislaw August Poniastowski, King of ­Poland.
However, they remained in London because he was deposed before they were
dispatched. ­Bourgeois died in 1810 and was interred in the mausoleum. But
before his death, he decided to donate the painting collection to Dulwich Col-
lege, stipulating that it should be displayed in England’s first ­purpose-built
public art gallery and that Soane should be the architect.33 Opened in 1817,
the design included a row of almshouses and a mausoleum, very similar to
the one at Charlotte Street and again housing the three sarcophagi.34 Soane
originally wanted to place the mausoleum in front of the gallery so that it would
emphatically face the visitor. Instead, it was built to the rear of the gallery, still
expressed as a distinct entity and entered directly from the gallery.35 ­Watkin
suggests that the mausoleum’s external form recalls Roman tombs and
may also be indebted to the towers of Adam’s St Mary the Virgin at Mistley,
Essex, 1777.36
Each space at Dulwich was treated in a different manner. Materials, lighting
and heating accentuated the distinct sensory realms. The almshouses had fire-
places, the gallery had central steam heating and the mausoleum was unheated.
Proceeding from the gallery to the mausoleum, the visitor passes from warm,

161
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John Soane, Dulwich

Picture Gallery, 1817.
­Mausoleum exterior. Cour-
tesy of Martin Charles/RIBA
Collections.

John Soane, Dulwich

Picture Gallery, 1817.
­Mausoleum interior.
­Courtesy of Martin Charles/
RIBA Collections.

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 li f e in r uins

quiet rooms with timber floors, rich red walls and an even light to pale stone
surfaces, echoes, chilled air, defined shadows and an amber glow. Soane writes
that ‘a dull religious light shews the Mausoleum in the full pride of funereal gran-
deur.’37 The effect of the sepulchral light and frigid climate is especially evident in
winter, the season most associated with death, when the visitor stands symboli-
cally at the threshold between mortality and the afterlife.38
In the same decade, personal grief led Soane to design a further tomb. John
and Eliza Soane frequently resolved the financial problems of their younger son,
George. But when he was imprisoned for debt and then fraud in 1812 and 1814,
they refused to assist, hoping that the experience would modify his behaviour.
Unfortunately, George further offended his parents by publishing two anony-
mous newspaper articles in September 1815 in which he mocked their home in
­Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, and its architect, his father:

The exterior, from its exceeding heaviness and monumental gloom, seems as
if it were intended to convey a satire upon himself; it looks like a record of the
departed, and can only mean that considering himself as deficient in that part of
humanity—the mind and its affections—he has reared this mausoleum for the
enshrinement of his body.39

John Soane, Exterior,

12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Courtesy of Martin Charles/
Sir John Soane’s Museum,
London.

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 li f e in r uins

Shown the letters by her husband on 10 October 1815, Eliza responded:

‘These are George’s doings—he has given me my death blow—I shall never hold
up my head again.’40 Having suffered from gallstones earlier in the year, Eliza died
on 22 November 1815, with a burst gall bladder the official cause of death. But
Soane blamed his son, displaying the articles at Lincoln’s Inn Fields with a carved
inscription: ‘Death Blows given by George Soane/ 10th & 24th September 1815.’41
Eliza was just 53 when she died. Nine years older and in despair, her ­husband
began to design the tomb three months later. Dated 1808, design sketches refer
to ‘catacombs’ and a ‘mausoleum’ in the basement of 12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.42
But rather than incorporate Eliza’s tomb into their house, Soane chose a public
site at the edge of London, recalling ancient precedent. Tombs lined the roads
leading into ancient Rome, most famously along the Via Appia, which Piranesi
evocatively depicted in the frontispiece to the second volume of Antichità romane.
Soane copied Piranesi’s illustration for his fourth Royal Academy lecture, and
also appreciated Carlo Labruzzi’s atmospheric engravings in Via Appia illustrata
ab urbe Roma ad Capuam, 1794.43 Further recalling Piranesi, who empha-
sised ancient Rome’s debt to Etruscan architecture, Soane ‘regarded himself
as a ­latter-day Etruscan, sunk in the reflective melancholy of a nation of tomb-­
builders,’ writes Watkin.44
Soane was equally indebted to French eighteenth-century architects. Sharing
their concern for first principles, which was unfamiliar to many of his English contem-
poraries, led Soane to criticise Piranesi for disregarding ancient Greece.45 Assuming
the influence of climate on character in his first Royal Academy lecture, Soane con-
cludes that as some climates are superior to others, so are some buildings:

Grecian architecture, which now claims our attention, owes its origin and per-
fection to causes very different from those already spoken of. The Greeks were
the fathers of science and of art. Their climate, their laws, their mode of life, all
contributed to gain them a superior rank in the higher walk of intellect.46

Soane admired Laugier, owning various editions of Essai sur l’architecture, 1753.
In the section entitled ‘Monuments to the Honour of Great Men’ in Observations
sur l‘architecture, 1765, Laugier argues that tombs should be placed outside and
in public view, not in churches, and remarks that ‘mausolea offer a rich field for
the imagination of artists’ because they have few functional restrictions. In Livre
d’architecture, 1745, Germain Boffrand transfers the expression of appropriate
character from poetry to architecture, and concludes that the character of a mau-
soleum ‘must be treated appropriately to its subject and with a type of architecture

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and decoration that must be serious and sad.’47 A grand monument to an archi-
tect was then uncommon. But Soane aimed to memorialise himself twice over,
appreciating that a tomb glorifies the architect as well the interred and knowing
that he would be buried alongside his wife.
Soane’s home was in the parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields, which due to its
overcrowded churchyard had acquired an additional burial ground on London’s
northern periphery, adjacent to St Pancras Old Church and a road leading into
the city. Soane purchased two adjacent plots, reflecting the scale of his ambition
and protecting the tomb from demolition. ‘In Georgian London death was as hi-
erarchical as life,’ wrote Roger Bowdler and Christopher Woodward.48 The city’s
increasing population meant that the bones of the deceased were often dug up to
allow for new arrivals and relocated to an adjacent bone house. Most graves did
not even have a gravestone and a tomb was an indication of status. While estab-
lished churchyards had a number of lavish tombs, Soane’s tomb commanded the
burial ground, which since its opening in 1802 had acquired just one chest tomb
and no other significant full-size tomb.
Construction commenced in April 1816. Soane arranged for a pupil to
­regularly observe the building site and prepare watercolour sketches of the pro-
gress. But his deep sense of loss meant that he only visited the tomb on the
first anniversary of his wife’s funeral. Defining the edges of the site, the only
standard item is a low-level balustrade, purchased from a Coade stone cata-
logue and ornamented with details that refer to ancient sarcophagi, including
­cherubs holding extinguished torches representing the end of life.49 The coffins
are housed in a subterranean brick vault capped with a heavy stone slab to deter
grave robbers. The above-ground monument is modelled on the aedicula, a small
ancient ­Roman shrine typically with columns at its corners, and the diminutive
- meaning a temple or a dwelling. Many grand church
of the Latin term aedes,
monuments adopt this form, but its external use is rare.50 Soane’s tomb has two
aediculae, one inside the other. The outer Portland stone aedicula has Doric piers
at its corners supporting a shallow dome. It protects the inner Carrara marble
aedicula, which has Ionic columns at its corners supporting a pediment on each
façade. In turn, the inner aedicula safeguards a double cube memorial monolith,
also in Carrara marble, which was only available again due to Napoleon’s defeat
in 1815 and rarely used outside because it weathered poorly in London’s polluted
climate. The pale outer Portland stone contrasts with and safeguards the pure
white inner marble—a house within a house—as Soane symbolically protected
his wife’s memory. The four-sided monolith has Eliza’s epitaph on the east ele-
vation, Soane’s to the south and that of their older son, John, to the west, added

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after he died of tuberculosis in 1823. Four years later, Soane refused a request to
bury George’s daughter Caroline in the family tomb. The north face is blank, as
his younger son is not buried there.
Most likely a Deist who believed that God left the natural world in trust to
humanity and offered no further intervention, Soane ignored Christian symbol-
ism in his family tomb and other mausolea.51 Uniting the last house with the
first, his design recalls Vitruvius’ primitive hut, especially Laugier’s idealised ver-
sion in the frontispiece to the 1755 second edition of Essai sur l’architecture.
John Summerson describes the tomb’s shallow dome ‘as brutally crude and
­primitive—almost like a dolmen’ and suggests that it may be modelled on an
ancient ­Roman cinerary urn illustrated in Bernard de Montfaucon’s ten-volume
L’Antiquité ­expliquée et représentée en figures, 1719–1724, which was then the
most extensive visual survey of Greek and Roman antiquities, studied by Adam
as well as Soane.52 Pierre-François Hugues, the self-styled Baron d’Hancarville
and author of the three-volume Recherches sur l’origine, l’esprit et les progress
des arts de la Grèce, 1785, also influenced Soane’s symbolic language.53 The
shallow dome’s sides are incised with a wavy line representative of eternity and
sometimes ­associated with Freemasonry, emphasising Soane’s appointment as
Grand Superintendent of Works to the Freemasons’ Hall in 1813.54 Surmount-
ing the dome, the small circular drum has coiled around its circumference a
serpent swallowing its tail, which is a symbol of eternity called an ouroboros.
Familiar in mourning jewellery but rare in architecture, it appeared in the design
of a circular mausoleum that Soane’s first employer Dance exhibited at the Royal
Academy in 1785.55 In a eulogy to Eliza published in January 1817, Barbara
Hofland offered a more personal interpretation that her close friend Soane may
have shared, implying that the s­ erpent feeding on itself was representative of
George’s self-­destructive ingratitude.56 The finial completing the tomb is a pine-
apple, an emblem of regeneration often seen on Roman cinerary urns. In his
fourth Royal Academy lecture alongside a majestic illustration, Soane remarks:
‘The Mausoleum of Hadrian, built during his lifetime, was the most magnificent
sepulchral monument of all antiquity’ and ‘finished with a pineapple of bronze.’57

The father of modern gardening

Soane acknowledged the architecture of classical antiquity as an invaluable model,

but he criticised the literal transfer of architecture from one place to another and
emphasised the influence of local conditions such as culture, climate and site.58
In his tenth Royal Academy lecture in 1815, Soane identifies gardening as an

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exception to the general superiority of ‘the ancients over the moderns.’ Discuss-
ing a building and its setting, he remarks: ‘Architecture being thus identified with
gardening, it becomes a necessary part of the education of the architect that he
shall be well acquainted with the principles of modern decorative landscape gar-
dening.’59 Soane was indebted to early eighteenth-century gardens—notably those
of Kent—and to late eighteenth-century picturesque theories of William Gilpin,
Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight as well as to picturesque novels such
as Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,
1759–1767.
Like Sterne, Soane’s method as a designer and a writer was picturesque, frag-
mented, self-conscious, meandering narration, exploiting incompletion and ruina-
tion as a means to engage the reader and the viewer. It is likely that he first read
Sterne’s novel in 1779 when he received ‘6 Vols of Tristram Shandy, in a bundle
directed to you at the English Coffee-House, Roma.’60 Soane mentions Sterne early
in his first lecture and again in his two final lectures, while a further reference ap-
pears in Crude Hints towards an History of My House in L(incoln’s) I(nn) Fields,
1812.61 With storytelling now part of the story, Tristram sets out to tell the story
of his life but compulsively returns to his conception, birth and early childhood.
There are many means to understand and conceive time, and each is partial and
approximate, leading Paul Ricoeur to acknowledge ‘the ultimate unrepresentabil-
ity of time.’62 Personal, lived experience of time is not necessarily linear and tied
to the calendar or the cosmos. As a person is a fluid accumulation of ideas, emo-
tions and experiences and a life is not always remembered or even experienced
as a progressive sequence, Tristram’s story does not develop chronologically
but moves back, forward, around and sideways. Sterne remarks: ‘Digressions,
incontestably, are the sun-shine;—they are the life, the soul of reading;—
take them out of this book for instance,—you might as well take the book along
with them.’63 Through Tristram Shandy’s fractured narrative, we may actually
acquire a more honest, detailed, nuanced and convincing portrait of a person
than in a linear narrative. Digressions occur in life as well as literature. Even the
attention given to Tristram’s formative years is an accurate representation of his
concerns. As a metaphor for life itself, the final line of the book mocks the pur-
poseless but pleasurable journey the reader has followed: ‘A COCK and a BULL,
said Yorick—And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.’64
An amateur painter, Sterne precisely controlled the visual quality of Tristram
Shandy. Typographical devices indicate specific actions and images appear in
place of words. Sterne’s complex visual and typographical devices—­‘tripping
us up as we read’—are the narrator’s means to check that the reader is alert.65

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Communicating in a manner that words cannot, images call attention to the

possibilities and limitations of both means of communication. Two black pages
follow a reference to Yorick’s grave, which recalls ‘a ruined fragment,’66 a skull
in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, c. 1599–1601.67 According to Brodey,
­eighteenth-century designed ruins and novels such as Tristram Shandy ‘com-
bine the dual desires for monuments and ruins, artifice and nature, concealing
and revealing, control and spontaneity in order to satisfy’ contemporary ‘ambiv-
alence regarding authority and its longing for authentic communication.’68 The
novel’s origins in the fictional autobiography ensured that a ‘life in ruins’ became
a recurring literary metaphor, representing potential as well as loss, and a chal-
lenge to the protagonist, whether he/she was obsessed with a troubled birth like
Tristram Shandy or incarcerated on an island or in a prison as in Defoe’s two
best-known novels.
Soane notably described Kent as ‘the father of modern gardening’ and owned
many of his drawings, including Arcadian Hermitage with Satyr and Shepherdess,
c. 1730, which previously belonged to Adam.69 He also had a further, p
­ reliminary
design from the same year, showing the Richmond Hermitage in plan, section
and perspective. Following Kent, Soane admired the interplay of architecture and
landscape in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and owned many copies, i­ncluding the
1546 French translation.70 But as the eighteenth century progressed, the garden
as a story was less appreciated, partly because patrons were less concerned to
display their learning due to the increased emphasis on subjective ideas and
emotions. While preparing his 10th and 11th Royal Academy lectures, Soane
made extensive notes in his copy of Elements of Criticism, 1762, focusing in
particular on the chapter ‘Gardening and Architecture,’ in which Kames criticises
Kent’s emblematic monuments in Stowe’s Elysian Fields and writes: ‘Architec-
ture and gardening cannot otherwise entertain the mind, than by raising certain
agreeable emotions or feelings.’71 In Observations on Modern Gardening, 1770,
which Soane acquired in 1778, Whately praises Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown,
the pre-eminent landscape designer of the time. Rather than erudite analysis
of the emblematic garden’s numerous architectural and topographical incidents,
Whately assumes that the expressive garden’s open and empty vistas are more
conducive to the imagination:

The power of such characters is not confined to the ideas which the objects im-
mediately suggest; for these are connected with others, which insensibly lead to
subjects, far distant perhaps from the original thought, and related to it only by a
similitude in the sensations they excite.72

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Brown’s gardens are expressive, but a simple distinction between garden types is
not always evident. For example, Rousham is emblematic and expressive, a com-
bination that Soane most likely appreciated.73 The entries in ‘Soane’s Note Books’
are cursory and do not mention General Dormer’s garden. But it is likely that he
visited there given his admiration for Kent. Soane regularly called at nearby Oxford
and Blenheim and also travelled on the road between Oxford and Banbury, which
passes close to Rousham, only 30 miles from his birthplace.74
Kent designed in an era before the industrial revolution, which required an equiv-
alent ‘agricultural revolution’ to feed the expanding population.75 Greater efficiency
and productivity ensured that fewer people were employed as farmworkers, encourag-
ing the expanding middle class to appreciate wilder, uncultivated landscapes, which
Stephen Copley and Peter Garside describe as ‘an aesthetic of redundancy’ that con-
trasted with the newly developed regions in which they prospered, drawing attention
to ruined landscapes as well as ruined buildings.76 Gilpin’s first travel guide was
published in 1782, and his appreciation of decay extended to architecture:

A piece of Palladian architecture may be elegant in the last degree … Should we wish
to give it picturesque beauty, we must use the mallet, instead of the chisel: we must
beat down one half of it, deface the other, and throw the mutilated members around
in heaps. In short, from a smooth building, we must turn it into a rough ruin.77

Such descriptions led Ruskin to characterise the ‘lower picturesque’ as ‘heartless’

because it focuses on surface effects to the detriment of deeper social concerns.
In contrast, he praises the ‘nobler,’ ‘Turnerian Picturesque,’ concluding ‘that the
dignity of the picturesque increases from lower to higher, in exact proportion to
the sympathy of the artist with his subject.’78
Soane only owned one of Gilpin’s books and gave more attention to Price and
Knight, who both concluded that the monotonous artificiality of Brown’s softly
rolling lawns deny nature’s liberty and are thus not picturesque.79 As Brown
was dead, Humphry Repton responded to the criticism, asserting that Brown’s
inadequate imitators were to blame, not Brown.80 Questioning Knight’s assertion
that Brown was ‘ignorant of painting’ and had a formulaic disregard for nature’s
variety, Repton returned the criticism. Dismissing the ‘wild neglect’ of Knight’s
illustration of a picturesque landscape, he concluded that Knight saw ‘no delight
but in the scenes of Salvator Rosa.’81
Price unfairly assumed that Kent’s gardens are not picturesque, even though
they differ substantially from those of Brown, while Knight excluded Kent from
his criticism. Soane’s only negative comment on Kent’s gardens referred to the

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‘improper use of the ancient decoration’ in garden buildings.82 Soane did not
significantly criticise Brown; as a student, he had worked in the partnership that
Brown shared with Holland.
Soane acquired Price’s An Essay on the Picturesque in 1794, the year it was
published, influencing his sixth and ninth lectures. Extending Burke’s classificatory
system to include the picturesque, Price concludes that each aesthetic category
is distinct, but the picturesque sits between the beautiful and the sublime and ‘is
more frequently and more happily blended with them both than they are with each
other.’83 Emphasising time as a means to identify differences between aesthetic cat-
egories, Price equates beauty with youth and the picturesque with age and weather,
which ‘loosen the stones themselves; they tumble in irregular masses … now mixed
and overgrown with wild plants and creepers, that crawl and shoot among the fallen
ruins.’84 Price’s conception of the picturesque evokes English landscapes and its
muted colours are English too, emphasising ‘the mosses, lichens, and incrustations
on bark and on wood, on stones, old walls, and buildings of every kind.’85
At Foxley, his Herefordshire estate, Price questioned the blunt division of an
estate into field and garden and labour and leisure. His criticism of the B
­ rownian
landscape concerned its lack of social diversity as well as its repetitive aesthetic.
Price interpreted the picturesque broadly and emphasised the variety of his
­estate—from fields to farm cottages to woodland walks—as a means to establish
social cohesion between landowner, tenant and farm labourer, maintaining the
existing hierarchy and affirming the Georgic tradition. To this end, he commis-
sioned the agrarian reformer Nathaniel Kent to propose improvements to Foxley in
1774 and published Thoughts on the Defence of Property in 1797.86
In contrast, Knight focused his attention on aesthetics and did not consider
the social economy of his estate, even though the possibility of political upheaval
concerned him. In The Landscape, A Didactic Poem, 1794, Knight recoils from
the turmoil of the French Revolution. ‘Walls, mellow’d into harmony by time’ is
a metaphor for the societal benefits of continuity and compromise as well as a
building description.87 Knight directs his attention at gardens that do not de-
serve to be called picturesque.88 Two illustrations by Thomas Hearne contrast
a ­classical villa in a barren Brownian setting with an asymmetrical house in a
verdant, irregular landscape, which Knight assumes to be more conducive to the
imagination. Soane acknowledged Price’s influence and his debt to Knight was
deeper still. Purchased the year it was published, Knight’s An Analytical Inquiry
into the Principles of Taste, 1805, states that that richly varied picturesque effects
stimulate the association of ideas, inspiring extensive notes during Soane’s prepa-
ration for his second series of six Royal Academy lectures in 1815.89

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The tomb in the garden

Joseph Michael Gandy, View

of the Soane Tomb, 1816.
Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London.

As well as design drawings and work in progress sketches, Soane instructed

his assistants to depict his family tomb in a number of imaginary picturesque
landscapes. Joseph Michael Gandy enrolled to study architecture at the Royal
Academy in 1789. After visiting Italy, he returned to London, providing supremely
evocative illustrations that permeated public perception of Soane’s designs, rather
in the manner that Piranesi influenced visitors’ expectations and experiences
of Rome. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1816, Gandy’s watercolour sets
Soane’s tomb in a lush landscape, contrasting the beige outer aedicula to the
glacial inner aedicula and monolith gleaming in the low raking light.90 Sharing
Soane’s fascination for funerary architecture, Gandy’s mourning figures are just
18 inches high, exaggerating the tomb’s dimensions to emphasise its monu-
mental impact. On the north face, which would have received George’s epitaph
if he had been buried there, the skeleton hurling a spear at the inner aedicula is
probably a further reference to his treachery.91 One of Soane’s drawings shows
the skeleton in the same position, but it is unlikely that he considered inserting it
there. Such a conventional ­Christian funerary symbol would be incongruous on
a monument so enveloped in ­Enlightenment and pre-Christian iconography.92
Also in 1816, Soane’s gifted pupil George Basevi prepared watercolours of the
tomb, again enlarged beyond its actual size and set in imaginary landscapes. In one,

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George Basevi, View of

the Soane Tomb, 1816.
Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London.

Rousseau’s sarcophagus is visible to the right in the middle distance.93 Rousseau’s

praise for humanity’s primitive and natural state, which he equated with freedom of
expression, stimulated Soane’s appreciation of first principles and the natural world.
Rather than propose a return to a primitive life, Rousseau envisaged a society closer
to nature: ‘Fix your eyes on nature, follow the path traced by her.’94 The first person
to be buried in a garden since antiquity, Rousseau’s sarcophagus was designed by
Hubert Robert and conceived as the only structure on an island in the lake within the
picturesque jardin anglais at Ermeonville, France.95 A painter of ruins and a student
of Panini, Robert was in Rome at the same time as Adam, although there is no record
that they met. Responding to Robert’s paintings, Denis Diderot asked ‘why ruins give
such pleasure’ and answered: ‘I see the marble of tombs crumble into powder and
I don’t want to die!’96 In 1794, a temporary aedicula protecting an urn, again de-
signed by Robert, was erected in the Tuileries gardens, Paris, before the reinterment
of Rousseau’s ashes in the Panthéon; but it is uncertain whether Soane knew of it.97
Emphasising the close association of the ruined and the unfinished, Robert
also designed the Temple de la Philosophie at Ermeonville, which appears to be
a ruin at first glance. But on closer inspection, it is instead under construction
and representative of evolving philosophical discourse. Arranged around a circular
drum, the six erect columns are each dedicated to a philosopher—René Des-
cartes; Isaac Newton; Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu; Vol-
taire; Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and William Penn—with the intention that ­further
columns would be dedicated to future philosophers. A carved inscription Quis
hoc perficiet poses the question: ‘Who will complete this?’ A base already awaits
one column and other entire columns lie on the ground, ready for future use.98

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In the Renaissance, to acquire recognition as a mimetic art equivalent in

status to painting, architecture had to convincingly represent nature, which it
could not easily achieve. The Enlightenment—the natural light of reason—offered
a solution to this dilemma. French architects argued that architecture is superior
to the other arts because it follows the reason inherent in nature and not merely
its image, an opinion that Soane proudly affirmed.99 Extending this analogy and
praising the picturesque, Laugier writes: ‘One must look at a town as a forest …
Let us carry out this idea and use the design of our parks as plan for our towns.’100
In common with other architects who were inspired by Laugier’s example, Soane’s
confidence in architecture’s natural origins was sincere if unsubstantiated. A mem-
ber of the Royal Institution and the Royal Society, Soane appreciated technological
innovations as well as ancient forms. But he made little attempt to understand and
investigate nature, even though it was increasingly a subject of scientific research.
Nature was but a useful concept, first to justify reason as natural, then to justify
feelings as natural and ultimately to make any human intervention appear natural
whether a building, a garden or a city. Soane’s concern for reason and nature was
stimulated rather than undermined by the ambiguity of these terms because his
ultimate concern was the architectural imagination. In this regard, he was nota-
bly indebted to French architects—notably Etienne-Louis Boullée,101 Nicolas Le
Camus de Mézières, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Jean-Jacques Lequeau—who
were inspired to consider how architecture can evoke sensations comparable to
those found in nature but specific to the discipline.102 According to Watkin:

The relation between the philosophy of sensationalism in architecture and garden

theory was well understood in France … One feels that this world of debate was
really the intellectual setting for which Soane was made. Nothing like it existed
in England, so that a quarter of a century later, he had to re-create it for himself,
alone, in his cramped library at no. 12, Lincoln’s Inn Fields.103

The garden of architecture

In 1790, Soane inherited a fortune from his wife’s uncle and two years later bought
12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields in one of the residential squares that had developed around
the City of London, close to the Inns of Court and about a mile from the Bank of
England.104 Immediately rebuilding the house, he moved there two years later. In
1808, he acquired 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, accommodating his expanded office
and Museum at the rear, which was connected to the rear of number 12 in 1809.
Beginning in 1812, Soane rebuilt the front of number 13, including the Library
Dining Room and Breakfast Parlour. In 1823, he acquired a further adjacent house,

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and in the following year added the Picture Room, Monk’s Parlour and Monk’s Yard
at the rear of number 14 and inserted the Colonnade at the rear of number 13.
In his design of 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Soane responded to the application
of picturesque principles to architecture by Kent, Adam, Laugier and others, and
specifically to Le Camus de Mézières’ Le génie de l’architecture; ou, l’analogie de
cet art avec nos sensations (The Genius of Architecture; or, the Analogy of That Art
With Our Sensations), 1780. Aware of ut pictura poesis and appreciative of pictur-
esque gardens which were increasingly popular in France, Le Camus de Mézières
suggests that the architect should learn from the garden designer and that a house
and a garden can be designed according to similar principles.105 Also emphasis-
ing the analogy between architecture and theatre, Le Camus de Mézières praises
the architect and stage designer Jean-Nicolas Servandoni, a pupil of Panini who
conveyed plot development through design rather than dialogue.106 Le Camus de
Mézières recognises that optical effects can trigger physical sensations, including
ones associated with climate and weather, remarking of one of Servandoni’s stage
designs: ‘That would have been a spectacle to make us shiver.’107 Describing the
contrasting sensations evoked by a sequence of distinct rooms in a grand town
house, he writes: ‘Each room must have its own particular character. The analogy,
the relation of proportions, decides our sensations; each room makes us want the
next; and this agitation engages our minds and holds them in suspense.’108

John Soane, The Dome

Area with Soane’s bust,
12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Courtesy Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London.

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 li f e in r uins

The Genius of Architecture encouraged Soane to conceive 12–14 Lincoln’s

Inn Fields as a spatial poem and a garden of architecture.109 Avid for acquisition
and adjustment, his inquisitive imagination guaranteed seasonal and yearly trans-
formations, accentuating sensory experience. Doorways, windows and paintings
offer varied vistas and routes punctuated by monuments and ruins. Coloured
glass skylights bathe the garden in a golden glow, evocative of Rome. Innumera-
ble glazed, mirrored and reflective surfaces disperse light and views. Collectively,
these recall the Claude Glass, a device named after Claude but never used by
him, which alters a landscape according to picturesque conventions of composi-
tion and colour.110 The 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields is so excessively emblematic
that it is expressive. Even for a frequent visitor, learned interpretation of all the
artefacts on view is impossible. Sculptures and antiquities cover every surface like
architectural foliage, recalling the shaggy aesthetic of the late eighteenth-century
picturesque, while alternative routes and intricately interconnecting spaces of con-
trasting light and shadow are reminiscent of the early picturesque at Rousham.

The tomb in the garden of architecture

Soane depicted his tomb in a picturesque setting and conceived his home at
Lincoln’s Fields as such a garden, in which allusions to his and other tombs are
found. In the Library Dining Room, Helen Dorey notes the ‘ancient cinerary vases,’
niches that recall ‘Roman columbaria,’ and a ceiling painting ‘on the theme of
Pandora and her box “whence came all the miseries of the world,”’ with a figure
‘uncannily like Eliza, depicted as “Night,” wrapped in a black mourning veil.’
Dorey concludes that the Library Dining Room ‘evokes ancient Roman tombs,
which were gathering places for the living as well as the dead, with family and
friends sharing meals there with the spirits of the departed.’111 Commemorating
Eliza’s resting place and his future one, Soane placed a painted model of the
tomb, 1816, in the west pier of the screen dividing the Library Dining Room, with
the pier’s four slender columns adding a further aedicula to the two of the tomb.
Soane built many other versions of the shallow dome supported at its corners,
including in the Breakfast Parlour at number 13, where it is top-lit as he often
favoured. Soon after its construction, he placed a painting of his family tomb on
the north wall, just below the dome. Over 20 years later and only 10 days before
his death on 20 January 1837, he selected a small winged statuette of Victory, a
plaster cast of an antique bronze sculpture that refers to the myth of the ancient
Greek goddess nike flying over a battlefield eulogising the winners.112 Placing
Victory directly in front of the painting, Soane suggested his reputation’s symbolic
triumph over death.

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 li f e in r uins

John Soane, The

­Breakfast Parlour,
­looking north, 13 Lin-
coln’s Inn Fields. ­Courtesy of
Gareth Gardner/Sir John
Soane’s Museum, London.

George Soane described Lincoln’s Inn Fields as a ‘mausoleum for the

enshrinement of his body,’ but it is instead a mausoleum to Soane’s imag-
ination.113 As his sons’ disinterest frustrated his ambition to establish an
architectural dynasty, Soane offered 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields as an endur-
ing model for architects. He first allowed semi-public access in 1812, ena-
bling students and other visitors to study his collections. Four years before his
death, the Soane Museum Act of Parliament, 1833, established future public
access. In recognition, Chantrey’s white marble bust of Soane was relocated to
preside over the Dome Area at the Museum’s centre.114 The 12–14 L
­ incoln’s
Inn Fields is a Pantheon to Soane and the people he admired, including
Adam, Kent and Piranesi as well as Napoleon, Shakespeare and William Pitt
the Younger.115 In the discussions that preceded the Act, Sir Robert Peel
proposed that the collection should be absorbed within the British Museum,
which was established in 1753 as an all-encompassing national museum typ-
ical of the Enlightenment. But Peel failed to recognise that the building fabric
was part of Soane’s collection and essential to ‘the union and close connexion
between Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture.’116 Britain’s first museum of
architecture, 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields reflects the Enlightenment’s attention
to ancient artefacts and concern for categorisation by discipline. Mirroring the
expansion of worldwide trade and Britain’s imperial reach, Soane’s collection
includes objects from Egypt, China and South America as well as E
­ urope.
But unlike the British Museum, 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields is not ordered by

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 li f e in r uins

subject, region, type or chronology. Instead, objects and settings are com-
posed for mood and effect.
After the British Museum rejected the price as excessive, Soane acquired
his most expensive acquisition, paying £2,000 for the recently excavated
­thirteenth-century BC alabaster sarcophagus of Pharoah Seti I, which he located
in the basement ‘catacombs’ beneath the Dome at the rear of number 12.117 On
the surrounding walls above the sarcophagus, Soane placed items from Adam’s
collection, including Roman cinerary urns and a frieze depicting Proserpina, the
queen of the Underworld.118 Emphasising the analogy of architecture to theatre,
he held three candle-lit evening receptions for nearly 900 guests to view the
sarcophagus in March 1825. Lamps illuminated the façade to the square, while
the interior flickered with candlelight and the sarcophagus was discovered in the
crypt, alluding to its burial site. Turner and Coleridge were among the guests and
Hofland recalled the scene:

Had any one of that gay company been placed alone in the sepulchral chamber,
at the ‘witching hour of night,’ when ‘Churchyards yawn, and graves give up their
dead,’ when the flickering lights became self-extinguished, and the last murmur-
ing sounds from without ceased to speak of the living world,—it is probable that
even the healthiest pulse would have been affected with the darker train of emo-
tions which a situation so unallied to common life is calculated to produce.119

Wandering among the ruins

The sarcophagus terminates the west end of the Museum at the rear of 12–14
Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The ground floor Picture Room terminates the east end and
is entered directly from the Colonnade. Referencing two of Soane’s heroes, the
wooden cupboards to each side of the Colonnade are in the style of Kent and
once housed the multi-volume drawing collection of Robert and James Adam,
which includes numerous designs for fabricated ruins.120 Adam and Soane knew
each other well and were original members of The Architects’ Club. Founded
in 1791, its members met for dinner on the first Thursday every month.121 In
his ninth Royal Academy lecture, Soane acknowledges Kedleston ‘as one of the
great works of my late friend Mr. Robert Adam. In this superb structure he has
united the magnificence of a Roman villa with all the comforts and conveniences
of an English nobleman’s residence.’ Continuing, he praises Adam’s ‘efforts to
reconcile the idea of blending an Ancient triumphal arch with the exterior of a
modern building.’122

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John Soane, The Picture

Room with the panels open
to the Picture Room Recess,
14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Courtesy of Derry Moore/
Sir John Soane’s Museum,
London.

Nearly square in plan, the Picture Room is lit by a high skylight with a can-
opied ceiling that combines classical and gothic motifs.123 Low-level mahogany
bookcases, inlaid with ebony and topped with a brass shelf, line each wall. A
marble fireplace is on the east wall facing the only door. Between the bookcases
and the skylight, the walls are painted a sombre olive green to accentuate the
colours of the paintings and their gilded frames. Among the Room’s artistic
highlights are William Hogarth’s four-painting series An Election, 1754, and
eight-painting series A Rake’s Progress, 1733–1734, which Soane acquired
in 1823 and 1802, respectively. In Hogarth’s depiction of Tom Rakewell’s de-
cline from prosperity to Bedlam, Soane may have seen the moral inverse to his
own social elevation or a parable of George’s decline. But Soane was notably
concerned with his own fate: ‘At home all day a prey to melancholy and gloomy
reflections.’124 In his Memoirs, 1835, he recalls his unsuccessful application

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to be Surveyor to St Paul’s Cathedral: ‘I was represented as a man unqualified

for the situation—ignorant of the principles of Architecture—brought up as a
hack in Mr. Dance’s office.’ Cataloguing a lifetime of criticism, he continues:
‘I have been charged with suffering my nearest relatives to exist in a state of
“pauperism” whilst I am squandering my money by hundreds and thousands in
the ostentatious gratification of pride and vanity.’125 Soane may have feared his
own decline or Progress like that of his contemporary John Matthews, which
he recounts in Description of the House and Museum on the North Side of
Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1832:

This ingenious and indefatigable Artist, having failed in an attempt to gain the
gold medal given in the Royal Academy in 1771, for the best Design of a Noble-
man’s Villa, felt the disappointment so poignantly, that he neglected his studies
and passion for Architecture, became dissolute and sottish, and finally ended his
days in a prison.126

Among an impressive collection, the Picture Room includes the 4 engravings of

ancient Rome that Piranesi presented to Soane and 15 of Piranesi’s ink and wash
drawings of the ruins at Paestum, 1777, which the Venetian incorrectly assumed
to be Etruscan. Actually founded by ancient Greek settlers in the Bay of Salerno,
south of Naples, around 600 BC, Paestum disturbed English visitors educated to
admire Vitruvian principles and elegant Palladianism. Visiting in November 1761,
even James Adam remarked that:

the famous antiquities so much talked about of late as wonders, but which, curi-
osity apart, don’t merit half the time and trouble they have cost me. They are of
an early, an inelegant and unenriched Doric, that afford no detail and scarcely
produce two good views. So much for Paestum.127

Visiting the site in 1780, Soane compared his measurements to those in Thomas
Major’s The Ruins of Paestum, 1768, and described the baseless Greek Doric
columns as ‘exceedingly rude.’128 However, he came to appreciate their primal
magnificence, which resonated with Burke’s appreciation of the architectural
sublime and Laugier’s interpretation of the primitive hut. Soane employed the
baseless Greek Doric column in a number of his designs, including the two mau-
soleums for Desanfans, and acquired four cork models of the temples at Paestum
in the 1790s.

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Joseph Michael Gandy,

Architectural Visions of Early
Fancy, in the Gay Morning
of Youth; and Dreams in the
Evening of Life, c. 1820.
Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London.

Joseph Michael Gandy,

Public and Private Buildings
Executed by Sir John Soane
between 1780 and 1815,
1818. Courtesy of Sir John
Soane’s Museum, London.

The Picture Room’s architectural highlight is the south wall, which in-
corporates large hinged planes that open like shutters to reveal drawings and
watercolours of Soane’s designs. Among the paintings on the inside of the
left plane is Gandy’s Architectural Visions of Early Fancy, in the Gay Morning
of Youth; and Dreams in the Evening of Life, c. 1820. Soane’s unexecuted
designs are arranged across a mountainous landscape and lit by a dramatic
blue sky scattered with clouds, which casts patches of light and shadow.
The inside of the right plane includes Gandy’s Public and Private Buildings
Executed by Sir John Soane between 1780 and 1815, 1818, which recalls

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Panini’s depiction of paintings covering the walls of a vast classical temple in

Roma antica, 1755.129 Surmounted by a shallow dome and lit by a single oil
lamp, the room in Gandy’s painting is domestic in character. But the diminu-
tive seated draughtsman disturbs this interpretation, emphasising the cham-
ber’s monumental impact.130 Models and paintings of over a 100 of Soane’s
buildings are piled high like an artificial acropolis with the north elevation
of the Bank of England at the summit. A model of the entrance loggia of 13
Lincoln’s Inn Fields is to the extreme left. Immediately adjacent, a model of
Soane’s tomb is partially covered by a funereal black shroud, emphasising the
design dialogue between the homes that Soane characterised as ‘temporary’
and ‘eternal,’ respectively.131
The south wall’s second pair of hinged planes open to reveal more of Soane’s
designs on both sides and expose a high, shallow void, the Picture Room Re-
cess, which is top-lit with yellow glass and looks down to the Monk’s Parlour
below. Directly ahead, on the opposite wall of the Picture Recess, a model of
Soane’s design for the south elevation of the Bank of England is surmounted by
Sir Richard Westmacott’s original plaster model for a marble sculpture A Nymph,
c. 1823. Beyond, a large white glass window is highlighted with coloured glass.
Displaying paintings and drawings that include more of Soane’s designs alongside
depictions of classical ruins by Panini and Clérisseau, the Picture Room Recess is,
as its name suggests, thematically part of the Picture Room and not the Monk’s
Parlour.132
The connection between the Picture Room and the Monk’s Parlour is visual
alone. To the north of the Colonnade, a tight staircase descends to the mo-
nastic sequence of the Monk’s Cell, Monk’s Parlour and Monk’s Yard arranged
north to south in the basement. Soane’s purpose was to display his collection
of medieval casts, curios and fragments, and satirise the contemporary fash-
ion for gothic antiquarianism. The Monk’s Cell is a single-storey space below
the Picture Room, and includes a skeleton from John Flaxman’s studio placed
there in the last six months of Soane’s life.133 Another ­single-storey space
beneath the Picture Room, the Monk’s Parlour opens onto the Picture Room
Recess to form a double height volume and includes medieval curios, plaster
casts from Soane’s buildings, an early eighteenth-century Kentian table and
seventeenth-century chairs. To justify this combination of architectural styles,
Soane referred to works he admired: ‘In some of the landscapes of Claude and
Poussin Grecian and Gothic architecture is combined in the same picture.’134
The window on the south wall is adorned with clear and coloured glass and

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looks onto the Monk’s Yard, which is reflected in the mirror in the Monk’s
Parlour.
The journey from the Picture Room to the Monk’s Yard proceeds from the
display of painted ruins to the fabrication of physical ruins. According to Soane:
‘the Ruins of a Monastery arrest the attention. The interest created in the mind
of the spectator, on visiting the abode of the monk, will not be weakened by
wandering among the ruins of his once noble monastery.’135 Convinced that
ruins leave more space for the imagination than entire structures, Soane remarks
in his tenth Royal Academy lecture in 1815: ‘It is from the association of ideas
they excite in the mind that we feel interested.’136 To stimulate interpretations,
he concludes that fabricated ruins must appear authentic, historically accurate,
convincing in their materials and siting and newly discovered and not recently
constructed. Consequently, fabricated ruins should be gothic because many such
ruins exist in England but not classical, as surviving ancient Roman structures
are limited.137 But in 1802, he built classical ruins at Pitzhanger Manor, Ealing,
and then his country residence. Soane’s model was the fourth-century Temple of
Clitumnus, Spoleto, which he referred to four times in his lectures and sketched
in 1778, 20 years after Adam.138 Equally, as Watkin suggests, his model may
have been the detailed drawings he made of Marchionni’s mid-eighteenth-­
century ruined temple at the Villa Albani, Rome, which was itself based on the
Temple of Clitumnus.139
Soane pretended that Pitzhanger’s ruins were found not fabricated:

we perceived among the trees mutilated shafts of columns covered with ivy, wild
roses, and brambles. On removing some of the brambles and other obstacles,
the ruins appeared to be of greater importance and extent than had at first been
anticipated.140

In 1802, collaborating with his friend and fellow architect James Spiller, he
attempted to authenticate one fiction by fabricating another, preparing an anti-
quary’s assessment of the ruins for the Gentleman’s Magazine.141 When a group
of his friends visited Pitzhanger in July 1804, Soane offered them this letter as
well as survey plans and elevations, perspectives showing hypothetical recon-
structions of the ruins, and drawn speculations on what might still be hidden,
awaiting excavation. Emphasising that ruins can be understood as unfinished as
well as decayed—and thus represent the future as well as the past—the visitors,
who included Turner, were asked to interpret the ruins and propose their own
alternative reconstructions.142

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John Soane, The Monk’s

Yard, 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn
Fields. Courtesy of Derry
Moore/Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London.

Just as Soane imagined a ‘pious monk’ among Pitzhanger’s ruins, he invented

a hermit ‘Padre Giovanni’—Father John—at 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, increas-
ingly adopting this persona after Eliza’s death.143 In addition to the actual tomb that
awaited him in St Giles’ burial ground, Soane conceived his mythical interment in
his home. The Monk’s Yard houses the tomb of Padre Giovanni and that of his ‘faith-
ful companion’—inscribed ‘Alas, Poor Fanny!’—which actually contains the corpse
of Eliza’s pet dog, recalling Kent’s memorial to Fido in the Temple of British Worthies
and the hermit’s canine companion in Clérisseau’s Ruin Room.144 The Yard’s peb-
ble floor is inlaid with a pattern of glass bottle tops and bottoms that were suppos-
­ onastery.’145
edly ‘found amongst the gravel dug out for the foundations of the M
Soane entertained his friends for tea in the Monk’s Parlour. Recalling the pleasurable
times there, Hofland noted that the comfortable Parlour did not match her expecta-
tions of an austere lifestyle and teasingly wondered ‘where did the good monk get so
many bottles where-with to aid his innocent labours?’146 Soane’s own description of
the Monk’s Parlour and Yard concludes with a quotation of Horace in Latin: Dulce
est desipere in loco (it is pleasant to be nonsensical in due place).147
Adding authenticity and indicating that the humour is serious, the Monk’s
Yard includes medieval stonework from the Old Palace of Westminster, which

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Soane acquired while serving as architect to the Office of Works responsible for
government buildings. Once again, contrary to the preference for gothic ruins
in his tenth Royal Academy lecture, the Yard incorporates classical as well as
medieval elements, to which he added a technological innovation. Soane dedi-
cated a lengthy passage to heating systems in his eighth lecture, and particularly
appreciated modern ones that could be justified by reference to ancient Roman
precedent.148 In 1832, just a year after it was patented, Soane installed a hot
water central heating system in the Monk’s Yard: ‘Amongst these ruins is placed
the furnace that heats the water by which the Museum and part of the basement
storey of the House is warmed, by means of an ingenious apparatus, the con-
trivance of Mr A. M. Perkins.’149 After the failure of earlier systems, he probably
assumed that the Monk’s Yard was an appropriate location for a furnace that
would soon be a ruin, but it remained in use until 1911.150

Climate in ruins

Concerned with engendering ideas and emotions, wonder as well as discourse,

Soane noted the creative influence of climate on buildings and emphasised the
lyrical effects of weather on architectural experience.151 Beyond the city, he en-
joyed the shifting modulations of mist and light. But in London, he seems to have
concluded that retreat was the appropriate response to the city’s contaminated
air. Designing a climate as well as a garden, Soane employed an invention of
the industrial era, central heating, to render his garden habitable and counter a
by-product of industrialisation, intense pollution.
But like his friend Turner, Soane probably appreciated the malign external
climate he observed as well as the benign internal one he fabricated. The
front façade of 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields faces the square but the principal
focus is internal, towards and across the Monument Court, which includes
the composite column of 1819 that recalls Colonna and Piranesi. Combining
found and designed elements as in the Monk’s Yard, Soane writes that the
Pasticcio is:

composed of the pedestal upon which the Cast of the Belvidere Apollo, now in
the Museum, was charged; a marble Capital of Hindu Architecture; a Capital in
stone, of the same dimensions and design of those of the Temple of Tivoli and an-
other Capital in the Gothic gusto. These are surmounted by Architectural Groups
of varied forms composed of fragments from different works, chiefly in cast iron,
placed one upon the other, the whole terminated by a Pine-apple.152

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John Soane, Pasticcio

in the Monument Court,
12–14 Lincoln’s Inn
Fields. Courtesy of Sir John
Soane’s ­Museum, London/­
Bridgeman Images.

In Description of the House and Museum on the North Side of Lincoln’s

Inn Fields, 1835, Soane frequently highlights the Monument Court. Many of the
significant rooms of his private and professional life—the Library Dining Room,
Breakfast Parlour, Museum, Little Study and adjacent Dressing Room—gather
around the Monument Court. The Little Study where he worked every day ‘re-
ceives its light chiefly from a window looking into the Monument Court.’ From
the Library Dining Room, ‘the Monument Court, with its Architectural Pasticcio’
and the ‘assemblage of ancient and modern Art’ lining its walls ‘are seen to great
advantage.’ Soane emphasises that the Breakfast Parlour and ‘the views from this
room into the Monument Court and into the Museum … present a succession of
those fanciful effects which constitute the poetry of Architecture.’153 The cupolas
in the Dressing Room and Little Study have yellow and amber glass, as does the
Dressing Room window looking onto the Monk’s Yard. But the glass in all the
windows onto the Monument Court is clear. Like the Monk’s Yard, the Monument
Court was exposed to London’s ruinous, corroding pollution. Nearly every indus-
try was found in the city and coals had sulphur levels twice that of coals used

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centuries later. On combustion, sulphur oxidised to introduce sulphur dioxide into

the air and a secondary oxidation created sulphuric acid. As Soane did not roof
the Monument Court and Monk’s Yard in glass, it is likely that he appreciated the
contrasting internal and external climates, observing a sublime shadow of soot
accumulating on monuments and ruins.
The internal climate was also susceptible to pollution and decay. Oil lamps,
wax candles and coal fires in the domestic rooms caused blackened internal sur-
faces, which needed regular cleaning and repair.154 In 1837, George Bailey, the
first curator of Sir John Soane’s Museum, noted the damage caused by the glass-
fronted bookcases, which Soane no doubt appreciated for their reflective qualities:
‘Many of the Books were found to have suffered from mildew; in many instances
evidently from having being closed immediately after being bound up.’155

History in ruins

Admiring Rousseau’s Confessions, which was published posthumously in 1781,

Soane aimed for a comparable level of self-revelation. Perceived persecutions
and fears of personal and architectural ruination stimulated the novelistic Crude
Hints towards an History of My House in L(incoln’s) I(nn) Fields, 1812, during
a significant period of building work, as the existing house at 13 Lincoln’s Inn
Fields was demolished and the new one constructed, including the Library Dining
Room and Breakfast Parlour.156 Soane imagines that his home is first occupied
and then left to decay. Assumed to be haunted, the house has no visitors until a
future antiquary, on finding it in ruins, attempts to decipher its earlier purpose and
character.157 A part of the ruined house is equated to ‘one of those Carcerian dark
Staircases represented in some of Piranesi’s ingenious dreams for prisons.’158
Speculating on ‘the great Antiquity of this Design,’ the antiquary notes that some
people assume that the ruin was once a burial site, convent, monastery, temple
or ‘the residence of some Magician,’ but concludes that it was the home of ‘an
Architect’ intended ‘for the advancement and knowledge of ancient Arts … to
exemplify later changes in Architecture & to lay the foundation of an History
of the Art itself—its origin—progress—meridian splendour & decline!’159 Crude
Hints includes three alternative versions of a downcast conclusion, emphasising
Soane’s failure to establish an architectural dynasty. The final one even assumes
that Lincoln’s Inn Fields ‘has fallen into neglect’ by as early as 1830:

What an admirable (exquisite) picture (a striking example) to show the vanity &
mockery of all human expectations—the man who founded this place fondly im-
agined that the children of his children would have inhabited the place for Ages &

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that he had laid the foundation of an establishment which would daily gain
strength and produce a race of Artists that would do honour to their ­Country:—
Oh what a falling off do these ruins represent—the subject becomes too gloomy
to be pursued—the pen drops from my almost palsied hand…160

But Crude Hints is not only melancholic. Mirroring the experimental design process
at 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, it is a speculation on future constructions as well as
future ruins. Intrigued by a building’s unfinished state, Soane required his pupils to
further their education by drawing his buildings under construction.161 Demolition is
essential to construction and building sites often appear ruinous. As Soane imagined
new designs, he was literally surrounded by the ruins of the past in the fragments,
casts, models and drawings of his extensive collection. Referring to the architecture of
classical antiquity, Soane remarks in his ninth Royal Academy lecture:

Those monuments of human talent that have never been equalled, and the ruins
of which have been the admiration of the most enlightened minds in all ages and
in all countries, these ruins should be the first object of our consideration and the
basis of our taste.162

One possible interpretation of this statement is to assume that Soane advocated the
study of ancient ruins, so that modern reconstructions would acknowledge but not
replicate the past and inventively respond to new conditions. But this was only partly
his intention. Soane’s further purpose was to model contemporary buildings on an-
cient ruins. In his tenth Royal Academy lecture, he states: ‘And if artificial ruins of
rocks and buildings are so cunningly contrived, so well conceived, as to excite such
reflections … they can be considered as histories open to all the world.’163 In describ-
ing histories as built ruins rather than found ones, Soane emphasises that a history
is an interpretation of the past in the present, never neutral and always partial. Many
histories make implicit reference to the future, but a prospect of the future is explicit in
a design, which is always imagined before it is built and may take years to complete.
Conceiving a building as a history and a ruin, which may later fall into decay or rise
up again, further intensifies the already blurred relations between the unfinished and
the ruined and imagines the past, the present and the future in a single architecture.

England in ruins

Parallel projects that encompassed the majority of his career—the Bank of Eng-
land and 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields—Soane’s principal public and private build-
ings mirrored each other. Appointed architect to the Bank in 1788, Soane only

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resigned in 1833 due to fading health just four years before his death. His lengthy
tenure began as London surpassed Amsterdam as the world’s pre-eminent finan-
cial market and concluded as the Bank emerged as the nation’s ‘central bank,’ a
term invented in 1830, although it had loaned money to the government since its
inception and remained a private corporation. Opening its accounts to public scru-
tiny, the Bank Charter Act, 1833–1834, made the Bank responsible for stabilising
the national credit system and currency as the sole issuer of official bank notes.164
In his seventh Royal Academy lecture, Soane describes his compositional
principles: ‘By a judicious combination of the different geometrical figures and
their compounds, our plans will exhibit much elegance and classical purity with
an endless variety and inexhaustible novelty.’165 Elaborating on these principles
in his tenth lecture, he specifically praises Hadrian’s Villa.166 In 1827, Soane’s
friend James Elmes observed that the Bank, ‘like the villa of Hadrian at Tivoli,
comprises many buildings,’ which equally applies to Soane’s London house.167
The Bank and 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields are composites of architecture and
landscape like Hadrian’s Villa, but compressed to fit urban sites and informed by
the theorists and practitioners of the Enlightenment and the picturesque, includ-
ing Piranesi who applied Hadrian’s Villa to the ancient city in Campo Marzio. The
12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields is seemingly a miniature of the Bank, but given that so
much is telescoped within its boundaries, the perceptual dimensions of Soane’s
London home are equal to those of his major public building.

Joseph Michael Gandy,

View of the Consols Transfer
Office, Bank of England,
1799. Courtesy of Sir John
Soane’s Museum, London.

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 li f e in r uins

Like the designs and ruins displayed in the Picture Room, Soane’s Bank
was classical and not gothic.168 Writing from Rome in 1796, Gandy acknowl-
edged the ruin as a stimulus to the imagination: ‘We are apt to praise and
form greater ideas of ruins than we should perhaps have had of the buildings
when whole.’169 Painted two years after he returned from Rome, Gandy’s wa-
tercolour View of the Consols Transfer Office, 1799, shows the walls without
plaster and the dome constructed up to the base of the lantern. The Bank is
seen not as a ruin but as a building inspired by a ruin, open to the elements
and without signs of decay. An eighteenth-century visitor to Rome experienced
the ancient ruins partly buried, with a higher ground level than originally
intended, giving them the somewhat squat appearance seen in Piranesi’s
etchings and adopted in Soane’s designs for the Bank.170 Alongside a debt
to ruined forms, the watercolour indicates innovative construction. Soane ex-
perimented with new technologies so that the Bank was robust and fireproof.
Stone piers and stone and brick arches supported lightweight vaults of hollow
terracotta cones and brickwork. Even more than any currency, the Bank’s
most valuable assets were its paper records, which determined the durable
means of construction and the high external wall that isolated the Bank from
the city.
Images of the Bank appear throughout the 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Com-
pleted in 1795, Soane’s Rotunda was built on the foundations of the demolished
Rotunda of Robert Taylor, his predecessor as architect to the Bank. Three years

Joseph Michael Gandy, Ar-

chitectural Ruins—A Vision,
1798/1832. Courtesy of
Sir John Soane’s Museum,
London.

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 li f e in r uins

later, Soane asked Gandy to paint two watercolours of his Rotunda. One shows
an intact interior lit by gentle skies, while the other, a much larger painting, is
of a ruin, revealing the construction layers in a Piranesian manner as labourers
pick over the debris in a dark and foreboding light. Thoughts of national ruin
were prevalent in Soane’s lifetime due to the loss of the American colonies, the
violence of the French Revolution and the wars that followed Napoleon’s rise to
power.171 Soane waited over 30 years to exhibit the watercolour of the ruined
Rotunda at the Royal Academy in 1832 as Architectural Ruins—A Vision, pos-
sibly because he was wary of public reaction to the imagined decay of such an
important national symbol and wanted to first complete his work at the Bank.
Prospero’s words in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, c. 1610–1611, accompanied
the exhibit:

The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve.172

In his first and eighth Royal Academy lectures, Soane inserts this quotation along-
side praise for the massive solidity of Egyptian architecture: ‘Many of their prodi-
gious works still exist, and will exist, in aweful ruin and majestic state to the last
moment of recorded time.’173 Nearly 80 in 1832, Soane may have appreciated
The Tempest because he identified with Prospero, the banished sorcerer, and
the play was written late in Shakespeare’s life.174 The watercolour of the ru-
ined Rotunda was subsequently hung in the Picture Room beside a mezzotint of
John Martin’s apocalyptic The Fall of Babylon, 1831, which has a handwritten
­inscription—‘To John Soane RA with the sincerest Respects of the Artist’—in
response to the architect’s earlier praise for the painter’s skill.175 Soane’s deci-
sion to display these works side by side suggests that he associated the Bank’s
collapse with the inevitable decline of British power, even though Napoleon had
been defeated over a decade before.
In a capitalist society, construction inevitably implies ruination. According to
Daniel Abramson, the watercolour is ‘a fable of capitalism itself … suffering endless
cycles of booms and busts, ceaselessly consuming its past for future profit, al-
ways and for evermore simultaneously in ruins and under construction.’176 Equally,
Soane’s appreciation of a ruined Rotunda can be understood as stoic resistance to
the speculative flow of construction and demolition in a booming economy.
As in his other designs, the Bank incorporated elements reminiscent of the ar-
chitecture of death such as sarcophagi, mausolea, urns and inscribed tablets.177

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Given Soane’s melancholic disposition, the ruined Rotunda may represent the
ruin of a life and a reputation. But the watercolour’s noble grandeur and enigmatic
title, referring both to the future and the past, suggest an alternative, optimistic in-
terpretation in which an enduring ruin is an indication of quality and integrity, so
that Soane’s inventive response to classical antiquity—in the spirit of ­Piranesi—
allows his architecture to be the equal of ancient Roman architecture and the
British empire to be the equal of the Roman empire. Rather than prioritising one
interpretation, it is likely that Soane appreciated them as simultaneously and
equally relevant, enjoying the varied, multiple interpretations that ruins engender.
In 1830, Gandy’s Aerial View of the Bank of England from the South-East
was exhibited at the Royal Academy and later hung in the North Drawing Room
on the first floor of 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The surrounding City of London
is veiled in a blue-grey rainstorm, but the Bank is unaffected and bathed in a
dramatic golden light. To the bottom left, the steep cliff presents the Bank as an
acropolis, a high citadel terminating a rocky outcrop. In the foreground to the
bottom right, beside the Bank, there is a large sculpted capital overgrown with
vegetation, although its pristine condition suggests that it may have only been
recently placed there. Architectural Ruins—A Vision shows the rotunda in decay,
but the Bank’s condition in the aerial view is less certain. According to Woodward:

Soane must have expected many of his audience to interpret this view as a visual-
isation of future ruin. It is inescapably—and no doubt deliberately—reminiscent
of the excavations of Pompeii, a large cork model of which Soane had acquired in
1826, and of Hadrian’s Villa.178

Joseph Michael Gandy,

Aerial View of the Bank of
England from the South-
East, 1830. Courtesy of
Sir John Soane’s Museum,
London.

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But neither building decay nor overgrown vegetation is shown and the only trees are
contained within a courtyard garden, suggesting that the site is managed rather than
ignored. Rather than a found ruin, the watercolour may represent a model of a ruin in
an imaginary setting, evoking Gandy’s depictions of Soane’s executed and unexecuted
designs in the Picture Room. A further possibility is that it shows a construction site
and the Bank is unfinished, although there are no building materials to support this
interpretation. The quotation alongside the exhibit revealed it to be an aerial cutaway
view, a drawing technique first employed in sixteenth-century Italy: ‘I want to lift the
roof of that wonderful national building. The interior will be revealed to you like a meat
pie with the crust removed.’179 The words refer to a novel of which Soane owned four
copies, Alain René Le Sage’s La Diable Boiteux (The Devil on Two Sticks), 1707, in
which a flying devil exposes the failings of the people of Madrid. Having worked with
the Bank’s officials and employees for over 40 years, he may have wished to lift the
lid on their activities, even though no one is seen in the exposed interior. Again, it is
likely that Soane appreciated the ambiguity of Gandy’s depiction, which eulogises his
achievement as the equal of classical antiquity whether it depicts a ruin, a model of a
ruin, a construction site or a building conceived as a ruin.

John Soane, Old Dividend

Office, Bank of England,
1811, during demolition,
1925. The ruins of a built
ruin; only the outer wall of
Soane’s Bank survives today.
Courtesy of RIBA Collections.

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Soane in ruins

Architects, especially significant ones, tend to write, draw and publish as well as
build, acknowledging interrelated practices that have together stimulated archi-
tecture for centuries. Soane is emblematic of the principle that researching, test-
ing and expanding the limits of architecture occurs through the interdependence
of drawing, writing and building. He established a creative dialogue between
his ‘eternal’ and ‘temporary’ homes, respectively his tomb and 12–14 Lincoln’s
Inn Fields, and the drawings, paintings, models and texts he produced and dis-
played there, including the novelistic history Crude Hints. Describing Pitzhanger
‘as a sort of portrait,’ he continued to alter 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields between
the 1833 Act and his death four years later at the age of 84.180 If he had lived
longer, he would no doubt have made further changes, despite his failing eye-
sight. Aware that no art form can fully describe a person and a life, Soane turned
an impossible task to productive advantage. Creatively blurring fact and fiction,
12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields is an intensely personal, highly self-conscious, deter-
minedly fragmentary and decisively meandering autobiography—a technology of
the self—in which Soane reinvented life while reflecting upon it, altering the past
as well as influencing the future.
In the first industrialised society, fragmentation was seen in the partition
of knowledge into specialisms, the subdivision of labour into specific tasks and
practices and in arts appropriate to questioning, secular subjectivity. In the
­Renaissance, a fragment was conceived as a part of a coherent whole, but the
­eighteenth century appreciated a fragment for itself, which was seen in juxta-
position to other fragments that need not coalesce into a comprehensible total
system. A fragment was unnerving and exhilarating, representing the destruction
of one order and the opening up of other alternative orders.181 In Athenäums-­
Fragmente, 1798, the romantic poet Friedrich Schlegel noted that, whereas
‘Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns
are already fragments at the time of their origin.’182 The fragmented work was
assumed to be a more accurate reflection of modern society and modern subjec-
tivity than the complete work. Emphasising the possibility for endless, alternative
combinations and recombinations, the concern for fragmentation indicated that a
work of architecture, art or literature could remain unfinished, literally and in the
imagination, focusing attention on the creative role of the viewer or reader as well
as that of the architect, artist or writer.
In architecture, the fragment was associated with the ruin and existed along-
side a dialectical longing for wholeness as in Soane’s ‘union’ of the visual arts.183

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A ruin suggests a point of origin when a structure was once complete, but a
building conceived as a ruin undermines this chronology because it was never
whole. Working on two construction sites for over 40 years and ruining as much
as he built, Soane modelled 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the Bank of England
on ruins, and imagined them as future ruins. Visiting 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields
today it is easy to ignore how different it was in Soane’s lifetime. As he remained
on site while the three adjacent houses were constructed, demolished and rebuilt,
it was then a living ruin, unlike the preserved ruin it became after his death.
Born in 1753 and surviving into old age, Soane experienced the full impact
of the industrial revolution. The production cycles in a capitalist society ensure
that more artefacts as well as more ruins are generated than ever before. While
ancient ruins are admired, modern ruins are less appreciated, in part because
contemporary materials rarely match the stoic grandeur of earlier ruins. But mod-
ern ruins are disturbing for other reasons too, intensifying the analogy of a body
to a building. In an ancient ruin, decay occurred in the distant past, stimulating
general thoughts of degradation and renewal that allow us to contemplate our
own life and believe that death is inevitable but reassuringly in the future. In a
modern ruin, active decay occurs before our eyes, stimulating particularly disturb-
ing thoughts of our imminent degeneration and demise.184
The most substantial structures may survive as ruins, while ephemeral ma-
terials, subtle traces of use and environmental qualities such as acoustics are
less likely to remain, giving future generations a somewhat distorted image of
the original structure and the life within it. But ruination does not only occur
after a building no longer has a function. Instead, it is a continuing process that
develops at differing speeds in differing places while a building is still occupied.
A building is in a constant state of transformation, assembled from components
and materials of differing ages from the newly formed to those centuries or more
old. Harsh weather and atmospheric pollutants undermine components; plants,
insects, animals and birds enlarge fissures and cracks; building materials react
to each other; and people adjust, abandon or destroy whole structures. Varying
according to the needs of specific spaces, components and materials, mainte-
nance and repair can sometimes halt ruination or delay it somewhat, while ac-
cepting and accommodating partial ruination can question the recurring cycles
of production, obsolescence and waste that feed consumption in a capitalist
society.
All ruins may represent potential as well as loss, but a building modelled
on a ruin rebalances these relations. The inevitability of death can either induce
melancholic lethargy or stimulate creativity in every living moment. Expressed

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in drawings, writings and structures, Soane conceived his two homes as

­monuments to his knowledge, skill and reputation. Incorporating only new ele-
ments, his eternal home was designed as a pristine and immutable monument.
In contrast, he conceived his temporary home as a monument to a ruin, incor-
porating found and fabricated elements so that it was representative of time as
well as the timeless. Alongside familiar associations with death and decay, Soane
conceived the ruin as synonymous with the creativity of life.

Notes

1 Du Prey, p. 4.
2 The next female Royal Academician Laura Knight was only chosen in 1936, nine
years before the Royal Society elected its first female Fellows, Kathleen Lonsdale and
Marjory Stephenson. Vickery, pp. 65–66.
3 Du Prey, pp. 56–57; Salmon, p. 63; Savage, ‘A Royal Academy Student in Architec-
ture,’ pp. 86–95.
4 Bolton, The Portrait of Sir John Soane, pp. 4, 13; Curl, p. 183; Soane, Memoirs,
pp. 13–14; Summerson, ‘Sir John Soane and the Furniture of Death,’ pp. 123,
­147–155; Watkin, ‘Monuments and Mausolea,’ p. 9.
5 Bolton, The Portrait of Sir John Soane, pp. 13–14.
6 ‘Sir Wm Chambers to M. Edward Stevens, Architect, au Caffé Anglois, Place ­D’Espagne,
Rome,’ 5 August 1774; quoted in Soane, Memoirs, p. 13. Refer to Bolton, The Por-
trait of Sir John Soane, p. 12.
7 Stroud, pp. 63, 98; Wilton-Ely, Piranesi, Paestum and Soane, pp. 9, 12.
8 Watkin, ‘Soane and his Contemporaries,’ pp. 40–41.
9 Patterson and Jones, quoted in Darley, ‘Wonderful Things,’ p. 22.
10 Soane, Memoirs, p. 12.
11 Bolton, The Portrait of Sir John Soane, p. 17.
12 Bolton, The Portrait of Sir John Soane, p. 134; Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 289.
13 Kant provided the first detailed codification of the three systems in Critique of Pure
Reason, Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgement, published in 1781,
1788 and 1790, respectively.
14 Davy, quoted in Holmes, p. 276, refer to pp. 243, 295–300. Refer to Hamilton,
Turner and the Scientists, p. 12.
15 Wordsworth, p. xxxviii. Refer to Bate, Romantic Ecology, p. 40.
16 Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 436.
17 Mechanism of the Heavens was a translation and interpretation of Pierre Simon
­Laplace’s Traité de mécanique céleste, 1798–1827. Refer to Gage, p. 107; Hamil-
ton, Faraday, p. 277.
18 Faraday, 5 August 1841, quoted in Hamilton, Faraday, pp. 301–302, refer to
pp. 241–242.
19 Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 3, p. 254; Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 1, pp. 233–234.
20 Ruskin, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, pp. 55–63.

195
 li f e in r uins

21 Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke, p. 125. Refer to Hackney, pp. 53–54; Townsend,
‘Turner’s Use of Materials,’ pp. 5–6.
22 The painting was not exhibited during Turner’s lifetime. Butlin and Joll, p. 306.
23 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck categorised cloud types in Annuaire méteorologique, 1802,
but deficiencies in his system as well as resistance to the Napoleonic regime and
French language limited its influence. A more systematic study On the Modification of
Clouds was serialised in the July, September and October editions of the Philosophical
Magazine in 1803, and was published as a single volume the following year.
24 Howard, vol. 2, pp. 288–289.
25 The Meteorological Society of London became the British Meteorological Society in
1850 and Royal Meteorological Society in 1883.
26 Howard, vol. 1, p. iii. Refer to Boia, pp. 85–88; James Rodger Fleming, Histor-
ical Perspectives, p. 37; Golinski, pp. 74–75; Hamblyn, 184–203; Jankovic,
pp. 154–156.
27 The Abbé Batteux provided the first detailed categorisation of the fine arts in Les beaux
arts reduits à un même principe, 1746. Kant, part 2, p. 210.
28 Alberti, p. 309, 318.
29 Bolton, The Portrait of Sir John Soane, pp. 508–516; Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 297.
30 Soane, ‘Lecture III,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 528.
31 Soane, ‘Lecture I,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 492.
32 Watkin, ‘Monuments and Mausolea’, p. 11.
33 Summerson, ‘Sir John Soane and the Furniture of Death,’ pp. 128–132.
34 The gallery later expanded into the almshouses.
35 A separating grille was a later addition, but entry is now unrestricted again. Waterfield,
‘Dulwich Picture Gallery,’ pp. 63–64, 66.
36 Watkin refers to the tombs along the Via Appia. Watkin, ‘Monuments and Mausolea,’
p. 17.
37 Soane, Memoirs, p. 39.
38 Howard Colvin, Architecture and the After-Life, p. 360; Willmert, p. 57.
39 George Soane, The Champion, 10 and 24 September 1815, quoted in Watkin,
Sir John Soane, p. 419.
40 Eliza Soane, quoted in Palmer, ‘Prelude: The Death of Eliza,’ p. 5.
41 Soane, quoted in Bowdler and Woodward, p. 246.
42 Watkin, ‘Monuments and Mausolea,’ p. 17.
43 Piranesi, Antichità Romane, vol. 2, frontispiece; Soane, ‘Lecture IV,’ in Watkin,
Sir John Soane, p. 546. Refer to Watkin, ‘Monuments and Mausolea’, pp. 11, 21;
Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 322; Wilton-Ely, Piranesi, Paestum and Soane, p. 12.
44 Watkin, ‘Monuments and Mausolea,’ p. 18.
45 Soane, ‘Lecture XI,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 641. Refer to Watkin, Sir John
Soane, pp. 291, 311.
46 Soane, ‘Lecture I,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 497.
47 Laugier, Observations sur l‘architecture, 1765, and Boffrand, Livre d’architecture,
1745, translated and quoted in Watkin, ‘Monuments and Mausolea,’ p. 11.
48 Bowdler and Woodward, p. 248.

196
 li f e in r uins

49 A rare example at the time of a substantial business established and led by a woman
Eleanor Coade, the Coade Artificial Stone Company produced an extensive range of
decorative building elements in ceramic rather than stone.
50 Bowdler and Woodward, pp. 251–257.
51 Gittings, p. 50; Watkin, ‘John Soane,’ p. 80; Watkin, ‘Monuments and Mausolea’, p. 10.
52 Summerson refers to an early design drawing. Summerson, ‘Sir John Soane and the Fur-
niture of Death,’ pp. 135–136. Refer to Watkin, ‘Monuments and Mausolea’, pp. 16–17.
53 Soane, 1815, quoted in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 267. Refer to Bowdler and
­Woodward, p. 255.
54 Abramson, ‘Cockerell’s “An Architectural Progress of the Bank of England,”’ p. 125;
Bowdler and Woodward, pp. 250–251, 255; Howard Colvin, Architecture and the
After-Life, p. 360; Curl, pp. 184, 211; Darley, John Soane, p. 131.
55 Bowdler and Woodward, p. 256; Woodward, ‘The Soane Family Tomb,’ p. 198.
56 Hofland, 1817, in Bowdler and Woodward, p. 256.
57 Soane, ‘Lecture IV,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 547.
58 Soane, ‘Lecture I,’ ‘Lecture VIII,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, pp. 492, 595.
59 Soane, ‘Lecture X,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, pp. 627–628, 624. Refer to Soane,
quoted in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 228; Watkin, ‘John Soane,’ p. 82.
60 ‘C. Labaume to M. Jean Soan, au Caffé Anglois, Rome,’ 1779, in Bolton, The Portrait
of Sir John Soane, p. 25.
61 Soane, ‘Lecture I,’ ‘Lecture XI,’ ‘Lecture XII,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, pp. 491, 647,
653; Soane, ‘Crude Hints’, p. 63. Refer to Dorey, ‘Crude Hints,’ p. 76, n. 16.
62 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, p. 243.
63 Sterne, vol. 1, ch. 28, p. 64.
64 Sterne, vol. 9, ch. 33, p. 588.
65 Holtz, p. 88.
66 Brodey, p. 91.
67 Sterne, vol. 1, ch. 12, pp. 31–32.
68 Brodey, p. 123.
69 Soane, ‘Lecture VIII,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 642. Refer to Soane, Description
of the House and Museum, 1830, p. 42; John Harris, William Kent, pp. 29–30.
70 Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 246.
71 Kames, vol. 2, p. 322; refer to vol. 1, pp. 120–130; vol. 2, pp. 321–354.
72 Whately, p. 154, refer to pp. 213–227.
73 Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque, p. 98; Hunt, ‘Verbal Versus Visual Meanings in
Garden History,’ p. 178.
74 On 18 August 1817, he stayed at Banbury. On 29 January 1803 and 23 ­September
1828, he travelled on the road between Oxford and Banbury. Soane, ‘Soane’s Note
Books,’ vol. 5, 1803–1804, p. 5; vol. 10, 1817–1819, p. 22; vol. 12, 1823–1828,
p. 106.
75 Tom Williamson, An Environmental History, pp. 91–113.
76 Defined in the late eighteenth century, the term ‘tourist’ soon developed negative con-
notations. Copley and Garside, ‘Introduction,’ p. 7. Refer to Copley, p. 54; Gilpin,
Observations, vol. 1, p. 197.

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 li f e in r uins

77 Gilpin, Three Essays, pp. 7–8.

78 Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 4, pp. 19, 24–26, 23.
79 Knight, The Landscape, A Didactic Poem, p. 18; Price, An Essay on the Picturesque,
pp. 9–16, 184–190; Price, Essays on the Picturesque, vol. 1, pp. 32–33.
80 Repton commissioned William Coombe to write ‘A Letter to Uvedale Price, Esq.’
81 Knight, The Landscape, A Didactic Poem, p. 43n; Repton, p. 101. Refer to ­Ballantyne,
Architecture, Landscape and Liberty, pp. 217–218; Hipple, p. 249.
82 Soane, ‘Lecture XI,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 643.
83 Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, p. 76.
84 Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, p. 49.
85 Price, Essays on the Picturesque, vol. 1, pp. 169–170.
86 Daniels and Watkins, pp. 14–21.
87 Knight, The Landscape, A Didactic Poem, p. 34, refer to pp. 93–97.
88 Knight, The Landscape, A Didactic Poem, p. 18.
89 Watkin states that three books particularly informed Soane’s understanding of the
picturesque: Knight’s Analytical Inquiry, Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry and Kames’
Elements of Criticism. Knight, An Analytical Inquiry, pp. 139–140; Watkin, Sir John
Soane, p. 1. Refer to Middleton, ‘Soane’s Spaces’, pp. 32–33.
90 Woodward, ‘The Soane Family Tomb,’ pp. 196–199. Refer to Lukacher, pp. 32–37.
91 The skeleton is reminiscent of the one on Louis François Roubiliac’s 1761 monument
to Lady Elizabeth Nightingale in Westminster Abbey. Drysdale, p. 25; Summerson,
‘Sir John Soane and the Furniture of Death,’ p. 136.
92 Bowdler, p. 31; Bowdler and Woodward, pp. 256–257; Gittings, p. 49.
93 Bowdler and Woodward, pp. 252, 257; Drysdale, p. 24.
94 Rousseau, Émile, p. 14. Refer to Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, pp. ­62–63;
Soane, Memoirs, pp. 19, 59.
95 Created for Renè-Louis de Girardin, Marquis de Girardin.
96 Diderot, Salon de 1767, in Diderot, vol. 3, pp. 228–229, quoted in Wendorf, p. 175.
97 Bowdler and Woodward, pp. 252–253.
98 Dubin, p. 24; Levine, p. 327.
99 Soane, ‘Lecture III,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 532. Refer to Forty, Words and
Buildings, pp. 223–224.
100 Soane’s reference to first garden design and then urban design in his tenth Royal Acad-
emy lecture is indebted to Laugier. Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, pp. 1 ­ 28–129;
Soane, ‘Lecture X’, in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 628.
101 In Architecture, Essai sur l‘art, c. 1794, Boullée associates each season with a dif-
ferent mood and light, and imagines an architectural equivalent to poetry, an idea
developed from Le Camus de Mézières. Soane did not know Boullée’s Essai directly
because it was then unpublished, but he was familiar with Boullée’s teachings.
­Boullée, pp. 212–213. Refer to Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 203; Watkin, ‘Soane and
his Contemporaries,’ p. 41.
102 Soane purchased a copy of Ledoux’s L’architecture considérée sous le rapport de
l’art, des mœurs, et de la legislation (Architecture considered under the relation of
art, customs and legislation), 1804, as soon as it was published. Ledoux and Soane

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were united in their admiration for Rousseau’s Confessions, and Watkin suggests
that ­Ledoux’s ‘autobiographical,’ ‘self-pitying, fantasising tone’ may have influenced
Soane’s Crude Hints. Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 219.
103 Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 213.
104 The wealthy builder George Wyatt was the uncle of Elizabeth Smith, Soane’s wife.
105 Le Camus de Mézières, p. 74. Refer to Middleton, Introduction,’ pp. 51–54; Pelletier,
pp. 131–137.
106 Le Camus de Mézières, p. 71. Refer to Middleton, Introduction,’ pp. 31, 50, 55, 62;
Rykwert, The First Moderns, p. 110.
107 Le Camus de Mézières, p. 101. Refer to Le Camus de Mézières, p. 181, n. 3, where
Middleton considers the performance to which Le Camus de Mézières refers.
108 Le Camus de Mézières, p. 88.
109 Soane, Description of the House and Museum, 1835, p. 54. Refer to McFarland, p. 46;
Saisselin, pp. 247–248.
110 Identifying two devices available in the eighteenth century, Deborah Jane Warner
and Arnaud Maillet distinguish between the Claude Mirror, a tinted convex mirror,
and the Claude Glass, a flat coloured glass, sometimes presented as an array of
separately tinted sheets. But I refer to the tinted convex mirror as the Claude Glass,
which as Maillet acknowledges is an English convention. Warner, pp. 158–159;
Maillet, pp. 31–32.
111 Dorey, ‘Death and Memory,’ p. 10.
112 His friend, the sculptor John Flaxman, procured the cast. Bowdler and Woodward,
p. 260; Dorey, ‘Death and Memory,’ p. 13; Thornton and Dorey, p. 94.
113 George Soane, The Champion, 10 and 24 September 1815, quoted in Watkin,
Sir John Soane, p. 419.
114 The bust was carved in 1828.
115 Dorey, ‘Death and Memory’, pp. 7–17; Shell, p. 19.
116 Soane, Description of the House and Museum, 1835, p. vii.
Refer to Millenson, pp. 134–136; Watkin, Sir John Soane, pp. 213–214.
117 Giovanni Belzoni discovered the sarcophagus in 1817.
118 Dorey, ‘Death and Memory,’ p. 12; Watkin, ‘Monuments and Mausolea’, p. 21.
119 Hofland, quoted in Soane, Description of the House and Museum, 1835, p. 39. Refer
to Summerson and Dorey, p. 47.
120 It is possible that certain individuals, including Charles James Richardson, an articled
clerk and then assistant in Soane’s office between 1824 and Soane’s death in 1837,
removed and sold some of the collection without consent. But Bolton assumes that Adam
may have given at least one drawing, the coloured sketch of a ruin discussed in Chapter 6,
to ‘the father of C. J. Richardson, from whose collection it has passed to the Victoria and
Albert Museum.’ Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, vol. 1, p. 244.
121 Adam died in 1792. Bolton, The Portrait of Sir John Soane, p. 67.
122 Soane, ‘Lecture IX,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 621.
123 Sir John Soane’s Museum, pp. 21–37.
124 Soane, ‘Soane’s Note Books,’ vol. 11, 1820–1822, p. 29.
125 Soane, Memoirs, pp. 29, 60.

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126 Soane, Description of the House and Museum, 1832, p. 25. A slightly different ver-
sion appears in Soane, Description of the House and Museum, 1830, p. 24.
127 James Adam, quoted in John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 293. Refer to
Wilton-Ely, Piranesi, Paestum and Soane, p. 113, n. 34.
128 Soane, quoted in Du Prey, p. 137. Refer to Pinto, Speaking Ruins, pp. 198–214;
Thornton and Dorey, p. 41; Wilton-Ely, Piranesi, Paestum & Soane, p. 84.
129 Gandy’s two paintings were originally displayed in the Library Dining Room and were
installed in the Picture Room by 1830.
130 The figure is probably Soane or possibly Gandy.
131 The concluding pages of Soane’s Designs for Public and Private Buildings, 1828,
juxtapose 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields and his family tomb, which are referred to as
‘The Temporary Residence—The Probationary Domicile’ and the ‘Intended Domus
Aeterna,’ respectively. Soane, Designs for Public and Private Buildings, p. 33. Refer
to Bowdler and Woodward, p. 258; Middleton, ‘The History of John Soane’s “Designs
for Public and Private Buildings,”’ pp. 506–512.
132 Cereghini, p. 320; Knox, pp. 85–95; Summerson and Dorey, pp. 19–34, 53–56;
Woodward, ‘Catalogue,’ p. 21.
133 Flaxman died in 1826 and his sister-in-law Maria Denham donated it to Soane.
Thornton and Dorey, pp. 58, 60.
134 Soane, referring to Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, quoted in Watkin, Sir John
Soane, p. 528.
135 Soane, Description of the House and Museum, 1835, p. 26.
136 Soane, ‘Lecture X,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 626.
137 Soane, ‘Lecture X,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 627.
138 Soane, ‘Lecture III,’ ‘Lecture IV,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, pp. 522, 536, 539, 541.
Refer to Du Prey, pp. 142–143; Woodward, ‘Catalogue,’ p. 30.
139 Watkin, ‘Built Ruins,’ p. 13; Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 519.
140 Soane, Memoirs, p. 65.
141 Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, has various drafts of this letter with contributions
by Spiller and Soane.
142 Over 20 years later, Soane included an account of the ruins in his Memoirs, 1835.
Soane, Memoirs, pp. 63–66. Refer to Dorey, ‘Crude Hints,’ p. 54; Watkin, Sir John
Soane, p. 376; Woodward, ‘Catalogue,’ p. 30.
143 Soane, Memoirs, pp. 65–66; Soane, Description of the House and Museum, 1835,
p. 26.
144 Soane, Description of the House and Museum, 1835, p. 27.
145 Soane, Description of the House and Museum, 1832, p. 26. Refer to Dorey, ‘The
Monk’s Yard’, p. 51; Dorey, ‘Sir John Soane’s Courtyard Gardens at Lincoln’s Inn
Fields,’ pp. 18–21; Summerson and Dorey, p. 39.
146 Hofland, in Soane, Description of the House and Museum, 1835, p. 28.
147 Soane, Description of the House and Museum, 1835, p. 27. Refer to Dorey, ‘The
Monk’s Yard,’ p. 52.
148 Soane, ‘Lecture VIII,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, pp. 595–598. Refer to Charles James
Richardson, A Popular Treatise, 1839, p. 52; Willmert, pp. 47–48.

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149 Soane refers to Angier March Perkins, who worked with his father Jacob Perkins.
Soane, Description of the House and Museum, 1835, p. 27.
150 Willmert, p. 48. Refer to Breugmann, pp. 148, 154; Charles James Richardson, A
Popular Treatise, p. 51.
151 Soane, ‘Lecture I,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 497.
152 Soane, Description of the House and Museum, 1835, p. 29.
153 Soane, Description of the House and Museum, 1835, pp. 9, 54.
154 Palmer, At Home with the Soanes, pp. 25–30.
155 Bailey, quoted in Eileen Harris, ‘Sir John Soane’s Library,’ p. 246.
156 After he was chastised for criticising living architects in his fourth lecture, a dispute
with the Royal Academy led Soane to suspend his lectures in 1812, when he was
also in disagreement with William Kinnard, the district surveyor of the parishes of
St Giles-in-the-Fields and St George’s, Bloomsbury, over the design of the loggia to 13
Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Soane, ‘Lecture IV,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 544; Soane,
‘Crude Hints,’ p. 67. Refer to Dorey, ‘Crude Hints,’ pp. 55–57; Watkin, Sir John
Soane, pp. 72–74, 81.
157 Soane, ‘Crude Hints,’ p. 73.
158 Soane, ‘Crude Hints,’ p. 63.
159 Soane, ‘Crude Hints,’ pp. 63–64, 70.
160 Soane, ‘Crude Hints,’ p. 74; refer to Dorey, ‘Crude Hints’, p. 78, n. 61.
161 Abramson, Building the Bank of England, p. 195; Dorey, ‘Crude Hints,’ p. 54;
­Margaret Richardson, Building in Progress, pp. 2, 7; Thornton and Dorey, p. 39.
162 Soane, ‘Lecture IX,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 609.
163 Soane, ‘Lecture X,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 626.
164 Abramson, Building the Bank of England, pp. 195–196, 241.
165 Soane, ‘Lecture VII,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 589.
166 Soane, ‘Lecture IX,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 623.
167 James Elmes, in James Elmes and Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, Metropolitan Improve-
ments; or London in the Nineteenth Century Displayed in a Series of Engravings,
1827, quoted in Abramson, Building the Bank of England, p. 136.
168 Soane collaborated with Dance on the Bank Stock Office, 1792, a prototype for his
later work at the Bank, including the Consols Transfer Office. Abramson, ‘The Bank
of England,’ pp. 208–251; Abramson, Building the Bank of England, p. 106; Sum-
merson, ‘The Evolution of Soane’s Bank Stock Office in the Bank of England,’ p. 154;
Woodward, ‘Wall, Ceiling, Enclosure and Light,’ p. 66.
169 Gandy, quoted in Salmon, p. 46.
170 Schumann-Bacia, pp. 73–74.
171 Soane owned Comte de Volney’s Les Ruines, ou Méditation sur les révolutions des
empires, 1792. Woodward, ‘Scenes from the Future,’ p. 16.
172 This is the spelling as it appears in the Royal Academy exhibition catalogue. Slightly
different versions appear in his first and eighth lectures. Shakespeare, quoted in
Soane, The Exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1832, p. 42.
173 Soane, ‘Lecture I,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 496, refer to ‘Lecture VIII,’ p. 593.
174 Lukacher, p. 165; Woodward, ‘Catalogue,’ p. 28.

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175 Martin, quoted by Claire Chalvet in Woodward, ‘Catalogue,’ p. 50.

176 Abramson, Building the Bank of England, p. 196. Refer to Berman, p. 99.
177 Schumann-Bacia, pp. 116–122.
178 Woodward, ‘Catalogue,’ p. 49.
179 Alain René Le Sage, La Diable Boiteux, 1707, quoted in Woodward, ‘Catalogue,’
p. 49. Refer to Abramson, Building the Bank of England, pp. 194–195; Sum-
merson, The Architecture of the Eighteenth Century, pp. 146–147; Thornton and
Dorey, p. 98; Woodward, In Ruins, p. 164.
180 Soane, quoted in Watkin, ‘John Soane,’ p. 82.
181 Nochlin, pp. 8, 23–24.
182 Schlegel, Charakteristiken und Kritiken, p. 169. Refer to Elizabeth Wanning Harries, The
Unfinished Manner, pp. 2, 56–71, 122–128, 149–150; McFarland, pp. 46, 50–51;
Nochlin, pp. 8, 23–24; Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation,
pp. 318, 330; Vesely, ‘The Nature of the Modern Fragment’, p. 46.
183 Soane, Description of the House and Museum, 1835, p. vii.
184 Bille and Sørenson, ‘Into the Fog of Architecture,’ pp. 1–3, 12–14; Buchli,
pp. ­159–161; Edensor, ‘Incipient Ruination,’ pp. 348–364; Edensor, Industrial Ru-
ins, pp. 313–314; Harbison, The Built, The Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable, p. 121;
Pétursdóttir and Olsen, ‘Introduction,’ pp. 3–8.

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 7
wrapping ruins
around buildings
 w r app in g r uins ar oun d buildin g s

I always knew Rome was your dish

In Nathaniel Kahn’s documentary film My Architect, A Son’s Journey, 2003, Louis

Kahn recalls William F. Gray, his teacher at Central High School, Philadelphia:

And he gave a course on architecture, the only course in any high school I am sure,
in Greek, Roman, Renaissance, Egyptian and Gothic architecture. And at that point
two of my colleagues and myself realised that only architecture would be my life. How
accidental our existences are really and how full of influenced by circumstance.1

Before modernism transformed American architectural education, an ambitious stu-

dent either enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris or at an elite American
school under its influence. In 1924, Louis Kahn graduated from the University of
Pennsylvania, one of the most highly regarded Beaux-Arts schools in the US. Ac-
cording to Kahn’s contemporary, friend and occasional collaborator Joseph Esherick:

Although Pennsylvania is nominally an Ivy League institution, its character was and
remains distinctly urban and its students a more polyglot mix, more closely repre-
senting what one would expect in the urban centres of the East, than was character-
istic of deep Ivy League schools such as Princeton or Yale. In place of ‘hurrah for the
red and the blue’, a derisive parody of the Penn anthem in those days sung by op-
posing spectators at football games substituted ‘hurrah for the Wops and the Jews’.2

Adding to its cosmopolitanism, Penn was the most popular American destination
for Chinese architectural students.3 China had a long building tradition in which
craftsmen used established construction techniques, but architecture as an art
and a profession is a more recent innovation, arriving only in the early twentieth
century, stimulated by Chinese students who studied overseas, mostly in Japan
and America. A classmate of Kahn, Yang Tingbao returned home in 1927 to es-
tablish a successful career as one of China’s leading architects.4
Recalling the education at Penn, Esherick emphasises the value given to
drawing skills in charcoal, pencil, ink and watercolour in the Beaux-Arts tradition:

The first objects to be drawn were the usual pile of white painted wooden cubes,
pyramids, and spheres that used to fill up most drawing studios. From there, we
went on to architectural forms, drawing from plaster casts of mouldings, orna-
ments, and of course an infinite number of acanthus leaves.5

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Substantial forms were emphasised as well as substantial materials such as mar-

ble, brick and concrete. The monumental:

assembly of elements … from many different examples … had to go together

in a consistent and coherent whole … The Beaux-Arts idea of referring back to
traditional forms was so strong that there was simply no getting away from it.6

Later, at the height of his career, Kahn readily acknowledged the influence of
his Beaux-Arts education, which emphasised form, light and shadow, praised
­Boullée, Ledoux and Piranesi and prepared him to view ancient Roman architec-
ture with appreciative eyes:

Penn was a nice school then. It was highly religious, not as if it were a certain
religion, but religious in the sense that transcendent qualities were considered
worthy. We learned to respect the works of the masters, not so much for what
they did for themselves, but for what they did for others through their works,
which were a high use of the language of architecture.7

Kahn’s design critic in his senior year was the French architect Paul Philippe
Cret. An influential figure in the school, Cret was a graduate of the École des
Beaux-Arts in Paris as were the majority of Penn’s architectural design professors
in the early twentieth century.8 Kahn concluded: ‘Paul Cret was my teacher, Cor-
busier was my teacher.’9 Advocating an austere classicism, Cret was able to ap-
preciate and question both modernism and his Beaux-Arts education. In the year
that Vers une architecture, 1923, was published in English as Towards a New
Architecture, 1927, he favourably reviewed Le Corbusier’s book in a lecture to
the T-Square Club in Philadelphia, of which Kahn was a member.10 Below the
sketches of elemental forms, including a cylinder, pyramid, cube, rectangle and
sphere, Le Corbusier depicts Rome as a city of juxtaposed monuments.11 Plac-
ing a plan of Hadrian’s Villa next to his 1911 sketches of the site, he remarks:
‘Outside Rome, where there was space, they built Hadrian’s Villa. One can me-
diate there on the greatness of Rome. There, they really planned.’12 Le Corbusier
praises ‘the light play on pure forms’ and ‘Simple masses’ of ancient Rome but
dismisses ‘every sort of horror … and the bad taste of the Roman Renaissance’,
concluding that Rome ‘fell asleep after Michel Angelo.’13 The educational pin-
nacle of the École des Beaux-Arts was the annual Prix de Rome competition, for
which the reward was a four-year scholarship at the French Academy in Rome,

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which had occupied the Villa Medici since 1803. But mockingly, Le Corbusier
remarks:

The lesson of Rome is for wise men, for those who know and can appreciate, who
can resist and can verify. Rome is the damnation of the half-educated. To send
architectural students to Rome is to cripple them for life. The Grand Prix de Rome
and the Villa Medici are the cancer of French architecture.14

Ignoring this advice, in spring 1928 Kahn sailed to Europe for the first time, trav-
elling in style on the recently launched ocean liner S.S. Île de France, a fitting start
to a year-long Grand Tour. Having grown up in a poor Jewish family, who had em-
igrated to America from the western fringe of imperial Russia when he was a young
child, Kahn’s journey was hard earned, made possible by savings accumulated
while living with his parents and working in architectural offices after graduation.
Arriving first in England, he travelled through northern Europe to the Baltic, where
he met his Jewish relatives in Riga, many of whom were later killed during the Sec-
ond World War.15 Kahn then journeyed south to Italy before returning to the US.
Repeating the focus of eighteenth-century Grand Tourists, he made many more
sketches in Italy than during his equivalent time in northern Europe. His Grand
Tour offered Kahn new knowledge and status, as was the case for earlier architects
and patrons. But he returned home on ‘a humble tramp steamer’ to work for Cret,
who had a number of prestigious commissions, including the Folger Shakespeare
Library and the headquarters of the Federal Reserve, both in Washington DC.16
Reflecting on his travel sketches in graphite and watercolour, which were
indebted to impressionism and post-impressionism, Kahn remarked in 1931:
‘I try in all my sketches not to be entirely subservient to my subject, but I have
respect for it, and regard it as something tangible—alive—from which to extract
my feelings.’17 Vincent Scully later recalled: ’Watercolours were associated with
the Beaux-Arts period: modernism despised the watercolour as effete, so Kahn
kept them under wraps and most of us only later knew of their existence.’18
Kahn recognised his first visit to Europe as a pivotal influence on his
­career.19 But he only returned there for a second time over 20 years later. In
late 1950, Kahn began a three-month residency at the American Academy in
Rome, which was modelled on the city’s French Academy and styled its most
prestigious award, the Rome Prize, in honour of the Prix de Rome. Educated
at the École des Beaux-Arts like many of his talented American contemporar-
ies, Charles Follen McKim established architectural education at the American
Academy in the late nineteenth century and designed its headquarters on the

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Janiculum Hill to the west of the Tiber. Placed prominently above the entrance
to the McKim, Mead and White building, a portrait of the Roman god Janus
looked two ways—to the past and the future—representing the American Acad-
emy’s intention to conceive new designs from studies of classical antiquity. A
1920 photograph shows Piranesi’s extensive plan of Hadrian’s Villa, 1781,
dominating one of the studios.20
The American Academy was the pinnacle of achievement when the Beaux-
Arts dominated architectural education in the US, but its status diminished as
modernism spread through American schools. By 1950, the American Academy
was directed by Laurance Roberts and all the artists-in-residence were modern-
ists.21 Architects have used history in different ways, whether to indicate their
continuity with the past or departure from it. From the Renaissance to the early
twentieth century, the architect was a historian, in the sense that an architectural
treatise combined design and history and a building was expected to manifest
the character of the time and knowingly refer to earlier historical eras. Modernism
ruptured this system in principle if not always in practice. Advocating an architec-
ture specific to the present and breaking from previous educational models, Wal-
ter Gropius excluded the history of architecture from the Bauhaus syllabus, while
in the ‘Manifesto of Futurist Architecture,’ 1914, Antonio Sant’Elia and Filippo
Tomasso Marinetti proclaimed: ‘This architecture cannot be subject to any law of
historical continuity.’22 But to be modern requires an understanding of what is
not modern. Even modernists who denied the relevance of the past relied on his-
tories such as Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement, 1936, and
Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, 1941, to validate modernism’s
historical inevitability, rupture from the past and systematic evolution.23
To some degree, mid-century modernists merely reaffirmed an apprecia-
tion of history that was latent in a work such as Vers une architecture. But
the Second World War was a more technological war than the First. In the
aftermath of wartime bombing and with the new threat of nuclear devastation,
modernism’s confidence in scientific progress and dismissive reaction to social
norms and cultural memories were anachronistic. In contrast to the stereotyp-
ical early modernist rejection of history, architects acknowledged modernism’s
classical heritage, placing a concern for history at the heart of architecture
once again.
Resident at the American Academy at the same time as Kahn, Joseph
­Amisano was a recipient of the Rome Prize. He recalls that Italy ‘had not yet
recovered from the bombings and deprivations of war’ and was yet to experience
the industrial surge of the 1950s. Allowing visitors to imagine an earlier Rome:

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‘The streets late at night … made live by flickering overhead lights swaying in the
wind … were mystically quiet’:

It was the effects of the light that preoccupied Louis and fascinated him: the de-
liberateness of the detailed forms, some carved like deep wounds with shadows
deepening into reaches that promised forbidding secrets … Louis spent most of
the days wandering in Rome and its museums, feasting on the Italian scene. He
once remarked that the nocturnal Renaissance still life became animate when
daylight and the Italian people took over the scene.24

In December 1950, newly arrived in Rome, Kahn wrote to his practice colleagues
in Philadelphia: ‘I firmly realize that the architecture of Italy will remain as the inspi-
rational source of the works of the future,’ adding ‘Our stuff looks tinny compared
to it.’25 George Howe, who was instrumental in getting Kahn his position at the
­American Academy, wrote to him in January 1951: ‘I always knew Rome was your
dish. Yes, brick and stone are wonderful. We have spoken often of the pitiful ruin
America will present when the archaeologists dig it up 5000 years from now.’26 In
early and mid-twentieth-century America, building obsolescence and expendability
were even associated with progress and consumer choice in a booming economy,
presenting capitalist development and poor construction in a false, benign light.27

Louis I. Kahn, Piazza

Campidoglio, Rome, 1951.
Courtesy of Louis I. Kahn
Collection, University of
Pennsylvania and the
Pennsylvania Historical and
Museum Commission.

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Kahn travelled through Italy and visited Greece and Egypt, making more
sketches in just three months than he had produced in a year in 1928–1929.
Rather than the watercolour or graphite sketches of before, his pastel drawings
were appropriate to an enhanced emphasis on mass, form, colour and shadow
that was indebted both to sites he visited and artists such as Giorgio de Chirico.
Carefully chosen, he focused on ancient buildings, but made a brief visit to the
construction site of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, the work of
another architect inspired by the architecture of classical antiquity.28 In 1966,
Kahn remarked: ‘I have every feeling that Corbusier really wanted to build a new
Parthenon’.29
As Kahn did not drive, he either had to travel by train or find a willing mo-
torist. One travelling companion was the landscape designer George Patton, who
studied and analysed gardens while he was in Italy as a recipient of the Rome
Prize. In the late 1950s, Patton became Kahn’s principal landscape collaborator
and their offices were in the same Philadelphia building. Patton’s employee Har-
riet Pattison exchanged books on garden history with Kahn and together they had
a son, Nathaniel.30 Recognising that many of Kahn’s sketches fuse a building and
a setting, Kazi Khaleed Ashraf concludes that he emphasised ‘the rootedness of
architecture,’ which Kahn affirmed: ’I draw a building from the bottom up because
that’s the way it’s constructed. It depends on gravity … If you do that, then you
draw like an architect.’31
Another companion was Frank E. Brown, Kahn’s colleague at Yale and the
American Academy’s resident archaeologist. A contemporary described Brown
as ‘the last living ancient Roman, so at home in the ancient ruins that he seems
no longer a part of the modern world.’32 Also a Yale colleague and author of the
first monograph on Kahn in 1962,33 Scully remarks: ‘Brown led us all to Rome
and made us see that it wasn’t just an architecture of engineers … but also an
architecture of poetry, of light and water’.34 With Brown’s guidance, Kahn visited
many ancient Roman sites, including Hadrian’s Villa.35 With regard to the Forum
of ­Trajan, second century AD, which was of particular interest to Kahn, Brown
writes: ‘The basilica was … an augustly luminous volume, doubly wrapped by
shadowed galleries, behind which, at the ends, wide apses opened, repeating
the hemicycles of the forum.’36 Brown refers to the complete building, but Kahn
­appreciated broken, brickwork ruins seen in sunlight and shadow, not entire
structures decorated with marbles and mosaics. Although his sketches are vi-
brantly coloured, he ignored the surviving decorated surfaces of ancient Roman
architecture, unlike the artist Mark Rothko, who in 1959 associated his colour
field paintings with ancient Roman murals.37 Kahn’s appreciation of ancient

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Roman sites was, of course, selective and creative. Just as two foreigners, Pal-
ladio and Piranesi—a Vicentine and a Venetian, respectively—were the greatest
Roman architects of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, an American became
the greatest Roman architect of the twentieth century.

The problem of a new monumentality

Rather than appreciate monumentality for the first time in Roman structures,
Kahn sought them out because monumentality was an emerging theme of
­mid-twentieth-century architecture and his own evolving design concerns, which
recalled his Beaux-Arts education. The attention to monumentality was a reac-
tion to modernism’s failure to articulate societal values and gain widespread
respect. It also reflected a need to represent democracy in the face of totalitarian
regimes, whether defeated Fascist ones or a recent ally, the Soviet Union, which
had exploited monumentality to suggest the coherence and cohesiveness of a
society. One question was how the monumental architecture of a liberal society
would differ from that of a repressive one?
In the Bauhaus publication The New Vision, 1928, László Moholy-Nagy criticises
people ‘who look for the essence of architecture in the meaning of the conception of
shelter’.38 Steel and glass seemed to best represent the early modernist concerns
for transparency, lightness, impermanence and anti-monumentality. In Building in
France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete, 1928, Giedion writes that ‘There
arises—as with certain lighting conditions in snowy landscapes—that demateriali-
zation of solid demarcation that distinguishes neither rise nor fall and that gradually
produces the feeling of walking in clouds.’39 But Giedion also refers to Le Corbusier’s
reinforced concrete housing at Pessac, France, 1926, and argues for the widespread
use of the material because it diminishes national boundaries. In 1938–1939, he
presented an implicit critique of monumentality in the Charles Eliot Norton lectures
at Harvard University, which appeared collectively as Space, Time and Architecture,
1941. Establishing a canonical history, Giedion presents modernism as a coherent
movement with the concept of space and time linking architecture to developments
in physics and art. To support his argument, he quotes the mathematician Hermann
Minkowski in 1908: ‘Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to
fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an in-
dependent reality.’40 Seeking a comparable approach in art, Giedion praises cubism:

The presentation of objects from several points of view introduces a principle

which is intimately bound up with modern life—simultaneity … The cubists

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dissect the object, try to lay hold of its inner composition. They seek to extend
the scale of optical vision as contemporary science extends the law of matter.41

Indicating a new emphasis on monumentality, Fernand Léger, José Luis Sert

and Giedion were each asked to contribute to an American Abstract Artists (AAA)
publication in 1943 and decided to prepare a joint essay. Identifying ‘Nine Points
on Monumentality,’ they describe monuments as expressions of societal values
and acknowledge the failure of modernism in this regard: ‘Monumental archi-
tecture will be something more than strictly functional. It will have regained its
lyrical value.’42 Without mentioning the ruin, they conclude that monumental
buildings ‘are intended to outlive the period which originated them, and con-
stitute a heritage for future generations. As such, they form a link between the
past and the future.’43 A year later, Paul Zucker organised the symposium ‘New
Architecture and City Planning’ at Columbia University, which also appeared as
an edited book. In his introduction, Zucker asserts that functionalism lacks ‘emo-
tional impact.’44 Functionalism was a useful concept for early twentieth-century
modernists, but there was no coherent theorisation of architectural determinism
at the time and little indication that it was rigorously applied to a design. Instead,
Stanford ­Anderson argues that ‘The Fiction of Function’ was a stimulus to design:

Architecture is, among other things, a bearer of meaning … Yet this was no less
so in modernism than in other periods. Furthermore, it is surely not unique to
modern architecture that part of the story it tells is about function. It may be
sustainable, however, that modern architecture, more than that of any other time,
emphasized stories about function.45

By the mid-twentieth century, the fiction of function was not enough and other
stories were given new attention. Zucker’s introduction does not mention mon-
umentality. Including just 5 contributions out of a total of over 50, the section
entitled ‘The Problem of a New Monumentality’ is only a small proportion of a
substantial publication. A short paragraph introduces the section: ‘For the last fif-
teen years, the aspects of Housing, Prefabrication, City Planning and other archi-
tectural questions have enjoyed wide discussion, yet the scarcely less important
problem of Architectural Monumentality has not been generally recognized’.46
When the AAA’s publication failed to appear in print, Giedion arranged for his
essay, ‘The Need for a New Monumentality,’ to open the section on monumen-
tality, which also includes contributions from Kahn, the printmaker Ernest Fiene,
architect Philip L. Goodwin and furniture designer George Nelson.

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Emphasising a concern for remembrance and posterity, Giedion recognises

‘the impulse to create symbols in the form of monuments, which, according to
the Latin meaning are “things that remind.”’ But the monumentality he envisions
is not meant to recall past models. Disparaging ‘the icy atmosphere, created by
those architects and their patrons who, in order to compensate for their own lack
of expressive force, misused eternal names by robbing history,’ he ­concludes that
‘the great monumental heritages of mankind became veiled and even p
­ oisonous to
everybody who touched them.’ Dismissing ‘pseudo-monumentality,’ he places a
drawing by the French neoclassical architect Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand ­alongside
a photograph of Nazi architecture.47 Giedion only associates austere classicism
with authoritarian regimes, even though it is predominant in ­Washington DC and
was commissioned during President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s interwar New Deal
as in Cret’s Federal Reserve building. While a sociopolitical agenda is implicit in
Giedion’s co-authored 1943 text, it is explicit in his longer, sole-authored 1944
essay. Praising ‘liberal economists, such as John Maynard Keynes’, he argues
that state intervention could stimulate a resurgence of monumental architecture,
according to his aesthetic preference of course.48
Kahn emphasises that ‘Monumentality in architecture may be defined as a
quality, a spiritual quality inherent in a structure which conveys the feeling of its
eternity, that it cannot be added to or changed.’49 His conception of monumen-
tality appears to exclude any possibility of ruination or decay. Kahn rejects ‘faithful
duplication’ of the monumental structures of ancient Greece and Rome as well
as gothic cathedrals: ‘But we dare not discard the lessons these buildings teach
for they have the common characteristics of greatness upon which the build-
ings of our future must, in one sense or another, rely.’50 Praising ‘ribs, vaults,
domes,’ Kahn proposes that contemporary monumental architecture should learn
from past forms and employ ‘lighter,’ ‘synthetic’ modern materials, specifically
steel.51 But after his time at the American Academy, Kahn never again used
lightweight materials, turning instead to the massive structures and materials of
ancient Rome—drums, arches and vaults, brickwork and concrete—as a means
to combine contemporary relevance and historical continuity, distinguishing his
work from the fast-track steel frame construction familiar in the US.52
Of the five contributors, only Nelson acknowledges ‘a contradiction between
the demand for monumentality and a general lack of faith in the institutions
normally glorified in monumental architecture.’ He also appreciates ‘that monu-
mental building is an anachronism in our time’ due to increasing fascination for
the transient and ephemeral. However, rejecting past models, he concludes that
‘a renewed vision of society as an organism regulated by its members in their

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own interest’ would be ‘worthy of monumental expression.’53 Comparing mon-

uments from differing regimes, including the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany,
Philip L. Goodwin emphasises the need for monumental ‘symbols of democracy’
with present and future relevance: ‘The ruins of New York two thousand years
from now are hardly likely to be as imposing as the ruins of Athens.’54 The final
text by Ernest Fiene is confined to a discussion of sculpture and painting, which
Giedion also considers when he praises Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, 1937, painted
in response to the Fascist bombing of a Basque village in the Spanish civil war.55
Also in New York in 1944, Elizabeth Mock curated an exhibition at the
­Museum of Modern Art entitled Built in the USA, 1934–1944, which reviewed
the nation’s architecture since Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson’s sem-
inal Modern Architecture: International Exhibition at the same venue in 1932.56
Wary of the ‘shifty word monumentality,’ Mock still concluded: ‘Democracy needs
monuments, even though its requirements are not those of a dictatorship.’57
Stimulated by Giedion’s lecture at the Royal Institute of British Architects
(RIBA) in September 1946, The Architectural Review arranged a symposium enti-
tled ‘In Search of a New Monumentality,’ which was attended by Giedion, Gropius
and Hitchcock among others, and published in 1948. Already in January 1947,
the magazine’s editors—Hubert de Cronin Hastings, Osbert Lancaster, Nikolaus
Pevsner and J. M. Richards—had published an editorial in the celebratory 50th
anniversary issue entitled ‘The Second Half Century.’ Calling for a ‘new humanism,’
this text, which implies a reassessment of modernism as well as the magazine
itself, promotes ‘a new richness and differentiation of character, the pursuit of dif-
ference rather than sameness, the re-emergence of monumentality, the cultivation
of idiosyncrasy and the development of those regional dissimilarities that people
have always taken pride in.’58 Reflecting on the symposium, the editors continue
in a similar vein, praising the successful ‘battle against period revivalism’ while ac-
knowledging that ‘functionalism was not enough’ and concluding that modernism:

has only achieved the first negative stage of the struggle for a contemporary
architectural language. The second positive stage has still to be undertaken, the
development on an idiom rich and flexible enough to express all the ideas that
architecture—especially representational architecture—ought to be capable of
expressing.59

Giedion repeats his earlier argument, while Hitchcock characterises monumen-

tality in terms of ‘relative durability,’ ‘solidity,’ ‘dignity,’ ‘large size,’ ‘a testimonial
consciously or unconsciously provided for the future,’ and ‘fundamental emotional

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impact.’60 A number of the contributors deride ‘pseudo-monumentality’ as stylisti-

cally moribund, socially oppressive or both.61 Only Gregor Paulsson and Gropius
offer distinctive, alternative interpretations. Paulsson notes that the Latin term for
monumentality ‘was never connected with aspects of building, but only with land
survey, e.g.: cippus monumentalis, a border post serving at the same time as a
memorial.’ Monumentality ‘therefore, has no aesthetic distinction.’62 In conclu-
sion, Paulsson rejects the need for contemporary monuments:

If we look more closely into the question of when the monumental quality was
particularly sought for we find that it was in anti-democratic times … The word
monumentality should therefore be eliminated from the architectural vocabulary
as a characteristic desirable for buildings in a democratic society.63

In 1944, furthering his concern for space and time, Giedion had characterised
spectacular, transient events such as fireworks in terms of an architecture that
is both ephemeral and monumental.64 Four years later, Gropius more forcefully
argued for a new conception of monumentality that remains true to the modernist
association of democratic society with flexible architecture. Accordingly, he states
that monumentality ‘will not come back as the “frozen music” of static symbols,
but as a dignified inherent quality of our physical environment as a whole, a qual-
ity in a process of continuous transformation.’65
Giedion, Léger and Sert’s 1943 essay was only published for the first time in
Giedion’s Architecture You and Me: The Diary of a Development, 1958, in which
he also reprinted his 1944 essay. Reflecting on these texts as well as The Archi-
tectural Review conference, Giedion acknowledges that it ‘was certainly danger-
ous to revive a term that had become so debased’ and concludes: ‘the problem of
monumentality still lies before us as the task of the immediate future.’66

That golden stain of time

A number of issues are notably absent from the two 1940s symposia on mon-
umentality. There is no acknowledgement that monuments can be ineffective
means of collective remembrance. Their original meanings are soon transformed,
obscured or forgotten unless they are continuously recalled and reaffirmed through
everyday or ritualistic behaviour, which are as necessary to perpetuating collec-
tive memory as any material object. In La Mémoire Collective, 1950, Maurice
­Halbwachs argues that urban, social experience aids collective memory, which
he contends offers a richer, more faithful understanding of the past than history.67

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As some histories are forgotten and others reaffirmed, it is possible to talk of

collective history as well as collective memory. Developing in dialogue with each
other, they are both open to manipulation and distortion. Collective memory varies
according to who is remembering and when. For example, the collective memory
of architects is likely to be quite different from the collective memory of another
community. Avoiding such social and cultural distinctions, the contributors simply
assume that the monument is intended for a monolithic society and future gen-
erations as well as the present. Only one contributor Goodwin briefly mentions a
future ruin, and none of them considers the simultaneous interdependence of the
monument and the ruin in a present-day structure.68 Their incomprehension oc-
curs because, in most cases, they deny historical models that would have drawn
them to these issues.
In ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’ (‘On German Architecture’), 1772, Goethe
states that art as the expression of creative spirit is another nature, which learns
from nature but is distinct from it. Eulogising ‘the genius of Erwin von Steinbach’
in the design of Strasbourg’s gothic cathedral, he writes:

Yet what need you a memorial! You have erected the most magnificent one for
yourself, and although your name does not bother the ants who crawl around it,
you have the same destiny as that Architect who piled up his mountains to the
clouds … Just as in the eternal works of nature, everything is perfectly formed
down to the meanest thread, and all contributing purposively to the whole.69

Informed by German romantic thought—notably Goethe’s ‘On German Architec-

ture’—Ruskin in The Stones of Venice, 1851–1853, writes that ‘art is valuable
or otherwise, only as it expresses the personality, activity and living perception
of a good and great human soul.’70 Praising craft practices and regretting indus-
trialisation, which he believes to be dehumanising, Ruskin applies the principle
of creative expression widely, recognising architectural ingenuity beyond that of
the architect. Emphasising the social value of this theme in The Seven Lamps of
Architecture, 1849, he extends the eighteenth-century theory of association to
the politics of human labour, valuing ‘not only what men have thought and felt,
but what their hands have handled, and their strength wrought.’ As well as craft
and labour, Ruskin appreciates the effects of use and weather:

For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, or its gold. Its glory
is in its Age … it is in that golden stain of time, that we are to look for the real
light, and colour, and preciousness of architecture’.71

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The Seven Lamps’ sixth chapter is ‘The Lamp of Memory,’ in which Ruskin writes
that ‘we cannot remember without’ architecture which ‘is always destroyed cause-
lessly.’72 He concludes that any attempt at restoration is inauthentic because it
destroys a building’s past and thus its value in the present and future. Ruskin’s ap-
proach was diametrically opposed to that of his contemporary ­Eugène-Emmanuel
Viollet-le-Duc, who favoured a restoration policy that—in valuing one era above all
others—constructed an ideal that may never have existed and removed unwanted
remains that did not fit this model. Restoration became prevalent in France and
the rest of Europe but not in Britain.73 Alongside a tribute to past endeavours,
Ruskin recognises a responsibility to future generations:

The idea of self-denial for the sake of posterity, of practising present economy
for the sake of debtors yet unborn, of planting forests that our descendants may
live under their shade, or of raising cities for future nations to inhabit, never, I
suppose, efficiently takes place among publicly recognised motives of exertion.
Yet these are not the less duties; nor is our part fitly sustained upon the earth,
unless the range of our intended and deliberate usefulness include not only the
companions, but the successors, of our pilgrimage. God has lent us the earth for
our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us,
and whose names are already written in the book of creation, as to us; and we
have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary
penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath.74

Ruskin’s appreciation of the labour of past generations and concern for the ef-
fects of time on architecture had notable consequences, furthering sustainable
development and the conservation of landscapes as well as buildings. In 1877,
William Morris founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings on
the premise that each layer of a structure’s history should be retained. Founded
in 1895, the National Trust developed into a substantial land and property
owner with the largest membership of any organisation in the UK, extending to
a car-owning public the picturesque tours that Gilpin had helped to promote. At
the Trust’s Annual General Meeting in 1934, Philip Kerr, eleventh Marquess of
Lothian, associated national identity with the landed estate and indicated that
aristocratic owners were to be retained within their houses, adding an aura that
James Lees-Milne, the Trust’s first historic buildings secretary, appreciated as ‘a
little patrician decay.’75
Conservation accepts the past as a palimpsest. But it requires subtle and
unseen maintenance, which can—like its counterpart, restoration—lead to the

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denial of time, decay and change.76 The Stones of Venice implies that a whole
city can be a historical monument conserved for posterity in a state of gentle
dilapidation, which may have dire consequences for its urban life, as Venice’s
recent history emphasises.
Referring to individuals as well as societies, Edward S. Casey acknowl-
edges: ‘It is an inescapable fact about human existence that we are made of
our memories: we are what we remember ourselves to be.’77 Memory can be
notably unreliable, selective and creative. But Frances A. Yates contrasts: ‘We
moderns who have no memories at all’ to the ‘the ancient world, devoid of
printing’ in which ‘the trained memory was of vital importance’.78 Concurring,
Casey writes that ‘we have turned over responsibility for remembering to the cult
of computers, which serve as our modern mnemonic idols.’79 But one medium
has not simply replaced the other, and buildings continue to be invaluable to
memory.
Alongside the creation and retention of monuments that recall and represent
societal beliefs, there is a process of forgetting in terms of the decay of meaning as
well as the decay of material, which may result from natural processes or human
actions, whether individual or collective. According to Adrian Forty:

The Western tradition of memory since the Renaissance has been founded upon
an assumption that material objects, whether natural or artificial, can act as
analogies of human memory … It would appear that this Western tradition owes
a great deal to the concept of memory put forward by Aristotle, according to
whom memory ‘is like the imprint or drawing in us of things felt’; in this scheme,
forgetting is the decay of the imprint.80

Sigmund Freud likened psychoanalysis to archaeology.81 He also compared

Rome to human memory, but then dismissed the analogy because it would have
to be a city ‘in which nothing once constructed had perished, and all the earlier
stages of development had survived alongside the latest’ so that many structures
simultaneously occupied the same site.82 Countering the assumption that forget-
ting occurs slowly over time, which Aristotle proposed and humanism affirmed,
Freud’s 1919 essay on the uncanny associates forgetting with repression with
what is ‘Concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know about
it.’83 A perception not a property of space, an uncanny and threatening experi-
ence occurs when the repressively forgotten is unexpectedly remembered, ren-
dering the homely unhomely. But, quoting Freud’s assertion that ‘forgetting is
often intentional and desired,’ Forty writes: ‘As Freud once remarked, the aim

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was to give patients the “freedom to decide one way or the other”, whether to
remember or forget.’84 Noting that the ancient Greeks located ‘the springs of
Lethe ­(Forgetfulness) and of Mnemosyne (Memory) nearby’ and made ‘those who
came to consult the oracle at Trophonios drink the waters of first one and then the
other,’ Forty concludes that ‘architecture is and always has been above all an art
of forgetting’ as well as an art of remembering.85
According to Casey: ‘collective remembering hides the very forgetting which it
nevertheless requires.’86 The structures that a society decides to regard or disre-
gard are a mirror of its values and concerns. A structure may be built as a monu-
ment or become one over time, while its meaning may be specific to an event or
a theme, or of general relevance. In ‘On the Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Char-
acter and its Origin,’ 1903, Alois Riegl distinguishes between ‘intentional’ mon-
uments with deliberate ‘commemorative value’ and ‘unintentional monuments’
that only acquire significance in a later era. Both types of monument can either
be reaffirmed or devalued by succeeding generations. Focusing on ‘the modern
cult’ of unintentional monuments, Riegl identifies ‘historical value,’ which refers
to a specific time, and ‘age value,’ which relates to a general appreciation of the
passage of time.87 Reigl’s conception of age value is distinct from the specific
temporal layers that Ruskin appreciated and wished to conserve, who he does
not mention. Acknowledging that commemoration is not the monument’s only
purpose, Riegl also identifies ‘use value’ and ‘art value’ in the present. Appointed
president of the Austrian Commission on Historic Monuments in 1902, his in-
tention was to show that these apparently conflicting values could be resolved on
a practical case-by-case basis for specific monuments. Believing that the con-
struction of intentional monuments had diminished in his era, Riegl concluded
that unintentional monuments were appreciated for their age value as a means
to come to terms with mortality, while their historical value was largely ignored.
However, the victories, devastations and agonies of two World Wars stimulated
resurgence in intentional monuments.88
The contributors to the two 1940s symposia assume that monuments are
only celebratory even though many commemorate traumatic events. Focusing on
the historical value of intentional monuments, they largely ignore age value and
decay. However, the ruin is adept in combining historical value and age value, as
continuing reverence for the structures of ancient Rome indicates. The contribu-
tors also fail to acknowledge debates on the respective merits of the symbol and
the allegory. Giedion mentions ‘the impulse to create symbols in the form of mon-
uments, which, according to the Latin meaning are “things that remind.”’89 In his
schema, the monument addresses our fear of mortality by convincing us that our

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era will be remembered in the future. But a more complete etymology of the term
‘monument’ refers to the Latin monumentum, which in turn derives from monere,
meaning to remind, warn and advise. In contrast to Giedion’s narrow focus on its
adulatory purpose, the monument’s actual function is complex and questioning.
Unlike the comparatively static value of the symbol, which mostly concerns
remembrance, allegory requires a person or a society to remember or to forget,
so that meanings are not fixed but open to adaptation and reinvention. Allegory
was appreciated in the eighteenth-century fascination for ruins. Diminishing an
object physically, ruination was understood to expand architecture’s stimulus to
the imagination, as Whately concluded in 1770.90
Formulating an alternative precedent for allegory in The Origin of German
Tragic Drama, 1928, Walter Benjamin criticises the assumed superiority of the
symbol and its didacticism. Instead, he identifies the baroque Trauerspiel or trag-
edy as a discursive, critical artistic practice that exploits the dialectical potential of
allegory.91 Benjamin suggests that the contemplative, melancholic stance of the
baroque should be exchanged for political action in the present. In ‘The Author as
Producer,’ 1934, he proposes montage as an allegorical procedure appropriate to
the twentieth century. According to Peter Bürger:

The organic work of art seeks to make unrecognisable the fact that it has been
made. The opposite holds true for the avant-gardist work: it proclaims itself an
artificial construction: an artefact. To this extent, montage may be considered the
fundamental principle of avant-gardist art.92

The cubist collages of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso required the literal ruin-
ation of other works and the dialectical juxtaposition of appropriated fragments in
a new context. But cubism presented the illusion of material fragments even when
the whole work was actually painted, as in Picasso’s Violin, 1913.93 Technically,
they may differ little, but collage is primarily a formal procedure used in paint-
ing, while montage is more often associated with critical intent and employed in
differing media. The importance of montage depends upon its dual character as
the principal artistic strategy of the avant-garde and the technical procedure of
mass-production, including film. In contrast to the concentrated contemplation of
the individual absorbed in a work of art, Benjamin states that:

the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regards to
buildings. Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the
reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.94

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Benjamin asserts that shock can lead to collective, political action—‘I am

­speaking of the procedure of montage: the superimposed element disrupts the
context in which it is inserted’—and praises film rather than architecture in
this regard.95 But shock wears off very quickly and is particularly ineffective
in architecture as most buildings are used many times. Architecture is most
often experienced habitually when it is rarely the focus of sole attention. But as
empiricism made evident, habit is not passive. Instead, it is a questioning in-
telligence acquired through experience and subject to continuing ­re-evaluation.
Rather than necessarily a deviation from habit, creative use can instead estab-
lish, ­affirm or develop a habit that is itself unexpected and evolving. In contrast
to a singular focused activity such as reading a book, using a building is a par-
ticular type of awareness in which a person performs, sometimes all at once, a
series of complex activities—some habitual, others not—that move in and out
of conscious attention.
Allegory’s facility for fragmentation, juxtaposition and multiple interpretations
is sometimes associated with anti-monumentality, but it is also a valuable means
to appreciate the dialogue between the monument and the ruin. In The Origin of
German Tragic Drama, Benjamin writes: ‘Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts,
what ruins are in the realm of things.’96 Associating the destruction of extraneous
material with a process of critique and demythification from which an alternative
is constructed, Benjamin equates a ruin to a history, a dialectic between the past
and the present, and an allegory of the thought process. Our understanding of
the past is inevitably partial. Laying bare the processes of construction and decay
while selectively discarding some ideas and events in favour of others, a history is
both a ruin of the past and a speculative reconstruction in the present.
Praising Kahn as ‘America’s outstanding’ contemporary ‘architect,’ Scully
concluded in 1969 that the architect will ‘always be dealing with historical
­problems—with the past and, a function of the past, with the future. So the
­architect should be regarded as a kind of physical historian … the architect builds
visible history.’97 A reinterpretation of the past that is meaningful to the present,
a design is equivalent to a history. As a ‘physical historian,’ the architect can
conceive a design simultaneously as a ruin and a monument. Many ruins are first
monuments. A monument can also be a ruin or vice versa. Monuments are often
symbols, while ruins tend to be allegories. But a monument can be allegorical
and a ruin symbolic. These roles are not precisely defined and may change over
time. Crucially, the monument and the ruin can be creative, interdependent and
simultaneous themes within a single building dialectic, interspersing the allegor-
ical and the symbolic.

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Parallel aims

In 1959, at the invitation of the British architects Alison and Peter Smithson, Kahn
was one of only two American architects to contribute to the Congrès Internation-
aux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) meeting in Otterlo, the Netherlands.98 Like the
Smithsons, Kahn was critical of corporate, consumer society. He did not confuse
the architect with the profession or the business of architecture, which he con-
sidered to be potentially detrimental to the design and construction of meaningful
architecture.99 While in Europe, Kahn sketched Le Corbusier’s chapel of Notre
Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, 1955, and the cylindrical towers of Albi Cathedral and
Carcassonne, affirming his lifelong interest in massive fortified walls.100 Kahn ap-
preciated Aldo van Eyck’s Amsterdam Orphanage, which was nearing completion,
and also visited wood-panelled English houses with the Smithsons, which may
have inspired the timber panelling that he later set in concrete frames. Indicating
that the influence was likely, Kahn’s library included a number of books on the
subject, including Charles Latham’s three-volume In English Homes, 1909.101
Reflecting the prevailing mood of the CIAM meeting and the era, the ­Italian
architect Ernesto N. Rogers criticised international modernism and ­promoted
­national and regional architectural cultures. In 1954, he had advocated
­‘continuity,’ emphasising that ‘No work is truly modern which is not genuinely
rooted in tradition, while no ancient work has a modern meaning which is not
capable of somehow reflecting our modern temper.’102 To explain his conception
of a building in dialogue with its physical and natural surroundings and contrib-
uting to an evolving historical continuity, Rogers referred to ‘Tradition and the
Individual Talent,’ 1919, in which T.S. Eliot emphasises that the present alters
our understanding of the past as much as the past influences the present: ‘The
existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by
the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.’103
Advocating the virtues of evolving traditions at the end of one destructive
World War, Eliot’s text acquired further relevance in the aftermath of another
World War. As a means to affirm specific values and strive for cohesion in a com-
munity, a tradition is defined in relation to other traditions and other societies.
Social cohesion may be imaginary or real, defining who and what is acceptable.
Each tradition was once novel and has been subject to transformation over time.
Some traditions have a long history, while others accepted as old are actually
comparatively new. Uncertain, changing times are particularly conducive to the
formulation of new ‘invented traditions’ that ‘normally attempt to establish conti-
nuity with a suitable historic past,’ writes Eric Hobsbawm.104

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Rogers was respected internationally and corresponded with the British ar-
chitect Denys Lasdun, who was equally indebted to Eliot’s essay.105 But Peter
Smithson initially opposed the inclusion of Italian architects at Otterlo. The re-
sponse to Rogers’ presentation on the recently completed Torre Velasca, Milan,
was hostile.106 Peter Smithson remarked: ‘I agree with you that it is no longer
possible to take up an anti-historical position.’ But he then criticised the tower’s
similarity to the projecting ‘medieval fortress architecture of Northern Italy’ as ‘a
bad model’ for others to adopt: ‘I realize that mine is a very-Ruskinian position,
perhaps even a puritanical one.’107 Rejecting the criticism, Rogers argued that the
form of the building was practical in that it permitted expansive upper floors.108
But also in 1959, Reyner Banham dismissed ‘the Italian retreat from modern
architecture’ as ‘infantile regression.’109 Two years later, Pevsner affirmed this
criticism, specifically dismissing Rogers’ historicism.110
The conference participants challenged Rogers because his historical refer-
ences were literal, but Kahn was extensively praised because his were abstract.
Like his Beaux-Arts tutors, Kahn was a European architect as much as an American
one. At Otterlo, he recalled the pivotal influence of his first visit to Europe and cele-
brated archetypal forms such as ‘arches, arcades, and loggias.’111 In the concluding
discussion, Peter Smithson focused exclusively on Kahn, mentioning him five times:

You have heard and seen tonight architectural concepts which place Louis Kahn
in history. But we are also seeing developing among us processes which place us
as a generation in history. This is the point where one can see quite clearly that
which differentiates the architects of the fifties and sixties from those of the tens
and twenties.112

The Smithsons believed that they shared ‘Parallel Aims’ with Kahn, who British
architects regularly praised at the time.113 Early modernists had little concern for
the ruin, preferring the tabula rasa, but in the post-war era the return of history
meant the return of the ruin. An editorial in The Architectural Review summarised
the prevailing respect for Kahn, particularly appreciating the attention he drew to
ruins and thus architecture’s origins:

It is, of course, the language of the contemplative, of the man who looks a long
way back so that he may look a long way forward. Louis Kahn is thus like that
character who appears in the end of a Shakespearean tragedy whose job is to
restore a right perspective and good sense after an orgy of disillusion. This is a
service for which we have every reason to be grateful.114

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While Europe was essential to Kahn’s architectural understanding, his prac-

tice remained in Philadelphia. America has tended to misunderstand ruins,
identifying them only with regressive nostalgia. Obsession with progress has
sometimes led America to ‘resent the past bitterly … and to be crushing too,
especially of anything or anyone that gets in its way,’ writes Scully.115 Louis
Sullivan reportedly quipped: ‘If you live long enough, you’ll see all your build-
ings destroyed.’116
Already in 1944, the Allied nations, led by the US, were planning the post-
war market at the Bretton Woods conference, formulating means to regulate the
international monetary system. American post-war prosperity was immediate.
Before his second visit to Rome in 1950, Kahn’s practice focused on public
and private housing, and Michael Bell speculates on whether he appreciated
‘the scalar shift in America’s postwar economy and sought a new architecture to
compensate for its magnitude’?117 Did Kahn intend a deliberate analogy between
modern, ‘imperial’ America and ancient Rome? The structures that he revered
such as the Forum of Trajan and Baths of Caracalla date from the empire not
the republic. The interdependence of the monument and ruin, which came to
define his post-war design development, was a critique of obsolescence and ex-
pendability. It may also have been a warning to America’s imperial ambitions. In
1973, Kahn made a rare political statement in reference to Joseph McCarthy, the
Republican Senator for Wisconsin who instigated an anti-Communist crusade in
the 1950s. Kahn concluded that American prosperity can cultivate a suspicious,
divisive illiberalism:

as ruinous as McCarthy, who spoiled our true consciousness, our sense of de-
mocracy. He tried to define it and called for sides to be held, to be counted,
and therefore destroyed the beauty of what democracy could be. And we’re suf-
fering to this day because of the attempt to isolate, you know, the qualities of
democracy.118

I discovered myself

Kahn’s second visit to Rome inspired a new design direction, which was
in part a rediscovery of his Beaux-Arts roots and first Italian journey. The
transformation took a decade to develop and was stimulated by contempo-
rary scholarship. Emil Kaufman’s Three Revolutionary Architects: Boullée,
Ledoux, and Lequeu, 1952, affirmed Kahn’s interest in the first two archi-
tects and in 1967, he proclaimed in a short poem: ‘Boullée is/ Ledoux is/

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Thus Architecture is.’119 In 1949, the Bauhaus pioneer Josef Albers first vis-
ited Yale University as a critic and became a full-time professor the following
year. Albers’ concern that art should transcend everyday criteria to emphasise
psychic and perceptual effects influenced Kahn, who became his teaching
collaborator and friend.120 In 1952, Robert Venturi worked for Kahn, who
supported his employee’s successful application to be a Rome Prize Fellow
at the American Academy between 1954 and 1956. Venturi then returned to
Kahn’s office and became his teaching assistant at Penn, where Kahn was a
Professor after he left Yale. Scully describes Kahn as ‘Venturi’s closest mentor’
in the introduction to Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1966, in
which Venturi praises Eliot, quotes Albers and frequently refers to Kahn, stat-
ing that his ‘viaduct architecture’ has ‘complex and contradictory hierarchies
of scale and movement, structure, and space within a whole.’.121 Citing ‘a
not uncommon case of the son informing the father,’ Venturi claims to have
inspired Kahn’s concern for ‘layering, holes in walls … and historical anal-
ogy.’122 Scully writes: ‘Venturi, who first went to Rome in 1948, preceded
Kahn in projecting the use of Roman ruins as deep screens around his build-
ings, as in the Pearson house project of 1957,’ which Venturi describes as
‘things in things and things behind things.’123 But Scully exaggerates Kahn’s
debt to Venturi, as the Pearson House is not similar to Roman ruins or Kahn’s
projects. Venturi developed design principles contrary to his mentor. In Learn-
ing From Las Vegas, 1972, Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour
proposed a vast sign with the words ‘I AM A MONUMENT’ set high above
a banal building, provocatively isolating architecture’s monumental function
from its building fabric.124 In his unpublished introduction to Learning from
Las Vegas, Scully writes:

Kahn’s buildings tend to remain abstractly ‘expressive’—of structure and space—

rather than symbolic … But Venturi’s work comes out of Kahn’s … Venturi simply
takes the next step—but a giant one—away from abstract idealism to full archi-
tectural realism: the step to symbol.125

But for Kahn, this was a step backwards not forwards. According to Scott Brown:

When Lou and Bob had fallen out I did say to Lou, ‘You’ve never helped us with
work.’ And we had information from people that he had in fact done the opposite.
He would say to clients, ‘Well, I would never look at signs.’ … But he said, ‘Send
a message to Bob, send a message that there is truth in Las Vegas’.126

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Venturi and Scott Brown’s appreciation of the typical American town was con-
temporaneous with that of the artist Robert Smithson, who published two essays
on monuments and ruins in the mid-1960s. In ‘Entropy and the New Monu-
ments,’ 1966, and ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,’ 1967,
Smithson identifies a ‘new kind of monumentality’ in the ‘urban sprawl,’ ‘used
car lots,’ ‘discount centers and cut-rate stores’ of suburban America typified by
his home town.127 Noting their flimsy construction, he suggests: ‘Instead of
causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments
seem to cause us to forget the future.’128 In black and white Instamatic photo-
graphs as cheap as the monuments he depicts, Smithson teasingly asks: ‘Has
Passaic replaced Rome as The Eternal City.’129 Surveying the desolate scene,
he concludes:

That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is—all the new
construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the ‘romantic
ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise
into ruin before they are built.130

But Smithson’s characterisation of romanticism is deceptive in that Soane, for

example, conceived a building as initially and finally a ruin.
In Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, 1949, Rudolf Wittkower
hoped to encourage architects to develop ‘new and unexpected solutions to this
ancient problem’ of proportion and its symbolic meaning to society.131 Two years
earlier, Colin Rowe, Wittkower’s student at the Warburg Institute, University of
London, had published ‘The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa,’ which compares
the Platonic form and Arcadian setting of Palladio’s Villa Rotonda, 1569, and
Villa Foscari, c. 1560, to those of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1931, and
Villa Stein, Garches, 1927.132 Committed to the German-speaking tradition of
architectural history established in the nineteenth century, Wittkower and Rowe
continued the comparative formal spatial analysis of buildings according to their
effects on personal and social experience and vice versa, identifying architectural
styles and eras according to this method. Together, they helped to encourage
a classical resurgence in post-war modernism that was also stimulated by the
proportional system manifested in Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles,
1952, and advocated in Le Modulor, 1948, which was published in English six
years later.
In December 1955, Rowe visited Kahn’s office, initiating correspondence
between them and influencing Rowe’s essays ‘Neo-“Classicism” and Modern

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Architecture,’ I and II, which were written in 1956–1957 and first published
in 1973.133 A few weeks after their meeting and irritated by Banham’s crit-
icism of Wittkower’s influence on contemporary architecture in ‘The New
­Brutalism,’ 1955, Rowe sent Kahn a new copy of Architectural Principles in
the Age of Humanism, which Kahn had previously studied, writing: ‘I think
you may discover attitudes with which you are profoundly in sympathy.’134
Rowe shared Kahn’s fascination for Italy’s enduring influence on architecture.
Following the practice of the Grand Tour, Peter Eisenman recalls that in the
early 1960s ‘Colin suggested that I was the “noble savage” to his Robert
Adam, and proposed that we travel to Europe for the summer.’135 Furthering
this fascination, Rowe and Fred Koetter reassessed cubist technique in Collage
City, 1978, citing Hadrian’s Villa as an attempt to ‘dissimulate all reference to
any controlling idea.’136

Which is to say that, because collage is a method deriving its virtue from its
irony, because it seems to be a technique for using things and simultaneously
disbelieving in them, it is also a strategy which can allow utopia to be dealt with as
image, to be dealt with in fragments without our having to accept it in toto, which
is further to suggest that collage could even be a strategy which, by supporting
the utopian illusion of changelessness and finality, might even fuel a reality of
change, motion, action and history.137

Rowe subsequently described his design studio at Cornell University in terms

of ‘a dialectic between the present and the past, between the empirical and the
ideal, between the contingent and the abstract.’138 In his lectures, Kahn ex-
pressed a similar theme in a frequently recurring sentence: ‘A great building, in
my opinion, must begin with the unmeasurable, go through measurable means
when it is being designed, and in the end must be unmeasurable.’139 Kahn
explained this dialectic in terms of ‘Form and Design,’ 1961, the neo-Platonic
essay that his office routinely sent to anyone interested in his theory of practice,
which Scully characterises as an ability ‘to adapt European forms picturesquely
for programs with which they originally had nothing to do.’140 In conclusion,
Kahn writes:

From all I have said I do not mean to imply a system of thought and work leading
to realization from Form to Design. Designs could just as well lead to realizations
in Form. This interplay is the constant excitement of Architecture.141

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Louis I. Kahn, Bath House,

Jewish Community Center,
Trenton, 1955. Courtesy of
The Architectural Archives,
University of Pennsylvania.

Kahn identified two projects begun in 1957 and 1955, respectively, as funda-
mental to his maturing design agenda: ‘If the world discovered me after I designed
the Richards Medical Research Building, I discovered myself after designing that
little concrete block bathhouse in Trenton.’142 Both projects display Kahn’s distinc-
tion between served and servant spaces, which are seen in the Richards’ sculp-
tural towers at the University of Pennsylvania and the hollow, corner columns of
Trenton’s pyramidal-roofed pavilions. A cruciform plan with an open ‘atrium’ at the
centre and four pavilions to the sides, the Trenton Bath House enabled Kahn to
recall an admired building type of ancient Rome, avoid the physical enclosure ex-
pected of other building types and suggest the ambiguity and potentiality of a ruin.

The beauty of ruins

In 1961, discussing his unrealised design for the American Consulate in Luanda,
Angola, 1959–1963, Kahn emphasised the need to provide strong shadows,
reduce glare and create a soft, reflected light: ‘I thought of the beauty of ruins …
the absence of frames … of things that nothing lives behind … and so I thought
of wrapping ruins around buildings.’143 Enclosing a building with loggias is a
familiar design strategy in a warm climate. But Kahn pointedly referred to ruins
not loggias or porticoes, the term Palladio employed for his Basilica.144 Indicating
that the protective ruin was principally a ‘shield,’ Kahn first ‘wanted to make’ it

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‘out of paper, though concrete was the more logical material.’145 Creating am-
biguity between old and new, the inner building was to be limestone while the
outer ruin was to be concrete. Kahn proposed a ruined, symmetrical façade with
large, unglazed, ‘keyhole’ openings consisting of a semi-circular arch above a
narrow, vertical slot, which simultaneously appeared in his unrealised design for
the Fleisher House in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, 1959. According to Scully, this
motif recalls Hadrian’s Villa and ‘Roman Ostia, visited by Kahn in 1950.’146
Wrapping an object or a body may be a means of protection so that it can be
transported safely, studied in seclusion or selectively repaired, as in archaeology or
surgery. Associated with the giving of gifts, wrapping is also a means of veiling, so
that something becomes more mysterious, ambiguous and seductive, ensuring that
the process of unwrapping is charged with discovery, excitement and potential elation
or disappointment. Kahn initially wrapped a ruin around a building to protect daily
life from the glaring sun. But the climates of Luanda and Philadelphia are contrasting,
and he continued to wrap ruins around buildings wherever he built.

Louis I. Kahn, Fleisher

House, Elkins Park, Penn-
sylvania, 1959. Ground
floor plan. Courtesy of Louis
I. Kahn Collection, Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania and the
Pennsylvania Historical and
Museum Commission.

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 w r app ing r uins ar ound building s

Louis I. Kahn, Fleisher

House, Elkins Park,
­Pennsylvania, 1959.
Model. Courtesy of Louis I.
Kahn Collection, University
of Pennsylvania and the
Pennsylvania Historical
and Museum Commission.
Photograph, Marshall D.
Meyers.

The Fleisher House is untypical of its time and place, rejecting the f­ree-flowing
modernism and built-in furniture that was indicative of a suburban American life-
style.147 More than any other modernist architect of his generation, Kahn was com-
mitted to the room, which he characterised ‘as the beginning of architecture’ and
emblematic of its social purpose.148 A matrix of connected cubic rooms of equal
size arranged around a high central hall, the Fleisher House is the most Palladian of
Kahn’s house designs. The central hall is a Greek cross in plan and double height in
part, with a smaller ancillary room in each of its four corners. The arms of the cross
are of equal length but unequal width. Those on the main axis leading from the
entrance to the main living room are slightly wider than those to the sides, which
either incorporate a staircase to the first floor bedrooms or lead to ground floor
bedrooms, recalling the subtly different dimensions of the Villa ­Rotonda’s ­central
axes.149 With regard to the design of another house also conceived in 1959, Kahn
exclaimed somewhat disingenuously given his debt to Palladio: ‘This is not the Villa
Rotunda!’150 But in a section of his notebook, 1955–c.1962, titled ‘The Palladian
Plan,’ he referred to a further house design of the mid-1950s, ‘which is strictly
Palladian in spirit, highly ordered for today’s space needs.’151
The modular rooms in a Palladio villa differ in orientation, allowing uses to
vary according to the seasons and time of day. Kahn did designate a function to
each room, unlike Palladio. But a lack of functional specificity is implicit in the
Fleisher House’s modular plan. Reinforcing this interpretation, in January 1954
Kahn referred to the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu’s understanding that
the potential of a space depended on emptiness:

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The reality of a room, for instance, was to be found in the vacant space enclosed
by the roof and walls, not in the roof and walls themselves. The usefulness of a
water pitcher dwelt in the emptiness where water might be put, not in the pitcher
or the material of which it was made.152

Murals with mythological and historical subjects allow thematic differentiation

from room to room in a Palladio villa but do not appear in the Fleisher House.
None of Kahn’s houses constructed in that era has a mural. But he did design
a number of murals that were not executed, including one for the Weiss House,
Pennsylvania, 1950. Also, a geometric mural was painted on one wall of the
hollow column close to the entrance of Trenton Bath House.153
Referring to the Renaissance villa, Robin Evans writes: ‘The matrix of con-
nected rooms is appropriate to a type of society which feeds on carnality, which
recognizes the body as the person, and in which gregariousness is habitual.’154
But the matrix of rooms is also a means to accommodate differing types of be-
haviour. In contrast to the nineteenth-century corridor plan, which emphasises
privacy, and the modernist open plan, which denies it, the matrix of connected
rooms allows choices to be made so that public and private activities and discrete
and gregarious ones can exist concurrently or sequentially. According to Kahn:

You have a society of rooms in which each one has its character, allowing delicate
differences to express themselves. In a way, people meeting in them are different
people from those who live in division-less space.155

A semi-circular opening sits above a vertical slot on each elevation of each cubic
room, which is precisely 16 feet square in plan and 18 feet high. Externally, the
rooms of a Palladio villa are not distinguished as individual elements but absorbed
within the whole composition, while the Fleisher House gives subtle external
expression to the individual rooms. Of the 12 cubic rooms, seven are internal.
The other five are garden or ‘ruin’ rooms: ambiguous spaces both internal and ex-
ternal, with enclosing walls, unglazed openings and no roofs. Mediating between
the house and the garden, three garden rooms are to the rear and two flank the
entrance court, defining the edges of the house in a modern reinterpretation of
the side rooms and agricultural arcades with which Palladio would frame a cen-
tral loggia. Acknowledging the garden rooms’ intermediary status, their walls are
thinner than those of the fully enclosed, internal rooms. Further emphasising this
status, four of the garden rooms are subtly separated from the rest of the house
by very narrow gaps.

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Each cubic room is somewhat reminiscent of an aedicula, a small ancient

- meaning a temple or a
Rome shrine and the diminutive of the Latin term aedes,
dwelling. The subtle variations of the simple module give each room a degree of
independence, while also emphasising its interdependence with the other rooms
and role in the whole composition. In designing each room as an aedicula, Kahn
expressed the elements and cohesion of a society at an intimate scale, indicating
that monumentality is not only synonymous with a grandiose programme.
The constrained site, with an old house nearby, was wooded and the high,
semi-circular openings acknowledge that the best views are towards the trees
and sky, stimulating dramatic shadows.156 In a section through the single vol-
ume dining room, double volume living room and single volume garden room,
the overhanging branches of an adjacent tree are shown leaning down into the
garden room, where two figures dance.
Kahn appreciated the specific characteristics of a site and the particular re-
quirements of its users, concluding that they turn a house into a home.157 But
according to his clients for the Fisher House, Hatboro, Philadelphia, 1967: ‘Once
Mr. Kahn told us that he really doesn’t design for specific people. A house has to
be suitable for more than one client.’158 Remarking that a ‘house is not merely a
house but house itself,’ Kahn considered the house to be the smallest social insti-
tution and an archetype of dwelling and society.159 He concluded: ‘Every building
is a house, regardless of whether it is a Senate, or whether it is just a house.’160
Emphasising an ancient theme, his words recall Palladio’s remark that ‘the city
is nothing more or less than some great house and, contrariwise, the house is a
small city,’161 which Alberti also affirmed:

If (as the philosophers maintain) the city is like some large house, and the
house in turn is like some small city, cannot the various parts (rooms) of the
house—atria, xysti, dining rooms, porticos, and so on—be considered miniature
buildings?162

But who owns the circle?

Kahn continued to design houses, even though by the mid-1950s he was in-
creasingly commissioned to design civic and public buildings. In 1959, he met
the inventor of the polio vaccine Jonas Salk, who wanted him to recommend
suitable architects. But after they walked together around the Richards Build-
ing, Salk decided to commission Kahn instead, recognising their affinity.163 In

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January 1960, Kahn visited the spectacular site proposed for the Salk Institute
for Biological Studies, perched on cliffs above the Pacific Ocean at La Jolla, San
Diego. In his initial designs, the Institute is focused around a deep ravine that
leads towards the Ocean. Parallel rows of laboratories are at the eastern end of
the ravine adjacent to the access road, while the residences curve along the
ravine’s southern edge. In the most prominent setting, the Meeting House is
to the north of the ravine, closest to the cliff edge and overlooking the Ocean.
Surmounting a five-sided plinth, varied geometrical structures cluster around the
Meeting House’s central court. According to Robert McCarter, the plinth is not
derived from the site’s contours but has ‘an uncanny resemblance’ to the one
at the Athenian Acropolis, which Kahn had sketched in 1951.164 Depicting the
plinth as a formal and material continuation of the cliff so that the brevity of
human history appropriates the longevity of geological history, Kahn equated a
ruined architecture to a ruined mountain. Aware that a medieval monastery was
a site of scholarly debate, Salk proposed the friary of St Francis in Assisi as a
design reference. There, too, the lesser monastery buildings surmount a rocky
outcrop and appear to form a plinth to the basilica, which Kahn had sketched
in 1929.165
Salk’s intention to foster dialogue between the sciences and the arts was
exemplified in the proposal that the Institute should be a place where scientists
could converse with Pablo Picasso.166 In Kahn’s initial designs, the interdepend-
ence of creative research and social interaction is manifest in the Meeting House:

It was a place where one had his meal, because I don’t know of any greater sem-
inar than the dining room. There was a gymnasium. There was a place for the
fellows who were not in science. There was a place for the director. There were
rooms that had no names, like the entrance hall, which had no name. It was the
biggest room, but it was not designated in any way.167

The Meeting House reaffirms Kahn’s analogy of a house to an institution and em-
phasises his belief that a sequence of spaces may be appropriated for varied uses
in the tradition of the Palladian villa. He appreciates the Beaux-Arts’ conception
of a programme as a loose guide not the dogmatic regime it became in the func-
tionalist ethos. Accordingly, ‘Architecture has little to do with solving problems.’168
Kahn does not accept that form follows function, remarking: ‘I make a space as
an offering, and do not designate what it is to be used for. The use should be
inspired.’169 Paradoxically, Kahn implies that the user is obliged to be unpredict-
able, but he also believes that architecture can galvanise a specific use. Setting

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a project for his students at Penn, he simply states: ‘I am thinking of a room that
would inspire a painter to do a great painting on its walls.’170
In the first monograph on Kahn, published while he was preparing prelim-
inary designs for the Salk Institute, Scully describes the Meeting House as ‘a
palatial expansion of the Fleisher project.’171 Both projects affirm Kahn’s state-
ment ‘that a plan is a society of rooms,’ but one is a Piranesian assemblage and
the other is Palladian matrix.172 Kahn appreciated architectural references that
Piranesi, Adam and Soane also favoured. Discussing the Salk Institute in 1969,
he referred to the ‘archaic’ beauty and ‘unsure, scared proportions’ of the ancient
Greek architecture at Paestum, concluding that it ‘represents the beginning of
architecture … It was a beautiful time and we are still living in it.’173 Kahn was
even more indebted to ancient Roman architecture such as Hadrian’s Villa and
the Emperor Diocletian’s Palace in Dalmatia, which is referred to in the margins
of one of his drawings.174 Scully recalls that during the Meeting House’s design
development: ‘An early sketch had been traced by a draftsman, partly as a joke,
from a plan of one of the units of Hadrian’s Villa itself. “That’s it,” said Kahn.’175
He did not appreciate the publication of this anecdote, but the draftsman Thomas
Vreeland has affirmed its accuracy.176 Identifying direct references to ancient Ro-
man structures in Kahn’s later designs, Scully cites the influence of Trajan’s Forum
on the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, 1962–1974, and the
Thermopolium and Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus at Ostia on another pro-
ject commissioned in 1962, which became the National Assembly complex when
Bangladesh became a nation in 1971.177 Occupied, in turn, by opposing forces
during the war of independence, Kahn’s employee Henry Wilcots recalls:

We thought it was going to be the first target, because it is placed very close to
the airport. There is a story they told Lou. What happened was that the pilots
making the runs over Dacca saw this building and they thought that it had al-
ready been bombed, because there were so many holes in it, so they wouldn’t
waste another bomb on it!178

Kahn remarked: ‘My design at Dacca is inspired, actually, by the Baths of Caracalla,
but much extended.’179 But, sensitive to criticism and sidestepping the relevance of
ancient Western forms to a modern Asian nation, he also refuted suggestions that
the design was indebted to Hadrian’s Villa, proclaiming, ‘But who owns the circle?
It’s ridiculous.’180 Concurring, the eminent Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi, who
recommended Kahn’s appointment as architect of the IIM, argued that Kahn’s design
resonated with the history and philosophy of India and noted its physical resemblance
to ancient Indian architecture.181

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 w r app in g r uins ar oun d buildin g s

Louis I. Kahn, Indian

Institute of Management,
­Ahmedabad, 1974.
Entrance façade of the dor-
mitories. Courtesy of ORCH/
RIBA Collections.

Louis I. Kahn, National

Assembly Building, Sher-
e-Bangla-Nagar, Dhaka,
1983. The assembly hall
seen across the lake from
a dining hall courtyard.
Courtesy of ORCH/RIBA
Collections.

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 w r app ing r uins ar ound building s

Louis I. Kahn, National

Assembly Building, Sher-
e-Bangla-Nagar, Dhaka,
1983. The Presidential
staircase. Courtesy of
ORCH/RIBA Collections.

In conceiving archaeology as a creative stimulus to design, Palladio facil-

itated and Piranesi expanded the practice of the archaeologist-architect that
enabled Kahn to appreciate and revive ancient forms. Like both architects,
Kahn’s designs are creative interpretations, but rather than entire reconstruc-
tions as Palladio intended, they are inhabited ruins as Piranesi proposed.
While the ‘ruins’ of the American Consulate and Fleisher House are com-
posed of parallel planes, those at the Meeting House consist of contrasting
­three-dimensional forms. As much as ancient Rome itself, Kahn’s inspiration
was the ruined city reimagined by Piranesi. While designing the Salk Institute,
he first placed a copy of Campo Marzio’s Ichnographia on the wall in front
of his desk, where it remained. In the side towers that cluster around the
Meeting House’s central court, ruins wrap buildings in a manner comparable
to ­Piranesi’s ­Carceri. But contrasting materials add subtle ambiguity to this
relationship. Concrete cylindrical towers with large keyhole openings wrap
three floors of cubic glass-walled reading rooms and concrete cubic towers
wrap three floors of cylindrical glass-walled dining rooms. Of all materials,

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 w r app in g r uins ar oun d buildin g s

Louis I. Kahn, Salk Institute

for Biological Studies, La
Jolla, California. Perspec-
tive sketch of the Meeting
House, 1962. Courtesy of
Louis I. Kahn Collection,
University of ­Pennsylvania
and the Pennsylvania
Historical and Museum
Commission.

glass is most indicative of a window and representative of the human gaze. In

prioritising monumental unframed openings and concealing glass in the shad-
ows, Kahn emphasised the ruin and not the building, creating a picturesque
spatial experience in which people, architecture, setting and sky are framed
according to the viewer’s changing position.182
It is sadly ironic that Kahn’s earliest designs for ruins wrapped around
buildings were never constructed: the United States Consulate, Fleisher House
and Meeting House. By 1962, Salk had concluded that three distinct and
distant structures arranged around the ravine would isolate the scientists from
each other, and he preferred a single site. The Salk Institute, as constructed,
was approached through a rambling eucalyptus grove.183 Rising on to the
plinth, the view towards the Ocean is framed by the two flanking blocks,

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which have deep, shadowy recesses that emphasise Kahn’s fascination for
ruins. Throughout the design process, he made sketches inspired by Claude
in which an arching tree canopy frames an architectural scene. Kahn origi-
nally conceived the plinth as such a garden. But when the Institute was close
to completion, he was unsure about the design of this central space. Seeing
Luis Barragán’s own house illustrated in Elizabeth Kassler’s Modern Gardens
and the Landscape, 1964, Kahn arranged a visit to Mexico City in December
1965, remarking:

I was impressed by his work because of its closeness to nature. His garden is
framed by a high private wall, the land and foliage remaining untouched as he
found it. In it is a fountain made by a water source lightly playing over a jagged
splinter and, drop for drop, falling in a great bowl of rhinoceros-gray-black stone
filled to the brim. Each drop was like a slash of silver making rings of silver reach-
ing for the edge and falling to the ground.184

Invited to visit La Jolla in 1966, Barragán advised: ‘I would put not a tree
or blade of grass in this space. This should be a plaza of stone, not a gar-
den.’185 In dialogue with Salk, the two architects concluded that the stone
surface would be ‘a façade to the sky.’186 But Kahn imagined something more
austere than Barragán intended: ‘Then he proceeded to design it, and it was
impossible. He made steps, he’d go down and up, have a garden here and
court there. I saw a single sweep from building to building.’187 In an equally
dismissive tone, Kahn recalls: ‘then somebody came in and wanted to put
little flowers in it.’188
Kahn understood that an internal room can have a public character.189
Equally, the public plaza is an external room framed by the two flanking blocks.
The constructed design—a continuous travertine plaza bifurcated by a central
water rill—reflects Kahn’s principle that ‘Architecture is what nature cannot
make.’190 Although the Institute is sited a few hundred metres from the sea at the
start of the ravine, the western edge of the plinth obscures the intervening slope
and creates the impression that a steep drop leads directly to the sea beyond. As
the central rill is aligned exactly east to west, the sun sets over the plinth and is
reflected in the water, which tumbles over the edge towards the Ocean. Juxtapos-
ing one idea of nature to another, verdant vegetation immediately surrounds the
site but is excluded from Kahn’s architecture, in which nature is presented as an
abstract image.

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 w r app in g r uins ar oun d buildin g s

Louis I. Kahn, Salk Institute

for Biological Studies, La
Jolla, California, 1965.
Public plaza seen from the
east and looking towards
the ocean. Courtesy of
The Architectural Archives,
University of Pennsylvania.
Photograph, John Nicolais.

Louis I. Kahn, Salk Institute

for Biological Studies, La
Jolla, 1965. West end of
the central rill, looking up
to the north block flanking
the public plaza. Cour-
tesy of John Donat/RIBA
Collections.

How much weather?

In 1962, Kahn commented that his design for the Salk Institute indicated ‘a re-
spect and understanding of the nature of nature’ and concluded that ‘I am becoming
increasingly conscious of the architecture of water, the architecture of air, the ar-
chitecture of light.’191 In these remarks, Florian Sauter identifies two humanist Re-
naissance concepts: the geometric, generative foundation of nature, natura naturans,
and the experiential understanding of tangible objects and forces, natura naturata.

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Sauter suggests that the ‘first of the two Renaissance concepts, natura naturans’
was ­important in Kahn’s work in the early 1950s, in that he conceived architec-
ture ­‘following the Platonic tradition, on nature itself,’ in which ‘the cube represents
earth, the ­tetrahedron stands for fire, the octahedron for air, the icosahedron for
water, and the dodecahedron for ether.’192 According to Kahn, if a person could
only read one book in a lifetime it should be On Growth and Form, 1917, in which
D’Arcy ­Thompson proclaims that there is ‘no exception to the rule that God always
geometrizes.’193 Alongside a continuing fascination for the geometric foundation of
natura naturans, Sauter concludes that by the early 1960s Kahn was also increas-
ingly concerned with ‘the experiential reality of the natura naturata’:

In these works, his more strictly abstract ‘Platonic’ viewpoint was supplemented
with a more empirical understanding, wherein the elements were treated as what
they are—sensually perceivable phenomena, material substances, and physical
energies. Of course, such concerns had not been wholly absent even in his most
‘Platonic’ projects.194

But the two humanist Renaissance conceptions of nature—natura naturans and nat-
ura naturata—do not fully encapsulate Kahn’s appreciation of architecture and nature
because of his debt to Goethe, which the strong bond with his mother had stimulated.
Kahn’s wife Esther recalls a terrible childhood accident in front of an open fireplace:

And Lou was fascinated by the color, and he wanted to save it—the color—and
he put his hands in the fire and he picked out the coal, which was this gorgeous
shade of blue-green, and he put it in his pinafore. And, of course, the pinafore
went up in flames and he put his hands over his eyes; that’s why he was scarred
from his eyes down and the back of his hands were scarred. He saved his eyes.
And for months they did didn’t know if he would live.195

According to Kahn:

My mother held true to the absolute confidence in me. When I was three, my
face was burnt. My father said, I think it’s best that he dies. And my mother said,
No, he’ll live and be a great man.196

At Central High School, Philadelphia, the teacher who stimulated Kahn’s interest in
architecture, William F. Gray, admired Ruskin. At school and university, Kahn was ex-
posed to American transcendentalist romanticism, which was indebted to German ide-
alism and English romanticism—Coleridge as well as Ruskin—and notably expressed
in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.197 Throughout his life, Kahn was beholden
to his mother’s cultural inheritance and fascination for German romantic literature:

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 w r app in g r uins ar oun d buildin g s

I was born into the consideration of art as a part of life, not something that’s at-
tached to life in a peripheral way. My parents were in the middle of it … Goethe
was always reflecting on whether life was form or form was life. From that he
means that you are cognizant of the characteristics of something.198

After attending a production of Faust in 1949, Kahn remarked that Goethe did
not limit his narrative to the ‘circumstantial or what happened, but reflected on its
meaning which transcended his own life.’199
After to a visit to Paestum in 1787, Goethe’s appreciation of classicism be-
came as romantic and nationalistic as his earlier promotion of gothic.200 Identify-
ing picturesque lawns and temples as the setting for these ideals, he contributed
to the redesign of the park along the River Ilm at Weimar, the city most associated
with the German Enlightenment. At first, he occupied a cottage in the park, which
later became his summer retreat. On the opposite slope, Goethe collaborated
with Johann August Arens on the design of the Roman House, 1798, the ducal
summer retreat. Set on the cusp of a ridge just as it begins to fall towards the
river, the location exaggerates the building’s scale, ensuring that it commands the
valley. Elsewhere, a carved stone inscription—‘Genio huis loci’ (‘Genius of this
place’)—indicates the park’s debt to the English picturesque as well as its concern
for associations and symbols specific to German-speaking territories.

Johann August Arens,

­Roman House, Weimar,
1798. Courtesy of Jonathan
Hill.

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 w r app ing r uins ar ound building s

Indebted to Kames, Whately and English garden designers such as Kent,

Christian Hirschfeld’s comprehensive five-volume Theorie der Gartenkunst
(Theory of Garden Art), 1779–1785, appeared simultaneously in French and
­German. Hirschfeld included a chapter on ruins in the third volume, in which he
emphasises their stimulus to the imagination and his preference for gothic ruins
rather than classical ones, largely because he considers them to be more appro-
priate to northern countries.

In fact, the idea of creating artificial ruins could not arise until people began to
calculate the various effects of landscape objects as they expand and intensify
garden sensations. They therefore appeared first in the new English garden …
Since gardens themselves are nothing but imitations of all kinds of natural re-
gions, ruins, too, can assume a place there.201

German patrons built more ruins than any people apart from the British. But they
admired ruins for somewhat different reasons, as Goethe’s 1829 assessment of
Claude indicates:

The paintings possess the highest truth, but no trace of reality. Claude Lorrain
knew the world by heart, down to the smallest detail, and he employed it as a
means of expressing the world of his beautiful soul. And this, precisely, is true
ideality: to avail oneself of realistic means to reveal the True in such a way that it
creates an illusion of being Real.202

Emphasising Goethe’s concern for the ideal in his Italian Journey, 1786–1788,
Panofsky writes:

In Goethe’s use of the phrase Et in Arcadia ego, finally, the idea of death has been
entirely eliminated. He uses it, in an abbreviated version (‘Auch ich in Arkadien’)
as a motto for his famous account of his blissful journey it Italy, so that it merely
means: ‘I, too, was in the land of joy and beauty’.203

Rather than purely idealist, Goethe’s emphasis on experience characterises his

approach as ‘empirical idealism.’204 Writing to Goethe, his friend and early men-
tor, Alexander von Humboldt remarks that ‘Nature … must be felt.’205 In 1844
and 1847, Humboldt published the two volumes of Cosmos: A Sketch of the
Physical Description of the Universe, in which he argues that natural history

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 w r app in g r uins ar oun d buildin g s

and human history must be considered together because the underlying order of
creation is common to them both. He concludes that:

a distinction must be made in landscape painting, as in every branch of art,

between the elements generated by the more limited field of contemplation and
direct observation, and those which spring from the boundless depth of feeling
and from the force of idealizing mental power.206

Idealism’s influence led German art to assert the mind’s ability to construct re-
ality, placing less emphasis on the experience and effects of nature that fasci-
nated British society. The great exponents of British and German romantic art
Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, respectively, shared a concern for a unified
world but depicted a different nature and a different humanity. In Turner’s Snow
Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, 1842, dynamic nature is energetic
and immediate, and the viewer is at sea and fully immersed in the scene.207 In
­Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea, 1808–1810, transcendent nature is still and distant
and the viewer is at the cliff edge, gazing towards the distant horizon and willing
the sky closer, an arrangement mirrored in the central plaza at the Salk Institute.
Rather than the sequential arrangement of foreground, middle ground and
background that is characteristic of the picturesque, only the foreground and
background are present in romanticism. Monk by the Sea displays the concern
for classical composition that pervades German romanticism even when authority
is questioned, as in Friedrich’s conviction that the path to spiritual enlightenment
is personal: ‘The painter should not paint merely what he sees in front of him,

Caspar David Friedrich,

Monk by the Sea,
1808–1810. Courtesy of
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin/
Bridgeman Images.

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 w r app ing r uins ar ound building s

but also what he sees within himself.’208 Kahn’s classicism was certainly roman-
tic, as he acknowledged in 1961: ‘Feeling and dream has no measure, has no
language, and everyone’s dream is singular’.209 Seven years later, he used the
term ‘land architecture’ to characterise his design intention, recalling the romantic
concern for the geological ruin and the fragment as well as the whole: ‘Land isn’t
just a hunk of real estate. Even a little square of it has many worms. Something’s
going on. You can go as microscopic as you like. It’s a recognition of oneness, not
division.’210 In accentuating ‘the awesome and the unfinished, the primitive and
the frightening,’ Scully concludes that ‘Kahn is an idealist and, indeed, a Roman-
tic Classic architect; his models are the great architects of the 18th century.’211
According to Neil Levine: ‘As for Schlegel, the perception of the sense of in-
completeness in a building was felt by Kahn to be a fundamental reality of modern
artistic thought and this had to embodied in the completed work itself.’212 Whether
a book, a painting or a building modelled on a ruin, a work of art can be understood
as incomplete even if its material condition is pristine. However, buildings cannot
avoid decay and are bound to change over time. Each building material has specific
attributes and relations with other materials. Collectively, they react to the weather
and affect it to some small degree, both locally in terms of the microclimate and
globally in terms of the atmosphere. Kahn is known for a subtle, quasi-mystical
appreciation of the precise qualities of particular materials, remarking in 1972: ‘If
you’re dealing with concrete, you must know the order of nature, you must know the
nature of concrete, what concrete really strives to be.’213 But Réjean Legault ques-
tions this myth, citing construction problems at the Salk Institute such as numerous
attempts to identify a convincing formwork pattern and broken edges to the carefully
conceived V-joints imprinted in the concrete surfaces, which suffered from irregular
discolouration and recurring dust accumulations. Legault concludes that like other
architects Kahn’s ‘encounter with the material was, manifestly, more of a struggle
than a miracle.’214 In 1969, Kahn remarked that the teak external panelling at
the Salk Institute is easy to maintain because it has ‘enough natural oil’. Asked if
‘It weathers well?’ he replied: ‘Depends on how much weather? The upper ones
weather much more than the other ones. They were quite red when they got up
there, but now they are sort of grey and they look almost like the concrete.’215 Kahn
was pleased to report that that the ‘tobacco juice color’ of the ‘teak is being gradually
erased by the salt of the air.’216 But the long-term effect of the marine climate led to:

surface erosion, the growth of a fungal biofilm (likely spread by nearby eucalyptus
trees) that gave the wood a black appearance, changes to the teak’s color due to
previously applied sealers and finishes, insect infestation, and moisture infiltration
due to the omission of flashings and weather stripping and the failure of sealants.217

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Kahn predicted the ruin of a ruin in his remarks that a ‘Good building would
produce a marvellous ruin’ and ‘A building that has become a ruin again is free of
the bondage of use.’218 However, unlike architects who appreciated decay such
as Piranesi, Lasdun and the Smithsons, he did not imagine his designed ruins
ageing and weathering with time or overgrown with vegetation.

Gloom and glare

Suggesting ‘that at the dawn of romanticism, Burke’s elaboration of the aesthetics

of the sublime, and to a lesser extent Kant’s, outlined a world of possibilities for ar-
tistic experiments in which the avant-gardes would later trace their paths,’ ­Lyotard
states: ‘The sublime is perhaps the only mode of artistic sensibility to characterize
the modern.’219 He concludes that art’s fundamental purpose remains the same
as in the eighteenth century to offer a ‘pictorial or otherwise expressive witness
to the inexpressible,’ including ‘impending death.’220 The influence of Barnett
Newman’s ‘The Sublime is Now,’ 1948, led Lyotard to distinguish between the
romantic sublime and the modern sublime, which is concerned only with the
present time and place, he contends. But in Modern Painting and the Northern
Romantic Tradition, 1975, Robert Rosenblum still places Newman within a ro-
mantic tradition, noting that ‘the Jewish tradition of proscribing graven images’
may have encouraged him to emphasise abstraction as a means to encounter
the sublime, an assumption that can also be applied to Kahn.221 According to
James Williamson: ‘Kahn understood the Talmudic principle that an ambiguous
observation can often be more effective than a straightforward one in conveying
a truth.’222
During the design process, Kahn originally considered Cordova Shell lime-
stone imprinted with shadowed cavities formed by fossilised shells.223 Deciding
not to use stone, he chose exposed concrete instead, characterising it as ‘molten
stone.’224 One of Kahn’s staff Marshall D. Meyers recalls that Kahn wished to re-
tain the concrete trial walls as ‘fossils’ of the construction process to be discovered
in the basement of the finished building.225 Kahn selected travertine for the plaza
because it was pitted with shadowed cavities, like Cordova Shell limestone, and
specified a sawn, not polished, surface:

the Travertine and the concrete are so much together that it now looks to people
as though that building were there thousands of years ago, because the decision
of its harmony, which takes many years to attain, was there already, right?—as a
new building it already had the harmony of something which was aged.226

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Arguing against mechanical means of climate control, Kahn supported traditional

means that respect ‘the order of wind, the order of light.’227 Asked by clients how
he began to design their house, he replied: ‘When I put down the places where
the rooms were constructed I was thinking about the light. I wasn’t thinking of
beams or studs.’228 Remarking that ‘Artificial light is only a single, tiny, static mo-
ment in light and is the light of night and can never equal the nuances of mood
created by the time of the day and the wonder of the seasons,’ Kahn associated
forms with patterns of natural light and shadow, identifying architecture with an
era before industrialisation. Indicating a concern for chiaroscuro and spaces veiled
in shifting shadows, he continued: ‘Even a space intended to be dark should have
just enough light from some mysterious opening to tell us how dark it really is.’229
Kahn’s attention to light and shadow emphasises architectural experience
not only in terms of days and seasons, but also an archaic understanding of time
before it was measured into hours and minutes. The retina has two types of light
receptor cells. The cones are mostly at the centre and function in the light. The
rods are mostly at the periphery and function in the dark. Remarking that the
cones and rods ‘adapt at different rates: cone adaptation is completed in about
seven minutes, while rod adaptation continues for an hour or more.’ Richard
Gregory equates slow adjustment to the gloom to a journey back in time:

It might be said that whenever we look from the central fovea towards the pe-
riphery we travel back in evolutionary time—from the most highly organized
structure in nature to a primitive eye barely capable of detecting movements of
shadows.230

Kahn’s ruins are as archaic as the gloom. A ruin is a metaphor for the passage
of time, inevitable decay and potential renewal. An architect who imagines a de-
sign as a future ruin accepts the inevitability of decay and longs for a continuing
reputation. But an architect who builds a design as a ruin pre-empts the vagaries
of time by presenting a structure in a fragmented state. Like a fabricated ruin
in an eighteenth-century estate, Kahn’s designs seem to belong to a preceding
era, evoking the sublime in broken Platonic forms. But as an idealist, he did not
conceive nature as an active agent of the sublime, appreciating more the idea of
nature and the idea of ruin. Rather than being conceived as progressively weath-
ered, Kahn’s ruins appear to have always existed, suspended in time. Rather than
made as new or as old and ageing, they were made as old.
Amidst the dark shadows of ruins wrapped around buildings, the glare of un-
framed openings stands out even brighter. Passing from gloom to glare to gloom,

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the eye repeatedly adapts as the visitor moves around the structure. Given that
Kahn defined ruins as ‘things that nothing lives behind,’ wrapping a ruin around a
building is equivalent to wrapping absence around presence, the past around the
present and death around life.231 But given that he made ‘a space as an offering’
and thought that ‘use should be inspired,’ Kahn’s design strategy is equivalent to
a gift, which celebrates the interdependence of a monument and a ruin and their
stimulus to the imagination.232
Kahn made frequent references to historical continuity: ‘I just want to make
my last remark in reverence to the work that has been done by architects of the
past: what was has always been, what is has always been, and what will be has
always been.’233 In his documentary film, My Architect, A Son’s Journey, 2003,
Nathaniel Kahn remarks that Scully ‘always talked about him as some long dead,
ancient hero, it was unsettling.’234 In the subsequent interview, Scully monumen-
talises the person and the architecture:

From the very beginning he was after symmetry, order, geometric clarity, primitive
power, enormous weight, as much as he could get … enduring monuments, he
wanted a material that is going to last, which is a permanent work in the world.235

Paradoxically, Kahn adopted a form associated with time—the ruin—but wanted

it to be timeless, and thus a measure of our impermanence: ‘How accidental our
existences are really.’236

Notes

1 Kahn, in Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect, A Son’s Journey. Refer to Lesser, pp. 56–57;
Wiseman, pp. 20–21.
2 Esherick entered Penn in 1932 and like Kahn was taught by John Harbeson in first year
and by Paul Philippe Cret in a later year. Harbeson was tutored by Cret and became a
senior member of his office. Esherick, p. 238.
3 At least 26 Chinese architecture students studied at Penn between 1918 and 1941,
according to William Whitaker, 2003.
4 Yang Tingbao was one of Paul Philippe Cret’s favourite students and worked in his office
between 1924 and 1926. He also undertook an architectural tour of Europe. Denison
and Guang Yu Ren, pp. 88–91; Rowe and Seng Kuan, pp. 78–81, 227–229.
5 Esherick, p. 247.
6 Esherick, pp. 247, 253–254, 261.
7 Kahn, ‘From a Conversation with Robert Wernischner,’ p. 121.
8 The École was closed down in 1968. Draper, p. 216; Esherick, p. 239; Frampton,
‘Louis Kahn and the French Connection,’ pp. 122–127.

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9 Kahn, ‘How’m I Doing Corbusier?’, p. 307.

10 Cret, ‘Modernists and Conservatives,’ 19 November 1927, referred to in Brownlee, ‘Ad-
ventures of Unexplored Places,’ p. 21. Refer to Paul Philippe Cret Papers, 1876–1945,
University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library; box 14, folder
580, 594, 598; box 15, folder 609; box 16, folder 629, 632.
11 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, p. 147.
12 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, pp. 139, 171–172, 179–180, 145.
13 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, pp. 146, 160.
14 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, p. 161.
15 Born Leiser-Itze Schmulowsky on 5 March (20 February according to the Julian calen-
dar) 1901, Kahn travelled to the US with his mother and siblings on the S.S. Merion,
which left Liverpool on 13 June 1906 and docked at Philadelphia on 25 June, where he
was met by his father, who had arrived in the US two years earlier. Lesser, pp. 47–48,
65–68, 129, 315–319; Wiseman, pp. 12–15.
16 Kahn’s sea travels in 1928–1929 were researched by William Whitaker and are re-
ferred to in Lewis, ‘Louis Kahn’s Art and his Architectural Thought’, p. 72.
17 Kahn, ‘The Value and Aim in Sketching,’ p. 21. Refer to Lewis, ‘Kahn’s Graphic Mod-
ernism’, pp. 7–13.
18 Scully, ‘Louis I. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome,’ pp. 4–5.
19 Kahn, ‘New Frontiers in Architecture,’ p. 93; Kahn, ‘Talk at the Conclusion of the Otterlo
Congress,’ pp. 211–213. Refer to Johnson, pp. 34–37.
20 Yegül, p. 41, fig. 9. Refer to Draper, p. 216.
21 Scully, Louis I. Kahn, p. 18.
22 Sant’Elia and Marinetti, p. 35.
23 Pioneers of the Modern Movement was reprinted as Pioneers of Modern Design
in 1949 and revised in 1960. Refer to Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present,
pp. 4–5.
24 Amisano, p. 265.
25 Kahn, letter to his practice colleagues, 6 December 1950, quoted in Johnson, p. 72.
26 Howe, letter to Kahn, 22 January 1951, quoted in Goldhagen, p. 54.
27 Abramson, Obsolescence, pp. 16, 31–37, 61–67; Berman, pp. 30, 99; Byles, p. 159.
28 Scully, Louis I. Kahn, p. 18.
29 Kahn, ‘Lecture to the Boston Society of Architects (1966),’ p. 218.
30 Among the books they exchanged, Pattison gave Kahn a copy of John Shepherd and
Geoffrey Jellicoe, Italian Gardens of the Renaissance, 1925, and Kahn gave Pattison
copies of Marie-Luise Gothein, History of Garden Art, 1928, and Avray Tipping, Eng-
lish Gardens, 1925. Kahn had a daughter with his wife Esther and another with Anne
Griswold Tyng. Merrill, pp. 186–189; Sauter, pp. 189, 200 (no. 56–58).
31 Ashraf, pp. 54–55; Kahn, ‘From a Conversation with Robert Wernischner,’ p. 121.
32 Jon Michael Schwarting, who was at the American Academy, speaking in 1983,
quoted in McCarter, Louis I. Kahn, p. 57.
33 In 1962, Scully cites structures that Kahn sketched, including ‘the great masses’ of
Egypt, ‘the Athenian Acropolis’ and ‘the miraculous spaces of Hadrian’s Villa.’ But
in 1991, he claimed that one of Kahn’s sketches is ‘nine-tenths Mussolini’s Forum,’

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1932, designed by Enrico del Debbio. In 1993, he stated that Kahn first visited the
Foro Mussolini not an ancient Roman forum, publishing Kahn’s sketch next to a photo-
graph of Mussolini’s forum even though they are not similar. Writing in 1996, Eugene
J. Johnson concludes that the sketch is ‘Piazza San Pietro from Atrium of Saint Peter’s,
Rome,’ suggesting that ‘Scully seems to have been misled by a desire to claim Kahn’s
work as a major source for the architecture of Aldo Rossi’. Scully, Louis I. Kahn, p. 18;
Scully, ‘Introduction,’ in Hochstim, p. 15; Scully, ‘Louis I. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome,’
p. 5; Johnson, pp. 71, 130 (no. 140).
34 Scully, ‘Louis I. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome,’ p. 9.
35 MacDonald and Pinto, pp. 315, 316, 321–324.
36 Frank E. Brown, Roman Architecture, p. 34. Refer to McCarter, Louis I. Kahn, p. 57.
37 Bruno, pp. 235–239. Refer to John Fisher, ‘Mark Rothko’, pp. 21–22.
38 Moholy-Nagy, p. 59.
39 Giedion, Building in France, p. 169, refer to p. 152.
40 Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, p. 14.
41 Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, pp. 436–437.
42 Giedion, Léger and Sert, p. 51.
43 Giedion, Léger and Sert, p. 48.
44 Zucker, ‘Planning in Three Dimensions,’ p. 9. Refer to Pelkonen, pp. 136–138; Zucker,
‘Ruins—An Aesthetic Hybrid,’ pp. 119–130.
45 Anderson, p. 21.
46 Zucker, New Architecture and City Planning, p. 547.
47 Giedion, ‘The Need for a New Monumentality,’ pp. 553, 550, 554–555.
48 Giedion, ‘The Need for a New Monumentality,’ p. 566.
49 Kahn, ‘Monumentality’, p. 18. Refer to Brownlee, ‘Adventures of Unexplored Places,’
p. 21; Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture, pp. 209–210.
50 Kahn, ‘Monumentality,’ p. 578.
51 Kahn, ‘Monumentality,’ pp. 21, 26.
52 The Bernard S. Pincus Occupational Therapy Building at Philadelphia Psychiatric Hospital,
1949–1950, was the last time that Kahn constructed in metal. Scully, Louis I. Kahn, p. 17.
53 Nelson, pp. 574–575.
54 Goodwin, pp. 599, 592.
55 Fiene, pp. 602–604; Giedion, ‘The Need for a New Monumentality,’ p. 561.
56 Published as The International Style: Architecture Since 1922, 1932.
57 Mock, p. 25.
58 Hastings, Lancaster, Pevsner and Richards, ‘The Second Half Century/The First Half
Century,’ p. 36.
59 Hastings, Lancaster, Pevsner and Richards, ‘In Search of a New Monumentality,’
p. 117.
60 Hitchcock, in Hastings, Lancaster, Pevsner and Richards, ‘In Search of a New Monu-
mentality,’ pp. 123–124.
61 Giedion, Gropius, Hitchcock and Paulsson, in Hastings, Lancaster, Pevsner and
­Richards, ‘In Search of a New Monumentality,’ pp. 126, 127, 123. Refer to Giedion,
‘The Need for a New Monumentality,’ pp. 554–555.

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62 Paulsson, in Hastings, Lancaster, Pevsner and Richards, ‘In Search of a New

­Monumentality,’ p. 122.
63 Paulsson, in Hastings, Lancaster, Pevsner and Richards, ‘In Search of a New
­Monumentality,’ p. 123.
64 Giedion, ‘The Need for a New Monumentality, pp. 562–563.
65 Gropius, in Hastings, Lancaster, Pevsner and Richards, ‘In Search of a New Monumen-
tality,’ p. 127.
66 Giedion, ‘Marginalia’, pp. 22–23.
67 Halbwachs, pp. 78–84. Refer to Boyer, The City of Collective Memory, pp. 66–68,
133–137; Crinson, ‘Urban Memory: An Introduction,’ pp. xii–xiii; Ricouer, Time and
Narrative, pp. 118–119.
68 Goodwin, p. 592.
69 Goethe, ‘On German Architecture (1772),’ pp. 104–108.
70 Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 1, pp. 35–45.
71 Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, pp. 169, 177.
72 Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, pp. 169, 187.
73 Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, pp. 99–108.
74 Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 176.
75 Lees-Milne was appointed in 1936. Lothian, quoted in Gaze, p. 121; Lees-Milne,
quoted in Patrick Wright, Journey Through Ruins, p. 72.
76 Otero-Pailos, ‘Experimental Preservation,’ pp. 28–29; Otero-Pailos, ‘Preservation’s
Anonymous Lament’, p. iii.
77 Casey, p. 290.
78 Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory, p. 4.
79 Casey, p. 2
80 Aristotle, p. 51, quoted in Forty, ‘Introduction,’ p. 2. Refer to Casey, pp. 14–16; Wesley,
p. 185; Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory, pp. xi, 4, 32–35.
81 Freud, ‘Constructions in Analysis,’ p. 259.
82 Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 6. Refer to Crinson, ‘Urban Memory: An
Introduction,’ pp. xi–xx; Forty, ‘Introduction,’ p. 6; Lowenthal, p. 239; Rendell,
pp. 163–164.
83 Freud quotes from a German dictionary, Daniel Sanders, Wörterbuch der deutschen
Sprache, 1860. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny,”’ p. 223.
84 Freud, quoted in Forty, ‘Introduction,’ p. 5.
85 Forty, ‘Introduction,’ p. 16. Refer to Pausanius, vol. 1, p. 394.
86 Casey, p. xiii.
87 Riegl, pp. 22–24, 29, 38. Refer to Arrhenius, pp. 92–111; Choay, The Invention of the
Historic Monument, pp. 1–16, 111–116.
88 Freud considered monuments as ‘mnemic symbols’ constructed to acknowledge trau-
matic events. Freud, ‘Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis’, pp. 16–17.
89 Giedion, ‘The Need for a New Monumentality,’ p. 553.
90 Whately, p. 131.
91 The Origin of German Tragic Drama was completed in 1928 but published later.
­Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, pp. 159–161.

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92 Bürger, p. 72.
93 Bürger, pp. 73–74; Harbison, Ruins and Fragments, p. 151.
94 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art,’ p. 239.
95 Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer,’ p. 234. Refer to Benjamin, ‘What is Epic
Theater?’, p. 150.
96 Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, p. 178, refer to p. 177. Refer to
­Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ pp. 255, 264; Buck-Morss, pp. 55–56,
170, 211–212, 218–219.
97 Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism, pp. 221, 257. Refer to Giedion, ‘His-
tory and the Architect,’ pp. 106–110; Ricoeur, ‘Objectivity and Subjectivity in History,’
p. 22.
98 Wendell H. Lovett was the other American.
99 Doshi, ‘Interview,’ p. 271; James Williamson, Kahn at Penn, pp. 19–21.
100 Kahn believed that he was born in Arensburg, where there is a castle that he greatly
admired, on the island of Ösel, which is now called Saaremaa in Estonia. The plan of
Comlagan Castle, Dumfrieshire, was also a particular reference. Scully, Louis I. Kahn,
p. 39.
101 Goldhagen, p. 258; Hochstim, pp. 305–332; McCarter, Louis I. Kahn, pp. 173–174.
102 Rogers, p. 2.
103 Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ pp. 26–27.
104 Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions,’ p. 1, refer to pp. 5, 8.
105 Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ filed in Lasdun Archive, RIBA Library Draw-
ings and Archives Collections, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
106 Designed by his firm Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peressutti and Rogers (B.B.P.R). Rogers, in
Newman, pp. 92–93. Refer to Boyer, Not Quite Architecture, pp. 70–73.
107 Peter Smithson, in Newman, pp. 94–96.
108 Rogers, in Newman, pp. 95–96.
109 Banham, ‘Neo-Liberty’, p. 235.
110 Pevsner, ‘Modern Architecture and the Historian or The Return of Historicism,’
pp. 231–233.
111 Kahn, ‘New Frontiers in Architecture,’ p. 93; Kahn, ‘Talk at the Conclusion of the
Otterlo Congress,’ pp. 211–213. Refer to Johnson, pp. 34–37.
112 Peter Smithson, in Roth, Bakema, Rogers, Smithson and Tange, p. 219.
113 Peter Smithson, ‘Parallel Aims,’ pp. 54–55. Refer to Atkinson, pp. 80–81; Gowan,
pp. 81–82; Richards, Pevsner, Hastings and Casson, ‘Troubled Coast,’ pp. 376–377;
Peter Smithson, ‘The Fine and the Folk,’ p. 397; Colin St John Wilson, ‘Open and
Closed,’ pp. 101–102.
114 Lance Wright, ‘The Span of Kahn,’ p. 320.
115 Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism, p. 257.
116 Sullivan, quoted in Byles, p. 159.
117 Bell, p. 92.
118 Kahn, ‘Lecture at Pratt Institute (1973),’ p. 279.
119 Kaufmann further developed his argument in Architecture in the Age of Reason,
1955. Kahn, ‘Twelve Lines,’ p. 9.

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120 Pelkonen, pp. 133–139.

121 Scully, ‘Introduction,’ in Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, p. 10;
Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, pp. 20, 13, 34. Refer to Scully,
The Architecture of Community, pp. 23–24.
122 Venturi, ‘Louis Kahn Remembered,’ p. 91. Refer to Sauter, p. 186.
123 Scully, ‘Foreword’, p. 8; Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,
p. 106.
124 Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour, p. 156. Refer to Vinegar, pp. 93–94.
125 Scully, ‘Unpublished Introduction to Learning From Las Vegas,’ pp. 175–176.
126 Scott Brown, ‘Interview,’ p. 257.
127 Smithson, ‘Entropy and the New Monuments,’ pp. 10, 13; Smithson, ‘A Tour of the
Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,’ p. 74.
128 Smithson, ‘Entropy and the New Monuments,’ p. 11.
129 Smithson, ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,’ p. 74.
130 Smithson, ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,’ p. 72. Refer to Alloway,
p. 135; Dillon, ‘Introduction,’ p. 14; Linder, pp. 192–196; Reynolds, 86–91; Tsai,
pp. 21, 25.
131 Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, p. 135.
132 Rowe refers to Isaac Ware’s 1738 English translation of Palladio’s I quattro libri
dell’archittetura and the original French edition of Le Corbusier’s Précisions, 1930.
Rowe, ‘The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa,’ pp. 2–14.
133 Rowe discusses Kahn’s 1956 design for the Jewish Community Center, Trenton.
Rowe, ‘Neo-“Classicism” and Modern Architecture II,’ pp. 152–155.
134 Rowe, letter to Kahn, 7 February 1956, quoted in De Long, p. 59. Refer to Banham,
‘The New Brutalism,’ pp. 355–361; Gargiani, p. 109; Rowe, ‘Ideas,’ pp. 321–326;
Rowe, ‘The Revolt of the Senses’, pp. 278–280.
135 Eisenman, ‘The Last Grand Tourist: Travels with Colin Rowe,’ p. 131.
136 Rowe and Koetter, p. 90.
137 Rowe and Koetter, p. 149.
138 Rowe, ‘Introduction,’ p. 2.
139 Kahn, ‘Wanting to Be,’ p. 89.
140 Kahn, ‘Form and Design,’ pp. 112–120; Scully, American Architecture and ­Urbanism,
p. 213. Refer to De Long, p. 71; Steven Fleming, ‘Louis Kahn’s Situated Platonism,’
p. 4.
141 Kahn, ‘Form and Design,’ p. 120.
142 Kahn, quoted in Brady, p. 86.
143 Kahn, ‘A Discussion Recorded in Louis I. Kahn’s Philadelphia Office in February,
1961,’ p. 123. For an analysis of the materials and construction techniques proposed
for Luanda, refer to Gargiani, pp. 204–206; Larson, pp. 38–45.
144 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 3, ch. 20, p. 41.
145 Kahn, ‘From a Conversation with Richard Saul Wurman,’ p. 232.
146 Scully, Louis I. Kahn, p. 35.
147 Jarzombek, p. 87; Marcus and Whitaker, p. 89.
148 Kahn, ‘I Love Beginnings,’ p. 291.

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149 Ackerman, Palladio, p. 164; Holberton, pp. 156–163.

150 The Goldenberg House, Rydal, Philadelphia. Kahn, recalled by Thomas R. Vreeland,
22 March 2011, quoted in Marcus and Whitaker, p. 57.
151 Kahn mentions the DeVore House and in the following sentence refers to the Adler
House. Proposed for suburbs of Philadelphia, both were designed in 1954–1955 but
unrealised. Kahn, ‘The Palladian Plan,’ Kahn Notebook, 1955–c.1962, quoted in De
Long, p. 59.
152 Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea, 1931, stimulated Kahn’s appreciation of Lao Tzu.
Kahn, letter to Anne Griswold Tyng, 8 January 1954, in Tyng, p. 89. Refer to Gargiani,
pp. 69–70; Lao Tzu; Ven, p. 3.
153 Gargiani, pp. 104–107; Hochstim, pp. 300–304.
154 Evans, ‘Figures, Doors and Passages,’ p. 88.
155 Kahn, ‘An Architect Speaks his Mind,’ p. 294. Refer to McCarter, The Space Within,
pp. 81–87.
156 Marcus and Whitaker, p. 56.
157 Kahn, ‘Form and Design,’ p. 113. Refer to Eisenbrand, p. 64.
158 Norman and Doris Fisher, p. 161.
159 Kahn, ‘Architecture: Silence and Light,’ p. 257. Refer to Kahn, ‘Form and Design’,
p. 113; Eisenbrand, p. 64.
160 Kahn, quoted in Ronner and Jhaveri, p. 379.
161 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 2, ch. 12, p. 46.
162 Alberti, p. 23.
163 Salk, p. 296.
164 McCarter, Louis I. Kahn, pp. 184, 188, 211.
165 Hochstim, p. 63, plate 37; p. 86, plate 70; pp. 270–277.
166 Salk, interviewed by David B. Brownlee and David G. De Long, 18 April 1983, quoted
in Brownlee, ‘The Houses of the Inspirations,’ p. 95. Refer to Wiseman, pp. 113–114.
167 Kahn, interviewed by Karl Linn, 14 May 1965, quoted in Brownlee, ‘The Houses of
the Inspirations,’ p. 95.
168 Kahn, ‘Lecture, Drexel (University) Architectural Society,’ p. 27.
169 Kahn, in Cook and Klotz, p. 202.
170 Kahn, 1973, quoted in James Williamson, Kahn at Penn, p. 46, refer to pp. 14–15.
171 Scully refers to a preliminary design of the Meeting House in 1960. Scully, Louis I.
Kahn, p. 36.
172 Kahn, ‘I Love Beginnings,’ p. 291.
173 Kahn, ‘Wanting to Be,’ p. 91.
174 Eugene J. Johnson uses photographic comparison to identify one of Kahn’s 1951
sketches as Hadrian’s Villa, while Jan Hochstim suggests that it may have been Pompeii
or Ostia. Johnson, p. 69, fig 58; Hochstim, p. 242, plate 332; Scully, Louis I. Kahn,
p. 39.
175 Scully, Louis I. Kahn, p. 37.
176 Brownlee and De Long, p. 433; Larson, p. 60; Wiseman, p. 118.
177 According to Scully, Kahn was aware of contemporary research by ‘an engineer and
a pupil of Brown’s indicating that ancient Romans understood the environmental

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advantages of openings without glass. Scully, ‘Louis I. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome,’
pp. 10–11.
178 Wilcots, in Wilcots and Wurman.
179 The anglicised spelling of Dacca has been replaced by Dhaka. Kahn, Louis I Kahn:
Conversations with Students, p. 45.
180 Kahn, in Cook and Klotz, p. 195. An alternative transcription of this interview quotes
Kahn as saying ‘who owns the circles? Ridiculous, when you think of it’, in Prown and
Denavit, p. 93. Refer to MacDonald, ‘Hadrian’s Circles,’ pp. 395–408.
181 Doshi, ‘Interview,’ pp. 272–273; Doshi, ‘Louis I. Kahn—Yogi of Architecture’,
pp. 7–8, Wiseman, pp. 138–150, 178–179.
182 Karsten Harries discusses this experience with regard to Kahn’s Yale Center for British
Art, New Haven, 1977. Karsten Harries, ‘Time, Death, and Building,’ pp. 25–26.
183 Jack McAllister, who worked on the original project, added a further building in 1994.
184 Kahn, ‘Architecture: Silence and Light,’ p. 256.
185 Barragán, recalled in Kahn, ‘Silence,’ p. 223.
186 Kahn credits the phrase ‘a façade to the sky’ to Barragán, who attributes to Kahn the
idea ‘that the surface is a façade that rises to the sky.’ Barragán, quoted in Kahn,
‘Silence,’ p. 232; Barragán, p. 269. Refer to Halprin, p. 279.
187 Kahn, ‘Conversation with Jonas Salk,’ p. 149.
188 Kahn, ‘Conversation with Jonas Salk,’ p. 149.
189 Kahn, ‘I Love Beginnings,’ p. 291.
190 Kahn, ‘Lecture at Yale University (1963),’ p. 167.
191 Kahn, ‘Law and Rule in Architecture,’ RIBA, London, 14 March 1962, quoted in
Sauter, p. 181.
192 Sauter, p. 181.
193 Anne Griswold Tyng introduced Kahn to On Growth and Form in 1952. Thompson,
p. 10. Refer to Burton, p. 84; Sauter, p. 181.
194 Sauter, p. 182.
195 Esther Kahn, ‘Interview,’ p. 282.
196 Kahn, ‘From a Conversation with Richard Saul Wurman,’ p. 233.
197 Stephen Kite suggests that Arthur Schopenhauer particularly informed Kahn’s appre-
ciation of shadows. Kite, pp. 167–170, 227–232.
198 Kahn, ‘Comments on the Fort Wayne Fine Arts Center,’ p. 10. Refer to Kahn, ‘From a
Conversation with Richard Saul Wurman,’ p. 233; Kahn, ‘An Interview,’ p. 45; Kahn,
‘Lecture at Yale University (1963),’ pp. 165–166; Burton, pp. 75–76; Tyng, ‘Born on
a Castled Island in the Baltic,’ p. 12.
199 Kahn, quoted in Pelkonen, p. 142.
200 Later in his life, Goethe coined the term Weltliteratur in opposition to a nationalist
art form. For a discussion of Goethe’s relations with romanticism, nationalism and
internationalism, refer to Hoffmeister, pp. 232–255; Saul, pp. 34–36.
201 Hirschfeld, Theory of Garden Art, pp. 302–303, refer to pp. 304–307, 336–339.
202 Goethe, 10 April 1829, translated and quoted in Sonnabend, p. 17.
203 Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego,’ p. 319.
204 Nassar, pp. 68–69. Refer to Jane K. Brown, ‘Faust,’ pp. 95–96.

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 w r app in g r uins ar oun d buildin g s

205 Humboldt, quoted in Bergdoll, p. 148.

206 Humboldt, vol. 2, p. 95.
207 The painting’s full title is Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth making
Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the
Night the Ariel left Harwich.
208 Friedrich, quoted in Koerner, p. 74. Refer to Rosenblum, p. 28.
209 Kahn, ‘Form and Design,’ p. 112. Refer to Scully, ‘Introduction,’ in Brownlee and De
Long, p. 13.
210 Kahn, ‘Lecture, Drexel (University) Architectural Society,’ p. 31.
211 Scully, ‘Louis I. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome,’ p. 10.
212 Levine, p. 324.
213 Kahn, ‘I Love Beginnings,’ p. 288.
214 Legault, p. 230, refer to pp. 223–225. Refer to Rosellini, pp. 42–43, 95–123.
215 Kahn, in Prown and Denavit, p. 116.
216 Kahn, ‘From a Conversation with William Jordy,’ p. 241.
217 Lardinois, ‘Inside the Conservation Work at the Salk Institute, Kahn’s Masterpiece.’
218 Kahn, quoted in Norman and Doris Fisher, p. 155; Kahn, ‘Remarks,’ p. 206.
219 Lyotard, pp. 206, 200.
220 Lyotard, pp. 199, 204.
221 Rosenblum, pp. 211–212. Refer to Crowther, p. 54.
222 James Williamson, Kahn at Penn, p. 28.
223 Rosellini, pp. 12–14, 26, 30, 36–38, 60, 73–75.
224 Kahn, quoted in Rosellini, p. 123.
225 Meyers, p. 81. Refer to Rosellini, pp. 55, 58–59.
226 Kahn, ‘The Wonder of the Natural Thing,’ p. 401. Refer to Rosellini, p. 90.
227 At Penn, Kahn lectured on the course ‘Man and Environment,’ which Ian McHarg
initiated in 1959 and developed into his seminal book Design with Nature, 1969.
Kahn, ‘Wanting to Be,’ p. 97. Refer to Sauter, p. 186.
228 Kahn, quoted in Norman and Doris Fisher, p. 161.
229 Kahn, ‘Wanting to Be,’ p. 89.
230 Gregory, pp. 55–56.
231 Kahn, ‘A Discussion Recorded in Louis I Kahn’s Philadelphia Office in February,
1961,’ p. 123.
232 Kahn, in Cook and Klotz, p. 202.
233 Kahn, in Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect, A Son’s Journey.
234 Nathaniel Kahn, in Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect, A Son’s Journey.
235 Scully, in Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect, A Son’s Journey.
236 Kahn, in Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect, A Son’s Journey.

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 8
nations in ruins
 na t i ons in r uins

Bombed churches as war memorials

In the aftermath of World War Two, the concern for the monument and the ruin
varied according to national histories, philosophies and needs. In Britain, devas-
tated by wartime bombing raids, the demand for reconstruction was greater than
in America. Already in 1942, UK government committees were preparing for
post-war regeneration and a Ministry of Town and Country Planning was estab-
lished. In the following year, a Minister for Reconstruction was appointed to the
War Cabinet.1 Heir to the liberal Enlightenment, the idea of the British welfare
state was established in 1942 when the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social
Insurance and Allied Services under the chairmanship of Sir William Beveridge
presented its report to the wartime coalition government led by the Conservative
Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The Labour party’s landslide victory in 1945
brought the report’s conclusions to fruition. In the UK, monumentality came to
represent the monolithic self-image of the welfare state, which aimed to extend
access to good schools, universities and hospitals to the whole population, but
did not intend a fundamental transformation of capitalism or attempt to address
financial inequalities between rich and poor.
Britain’s historical understanding of the interdependence of the monument
and the ruin acquired new resonance due to wartime bombing raids and a bur-
geoning romanticism that celebrated national identity in the face of adversity.
‘Bomb damage is itself picturesque,’ proclaimed Kenneth Clark, director of the
National Gallery and chairman of the War Artists Advisory Committee, in a stoic
embrace of devastation, survival and renewal.2 Once again, the ruin was asso-
ciated with hope as well as loss, but changing national fortunes added nuance
to its meaning. In the eighteenth century, a taste for ruins was seen alongside
British imperial expansion, while in the mid-twentieth century it was seen along-
side British imperial decline, stimulating nostalgia for the optimism of two cen-
turies before.3 The tenets of this romanticism soon found support among other
figures of Britain’s intelligentsia, with Clark joined by T.S. Eliot and John Maynard
Keynes in writing a letter to The Times in 1944, in which they state that a ruined
church would be an evocative monument to wartime sacrifices, acknowledging
the trauma of destruction as well celebrating future potential.4 Their letter was
reprinted in a subsequent publication Bombed Churches as War Memorials,
1945, in which the landscape architect Brenda Colvin complements this rec-
ognition of the cultural value of a damaged ruin with a corresponding call for
an enveloping and unkempt nature. Her landscape proposal for Wren’s Christ
Church, Newgate Street, would ‘emphasise the passing seasons’ in relation to the

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 na t i ons in r uins

‘charred and battered’ church and ‘the crisp polished facades of the surrounding
buildings,’ reintroducing ‘the self-sown flowers’ that had flourished during the
sustained ­German bombing raids of 1940 and 1941.5 Returning to this theme
in the s­ econd edition of Land and Landscape, 1947, she writes: ‘With a little
imagination one might visualise a London left to nature’s healing hand after all
mankind was doomed, and see, in the mind’s eye, a lost and broken city hidden
under a great forest of sycamore.’6
In his memoirs, Albert Speer writes that:

Hitler liked to say that the purpose of his building was to transmit his time and its
spirit to posterity. Ultimately all that remained to remind men of the great epochs
of history was their monumental architecture … Our architectural works should
also speak to the conscience of a future Germany centuries from now.7

Exemplifying Nazi Germany’s imperialist ambitions and Speer’s ­Ruinengesetz—‘law

of ruin value’—Hitler hung two of Hubert Robert’s eighteenth-century paintings of
the Roman Forum in the Cabinet Room of Speer’s Reich Chancellery, Berlin, 1939,
and appreciated Speer’s sketch of the Haupttribüne at the Zeppelinfield Stadion,
Nuremberg, 1939, as an ivy-clad ruin. Speer’s bombastic, idealised celebration of
the naturalised future ruin contrasted with Clark and Colvin’s gentle appreciation of
the recent ruin and nature’s cathartic and redemptive influence.

The genius of the place

At the height of the war, Pevsner recalled the traditional two-way cultural d
­ ialogue
between England and continental Europe, describing the picturesque as ­England’s
principal contribution to European architecture and landscape.8 An émigré from
Nazi Germany, Pevsner proclaimed that the picturesque was ‘tied up with E
­ nglish
outdoor life and ultimately even the general British philosophy of liberalism and
liberty.’9 His promotion of the picturesque culminated in ‘The Englishness of
­English Art,’ the 1955 BBC Reith Lectures, which soon appeared in book form.
The first chapter introduces the climate as a recurring theme in the nation’s art and
literature and suggests that a phlegmatic pleasure in unreliable weather is par-
ticularly English. While recognising that national character is far from ­permanent
and that a fascination for the atmosphere is European as well as English, Pevsner
attributes two traits of English liberalism—moderation and imagination—to a mild
and misty climate: ‘That moisture steams out of Turner’s canvases … and lays a
haze over man and building, dissolving their bodily solidity.’10

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Aware of resistance to a new architecture, Pevsner identifies a means to

make modernism familiar. He remarks that the picturesque and ‘the modern
­revolution … had all the fundamentals in common,’ but also wishes to distinguish
between interwar and post-war modernism.11 Noting an increasing sensitivity to
place and ‘a new faith in nature’ that recalls Thomson, Pevsner draws attention
to the picturesque in order to question one modernism that is universal, me-
chanical and insensitive in favour of another that is local, empirical and environ-
mentally aware.12 Denying that picturesque modernism is nostalgic, he evokes
Locke to conclude: ‘In planning and architecture today, “each case on its merit”
is the functional approach.’13 Pevsner’s praise for the picturesque met extensive
criticism. Alan Colquhoun, with a certain modernist intransigence, claimed that
Pevsner had focused on aesthetics to the detriment of function, which Pevsner
denied, repeating his opinion that the ‘aesthetic value’ of the picturesque and of
modernism was ‘stimulated by the disciplines of function and technique.’14 But
Pevsner’s most ardent critic, due to their close association, was Banham, his
former PhD student. Banham admired the picturesque, appreciating ‘a controlling
sensibility that combined toughness of conception with tenderness towards the
“genius of the place.”’15 But he was shocked by his former tutor’s emphasis
on its continuing relevance, declaring Pevsner’s support for the ‘empiricism and
compromises’ of the picturesque to be a denial of his life’s work.16 In opposition
to the picturesque and in support of an alternative modernism, Banham promoted
a new architectural movement ‘The New Brutalism’ in The Architectural Review’s
December 1955 issue.17 His article was a response to Alison and Peter Smith-
son’s one-page statement in the January 1955 issue of Architectural Design in
which they describe ‘The New Brutalism’ as ‘the only possible development for
this moment from the Modern Movement.’18 As precedents, they emphasise Le
Corbusier’s use of primitive béton brût (raw concrete) in the early 1950s, which
Banham also mentions, and the ‘reverence for the natural world and, from that,
for the materials of the built world’ in traditional Japanese architecture.19 Alison
Smithson claimed to be the first person to use the term ‘brutalism’ in 1953,
while Peter Smithson was nicknamed ‘Brutus.’20 Confirming the Smithsons as
brutalism’s key architects, Banham praises the directness of their first significant
building, Hunstanton Secondary Modern School, 1954, in northwest Norfolk,
close to Houghton, which he describes as:

almost unique among modern buildings in being made of what it appears to be

made of … Water and electricity do not come out of unexplained holes in the wall,
but are delivered to the point of use by visible pipes and manifest conduits.21

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 na t i ons in r uins

Alison and Peter Smithson,

Hunstanton Secondary
Modern School, Norfolk,
1954. Interior. Courtesy of
Architectural Press Archive/
RIBA Collections.

Peter Smithson had enrolled at the Royal Academy precisely to acquire a

classical expertise, submitting as his entry for the 1949 Grand Prize a design
for a university museum that acknowledged modernism’s debt to classicism.
But Banham’s one criticism was Hunstanton’s formal composition. Concerned
that a design should reflect the logical disposition of its functions, Banham was
suspicious of symmetry as was Pevsner for similar reasons and his preference
for a memorable, asymmetrical image may indicate a suppressed debt to his
doctoral supervisor. Banham attributed Hunstanton’s symmetry to the influence
of Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, 1949. But the
Smithsons disputed the timing of Wittkower’s influence and may instead have
read Rowe’s ‘The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa,’ 1947. By 1952, the Smithsons
described Architectural Principles as ‘the most important work on architecture
published in England since the war.’22 Pevsner’s only rejoinder was to causti-
cally remark that Hunstanton School ‘is entirely unbrutal. It is symmetrical, clean,
precise.’23
Praising Kahn’s Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, 1953, in ‘The New
Brutalism,’ Banham identifies ‘formality, expressed structure, exposed materials;
the most truly Brutalist building in the New World,’ but concludes that it is defi-
cient in each of these qualities in comparison to Hunstanton.24 Kahn’s response
is not known. But Rowe wrote to him on 7 February 1956:

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 na t i ons in r uins

Did you see in the Architectural Review a deplorable article on ‘the New
­Brutalism’–very chauvinistic and patronising–suggesting first of all that you were
a ‘new brutalist’, which as far as I know you would never claim to be, and then
turning around and damning you because you didn’t fulfil the N.(ew) B.(rutalism)
canon.25

Submitting to the seasons

Continuing long after the end of the Second World War, rationing in the UK fi-
nally ended in 1954, leading to rising prices. The consumer boom was soon so
­buoyant that in 1957 the incoming Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan
­famously remarked: ‘people have never had it so good.’26 But in ‘Letter to A
­ merica,’
1958, ­Alison and Peter Smithson indicated their disenchantment with wasteful
­‘consumer-orientated society’27 and patronisingly dismissed American architecture as
­‘aluminium folk-art.’28 Emphasising, instead, the continuing relevance of the ad hoc
‘make-do-and-mend’ philosophy that had prevailed during rationing, the S
­ mithsons
increasingly acknowledged the picturesque as a found condition relevant to the
present, which promoted empirical observation of the physical fabric and patterns
of inhabitation.29 Consequently, Peter Smithson appreciated the ‘Picturesque not as
picture, but people in the centre, sensitiveness and feeling; the Picturesque as a root
of our thoughts.30 Identifying positive Georgic metaphors, he wanted ‘to build like a
farmer’ and draw on local knowledge of a place, ‘not only the visual, but what a place
smells like, how the wind hits it.31 Alison Smithson proposed that ‘a society becoming
more climate, nature, energy-resource responsive … will allow us to begin to think of
a new form of restorative habitat for a future light touch inhabitation of the earth.’32
In 1956, the Smithsons, working with Nigel Henderson, R. S. Jenkins
and Eduardo Paolozzi, created Patio and Pavilion, one of 12 displays in This is
­Tomorrow, an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.33 The Pavilion was
a shed of reused timber boarding adorned with decayed and discarded objects
on the corrugated plastic roof and in the surrounding Patio. Responding to intel-
lectual, emotional and physical needs in a simple and direct manner, Patio and
Pavilion was a primitive hut or hermitage appropriate to post-war austerity and
uncertainty. Lawrence Alloway astutely described the design as ‘a frugal pasto-
ral.’34 But Banham remarked that it was ‘submissive to traditional values’ and
evoked remains ‘excavated after the atomic holocaust’.35
The Smithsons appreciated that ‘the Virgilian dream’ has always been conceived
and ‘enjoyed with the self-consciousness of the city dweller.’36 In 1958, as a second
home to their London one, they bought a small dilapidated cottage among a complex

260
 na t i ons in r uins

of former farm buildings on the picturesque Fonthill estate in Wiltshire, which W

­ illiam
Beckford had remodelled in the late eighteenth century to include two grottoes, a
hermitage and a wild, rocky garden. The Smithson’s site is a mile to the south of
Fonthill Abbey, Beckford’s monumental house. James Wyatt modelled the design
on a monastic complex, alluding to the Dissolution of Monasteries when the ruins
of many religious houses were converted for domestic use. A kindred spirit to ‘Padre
Giovanni,’ Beckford styled himself ‘Abbot’ of Fonthill and remained in contact with
Soane throughout their lives.37 Just 18 years after the completion of Wyatt’s design
in 1807, Fonthill’s high central tower collapsed. The landscape and a fragment of the
building survive, fulfilling the picturesque sensibility for a ruin. In 1844, a visitor to
the Abbey evocatively acknowledged the particular poignancy of the recently ruined:

Ruins that have been such for ages, whose tenants have long since been swept
away, recall ideas of persons and times so far back that we have no sympathy
with them at all; but if you wish for a sight of all that is melancholy, all that is des-
olate, visit a modern ruin. We passed through briars and brambles into the great
octagon. Straight before us stands the western doorway of the noble entrance
hall; but where is its oaken roof, with its proud heraldic emblazonments, where
its lofty painted windows, where its ponderous doors, more than 30 feet high?38

Renaming their property Upper Lawn Pavilion in reference to the e­ ighteenth-century

landscape, the Smithsons created a newly fabricated ruin near the ruins of the
Abbey and incorporated actual ruined elements to aid authenticity.39 Aligning
their practice with the picturesque, Alison Smithson described their new home as
‘A “folly” implanted within the bounds of the original “lawns” of Beckford’s folly
at Fonthill.’40 Close to the top of rising farmland, a garden wall wraps the rec-
tangular site, incorporating the old cottage’s northern boundary. The Smithsons
removed much of the building, which was subject to a demolition order due to
its condition. Combining new and old, they added a two-storey house of similar
volume and incorporated existing fragments such as the garden wall, chimney,
paving and well. Accessible up a steep climb, more a ladder than a staircase,
the glazed first floor ‘gazebo’ looks in all directions.41 On the ground floor, set
within the garden wall, two retained cottage windows afford long views to the
undulating fields and woods beyond, which shutters can obscure when neces-
sary. Creating ambiguities between inside and outside, and home and garden,
the position of the new house does not quite match that of the old cottage. One
retained cottage window is inside the new house and the other is outside adja-
cent to a patio, framing views towards the Fonthill Woods.

261
 na t i ons in r uins

Alison and Peter Smithson,

Upper Lawn Pavilion,
Fonthill Gifford, Wilt-
shire, 1962. The south
façade with the well in the
foreground. Courtesy of
Architectural Press Archive/
RIBA Collections.

Alison and Peter ­Smithson,

Upper Lawn Pavilion,
Fonthill Gifford, Wiltshire,
1962. View through the
­patio window to the woods
to the north, 1995, taken
after the Smithsons left
Fonthill. Courtesy of Georg
Aerni.

262
 na t i ons in r uins

Services were limited when the Smithsons lived at Fonthill. The kitchen
had a sink and a dishwasher but no fridge, oven or hob. Cooking occurred
outside. Bedrooms were not defined; at night, mattresses were unrolled and
placed on the floor. A wood-burning stove provided limited warmth. The
­single-glazed expanse caused over-heating in summer and condensation
and heat loss in winter, which was particularly apparent because the winter
of 1962–1963 was the coldest since 1740, when Kent was transforming
Rousham. But these ‘failings’ were important to the experience offered by
Upper Lawn Pavilion, questioning familiar notions of domestic shelter and
privacy. ‘Camping out’ at a ‘primitive’ ‘Solar Pavilion Folly,’ the Smithsons
tested the assumption that some loss in environmental comfort is amply com-
pensated by and even necessary to a more complete experience of nature
and weather.42 Peter Smithson remarked that ‘Upper Lawn was placed in an
eighteenth century English landscape with the conscious intention of enjoying
its pleasure … submitting to the seasons.’43
In the sectional drawing of Upper Lawn Pavilion, the house is small against
one horizontal register—the garden wall—and two vertical registers—the deep

Alison and Peter S

­ mithson,
Upper Lawn Pavilion,
Fonthill Gifford, Wiltshire,
1962. The Smithson
family lunching with Reyner
­Banham. Courtesy of
­Architectural Press Archive/
RIBA Collections.

263
 na t i ons in r uins

well and the high trees—which have an environmental purpose that is poetic as
well as practical, a combination the Smithsons explored in other projects. De-
scribing the glass-walled Yellow House at an Intersection, 1976, Peter Smithson
writes: ‘The trees in the private garden are acacia whose light leafage filters the
sun in summer and blows away golden pennies in winter.’44 The façades of the
Garden Building, St Hilda’s College, Oxford, 1970, are completed by a heavy
timber trellis covered with ivy so that ‘their gentle skin modulation seemed to
offer themselves in various sorts of ways for the contribution of the seasons, and,
passively, to the arts of inhabitation.’45 As an urban counterpoint, the Smithsons
described the stone surfaces and moulded forms of churches such as Nicholas
Hawksmoor’s St George’s, Bloomsbury, 1731, as London’s ‘climate register,’ their
surfaces marked by sun, wind, rain and pollution.46
The Smithsons worked collectively, but specific responsibility for Upper Lawn
Pavilion was credited to Alison Smithson, who concluded: ‘I work with memory,
and it allows me to make connections to the past, interpolations of the present
and gives foresight—a most valuable facility for an architect—as to a possible
­future.’47 Acknowledging the ancient tradition that conceives nature as a place
of retreat, c­ ontemplation and study, she described life at Upper Lawn Pavilion as
­‘Jerome-ing.’48 A fourth-century monk and hermit, who translated the Bible from its
original languages into Latin, Saint Jerome was a favoured subject of Renaissance
artists. Discussing paintings in which Saint Jerome is shown in either a desert or
a study, Alison Smithson remarks that these ‘habitats can also be thought of as
­allegories for the restorative place in nature and the energising cell supported by hu-
man order.’49 Rather than opposites, desert and study are complementary means
to learning: ‘In Saint Jerome’s life, withdrawal to Desert and asceticism becomes
an integral part of a productive, academic life. Jerome’s books went with him to the
desert.’50 In a number of the desert paintings, Saint Jerome seeks the protection of
a cave. A regular feature of the eighteenth-century picturesque landscape, the grotto
recalls the cave and the desert beyond, as Alison Smithson concludes:

Under the influence of travel, paintings, literature, Saint Jerome’s Desert habitat
of Renaissance imagery continued life in Europe as the impression of the Wild
place found in untamed nature—‘the awfulness of rocks’—reconstructed for the
European landscape garden.51

Where Beckford commissioned a hermitage, grotto and rocky outcrop, Alison

Smithson rediscovered the habitats of Saint Jerome’s life—the study, cave and
desert—conceiving Upper Lawn Pavilion as a twentieth-century hermitage.

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 na t i ons in r uins

Alison Smithson applied the theory of the picturesque widely, including to

car travel. Conceived in 1966 and developed into a writing project in 1970, AS
in DS: An Eye on the Road, 1983, is her account of journeys around England as
a passenger in the Smithsons’ treasured Citroën and a ‘Primer’ for the ‘sensibility
resulting from the moving view of landscape.’52 Rather than characterise this
sensibility as completely new, she locates its origins in the eighteenth-century
picturesque, which was also explored through movement:

With landscape, we are most encumbered by established English sensibilities;

and so deeply involved we have in front of our eyes almost a pre-formed vision,
the where-with-all to relive the whole spirit of the English picturesque.53

As a ‘teaching document’ Alison Smithson intends AS in DS to improve under-

standing of specific landscape conditions such as weather, topography, natural
history and use and to encourage designs that respond with thoughtful inven-
tion. She notes the delicate adjustments of an old road to site and seasons. In
contrast, ‘a modern road might lead a passenger to suspect that the road’s en-
gineer has no long knowledge of the route, nor the tricks of micro-climate, nor
sufficient interest to have travelled “his” route to discover its seasonal weather
mutations.’54 In the subtlety of the old road, she identifies a model for building.
Upper Lawn Pavilion’s design and construction were similarly ad hoc, re-
flecting the anecdotal assemblage of AS in DS and the Smithsons’ other writings,
which reused and adapted images and sentences, whether made or found. Louisa
Hutton, who worked for the Smithsons in the 1980s, notes their enjoyment of
adjustments made on site:

Peter always had a great respect for those who actually constructed the build-
ing. He was once really distraught to discover that one particular concrete wall
had been executed so badly that it been twice demolished out of shame before
he was allowed to see it. I found his acceptance of errors in building very gener-
ous, human and heartening. He saw the act of building as an accumulative pro-
cess in which mistakes are integrated into the final product in an organic way.55

The Smithsons’ photographs of Upper Lawn Pavilion evoke relaxed and rustic
habits: ‘old iron implements dug up, apples picked or dried, fragments of glass
and china, table settings, displays of flowers, petals and berries, wasps’ nests
and cedar cones.’56 Weathered and worn, the found objects they assembled and
displayed at Upper Lawn Pavilion are a mirror image of the building as it ages.

265
 na t i ons in r uins

Clad in reflective aluminium and rich teak, the contrast between old and new was
obvious in 1961 when it was first occupied. But over the years, weathering has
reduced the visual contrast between concrete, stone, teak and aluminium—now
aged to soft greys—so that they provide a background to the changing colours of
nature—yellow, brown, green, red and gold. Understanding the importance of Up-
per Lawn Pavilion’s weathered condition, the architect Sergison Bates of the 2003
renovation appointed ‘a specialist restoration contractor who normally works with
16th-century barns rather than 1960s modernist icons.’57 Improving the build-
ing’s thermal performance, the renovation was less sensitive to the pleasures of
‘submitting to the seasons.’

A ruin in reverse

At Robin Hood Gardens, 1972, the Smithsons’ social housing project in east
London, two cranked linear housing blocks with elevated walkways defined the
site perimeter, providing a barrier to the adjacent heavy traffic and enclosing a
landscape of grass mounds, one that was two-storeys high. Emphasising the
monumentality of their construction, they write that ‘This building for the so-
cialist dream … was for us a Roman activity and Roman at many levels,’ no-
tably because it was heroic, repetitive, designed for ‘the anonymous client’ and
‘built for an elaborate system of government.’58 In ‘Collective Design: The Vio-
lent Consumer or Waiting for the Goodies,’ 1974, Alison Smithson somewhat
patronisingly questioned the provision of services and housing by the welfare
state, suggesting that it can discourage civic responsibility and social integration,
increasing divisions between ‘the haves and the have-nots.’59 During a BBC2 TV
programme in 1970, she proclaimed:

Society at the moment asked architects to build these new homes for them. But
I mean, this may be really stupid, we may have to rethink the whole thing. It may
be that we should only be asked to repair the roofs and add the odd bathroom
to the old industrial houses and just leave people where they are to smash it
up in complete abandon and happiness so that nobody has to worry about it
anymore.60

Despite her sarcasm, the Smithsons designed Robin Hood Gardens with care.
Retrospectively collecting their work into two substantial volumes under the
title The Charged Void, 2001 and 2005, and applauding ‘holes in the city’
as ‘open, connective secret places,’ they recall that the ‘protected’ landscape

266
 na t i ons in r uins

was designed to be as large as the site would allow: ‘The demolition and
excavation materials were not removed off-site, but placed, instead, in the
central mound, making it as big as it came.’61 The focus of the site during
construction and use, the sparse, conical form was reminiscent of a burial
mound, containing the material remains of previous structures and alluding to
Robin Hood Gardens’ likely future ruination. The Smithsons appreciated the
open-ended potential of fragments and ruins, understanding that they imply
multiple futures.62 Their son Simon recalled childhood visits to the construc-
tion site:

The stacked pre-cast units that made up the vertical rhythmic mullions that
make the façade dance reminded me of the stacks of column parts we had
recently seen on a grand tour of Sicilian ruins … Back at home my mother Alison and Peter Smith-
working in shorts in the garden on series of tiles about 8 inches square that son, Robin Hood Gardens,
would make up a mural—each tile a collage of broken pottery unearthed London, under construction,
during the excavation of the site and the creation of the twin ‘mounds’ from 1970. Courtesy of Tony
63 Ray-Jones/RIBA Collections.
the rubble.

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In their exhibit ‘Sticks and Stones’ at the Venice Biennale in 1976, the
Smithsons argued that ‘an architecture which is palpably built is the most
pleasurable of all,’ emphasising that this quality can be appreciated during
construction, once a building is complete and when it is a ruin, revealing hid-
den layers of the construction process.64 The title of the exhibit implicitly re-
ferred both to building components, including the repetitive vertical fins on the
façades of Robin Hood Gardens and the English language children’s rhyme:
‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never break me.’ Im-
agining the sticks and stones ‘becoming a ruin,’ Alison Smithson remarked of
the display, which included a large construction photograph of Robin Hood
Gardens:

A building under assembly is like a ruin in reverse; at certain phases of a

building’s construction, the anticipatory pleasure of ruins is made manifest:
these pleasures are only enjoyed by those who are part of the process of as-
sembly, and even by them rarely, for making a building is mostly worry. Very
many photographs of buildings under construction are taken when the day’s
work is over, or when the construction closes at the weekend; under these
conditions, a quiet that recalls the loneliness of the deserted ancient site
takes over, so that for a moment we do not see worry but the silent marvels
of promise.65

Ruins are like building sites, full of potential. According to her schema, a building
proceeds from a ruin to a building to a ruin. Recalling Robert Smithson’s phrase
of 1967, construction workers experience a building as ‘a ruin in reverse,’ which
is enjoyed as a ruin again once it is no longer inhabited, this time as ‘a ruin in
advance’ as it slowly decays. Alison Smithson celebrates the first and last peri-
ods of ruin but does not mention another, although it is appreciated in many of
the Smithsons’ designs. The process of ruination begins the day that construction
workers enter the site, continues while the building is in use and develops after it
is no longer occupied.
London grew from two cities: the City of Westminster, where parliament
and government are situated, and the much larger City of London, which once
incorporated most of London’s homes and businesses but is now synonymous
with the financial market alone. As the port to the east attracted many of the
city’s industries and the prevailing wind blows from the southwest, London’s
prosperous residential districts spread westwards, where the Smithson chose
to live. In 1972, poorer housing and the post-industrial landscape of disused

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docks surrounded Robin Hood Gardens, as the port had relocated further to
the east to deeper waters required by larger ships. Urban decay created a de-
velopment opportunity. In the 1970 TV programme, Alison Smithson acknowl-
edged the contemporary appeal of east London’s network of riverside and
dockland sites: ‘For Tower Hamlets such a fashion is an economic bonanza …
We could have a new Venice in London.’66 Commercial development pro-
gressed slowly until the late 1980s, when the Canadian developers Olympia
and York began to develop Canary Wharf as a high-rise outpost of the financial
City. By the early twentieth century, Robin Hood Gardens was under threat
of demolition because the towers of Canary Wharf were just to the south. Of
equivalent quality to Robin Hood Gardens, two social housing projects by Ernö
Goldfinger—Balfron Tower, 1967, close to the Smithsons’ project, and Trellick
Tower, 1972, in west London—were each listed as a building of ‘special ar-
chitectural and historic interest’ in 1996 and 1998, respectively, giving them
protection from demolition. Aiding the listing process, their sites were densely
occupied and redevelopment was not economically viable.
Tower Hamlets council had poorly managed and maintained Robin Hood
Gardens for many years, but the 1970s space standards were higher than those
in the early twenty-first century and the apartments were dual aspect with bed-
rooms and kitchens looking onto the secluded landscape. In an attempt to have
Robin Hood Gardens listed, the Twentieth Century Society commissioned the so-
cial housing expert Dickon Robinson to assess the estate:

Ernö Goldfinger, Balfron

Tower, 1967, and Alison
and Peter Smithson, Robin
Hood Gardens, 1972,
London. Courtesy of David
Borland/RIBA Collections.

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 na t i ons in r uins

While it has suffered from all the trials and tribulations of any social housing
estate, there is little or no real evidence to suggest that it has been more or less
popular with residents … it can continue to provide satisfactory, and potentially
even popular homes, if it receives the level of investment many other estates in
Tower Hamlets have received in the past decade.67

Failure to list Robin Hood Gardens made demolition inevitable; its character-
less replacement is a much denser development with a combination of social and
commercial housing that is indicative of the creeping decline of the British welfare
state. Adding to the commercial pressure of Canary Wharf just to the south, the
Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is two miles to the north. London was chosen as
the location of the 2012 Olympics, largely on the ambition to regenerate and
develop sporting and cultural facilities in the east of London as a catalyst to new
businesses and housing. Addressing the Victoria and Albert Museum’s impending
outpost on the Olympic Park, Liza Fior proposed that it should add a fragment of
Robin Hood Gardens to its extensive art and design collection:

Alison and Peter S

­ mithson,
Robin Hood Gardens,
London. The west block has
been destroyed and the east
block is awaiting demolition,
2018. Courtesy of Izabela
Wieczorek.

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The V & A is full of bits of buildings that were victims of regeneration, or changes
in liturgical fashion and administrative power over the centuries … We knew it
wouldn’t be easy but it is the role of the museum to provide a platform for these
difficult conversations.68

As demolition was underway, the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired a

three-storey, nine-metre high fragment of the estate with front and rear façades,
elevated walkway and two maisonette apartments. Before becoming just one
more fragment in the museum, it travelled to Venice as an exhibit at the 2018
­Architecture Biennale entitled ‘Robin Hood Gardens: A Ruin in Reverse.’ Accord-
ing to Simon Smithson, his parents ‘believed Robin Hood Gardens to be their
most important building.’69 Fortunately, like Soane with the Bank of England,
they did not see it demolished. Just 42 years after its construction was celebrated
as ‘a ruin in reverse’ at one Biennale, Robin Hood Gardens returned to another
Biennale as the ruin of its potential. The temporary setting was sadly ironic, as
Venice is a museum city conserved for posterity and protected from change.

Algae, lichen and moss

In the early 1970s, Kahn and Lasdun were members of the ‘Jerusalem Committee,’
which was established in 1969 to consider the city’s planning policies. After Kahn’s
death in 1974, Lasdun replaced him as architect of the new Hurva Synagogue
in Jerusalem, but the project remained unbuilt.70 Around a decade younger than
Kahn, Lasdun had followed a somewhat similar intellectual journey, beginning with
a Beaux-Arts education before turning to early modernist architects and then reas-
sessing modernism via its classical heritage.71 By the 1950s, Lasdun asserted that
the city’s ‘historical continuity was being lost’ and concluded that architecture must
rediscover its roots, remarking that his intention was to create ‘high intensity, mon-
umental, poetic buildings.’72 In an analysis that he could have equally applied to
himself, Lasdun later remarked that Hawksmoor’s ‘point of departure was Ancient
Rome but he was convinced that departure from this was essential,’ concluding
that his hero broke the rules of classical architecture to emphasise them more.73
In 1962, contemporary with Kahn’s design for the Salk Institute, Lasdun was
appointed architect of the new University of East Anglia (UEA) in east Norfolk.
Lasdun had praised the Smithsons’ Norfolk school, Hunstanton, as ‘a good build-
ing because it observes, with an uncompromising rigour, the classic properties
in its proportions and in the disposition of its masses and volumes.’74 Returning
the compliment, the Smithsons concluded that Lasdun’s success at UEA was the

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result of ‘the classical architect’s skills … the traditional understanding about size,
scale and measure.’75 In Britain, due to his prestigious commissions, Lasdun
would become the architect most identified with brutalism, even more than the
Smithsons. But he vehemently disliked being called a brutalist and never applied
it to his own work, dismissing the term as dogmatic and inhumane.76
Synonymous with the welfare state and the first in Britain to be fully controlled
by the national government, the new 1960s universities aimed to extend access
to all people with ‘the qualifications and the willingness to pursue higher educa-
tion.’77 Acknowledging their monolithic self-image, the institutions of the welfare
state readily commissioned monumental megastructures, none more so than the
new universities. Banham remarks that Lasdun’s designs for UEA ‘have the un-
mistakeable air of megastructure, even though they fulfil few of the structural or
adaptive norms thought to be essential to the concept.’78 The 1960s is associated
with technological innovation as well as social and cultural experimentation. But
scientific progress did not mesmerise Lasdun and the generation of architects
who had seen military service in the Second World War. Peter Smithson served
with Queen Victoria’s Own Madras Sappers and Miners in India and Burma,
while ­Lasdun first served with the Royal Artillery and then transferred to the Royal
­Engineers Airfield Construction Company. The technological Pop sensibility was
primarily the work of a younger group of architects. Writing in 1965, with implicit
criticism of projects such as Peter Cook’s Plug-In City of 1963–1964, Lasdun
rejected the modernist obsession with the transformative potential of technology:
‘What we shall build in East Anglia is an organism which is architecturally com-
plete and incomplete, which can grow and change but which does not produce a
wilderness of mechanisms.’79
At the D-day landings and later during the Second World War, Lasdun was in-
volved in the design of airplane landing strips. ‘I found those earth-moving machines
extraordinarily exciting and I liked making hills, banks and ditches’ was how he ac-
knowledged UEA’s debt to his wartime years.80 Recalling aerial surveys, a photograph
records Lasdun’s pleasure as he disembarks from a bright yellow helicopter hired to
discover the best setting for the university at Earlham Park, a late eighteenth-century
picturesque landscape. At an early press conference to discuss his design, Lasdun em-
phasised his intention ‘not to wreck for all time the most wonderful landscape in which
we find ourselves … it’s a very, very beautiful place.’81 In a key design decision with
picturesque connotations, he decided that the various architectural elements ‘were to
be disposed on this site with loving care for the configuration and contours of the land-
scape, its prospect and aspect,’ recalling the first chapter ‘The Prospect’ in Christopher
Hussey’s seminal study The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View, 1927.82

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Remarking that ‘I became interested in designing buildings which responded

almost ecologically to unique and specific situations,’ Lasdun recommended Colvin as
UEA’s landscape architect.83 She looked to maintain the site’s rich variety of natural
habitats, including hedgerows, marshes, meadows, riverbanks and woods. As far as
possible, Colvin wanted the landscape to be ‘a self-conserving system,’ remarks Hal
Moggridge, her business partner, who characterises Colvin as ‘a romantic, as am I.’84
The rising ground was made to gently dip close to the base of the residential ziggurats
so that they appear to rise directly from the land like rocky outcrops tucked into the
slope above a moist, marshy river as the architect intended.85 Nearer to the university
buildings Colvin’s 1967 landscape report recommends that the fine grass is closely
mown, while further away it is of a rougher texture, left long and only ‘scythed occa-
sionally,’ contrasting a cultivated lawn to a wild meadow. Colvin also refers to ‘the dell,’
‘a large hollow, perhaps an old chalk pit’ with ‘a small wood of natural growth at its
southern end,’ which ‘is of ecological interest, containing self-sown deciduous’ trees
of various ages. She suggests that a part of this ‘wilderness’ could accommodate the
open-air elliptical amphitheatre depicted in this location in Lasdun’s 1962 develop-
ment plan, and a sketch section shows the wooded hill as a backdrop to the stage.86
Introducing a further emblem of the picturesque, Colvin & Moggridge proposed a
‘Prospect’ on a newly sculpted hill immediately to the north of the dell.87 To the south,
a further ‘wilderness’ ‘would include waterlogged reed beds, new plantations of cricket
bat willows, a large lake (the Broad) and a small area of unkempt meadow.’88

Colvin & Moggridge,

landscape architects for
Phase 1 of UEA, 1970. Hal
­Moggridge, site sketch. Cour-
tesy of Colvin & Moggridge.

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 na t i ons in r uins

Lasdun and Colvin both acknowledged the influence of Repton, a Norfolk

resident for over 20 years.89 Remarking that ‘Repton may have been the first
person’ to recognise ‘that there was a sort of natural appropriateness, depend-
ing on opposite rather than on similar qualities, between the forms of archi-
tecture and the forms of nature,’ Colvin was concerned to preserve a group of
mature Spanish Chestnuts. The ‘tree has a curious, gaunt habit with heavy
lateral branches that droop with age, and a flattened head of angular branches
at the summit’ that contrasts with and thus complements Lasdun’s residential
ziggurats.90 Proposing a vocabulary for post-war reforestation, she notes that
just 23 of the 60 trees in Trees for Town and Country, 1947, originated in
Britain and invokes an arboreal allegory of liberalism: ‘Although introduced to
Britain by human agency, the Spanish Chestnut grows well on light soils and
suits our landscape. It has become so well integrated that the eye accepts it
as a native tree.’91
Employing coastal, landscape and urban metaphors, Lasdun remarked
that the ‘architectural hills and valleys’ of an ‘academic city’ are an ‘outcrop
of stone on the side of a hill leading down to a river’ and a ‘landlocked har-
bour.’92 In this sense, the architect created the hill as well as the city. As
the sloping lawn rises nearly 25 metres from the river to the ridge and the
buildings rise a further 30 metres, the university is one of the higher hills in
the famously flat lowlands of east Norfolk, and visible from some distance. In
UEA’s carefully composed skyline, the service blocks surmounting the ziggu-
rats contain water tanks that initiate a poetic narrative described in a 1964
report: ‘rainwater is collected in gutters in the roof of each floor, discharged
from one to the next at the prow of each breakfast room and drained to the
River Yare.’93 Expressing the flow of water, an extruded concrete gargoyle
completes the prow of each floor. Rising behind the ziggurats, the articulated
rooftops of the teaching blocks are particularly evident in the science depart-
ments, which include cranked ventilation ducts, sculpted water tanks and a
cantilevered lecture theatre.
Lasdun commissioned the photographer Richard Einzig to prepare a fine
set of black and white images of the campus. One much published photo-
graph recalls Pevsner’s association of a nation with its climate: ‘moisture …
lays a haze over man and building, dissolving their bodily solidity.’94 Across
the marshy meadow, the craggy silhouette is seen in the misty evening glow
of a vast Norfolk sky scattered with high drifting clouds. To the left, the sparse
foliage of a large tree frames the view, very much in the manner that Claude

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 na t i ons in r uins

Denys Lasdun, University

of East Anglia, Norwich,
1968. View of the ziggurats
from the River Yare. Cour-
tesy of Richard Einzig/Arcaid
Images.

would frame his own picturesque subjects through left-of-centre overhanging

leaves and branches, inspiring both eighteenth-century and twentieth-century
advocates of the picturesque.
The forms and metaphors of Lasdun’s design reimagine a pastoral Arcadia of
temples, amphitheatres and rolling coastal landscapes. Predicting the romantic
appeal of UEA’s future appearance, he concluded:

As bits get chipped off and bits grow around it, I think it will become part of land-
scape … On a wet day it may look drab and forbidding, and they might scuttle
away from it. On a sunny day it’s magical, but then buildings are like that, they
should be.95

Of the National Theatre, London, 1976, Lasdun remarked, ‘I have always wanted
to see the exterior with something growing on it—Virginia creeper would be ideal,
changing colour with the seasons,’ adding, ‘It will weather, it will streak, it will
become part of nature. It will probably get lichen from the river, there will be trees
around it.’96

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Denys Lasdun, ‘scrapheap’

of discarded models of the
National Theatre, London, in
his studio, 1970. Courtesy
of Lasdun Archive/RIBA
Collections.

Celebrating ruination as a necessary and creative aspect of the design pro-

cess and the life of a building, Lasdun appreciated the monumental ‘scrapheap’
of discarded National Theatre models in his studio, recording the evolving as-
semblage in a series of photographs that recall Gandy’s paintings of Soane’s
built and unbuilt projects in the Picture Room. Admiring Soane, Lasdun dis-
cussed cork models with John Summerson, then curator of Sir John Soane’s
Museum, and followed Soane’s practice in commissioning one of UEA.97 Soane
favoured cork because of its ability to convincingly represent the monumental
stone buildings of classical antiquity, and Lasdun clearly hoped to achieve a
similar sense of mass with concrete, his preferred building material. Concrete
was extensively employed in ancient Rome, while reinforced concrete was de-
veloped in the nineteenth century as a hybrid of fine and coarse aggregates,
cement and water with steel reinforcement, which an early pioneer Auguste
Perret described as an ‘antique material turned modern.’98 Concrete was most
popular among architects not in the early twentieth century when they dis-
missed history but in the post-war era when they rediscovered it, wishing to

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emphasise continuity between the past and the present. Architects selected
concrete because of the meanings it suggested as much as any practical ad-
vantages it offered. Emphasising concrete’s primitivism to recall both archaic
forms and recent devastation, Le Corbusier characterised the angled rooflights
at the monastery of Sainte-Marie de la Tourette, 1959, as ‘cannons’ and ‘ma-
chine guns,’ while the monks described the pock-marked surfaces as ‘stigmata
of suffering’ and Banham concluded that they occupied a ‘magnificent ruin.’99
Of equal importance to its adoption as the material of mid-century modernism,
concrete was associated with the new rights and responsibilities available in the
post-war welfare state, as in uniform study bedrooms piled high in a ziggurat.

Denys Lasdun, University

of East Anglia, Norwich,
1968. Detail view of UEA
under construction. Cour-
tesy of Lasdun Archive/RIBA
Collections.

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 na t i ons in r uins

Denys Lasdun, University

of East Anglia, Norwich,
1968. Panoramic view of
UEA under construction.
Courtesy of Lasdun Archive/
RIBA Collections.

Concrete’s two construction processes, both employed at UEA, emphasise

the dialogue between old and new. Standardised and repetitive, precast concrete
is formed in a factory and quickly assembled on site, as in an industrial process,
while in situ concrete is poured into purpose-made formwork in the open air and
closer to a craft process. A concrete building is a memorial to the weather as its
constituent materials set and solidified and, bearing the imprint of its formwork,
to the shapes and surfaces of a lost timber building. Building materials have
specific attributes and relations with other materials, reacting to and affecting
the weather, both locally in terms of a microclimate and globally. Concrete’s en-
vironmental performance is complex. Its high thermal mass can help to maintain
an even internal temperature in summer and winter. But, when chalk and clay
fuse at high temperatures to form cement, high carbon dioxide emissions are
a disturbing consequence. Like Kahn, Lasdun was unaware of the seriousness
of this problem, having designed UEA before global warming became widely
acknowledged.
Reinforced concrete weathers and stains on the outside and also ages from
within. Lasdun liked ‘sombre buildings’ even when he was in Rome, and he was
aware that massive materials tend to produce the most evocative and poignant
ruins.100 Susan Lasdun recalls that her husband was ‘very romantic about rain-
streaked concrete.’101 Concrete’s tendency to form surface cracks allows water
penetration to initiate alkali-silica reactions, causing steel to corrode and concrete

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to fracture and break.102 Traditional atmospheric pollutants such as sulphur di-

oxide had decreased since the start of the twentieth century, but there had been
a significant increase in nitrogen dioxide fertiliser deposits, stimulating fungal
growths on UEA’s building surfaces.103 Marked with algae, lichen and moss,
UEA appeared archaic by the end of the twentieth century, suggesting wartime
destruction as well as picturesque and ancient ruins and indicating the continuing
appeal of the sublime in the modern era through technological failure and artistic
success. Exemplifying growth as well as decay, a monumental ruin looks to the
future as well as the past, generating an appropriate image for a highly regarded
and innovative university that today is best known for creative writing and climate
change research.104 But algae, lichen and moss also turned a past image of the
future—a new university—into one of swift decay that was sadly appropriate to
the demise of free higher education in 1998, one of the emblems of the welfare
state.105

A partial future

The destruction of the Second World War was most apocalyptic in a nation
where the traditional Western dialectic between a monument and a ruin was
itself an imposition. On 6 August 1945, the American Boeing B-29 Superfor-
tress Enola Gay was the first plane to drop an atomic bomb, code-named ‘Little
Boy.’ The devastation left flattened rubble-strewn cities, not sublime ruins, for
present and future generations, increasing the psychological need for monu-
mental as well as ruined architectures in a globalised world ‘suspended in a
nuclear threat of opposing superpowers.’106 Arata Isozaki was born in 1931, a
generation after Kahn. Denys Lasdun and Peter Smithson served in the military,
but Isozaki was a child during the Second World War, raised in the city of Oita
equidistant between Hiroshima and Nagasaki in southwest Japan. He recalls
the bombing campaign on dozens of conurbations that preceded the atomic
attack:

Those firebombs that lit up the evening skies over Japan’s cities towards the
end of the war looked like beautiful fireworks to me. My memories of running to
escape the bombs came back to me in the bursts of excitement children feel in
the mirror maze at amusement grounds. Terrified certainly, but even as I was des-
perate to escape, I wanted to be there within it all until the last possible moment.
Perhaps I instinctively understood that once I escaped that chaos, nothing would
remain but an abyss.107

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Isozaki characterises the trauma of nuclear devastation as ‘the degree zero’ from
which everything else derives and to which he compulsively returns:

Stained upon my eyes was the scene of destruction and extinction that came first,
before the beginning of everything else … the mark of trauma itself came to be
my signature. After-all this is the core of what Japan-ness is to me.108

Beginning in the 1630s and continuing for over 200 years, Japan pursued an iso-
lationist foreign policy in which trade and cultural relations with other nations were
limited, and most foreigners were barred from entering the country. The Western
concept of modernity was alien to Japanese Confucianism, which emphasised re-
spect for moral order and the status quo. Modernisation and Westernisation began
abruptly in the mid-nineteenth century after US intervention. In 1945, Japan sur-
rendered just days after the nuclear attack and the allied occupation of a defeated
nation continued until 1952, stimulating further Westernisation as well as disen-
chantment with the West, and both increasing modernisation and a suspicion of
technology.
Given this national history, Isozaki acknowledges that his generation was
the first to look equally at Japanese architecture and the ‘classics’ of the West
such as ‘the works of Palladio.’109 In premodern Japan, the distinction between
an intellectual and an artisan meant that master craftsmen constructed build-
ings according to known techniques and the taste of patrons.110 Discussing
the twelfth-century priest, who directed the reconstruction of the Great Buddha
Pavilion (Daibutsu-den) of Tõdai-ji in Nara, central Japan, Isozaki writes: ‘In
the strictest sense Chõgen was no architect … He judged and decided, but
expressed himself only by way of words and did not use drawings or models,
like Brunelleschi.’111 In Japan, as in China, the Western conception of the ar-
chitect as a designer and architecture as an art and a profession coincided with
the arrival of modernism. As a consequence, a premodern Japanese building
could retrospectively become architecture and the architect could retrospec-
tively ‘be interpolated, however anachronistically, between patron and master
carpenter.’112
Emphasising that the end of Japan’s isolation introduced the Western
­conception of ruins to Japan, Isozaki cites Piranesi and Burke in particular:
‘Much of our aesthetics of Ruins goes back to the visionaries of the ­eighteenth
century.’113 In a linear conception of time that materialises ideas in monu-
ments, there is a desire for architecture to physically endure, even as a ruin:
‘In the Orient, however, there is an easier attitude towards deterioration and

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destruction especially in Japan, and in particular in Tokyo. So these two c­ ultures

present the extremes: monument and anti-monument, or object and anti-­
object.’114 ­Traditional Japanese philosophy has no equivalent to the ­Western
notion of lasting physical ruins but other concepts of ruin are evident, which
in ­contemporary Japan exist alongside and in combination with the Western
understanding of ruins.
Dedicated to the ancestral gods of the imperial household, the ­seventh-century
Shinto shrine at Ise in central Japan has been rebuilt in timber over 60 times
around 20-year intervals. The shrine alternates between two adjacent sites so
that the rebuilt structure sits alongside a pebble rectangle marking the location
of the dismantled and future structures, and thus of past, present and future
ruins.115 Shinto focuses on life and not an afterlife of any kind. According to
­Isozaki, ‘the ritual of rebuilding/relocation reiterates the ­primary installation of the
sacred within the shrine’ and ‘embraces a biological model of ­regeneration.’116
Stone is more durable than timber. But comparing the Athenian Acropolis and the
Ise shrine and the values of the West and Japan, Isozaki recognises the ‘shared
will to embody permanence … but the paths to attainment are opposed.’117 The
Parthenon survives as a physical ruin, while Ise endures by never becoming one.
Emphasising the significance of rituals and customs rather than material
forms, Shinto and Buddhism are complementary and many Japanese observe
them both. The Buddhist concept of mujõ, which means impermanence, was
expressed in the contrasting huts of two medieval hermits. Demountable and
portable from site to site, and thus analogous to ‘dying and being reborn’ in ‘a se-
ries of incarnations,’ the hut of Kamo no Chomei emphasises ‘a kind of existence
that is in harmony on all levels with the law of impermanence/instability. The
corollary is that one ought to abandon all positions and constructions intended as
fortresses against mujo’, writes William LaFleur.118 Impermanent in other ways,
Saigyõ’s hut was static but ‘ruinous,’ ‘leaky and shaky.’119 According to Jin Baek:

These qualities—the result of nature’s weathering and the test of time—would be

the objects of immediate repair in a conventional practice of dwelling. However,
Saigyo accepted the hut in ruins not only as a legitimate condition, but also as
the ultimate destiny of life.120

Isozaki emphasises the influence on Japanese architecture of Saigyõ, who was

Chõgen’s friend and appreciated the harmony between the Ise shrine and its
ancient forest setting.121 Like Saigyõ, Isozaki affirms the ephemerality of architec-
ture and dismisses futile attempts to create enduring structures: ‘Time encroaches

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on all materials, and being decomposes and begins to flow away.’122 However,
the hut of Saigyõ, a famous poet, gently weathered and slowly disappeared during
a lifetime, while Isozaki recalls buildings blown to ashes in a moment.
In 1954, after studying at Tokyo University, Isozaki began working for Kenzõ
Tange, later equating his employer’s analysis of Ise, Prototype of Japanese Ar-
chitecture, 1965, to Kahn’s ‘Form and Design,’ 1961, in terms of ‘a discovery
of form that energizes potencies into a system.’123 Tange was the architect of the
Hiroshima Peace Center, 1950, at the centre of the reconstructed city, a partici-
pant at the 1959 CIAM meeting at Otterlo alongside Kahn, and briefly mentioned
in Banham’s The New Brutalism, 1966.124 In 1973, the Shah and Queen of
Iran commissioned Kahn and Tange to prepare designs for a new public space
in Tehran. Working in collaboration, their initial, separate designs converged in
a joint proposal. As a member of Tange’s team, Isozaki prepared a final drawing
of the design in 1974, but Kahn died unexpectedly that year and the project
did not progress further.125 Tange was a leading advocate of Japanese Metabo-
lism, which proposed buildings that assemble and disassemble in appreciation
of biological systems.126 To some degree, a Metabolist megastructure continued
Chomei’s understanding of mujõ, although the fixed structural cores were massive
and immovable; only the other parts were changeable, and then in principle more
than in practice.127 Describing megastructures as the ‘Dinosaurs of the Modern
Movement,’ Banham recognises a forlorn attempt to answer present problems
with past failures, concluding that a singular form suited architects’ sense of
visual order but was impractical and insensitive to the varied and changing de-
mands of a city.128 According to Isozaki: ‘In 1960 Japan was just entering a
period of exponential growth and, indeed, the future looked rosy.’129 But he could
not be naïvely optimistic:

Etched into my very retina in that moment when suddenly time stopped, those
burnt ruins would come back to me every time I confronted a white sheet of
drawing paper. Back in the early 1960s working on the City of the Future, I could
do little more than leave the white paper white. All I could draw were broken
fragments, melted and fused, deformed and distorted, that created objects that
were only formed by chance.130

His drawing, Incubation Process, 1962, shows a new city suspended above
multilevel roads, ramps and plazas, which Banham clumsily misinterprets as
merely an image of ‘the new city disdainfully overstepping the tumbled ruins of
older urban cultures.’131 A massive post and lintel megastructure rises among

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 na t i ons in r uins

the ruins of an equally vast Greek temple, mimicking its trabeated construction.
Some of the circular structural cores rise directly from broken Doric columns.
According to Isozaki: ‘The simple effect of placing plain, massive ruins at the
centre of tomorrow’s world was to destroy that rose-tinted future that I never
really believed in anyway.’132 In a corner of the drawing, a discarded fragment
of a modern megastructure may remain a ruin or become a future founda-
tion. Identifying ruins as a ‘source of the imagination’ and turning to ‘other
times in history when the image of ruins were cherished,’ Isozaki concluded:
‘Professing faith in ruins was equal to planning the future, so much were the
times deranged and out of sync.’133 Overlapping construction and ruination, he
conceived ‘time inverted’ so that Incubation Process ‘was a partial future and
partially it was the past.’134
Appreciating the anti-establishment ethos of the 1960s, Isozaki associated
worldwide protests against authority with ‘the dissolution of Modernism’:

In some respects, 1968 may be compared with 1527, when papal Rome was
sacked, occupied, and pillaged by the Spanish. Although the Spanish occupation
was only temporary and papal authority was restored with the passage of time,
this incident destroyed Rome’s character as a cultural center and gave birth to
the possibility of Mannerism.135

Citing Giulio Romano’s Palazzo Te, he conceives a ‘schizophrenic eclecticism’ or

modern Mannerism, in which Western and Japanese elements collapse and de-
construct.136 An early, unpublished version of Isozaki’s collected essays between
1960 and 1985 Japan-ness in Architecture, 2006, was entitled The Ruin of
Styles.137

Under such circumstances all architectural style is reduced to ruins. The only
things available for architectural design are the fragments scattered in the ruins.
Should reconstruction be accomplished, the results would no doubt still resemble
ruins.138

Isozaki’s first invitation outside Japan was for the 14th Milan Triennale in 1968,
when he exhibited alongside the Smithsons among others, presenting a multime-
dia installation Electric Labyrinth in collaboration with the photographer Shõmei
Tõmatsu, graphic designer Kõhei Sugiura and composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, over-
laying disturbing images of buildings, bodies and ghosts from Japan’s past and
recent history. As part of the installation, he produced a large photomontage

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Hiroshima Ruined Again in the Future, 1968, in which the charred, collapsed
ruins of a future megastructure are inserted into a panoramic photograph of the
city taken soon after nuclear devastation: ‘Bringing the city to be constructed back
to the city that had been destroyed emphasised the cycle of becoming and extinc-
tion.’139 Hiroshima Ruined Again in the Future combines and distorts W
­ estern
and Japanese concepts of ruins. The few broken structures are torn of any magnif-
icence. The rubble recalls a commemorative pebble rectangle, although ­violence
and not the life-affirming ritual was the cause.
The Japanese psyche is marked by the destruction wrought by frequent and
devastating earthquakes, sometimes in a single decade: ‘According to the herme-
neutics of Japan-ness, even instantaneous annihilation could be broadly regarded
as an act of nature.’140 Emphasising the continuing relevance of the photomon-
tage and the installation, Isozaki’s display in the Japanese Pavilion at the 1996
Venice Architecture Biennale was entitled ‘Architects as Seismographers,’ in which
he re-exhibited Hiroshima Ruined Again in the Future in response to the 1995
Kobe earthquake, while Electric Labyrinth was reconstructed at the Zentrum für
Kunst und Medientechnologie at Karlsruhe in 2002 and then exhibited at other
venues worldwide.141

Arata Isozaki, Kenzo Tange

and Atsushi Ueda, Festival
Plaza, Expo ’70, Osaka,
1970. A view of the west
side with tiers of spectator
seating. Courtesy of Archi-
tectural Press Archive/RIBA
Collections.

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 na t i ons in r uins

Expo ’70 at Osaka was a World Fair conceived to celebrate and promote J­ apan’s
economic success and technological advance with Tange as the chief a­ rchitect.
Proposing the central Festival Plaza, which included two huge robots, a retractable
roof, movable seating and dynamic sound and lighting equipment, Isozaki was
responsible for its technological systems. Secretly calling ‘the invisible devices’ an
‘Invisible Monument’ that would be destroyed after just six months, ­Isozaki was
caught between enthusiasm for the design and dislike of his state client:

This was a serious contradiction, and when the work finished, I suffered a breakdown
and had to be hospitalized … Was there a longing for Thanatos (the Greek figure of
death) lurking behind all of this? … But why are people so interested in ruins, unless
there is a need to destroy the dominant aesthetic order. Erotic energy aims at exciting
cold violence. So long as this passion exists, ruins will exist all around you.142

Isozaki’s ‘Invisible Monument’ was prophetic: ‘In 1960, the future suggested to
me only ruins. Then it was a question of dead masonry: now 20 years later, the
prospect is filled with dead technology.’143
Combining Western and Japanese conceptions of ruination, Isozaki still
designs with ‘three-dimensional, solid heavy materials, such as concrete, or
stone.’144 Rather than being specific to a time or a place, he argues that ruins are
architecture’s ‘general characteristic’:

From the moment the constructions I participate in are completed they begin
their journey on the road to ruin, just as living things move on to their death.
Indeed, from the moment a building is conceived in thought, of itself it already
includes its own decay.145

A cyclical conception of time, in which only change is eternal, conceives ruina-

tion in terms of a continuous cycle of birth, life and death. Isozaki associates the
Japanese spatio-temporal concept ma, which translates as interval or gap, with
the rubble aftermath of an earthquake or a nuclear bomb or a pebble rectangle at
Ise, and thus ‘with a productive emptiness’ and potential renewal: ‘Since change
is half-destructive and half-constructive, it should be permissible for architecture
to create the exact appearance of ruins.’146

Notes

1 Bullock, pp. 151–154, 169; Vidler, ‘Air War and Architecture,’ pp. 29–40.
2 Clark, quoted in Woodward, In Ruins, p. 212.

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 na t i ons in r uins

3 Boym, pp. 4–9; Huyssen, p. 7.

4 Clark et al., in Casson, Colvin, and Groag, p. 4.
5 Colvin, ‘A Planting Plan’, pp. 26, 28, 30.
6 Colvin, Land and Landscape, 1970, p. 222. Refer to Colvin, Wonder in a World,
pp. 5–6, 7–8, 26, 32.
7 Speer, pp. 36–37. Refer to Scobie, pp. 93–94, refer to p. 94, no. 5; Stead, pp. 51–64.
8 Pevsner, ‘The Genesis of the Picturesque,’ p. 139.
9 Pevsner, ‘The Genius of the Place,’ p. 232.
10 Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art, pp. 163–164, refer to pp. 14, 18–19,
163–164, 185–187.
11 Pevsner, ‘Twentieth-Century Picturesque: An Answer to Basil Taylor’s Broadcast,’ p. 229.
12 Pevsner, ‘The Lure of Rusticity,’ p. 27.
13 Pevsner, ‘The Genius of the Place,’ p. 233. Refer to Macarthur and Aitchison,
pp. 1–43.
14 Colquhoun, p. 2; Pevsner, ‘Twentieth-Century Picturesque: An Answer to Basil Taylor’s
Broadcast,’ p. 229, quoted in Pevsner, ‘Twentieth Century Picturesque: Reply to Alan
Colquhoun,’ p. 2. Refer to Hitchcock, pp. 9, 12, 220.
15 Banham, ‘Kent and Capability,’ p. 89.
16 Banham, ‘Revenge of the Picturesque,’ p. 267.
17 In ‘The New Brutalism,’ Banham does not refer to the picturesque directly but to
Basil Taylor’s criticism to which Pevsner responded. In The New Brutalism: Ethic or
­Aesthetic, 1966, Banham details his attack on the picturesque. Banham, ‘The New
Brutalism,’ p. 355; Banham, The New Brutalism, p. 43.
18 Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘The New Brutalism,’ p. 1.
19 Banham notes that the Smithsons had not visited Japan at that time. Alison and Peter
Smithson, ‘The New Brutalism,’ p. 1; Banham, ‘The New Brutalism,’ p. 356; Banham,
The New Brutalism, p. 46.
20 Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘Banham’s Bumper Book on Brutalism,’ p. 1590.
21 Banham, ‘The New Brutalism,’ p. 357.
22 Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘Correspondence,’ p. 140.
23 Pevsner, ‘The Anti-Pioneers,’ p. 298.
24 Banham, ‘The New Brutalism,’ p. 360.
25 Rowe, letter to Kahn, 7 February 1956, quoted in Gargiani, p. 109.
26 Macmillan, quoted in Nigel Fisher, p. 192. Refer to Zweinger-Bargielowska,
pp. 234–242.
27 Alison Smithson, ‘Patio and Pavilion,’ p. 11.
28 Peter Smithson, ‘Letter to America,’ p. 95. The article was first credited to Peter
­Smithson and then reprinted and credited to Alison and Peter Smithson in Ordinariness
and Light, 1970, pp. 135–143.
29 Already at Hunstanton School, they had incorporated references to the English land-
scape park, including a ha-ha. Alison and Peter Smithson, Alison and Peter Smithson:
The Shift, p. 36.
30 Peter Smithson in conversation with Bruno Krucker, 3 June 1995, quoted in Krucker,
p. 17.

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 na t i ons in r uins

31 Peter Smithson, Conversations, pp. 48–49.

32 Alison Smithson, ‘Saint Jerome,’ p. 225.
33 Collectively called Group Six, its members belonged to the Independent Group, which
was active and influential in the 1950s. Theo Crosby curated the exhibition.
34 Alloway, quoted in Lippard, p. 36.
35 Banham, ‘This is Tomorrow,’ p. 187; Banham, The New Brutalism, p. 65.
36 Alison and Peter Smithson, Without Rhetoric, p. 14.
37 For example, Soane met Beckford in London on 5 and 17 December 1813. They met
again on 14 May 1829. On 19 September 1829, Soane left his card at ­Beckford’s
home in Bath and visited two days later. Soane, ‘Soane’s Note Books,’ vol. 8,
­1811–1813, pp. 121–122; vol. 13, 1829–1831, pp. 20, 37.
38 Lansdown. p. 40.
39 In John Rutter’s 1823 map of the ‘Fonthill Domain,’ the Smithsons’ site is part of ‘West
Lawn Farm House.’ Rutter, following p. 100.
40 Alison Smithson, ‘Folly … A “Solar” Pavilion,’ p. 238.
41 Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘Folly at Fonthill, Wilts,’ p. 482.
42 Peter Smithson, in conversation with Bruno Krucker, 28 September 2001, quoted in
Krucker, p. 40; Alison Smithson, ‘Folly … A “Solar” Pavilion,’ p. 238; Alison and Peter
Smithson, ‘Folly at Fonthill, Wilts,’ p. 482.
43 Peter Smithson, in Alison and Peter Smithson, Upper Lawn, Solar Pavilion Folly.
44 Peter Smithson, ‘The Yellow House at an Intersection,’ p. 394.
45 Alison and Peter Smithson, Alison and Peter Smithson: The Shift, p. 66.
46 Alison and Peter Smithson, 1986, quoted in Salter and Wong, p. 9.
47 Alison Smithson, ‘Patio and Pavilion,’ p. 11.
48 As this lecture was given many years after the design of Upper Lawn Pavilion, ­Alison
Smithson’s interpretation may, in part, be due to hindsight. Alison Smithson, ‘At
the time of the Presentation of Upper Lawn Book: Barcelona’, unpublished lecture,
­December 1986, quoted in Risselada, p. 54.
49 Alison Smithson, ‘Saint Jerome,’ p. 225.
50 Alison Smithson, ‘Saint Jerome,’ p. 228.
51 Alison Smithson, ‘Saint Jerome,’ p. 228.
52 Peter Smithson, ‘A Sensibility Primer,’ p. 1; Alison Smithson, AS in DS, p. 47.
53 Alison Smithson, AS in DS, p. 151.
54 Alison Smithson, AS in DS, p. 91, refer to p. 11.
55 Hutton, p. 52.
56 Padovan, p. 72.
57 Jonathan Sergison in Allison, pp. 97–98.
58 Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘Robin Hood Gardens, London,’ p. 296.
59 Alison Smithson, ‘Collective Design: The Violent Consumer or Waiting for the Goodies,’
p. 277. Refer to Boyer, Not Quite Architecture, pp. 297–281; Boyer, ‘Why Do Archi-
tects Write?’ pp. 57–62.
60 Alison Smithson, in Alison and Peter Smithson. ‘The Smithsons on Housing,’ pp. 57, 69.
61 Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘Holes in Cities,’ p. 172; Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘Robin
Hood Gardens, Tower Hamlets, London (1966–1972)’, p. 177.

287
 na t i ons in r uins

62 Alison and Peter Smithson. ‘Contributions to a Fragmentary Utopia,’ p. 100.

63 Simon Smithson, p. 78.
64 Alison and Peter Smithson, quoted in Alison Smithson, ‘Sticks and Stones,’ p. 393.
65 Alison Smithson, ‘Sticks and Stones,’ p. 393. Refer to Turner, ‘A Small Segment of a
Masterpiece.’
66 Alison Smithson, in Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘The Smithsons on Housing,’ pp. 73–74.
67 Dickon Robinson, ‘Fit for Purpose,’ p. 129.
68 Fior, in Wainwright.
69 Simon Smithson, p. 79.
70 Kahn prepared several designs for the new Hurva Synagogue in the late 1960s and
early 1970s to replace the old synagogue on the same site. The Mayor of Jerusalem
Teddy Kollek visited and admired the National Theatre, London, in 1976, the year it
was completed, and approached Lasdun to replace Kahn. Kollek, letter to Lasdun, 27
December 1976, Lasdun Archive. RIBA Library Drawings and Archives Collections,
Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Refer to Lasdun, ‘Interview,’ p. 287.
71 Lasdun studied at the Architectural Association in London when the strong Beaux-Arts
influence led to projects such as ‘An Embassy on a Rocky Promontory,’ which was
seen alongside ‘the early stirrings of modern architecture’ that made the AA the first
UK architecture school committed to modernism. Richards, p. 43; Lasdun, ‘Royal Gold
Medallist Address’, p. 221.
72 Lasdun, ‘The Architecture of Urban Landscape,’ pp. 135, 137; Lasdun, in Davies and
Lasdun, ‘Thoughts in Progress: Summing Up II,’ p. 395.
73 Lasdun, ‘Notes on a Lecture on Nicholas Hawksmoor,’ p. 223.
74 Lasdun, in Davies and Lasdun, ‘Thoughts in Progress: The New Brutalism,’ pp. 111–112.
Refer to Lasdun, in Davies and Lasdun, ‘Thoughts in Progress: Summing Up III—The
“Objects Found” Philosophy,’ p. 436.
75 Alison and Peter Smithson, Without Rhetoric, p. 30.
76 Lasdun, in Davies and Lasdun, ‘Thoughts in Progress: The New Brutalism,’
pp. ­111–112. Refer to Calder, pp. 126–127.
77 Robbins, p. 265.
78 Banham, Megastructure, p. 132.
79 Lasdun, ‘His Approach to Architecture,’ p. 273.
80 Lasdun, in Dennis Sharp, ‘Interview with Denys Lasdun,’ 1976, first draft, pp. 3, 6,
Lasdun Archive.
81 Lasdun, ‘About Anglia.’
82 Lasdun, ‘His Approach to Architecture,’ p. 273; Hussey, The Picturesque, pp. 1–17.
83 Colvin was appointed in 1966. Lasdun, ‘The Architecture of Urban Landscape,’ p. 135.
84 Moggridge became her business partner in 1969 and collaborated on UEA. Moggridge,
in conversation with Jonathan Hill, 11 November 2013.
85 Lasdun, ‘The Architecture of Urban Landscape,’ p. 146; Lasdun, quoted in Curtis,
p. 96; Lasdun, ‘His Approach to Architecture’, p. 273.
86 Colvin, ‘Interim Landscape Report and Approximate Estimate of Cost, UEA’, December
1967, pp. 17–27, dwg. 511/R/5, Colvin & Moggridge Archive.

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 na t i ons in r uins

87 Colvin & Moggridge, ‘Site Sketch no. 3. “Prospect”—Further Shaping,’ 20 July 1970,
drawn by Moggridge, Colvin & Moggridge Archive.
88 Colvin and Moggridge, ‘Landscape Recommendations to Accompany Development
Plan 1970, UEA: First Draft,’ January 1970, p. 5, Colvin & Moggridge Archive.
89 Lasdun, ‘His Approach to Architecture,’ p. 273; Lasdun, in response to Frank Thistleth-
waite, ‘Origins: A Personal Reminiscence of UEA’s Foundation’, 2000, Lasdun Archive.
90 Colvin, Land and Landscape, 1970, p. 128; Colvin, Trees for Town and Country,
no. 16; Colvin, ‘Interim Landscape Report and Approximate Estimate of Cost, UEA,’
December 1967, p. 11, Colvin & Moggridge Archive.
91 Colvin, Land and Landscape, 1970, p. 220.
92 Lasdun, ‘The Architecture of Urban Landscape,’ p. 146; Lasdun, quoted in Curtis,
p. 96; Lasdun, ‘His Approach to Architecture,’ p. 273.
93 ‘Residential Accommodation,’ April 1964, UEA Special Collections, quoted in
­Sanderson, p. 163.
94 Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art, pp. 163–164.
95 Lasdun, in ‘Interview with Denys Lasdun,’ revised draft, 13 June 1979, p. 11, ­Lasdun
Archive.
96 Lasdun, in Simon Jenkins, ‘Interview with Denys Lasdun,’ 19 April 1979, Lasdun
Archive; Lasdun, quoted in Connell, p. 10.
97 In June and July 1972, Lasdun discussed the condition of Soane’s cork models with
Summerson, Lasdun Archive.
98 Perret, quoted in Legault, p. 46.
99 Le Corbusier, quoted in Forty, Concrete and Culture, p. 181; La Tourette monks,
quoted in Legault, p. 47; Banham, The New Brutalism, p. 16. Refer to Forty, Concrete
and Culture, pp. 21–22, 37–39, 69–77, 160–164; Virilio, pp. 37–47.
100 Lasdun, in ‘Interview with Denys Lasdun’, revised draft, 13 June 1979, p. 10, ­Lasdun
Archive.
101 Lady (Susan) Lasdun, in conversation with Jonathan Hill, 16 August 2012.
102 Yates, ‘Mechanisms of Air Pollution Damage,’ pp. 110–118.
103 Brimblecombe and Grossi, ‘Damage to Buildings from Future Climate and Pollution,’
pp. 13–14; Brimblecombe and Grossi, ‘Potential Damage to Modern Building Materi-
als from 21st Century Pollution,’ p. 116; Peter Brimblecombe, email correspondence
with Jonathan Hill, 1 and 4 September 2013.
104 In 2003, two years after Lasdun’s death, the ziggurats, spine, aerial walkway and
other elements of his design were listed Grade II*, initiating a refurbishment pro-
gramme to the specification of English Heritage, the public body responsible for his-
toric buildings. Ignoring that they had become part of the architecture and were in
accordance with the architect’s intention, the university appointed a contractor to
remove the algae, lichen and moss and apply an anti-fungal inhibitor.
105 After the Second World War, most local authorities paid students’ tuition fees and also
contributed a maintenance grant towards living costs, which the 1962 Education Act
made a legal obligation. But in the late 1980s, the Conservative government signalled
a policy change. The first state-supported student loans were for maintenance alone.

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Labour’s Teaching and Higher Education Act of 1998 introduced tuition fees, which
led to a sequence of higher fees and larger loans.
106 Isozaki, ‘1990s: Form,’ p. 160.
107 Isozaki, ‘Ruins,’ p. 31.
108 Isozaki, ‘Writing on Architecture,’ p. 6; Isozaki, ‘Ma (Interstice) and Rubble,’ pp. 84,
89. Refer to Seltzer, pp. 10–11.
109 Isozaki, 1983, quoted in Oshimi, ‘Paradoxical Processes,’ p. 13.
110 Isozaki, ‘Authorship of Katsura,’ p. 291.
111 Isozaki, ‘Brunelleschi versus Chõgen,’ p. 225.
112 Isozaki, ‘Authorship of Katsura,’ p. 293.
113 Isozaki, ‘Ruins,’ p. 32. Refer to Isozaki, ‘1960s: System,’ p. 31.
114 Isozaki, ‘Interview,’ pp. 112–113.
115 Isozaki, ‘Archetype of Veiling,’ p. 147.
116 Isozaki, ‘Preface’, p. xi; Isozaki, ‘Identity over Time,’ p. 145. Refer to Nute, p. 67.
117 Isozaki, ‘Identity over Time,’ p. 145.
118 LaFleur, p. 65.
119 Baek, pp. 66–67. Refer to LaFleur, p. 66.
120 Baek, p. 67.
121 Isozaki, ‘Nature and Artifice,’ pp. 48–50, 55–56; Isozaki, ‘The Problematic called
“Ise,”’ pp. 125–127.
122 Isozaki, ‘Ma (Interstice) and Rubble,’ p. 89.
123 Isozaki, ‘The Problematic called “Ise,”’ p. 128.
124 Banham, The New Brutalism, pp. 46, 128, 130.
125 Mohajeri, pp. 485–486.
126 Banham, The New Brutalism, pp. 46, 128, 130.
127 Baek, p. 68.
128 Banham, Megastructure, pp. 7–9, 130–132, 142–199.
129 Isozaki, ‘Ruins,’ p. 28.
130 Isozaki, ‘Ruins,’ p. 28.
131 Banham, Megastructure, p. 56, refer to p. 206.
132 Isozaki, ‘Ruins,’ p. 30. Refer to Isozaki, ‘Ma (Interstice) and Rubble,’ p. 88; Baek,
pp. 71–72; Oshimi, ‘Paradoxical Processes,’ p. 13.
133 Isozaki, ‘Ma (Interstice) and Rubble’, pp. 99–100.
134 Isozaki, ‘Ruins,’ p. 29.
135 Isozaki, ‘1970s: Metaphor,’ p. 71.
136 Isozaki, ‘1980s: Narrative,’ p. 114. Refer to Isozaki, ‘Ka (Hypothesis) and Hi (Spirit),’
p. 75; Drew, pp. 34–36.
137 In 1980, the theme of the first Venice Architecture Biennale was The Presence
of the Past. Of 20 architects invited to design a façade for the 70 metres long
Strada ­Novissima, 12 were European and 7 were American; Isozaki was the only
­non-Westerner. Szacka, p. 171.
138 Isozaki refers to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, 1986. Isozaki,
‘1980s: Narrative,’ p. 115, refer to p. 114.
139 Isozaki, ‘Ma (Interstice) and Rubble,’ p. 88.

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140 Isozaki, ‘Ma (Interstice) and Rubble,’ p. 84.

141 Isozaki, Japan-ness in Architecture, p. 326, n. 2.
142 Isozaki, ‘Ruins,’ pp. 31–33.
143 Isozaki, ‘Ruins,’ p. 33.
144 Isozaki, ‘Interview,’ p. 111.
145 Isozaki, ‘Ruins,’ p. 30.
146 Isozaki, ‘Ma (Interstice) and Rubble,’ p. 100; Isozaki, ‘1960s: System’, p. 35.

291
 conclusion: a
monument to a
ruin
 c onclusi on: a m onum en t t o a r uin

A monument

Monumentality is in the eye of the beholder. Without any physical transformation,

a structure may become a monument or may no longer be one. A monument can
be private and personal, but more often it reflects shared values. Whether they
are designed for a commemorative purpose or acquire significance in a later era,
monuments mirror a society’s values and concerns at a specific time, indicating
its relations with other communities and other times. Built to last, monuments
address our fears of mortality by convincing us that we will be remembered in
the future. But they can be an ineffective means of collective remembrance. Their
original meanings are soon transformed, obscured or forgotten unless they are
continuously recalled and reaffirmed through everyday or ritualistic behaviour,
which are as necessary to perpetuating collective memory as any material object.
Memory is not static. It may wither, linger or evolve, varying according to who is
remembering what and when. For example, the collective memory of architects
is likely to be quite different from that of another community. A monument may
be celebratory or recall a traumatic event, but it is more often dialectical, indi-
cating what a society chooses to remember and forget. An etymology of the term
‘monument’ refers to the Latin monumentum, which in turn derives from monere,
meaning to remind, warn and advise. A monument’s purpose is complex and
questioning and not merely commemorative.

A ruin

As a ruin, architecture is more not less. As a stimulus to the imagination, a ruin’s

incomplete and broken forms expand architecture’s allegorical and metaphorical
potential. Emphasising that meanings are not fixed but open to adaptation and re-
invention, a fragmented composition is a truer reflection of a contemporary society
than a complete composition, indicating that a work of architecture, art or liter-
ature can remain unfinished, literally and in the imagination, focusing attention
on the creativity of viewers, readers and users, and artists, writers and architects.
Indicative of continuity as well as change, a ruin is both timeless and time-
full. As a means to contemplate time, a ruin is an image of the future as well as
the past, encouraging us to imagine not only what is lost, but also what is yet to
occur. Often a precursor to change, a ruin offers a recollection of the old and a
promise of the new. Rather than confined to the past, the ideas and forms discov-
ered in a ruin can be seen as incomplete and thus ready to be revived, enriched
and expanded in the present. Ruins are like building sites, full of potential.

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 c onclusi on: a m onum en t t o a r uin

As a model for architectural environmentalism, a ruin establishes symbiotic

relations with its ever-changing immediate and wider contexts, celebrating the
creative influence of natural as well cultural forces.1 A ruin humanises nature,
making it comprehensible and familiar. But evolving weather and enveloping veg-
etation naturalise architecture, dialectically equating it to an enduring geological
formation while slowly facilitating its transformation and ruination.

A monument to a ruin

The practices of the architect and the archaeologist have been interdependent
for centuries. Mirroring the need for precision in the sciences, archaeological in-
vestigations stimulated demand for accurate, measured drawings as a means to
compile detailed records and aid comparative analysis within and between sites.
The most substantial structures, components and materials survived as ruins,
while ephemeral materials, subtle traces of use and environmental qualities such
as acoustics were less likely to remain, giving later generations a somewhat dis-
torted image of the original structure and the life within it, and thus an opportunity
for the present to reinvent the past. In surveying ancient ruins and conceiving
archaeology as a creative stimulus to design, Palladio established and Piranesi
expanded the practice of the archaeologist-architect that enabled Kahn to appre-
ciate and revive ancient forms. According to Palladio, the ancient Roman ruins’
purpose was to stimulate drawn and built reconstructions. But the ruin meant
more in subsequent centuries due to the increasing attention to time, nature,
subjectivity and the imagination in progressively secular societies. While Palladio
reconstructed a ruin as a building, Kahn constructed a building as a ruin, follow-
ing the practice of Piranesi before him.
A ruin is typically understood to be an edifice that is no longer in use. But
ruination does not only occur once a building is without a function. Instead, it is
a continuing process that develops at differing speeds in differing spaces while
a building is still occupied. Assembled from materials of diverse ages, from the
newly formed to those centuries or millions of years old, a building incorporates
varied rates and states of transformation. Fluctuating according to the needs of
specific spaces and components, maintenance and repair may sometimes halt
ruination or delay it somewhat, while accepting and accommodating partial ru-
ination can question the recurring cycles of production, obsolescence and waste
that feed consumption in a capitalist society.
The architectural equivalent of junk food, much present-day architecture is
pervasive and disposable: ‘Junkspace sheds architectures like reptiles shed skins,

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 c onclusi on: a m onum en t t o a r uin

is reborn every Monday morning,’ writes Rem Koolhaas.2 In contrast, conceiving

a building as a monument to a ruin is positively paradoxical in that it should be
built of durable materials, emphasising longevity and not obsolescence.
The inevitability of death can either induce lethargy or stimulate ingenuity
in every living moment. In the stoic grandeur of an ancient ruin, decay occurred
in the distant past, stimulating general thoughts of degradation and renewal that
allow us to contemplate life and assume that death is reassuringly in the future.
In a modern ruin, active decay occurs before our eyes, stimulating particularly
disturbing thoughts of our imminent degeneration and demise. All ruins represent
potential as well as loss, but a building modelled on a ruin rebalances this debate
and is synonymous with both the creativity and vulnerability of life. Conceiving a
building as a dialogue between a monument and a ruin, which may fall into ruin,
rise into built form or oscillate between the two, further intensifies the already
blurred relations between the unfinished and the ruined.

The ruin of an idea

Architectural developments rarely occur in national isolation and are more often
based on cultural exchange. Through trade in goods and ideas and colonisation
and conquest, the Western dialogue between a monument and a ruin has become
a global phenomenon, acknowledged in societies that previously had no equiva-
lent concept of architecture, favouring instead their own distinct understandings
of building permanence and impermanence. The resulting hybrid of influences
indicates both the prevalence of a monument to a ruin, its transformation in new
contexts and the point at which it may either be an imposition or an irrelevance.
As the concept assumes some degree of stability and continuity, it may be an
indulgence in a society that has just experienced violent destruction, whether
from an earthquake or a war. The relevance of a monument to a ruin is therefore
limited to times and places in which the concept is appropriate, meaningful and
stimulating.

Modern memory

A society may question what it should monumentalise and what it should ruin,
and give differing answers at differing times. Conserving an ancient site is a
means to emphasise, exploit and even transform the values it represents. The
inverse is its deliberate destruction. In 2015 and again two years later, the
­Islamic State captured Palmyra in modern-day Syria, annihilating 2000-year-old

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structures eulogised in Wood’s The Ruins of Palmyra, 1753, in an attempt

to change the present and deny the past, as if the ancient city, which had
been razed and rebuilt by Romans, had never existed. But a monument is
not necessarily dependent on its physical presence. Ruination can enhance
the status of a structure, which may evermore resolutely resound as a monu-
ment in the memory, if its destruction has profound social, cultural or political
meaning. The ruin of a ruin made Palmyra more widely known. According to
Victor Buchli: ‘the World Trade Center took on an unexpected monumentality
not in durable form but when it shifted in material register into the ephemeral
and highly attenuated visual images of its eternal collapsing structures.’3 Many
people vividly recall the live transmission on 11 September 2001 when the
Twin Towers buckled, later reliving an emotive echo of the original moment in
repeated video footage.
We now have many means to store information and return to these sites to
aid, affirm or adjust our recollections. In each case, to varying degrees, we trans-
fer the mnemonic function from the person to the place. As it is not possible to
literally carry a library of books, a museum of artefacts or an archive of videos,
we still need to mentally edit and recall what we have read, seen and experi-
enced in these places. But personal communications devices store and retain
vast amounts of information, changing the way that artefacts and images are
viewed and remembered. The Internet enables speedy access to knowledge that
was previously difficult to discover. Sharing the same information at the same
time can facilitate local collective action, while on a regional or global scale it
encourages the interconnectedness of peoples and places. At the same time, dig-
ital media can detach that information and the people who view it from an inter-
dependent awareness of history, society and place, encouraging an acontextual
formalism that has, so far, been the pervading characteristic of architecture that
claims distinctly digital origins. The Renaissance treatise established the principle
that a noted building is first seen as an image before it is appreciated with all the
senses. A book contextualises an artwork or a building in relation to other works,
but the Internet often presents an image in isolation and allows it to be readily
appropriated in such a manner. To a far greater degree than before, personal
communications devices undermine the need to recall and relate thoughts, forms
and spaces in the integrated manner that is essential to a creative practice such
as design. As an allegory of historical thinking and its discourse with memory,
the dialogue between a monument and a ruin is evermore poignant and neces-
sary in a twenty-first century society that needs to know how to remember and
remember how to forget.

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What is new?

The desire for the new is seen in our need to indiscriminately acquire and con-
sume the latest fashions, technologies and ideas. But the desire for the new is also
a creative and critical stimulus to cultural, social and technological innovation.
Often, what is presented as new is not new at all but a revival of an earlier form,
idea or practice that has either been ignored or forgotten. Sometimes, what is new
in the present is less fascinating than what was new in the past, which contem-
porary media stimulate via an extensive back catalogue of earlier decades. But
even the exact replication of a past design, fashion or musical genre is still new to
some extent because the present context is not the same as the past one. To ask
what is new, therefore, involves other questions: why is it new, how is it new, and
where is it new? To understand what is new, we need to consider the present, the
past and maybe even the future: we must think historically. Defining something as
new is an inherently historical act because it requires an awareness of what is old.
Each of the terms that we use to discuss and define architecture has an
evolving history and meaning and may disappear, linger or return in the future. For
example, now fashionable again, architectural postmodernism is often associated
with Charles Jencks, who began to use the term in the mid-1970s, but Joseph
Hudnut referred to ‘The Post-Modern House’ in 1945 and Pevsner questioned the
‘over-powering … brutality’ of the ‘postmodern style’ of Le Corbusier and Lasdun’
in 1966.4 More perceptive than Jencks and conscious of how ideas develop and
change, Lyotard included the postmodern within the modern. Acknowledging the
process by which a new artwork questions an earlier one, his categorisation is dy-
namic and not specific to an era: ‘A work can become modern only if it is first post-
modern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the
nascent state.’5 In Lyotard’s schema, we become postmodern to remain modern.
Terms as well as techniques can develop and grow or come and go. In ar-
chitectural design and society as a whole, numerous twenty-first-century tech-
nologies are actually rather old.6 Also, a new technology may look to the past
as much as the future. Bringing drawing closer to building and the ambiguities
of architectural authorship to the fore, the conjunction of design, computation
and fabrication questions the history of the architect and the division of labour
in a manner that brings to mind the thirteenth century as well as the twenty-first
century. In many contemporary industries, a number of practices and procedures
of differing ages remain relevant and stimulating. Rather than a simple linear
progression from one idea to another, the result is an interdependent network of
influences between and across diverse—new and old—models of architectural

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authorship that exist alongside each other. Just as a building can be both archaic
and modern, design can incorporate varied themes and techniques, not simply
because they are useful but because they have social and cultural meaning.
A concern for innovation need not reject or negate the past. Sometimes, the
old is more radical than the new. Creative architects have often looked to the
past to imagine the future, studying an earlier architecture not to replicate it but
to understand it as incomplete, relevant to the present and open to further devel-
opment. In many eras, the most fruitful architectural innovations have occurred
when ideas and forms have migrated from one time and place to another by a pro-
cess of translation that has proved to be as stimulating and inventive as the initial
conception, combining with pre-existing ideas and forms that were the results of
earlier migrations. Thus, a design can be understood as specific to a time and a
place, and also a compound of other times and other places. Twenty-first-century
architects should appreciate the shock of the old as well as the shock of the new.

Designs on histories and novels

Architects have used history in different ways, whether to indicate their continuity
with the past or departure from it. From the Renaissance to the early twenti-
eth century, the architect was a historian in the sense that a treatise combined
drawings and words to consider relations between the past and the present, and
a building was expected to manifest the character of the time and knowingly
critique earlier historical eras. Modernism ruptured this system in principle if not
always in practice, but it returned in the second half of the twentieth century as
modernism’s previously dismissive reaction to social norms and cultural memo-
ries became anachronistic. Vincent Scully concluded that the architect will ‘al-
ways be dealing with historical problems—with the past and, a function of the
past, with the future. So the architect should be regarded as a kind of physical
historian … the architect builds visible history.’7 The architect is a historian twice
over—as a designer of buildings and as an author of books.
As a design is equivalent to a history, we may expect the designer as well as
the historian ‘to have a certain quality of subjectivity’ that is ‘suited to the objec-
tivity proper to history,’ as Ricoeur concludes.8 But the designer does not usually
construct a history with the rigour expected of a contemporary historian, and
we expect the designer to display other qualities of subjectivity as well, whether
personal or cultural.
Histories and novels both need to be convincing but in different ways. The
historian acknowledges that the past is not the same as the present, while the

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novelist inserts the reader in a time and a place that feel very present even if they
are not. Although no history is completely objective, to have any validity it must
appear truthful to the past. A novel may be believable but not true.
Laying bare the processes of construction and decay, a history is both a ruin
of the past and a speculative reconstruction in the present. Surveying archaeolog-
ical sites and preparing analytical and imaginative records of lost buildings and
found ruins stimulated architects to conceive a design as a history, and thus a
history as a designed ruin.9 Equally, the novel’s origin in the fictional autobiogra-
phy ensured that a ‘life in ruins’ is a recurring literary and architectural metaphor,
representing potential as well as loss and a challenge to the protagonist.
The architect is a ‘physical novelist’ as well as a ‘physical historian.’ Like a
history, a design is a reinterpretation of the past that is meaningful to the present.
Equally, a design is equivalent to a fiction, convincing users to suspend disbelief.
We expect a history or a novel to be written in words, but they can also be delin-
eated in drawing, cast in concrete or seeded in soil.
Some architects conceive a building for the present, some imagine for a
mythical past, while others design for a future time and place. Instead, conceiving
a design as a history and a novel and a monument to a ruin envisages the past,
the present and the future in a single architecture. This design practice places
architecture at the centre of cultural production and emphasises its ability to en-
gage and stimulate ideas, stories, values and emotions that inform and influence
individuals and societies. While a prospect of the future is implicit in a history
and a novel, it is explicit in a design, which is always imagined before it is built.

The coproduction of multiple authors

Architecture is made by use as well as by design. Buildings and cities are most
often experienced habitually when they are rarely the focus of attention. But, as
empiricism made evident, habit is not passive. Instead, it is a questioning intel-
ligence acquired over time and subject to continuing re-evaluation. Rather than
necessarily a deviation from habit, creative use can instead establish, affirm or
develop a habit that is itself unexpected and evolving. Just as the reader makes
a book anew through reading, the user makes a building anew through using,
whether through a physical transformation, a change of function or an unexpected
association. In contrast to a singular focused activity such as reading a book,
using a building is a particular type of awareness in which a person performs,
sometimes all at once, a series of complex activities, some habitual and others
not, that move in and out of conscious attention.

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To varying degrees, we all now belong to ‘the look down generation’ navigating
via satellite and ignoring the world around us in favour of the screen. A building ex-
perienced as a ruin confronts this amnesia, promoting functional and spatial ambi-
guity as a means to disturb familiar assumptions and invite unexpected responses.
All buildings change slowly and subtly, but a building designed, occupied and
imagined as a ruin is more temporally aware than other buildings and will require
constant re-evaluation, encouraging particularly questioning and creative relations
between objects, spaces and users at varied times, scales and dimensions.
Climate always changes, whether by human agency or other means. An-
thropogenic climate change is often conceived in terms of biblical metaphors, in
which environmental catastrophe is the punishment for human failing. The dan-
gers posed by anthropogenic climate change are real and need to be addressed
when and where possible. But climate change is not only a scientific concern and
may also encourage unexpected cultural, social and even environmental benefits,
whether at a local, national or regional level. The weather and climate have long
been a stimulus to the architectural imagination and this creative tradition is ev-
ermore relevant in an era that is progressively aware of shifting atmospheres and
vulnerable environments. In response to climate change, the ruin can once again
represent potential as well as loss.
For centuries, and more noticeably since industrialisation, the ‘coproduction’ of
nature and culture explains the buildings, ruins, cities, landscapes, climates and
weathers we inhabit.10 People are natural as well as cultural beings, while every
urban or rural setting is teeming with life forms that are not simply subject to hu-
manity. The resulting intermingling of influences is often complex and sometimes
contradictory, but never simply one-way. A building designed, occupied and im-
agined as a ruin acknowledges the coproduction of multiple authors, whether hu-
man, non-human or atmospheric, and is an appropriate model for architecture in
an era of increasing climate change. A hybrid of nature and culture, a monument
to a ruin represents presence as well as absence, growth as well as decay, life as
well as death, potential as well as loss and the unfinished as well as the undone.

Notes

1 The earliest meaning of the term ‘culture’ referred to agriculture and endured in every-
day discourse from the Middle Ages to the late eighteenth century. Originating in the
early sixteenth century, a further meaning emphasised that the successful and pros-
perous cultivation of land enabled a person to become cultured and cultivated. Both
meanings were in use in the eighteenth century, but the association of culture with

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humanity—not nature—acquired prominence in the nineteenth century. Derived from

the Latin nascere, meaning ‘to be born,’ the term ‘nature’ has numerous meanings in
which the principal distinction is between, first, a concept through which humans de-
fine themselves in relation to what they think they are not and, second, the phenomena
and processes of which humanity is a part.
2 Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace,’ p. 9.
3 Buchli, p. 167; refer to pp. 168–171.
4 Hudnut, pp. 70–75; Jencks; Pevsner, ‘The Anti-Pioneers,’ p. 299.
5 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 79.
6 Edgerton, p. 212.
7 Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism, p. 257.
8 Ricoeur, ‘Objectivity and Subjectivity in History,’ p. 22. Refer to Ricoeur, Time and
Narrative, pp. 99, 243.
9 Soane, ‘Lecture X,’ in Watkin, Sir John Soane, p. 626.
10 Steve Rayner refers to ‘coproduction’ and Jane Bennett refers to ‘distributed agency’
while Carolyn Merchant recognises a ‘partnership’ in which ‘both humans and nature
are active.’ Herbert Marcuse conceives nature as active, sometimes humanity’s ‘ally,’
sometimes hostile. Rayner, p. 287; Bennett, p. 38; Merchant, pp. 223–231; Marcuse,
pp. 65, 69.

302
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Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes.

AAA see American Abstract Artists (AAA) American Abstract Artists (AAA) 211
Abbé Le Blanc 52 American Academy 206–9, 224
Abramson, Daniel 190 Amsterdam Orphanage 221
Accolti, Pietro 68 An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of
Ackerman, James S. 7–10, 17 Taste (Knight) 170
Adam, James 177, 179; and Sir Nathaniel Anderson, Stanford 211
Curzon 129–30, 147 Antichità romane (Piranesi) 90, 91, 96,
Adam, Robert 88, 98, 122, 141, 177; 102, 122, 164, 196n43
‘Bob The Roman’ 115–18; Capriccio The Antiquities of Athens (Stuart and
141–4; Design for a Roman Ruin 139, Revett) 124
141; Dowhill Castle 114; Kedleston The Antiquities of Rome (Palladio) 6, 7
Hall 130–3, 136, 141; Ruined Antique The Apotheosis of St Basil of Cappadocia
Shrine 138; Ruined Temple 138; Ruins 103
of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian Arcadia 38, 51–2
at Spalatro in Dalmatia 122–7, 130, Arcadia (Sannazaro) 42
140, 233; and Sir Nathaniel Curzon Arcadian Hermitage with Satyr and
130, 147; Sketch for Landscaping the Shepherdess (Kent) 79, 114, 168
Park at Kedleston 137; trompe I’oeil ‘Architect Earl’ 21–2
116, 118, 135 The Architects’ Club 177
Adam, William 114 architects 193, 201n156, 207, 277;
Addison, Joseph 47, 48, 54, 63–4, 73, 78 British 121, 124, 221; collective
Adorno, Theodor W. 44 memory of 215, 294; French 173;
Aedes Walpolinae 22 Renaissance 9, 25, 93, 160; Roman
aedicula 165, 231 125, 210
Aerial View of the Bank of England from Architectural Monumentality 211
the South-East (Gandy) 191 architectural movement 258
Ahmedabad 233, 234 Architectural Principles in the Age of
Air House 25–7 Humanism (Wittkower) 225, 226, 259
Aislabie, John 140 The Architectural Review 213, 214,
Aislaby stone 23–4 222, 258
Albani, Cardinal Alessandro 119 Architectural Ruins—A Vision (Gandy)
Albers, Josef 224 189–91
Alberti, Leon Battista (On the Art of Building Architectural Visions of Early Fancy, in the
in Ten Books) 33, 63, 93–4, 231 Gay Morning of Youth; and Dreams in
Alfred, King 78 the Evening of Life 180
algae, lichen and moss 271–9 architecture 300; garden of 173–5; general
allegory 219, 220 characteristic 285; origins 222; person
Alloway, Lawrence 260 and 246; profession of 160

343
 in dex

Architecture You and Me: The Diary of a Beaux-Arts: education 210; period 206;
Development (Giedion) 214 roots 223; tradition 204
architetto veneziano 86–7 Beckford, William 91, 261
Architetture e prospettive (Giuseppe Bell, Michael 223
Bibiena) 89 Benedict XIV, Pope 88
Arens, Johann August 240; Roman House Benjamin, Walter 219–20
126, 240 Bennett, Jane 302n10
art, and profession of architecture 160 The Bernard S. Pincus Occupational
artificial rudeness 48 Therapy Building 248n52
Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia 37, Beveridge, William 256
39, 241 Bibiena, Ferdinando Galli 68–9
AS in DS: An Eye on the Road (Alison Bibiena, Giuseppe 89
Smithson) 265 Blackfriars Bridge (Piranesi) 121
Astley, Stephen 140 Blair Adam 114
Athenäums-Fragmente (Schlegel) 193 ‘Bob The Roman’ 115–18
atomic attack 279 Boffrand, Germain 164
‘A Tour of the Monuments of Bolla, Peter de 134
Passaic, New Jersey’ (Robert Bolton, Arthur T. 141
Smithson) 225 Bomarzo 36
attitudes and allegiances 156 Bombed Churches as War Memorials
Aurelian Wall 97 256–7
Austrian Commission on Historic booming economy 190
Monuments (1902) 218 Boucher, Bruce 11
Ayres, Philip 21 Bourgeois, Francis 161
Bowdler, Roger 165
Bacon, Francis 86 Braque, Georges 219
Baek, Jin 281 The Breakfast Parlour (Soane) 173–6, 185,
Bailey, George 186 186
Baldinucci, Filippo 39 Brettingham, Matthew 129
Balfron Tower (Goldfinger) 269 Bretton Woods conference 223
Bangladesh 233 Bril, Paul 37
Banham, Reyner 222, 258, 277, 282, Brimblecombe, Peter 159
286n19 Britain 17, 19, 20, 26, 46, 48, 49, 62,
Bank Charter Act (1833–1834) 188 65, 78, 116, 117, 120, 122–47, 155,
Bank of England 187–92 176, 216, 256, 272, 274
Barbaro, Daniele 9 British architects 121, 124, 221
Barkan, Leonard 7, 33 British Museum 176–7
Barragán, Luis 237 British welfare state 256
Basevi, George 172 Brodey, Inger Sigrun 64
Basilica Palladiana (Palladio) 12–16 Brown, Frank E. 209
Bath House (Kahn) 227, 230 Brown, Lancelot 168, 169
Bathurst, Allen 72 Brown, Scott 224–5
Baudelaire, Charles 52 Bruce, Malcolm 114
BBC2 TV programme 266 Brunias, Agostino 126

344
 index

Buchli, Victor 297 Claridge, John 50

Building in France, Building in Iron, Clark, Kenneth 256
Building in Ferro-Concrete (Giedion) Claude Glass 175
210 Claude Lorrain 37–9, 52, 237; Landscape
Built in the USA (1934–1944) 213 with Ascanius Shooting the Stag of
Bürger, Peter 219 Sylvia 37, 39, 241; Liber Veritatis 70;
Burke, Edmund 54–5, 158, 244 Pastoral Landscape with the Arch of
Burnet, Thomas 54 Titus 37, 40–1, 43, 241
Clement XIII, Pope 87, 101
California 236, 238 Clérisseau, Charles-Louis 88, 115–20,
Campbell, Colen (Vitruvius Britannicus) 125–9, 134, 137, 141–3, 181, 183;
16–18, 22 Capriccio 143–4; Ruin Room 118–20;
II Campo Marzio dell’ Antica Roma Santissima Trinità dei Monti 40, 99, 118
(Piranesi) 96–8, 122, 133, 188, 235 climate 184–6, 301
Campo Marzio’s Ichnographia 235 ‘cloudiness’ 158
campo vaccino 6 Coke, Thomas 52, 66
Capriccio 86–7, 114, 141–4 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 157, 177
Carceri (Piranesi) 87, 235 Collage City (Rowe and Koetter) 226
Carracci, Annibale 37 ‘Collective Design: The Violent Consumer
Casa Guarnieri 117, 118, 125 or Waiting for the Goodies’ (Alison
Casey, Edward S. 217, 218 Smithson) 266
Castell, Robert 49 collective memory, of architects 215, 294
Cavendish, William 70 Colonna, Francesco (Hypnerotomachia
‘central bank’ 188 Poliphili) 33–5, 55n7, 73, 168
Cereghini, Elisabetta 69 Colquhoun, Alan 258
Ceremonial Precinct 120 Colvin & Moggridge (landscape architects
Cervantes, Miguel de 65 for Phase 1 of UEA) 271–9
Chambers, William 127–8 ‘commemorative value’ 218
Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Complexity and Contradiction in
Opinions, Times (Shaftesbury) 16–17, Architecture (Venturi) 224
46–8, 52, 53 Concorso Clementino 116
The Charged Void (Alison and Peter concrete 278–9
Smithson) 266 The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Chiari, Giuseppe 66 (Rousseau) 16, 172, 186
China 127, 128, 176, 204, 280 Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture
Chinese gardens 128 Moderne (CIAM) 221
Churchill, Winston 256 Cook, Peter 272
CIAM see Congrès Internationaux Copley, Stephen 169
d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) Cordova Shell limestone 244
cippus monumentalis 214 Cornaro, Alvise 9
circular pavilion 144, 146 Cornell University 226
City of Westminster 268 Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical
Civil Architecture (Ferdinando Galli Bibiena) Description of the Universe (Humboldt)
68–9 241–2

345
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Critique of Judgement (Kant) 55 ‘dissolution of Modernism’ 283

Crude Hints towards an History of My Dissolution of Monasteries 71–2, 261
House in L(incoln’s) I(nn) Fields (Soane) Dixon, Susan M. 97
167, 186–7, 193 dodecahedron 239
cubic room 230–1 The Dome Area with Soane’s bust
culture 301n1 (Soane) 174
Curzon, Nathaniel 129, 130, 132, domed pavilion 145
141, 147, 150n91 Domenichino 37, 70
Don Quixote (Cervantes) 65
Davy, Humphry 157 Dorey, Helen 175
De architectura libri decem (Vitruvius) 8, 9 Dowhill Castle (Adam) 114
Defoe, Daniel 54, 64, 65 Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste 90
Della magnificenza ed architettura de’ Dulce est desipere in loco (it is pleasant to
Romani (Piranesi) 93 be nonsensical in due place) 183
Delorme, Philibert 7 Dulwich Picture Gallery (Soane) 162
demolition 187 Durand, Jean-Nicolas-Louis 212
Dennis, John 54 Dying Gladiator (Kent) 73–5
Description of the House and Museum on
the North Side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields The Eclogues (Virgil) 10, 38, 41, 42, 51
(Soane) 179, 185 Einzig, Richard 274
Desgodtez, Antoine 125 Eisenman, Peter 226
‘design’, notion of 160 An Election 178
Design for an ornamental ruin in a park, Electric Labyrinth 283, 284
adapted for Kedleston 141 Elements of Criticism (Kames) 70,
Design for a Roman Ruin (Adam) 139, 141 136, 168
Design for the Ruin Room of the monastery Eliot, T. S. 221, 256
of Santissima Trinità dei Monti Elkins Park, Fleisher House in 228, 229
(Clérisseau) 118 Elmes, James 188
Design of a ruinous bridge for the Garden Elysian Fields (Kent) 77, 78, 168
at Sion 136 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 239
Designs in Architecture (Soane) 154 Emmons, Paul 26
Designs of Chinese Buildings empirical description 64
(Chambers) 128 emptiness 229–30
Detail of Antinous at the end of the Long England 16, 17, 48, 65, 70, 206, 257,
Walk (Kent) 74 259, 265; arcadian 51–2; georgic
The Devil on Two Sticks (Le Sage) 192 49–51, 157; lineage 20; ruin in 71–81,
Devonshire House 70 187–92; sublime 52–5; tour of 114
Dewez, Laurent-Benoît 126 English language 268
Dhaka 234, 235 English liberalism 257
Diderot, Denis 172 ‘The Englishness of English Art’
‘Dinosaurs of the Modern Movement’ 282 (Pevsner) 257
disegno 8, 17, 39, 62, 160 Enola Gay 279
A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’ (Robert
(Chambers) 128 Smithson) 225

346
 index

Entwurff, Einer Historischen Architectur 86 The Four Books of Architecture (Palladio)

Esherick, Joseph 204, 246n2 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 22, 25,
Essai sur l’Architecture (Laugier) 92, 26, 27n4, 28n47, 34, 129, 132
110n23, 164, 166 Frascari, Marco 26
An Essay Concerning Human French Academy 206
Understanding (Locke) 45–6 French architects 173
An Essay in Defence of Ancient Freud, Sigmund 217–18
Architecture (Morris) 21 Friedrich, Caspar David 242; Monk by the
An Essay on Man (Pope) 72 Sea 242
An Essay on the Picturesque (Price) 170 Fumifugium: or The Inconveniencie of the
‘eternal’ 181 Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated
Et in Arcadia ego (Poussin) 37–43, (Evelyn) 45
51–2, 241 functionalism 211
Europe 6, 33, 37, 51, 128, 176, 206,
216, 221–3, 226, 257, 264 Gallery of Views of Ancient Rome (Panini)
Evans, Robin 230 68–9, 87, 91, 115, 131, 150n82,
Evelyn, John 45–6, 57n44, 57n46, 63 181
Expo ’70, at Osaka 284, 285 Gandy, Joseph Michael 171; Aerial View
exterior 10–11, 80, 127, 162, 163, of the Bank of England from the
177, 275 South-East 191; Architectural Ruins—A
Vision 189–91; Architectural Visions
factual fiction 63–5 of Early Fancy 180; Public and Private
The Faerie Queene (Spenser) 78 Buildings Executed by Sir John Soane
The Fall of Babylon 190 180–1; View of the Consols Transfer
Fanzolo di Vedelago 10, 11 Office 188–9; View of the Soane Tomb
Faraday, Michael 157, 158 171
Farington, Joseph 91 Garden Building 264
Faust 240 gardening 166–73; see also picturesque
Festival Plaza 284, 285 garden of architecture 173–5; tomb 175–7
‘The Fiction of Function’ (Anderson) 211 Garside, Peter 169
Fiene, Ernest 211 Gazette Littéraire (Mariette) 93
The First Lord and Lady Scarsdale Genga, Girolamo 35
walking in the grounds of Kedleston ‘Genio huis loci’ (‘Genius of this place’) 240
(Hone) 135 The Genius of Architecture 175
First Part of Architectures and Perspectives ‘genius of Erwin von Steinbach’ 215
(Piranesi) 89 ‘genius of the place’ 257–60
Flaxman, John 91 Gentleman’s Magazine 182
Fleisher House (Kahn) 228–30, 235, 236 George I (King) 19
Fonthill Woods 261 Georgic England 49–51
‘Form and Design’ (Kahn) 226, 282 The Georgics (Virgil) 10, 38, 49–51
Forma Urbis Romae 95, 96, 98 German-speaking territories 240
forms 91–5 German-speaking tradition 225
Forty, Adrian 217 Geschichte der Kunst des Altherthums
Foucault, Michel 63 (Winckelmann) 92, 119

347
 in dex

Gibbs, James 19, 78 Herder, Johann Gottfried 16

Giedion, Sigfried 207, 210–13, 218–19 Hervey, Frederick 155
Gilpin, William 167, 169, 216 Hervey, John (second Baron Hervey) 19
Glacken, Clarence C. 57n42 Hippocratic tradition 25
‘gloom and glare’ 244–6 Hiroshima 279
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 16, 91, Hiroshima Ruined Again in the Future 284
159, 215, 239–41, 253n200 An Historical Narrative of the Great and
Goldfinger, Ernö 269; Balfron Tower 269 Tremendous Storm Which Happened
Goodwin, Philip L. 211, 213, 215 on Nov. 26th (Defoe) 54
gothic cathedral 215 ‘historical value of monuments’ 218
Grand Tour 21, 37, 54, 78, 86, 98, 115–17, histories and novels 299–300
147n2, 155, 156, 206, 226, 267 History of Ancient Art (Winckelmann)
Gray, William F. 239 92, 119
Great Buddha Pavilion (Daibutsu-den) 280 The History of the Modern Taste in
The Great Man 18–21 Gardening (Walpole) 70
Great Staircase 132, 135 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell 213
The Great Storm 54 Hobsbawm, Eric 221
Greek Doric column 179 Hofland, Barbara 166, 177
Gregory, Richard 71, 245 Hogarth, William 178
Greville, George 98 Holkham Hall 129, 132
Gropius, Walter 207, 213, 214 Hone, Nathaniel 135
Grotteschi 89 Hope, Charles 114
Grottoes 48 Horkheimer, Max 44
Grotto/Rock Room 144 Houghton Hall 19, 20, 23, 135
Guercino (Et in Arcadia ego) 37–43, Howard, Luke 159
51, 52, 70, 241 Hudnut, Joseph 298
Guernica, Picasso 213 Hugues, Pierre-François 166
Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) 18, 19 Hunstanton Secondary Modern School
(Alison and Peter Smithson) 258, 259
Hackfall Park 140 Hunt, John Dixon 35
Hadrian’s Villa 7, 32 Hussey, Christopher 272
Halbwachs, Maurice 214 Hutton, Louisa 265
Hamilton, William 98, 133 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Colonna) 33–5,
Hamlet (Shakespeare) 168 55n7, 73, 86, 168
Harley, Edward 136
Harries, Karsten 253n182 Ichiyanagi, Toshi 283
Harris, John 22, 29n63, 82n30 Ichnographia (Piranesi) 96–8, 122, 235
Harris, Leslie 137, 150n90, 150n91 icosahedron 239
Hawksmoor, Nicholas 16, 264, 271 idealism 242
Hearne, Thomas 170 illiberalism 223
Henderson, Nigel 260 Incubation Process 282, 283
Henry VIII (King) 71–2 Indian architecture 233
Herbert, Henry (ninth Earl of Indian Institute of Management (IIM)
Pembroke) 21–3 (Kahn) 233, 234

348
 index

In English Homes (Latham) 221 235; parallel aims 221–3; Piazza

‘intentional’ monuments 218 Campidoglio 208; Salk Institute for
Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Biological Studies 231–2, 236, 238
Insurance and Allied Services 256 Kahn, Nathaniel 204
interior 11, 12, 19, 38, 77, 78, 102, 119, Kames, Henry Home, Lord 70, 136, 168
127, 131, 133, 135, 141, 144, 162, Kant, Immanuel 16, 55, 160
177, 190, 192, 259 Kantor-Kazovsky, Lola 110n13, 110n24
interior wall elevation 144, 146 Kassler, Elizabeth 237
interwar modernism 258 Kaufman, Emil 223–4
The Investigator (Ramsay) 93 Kedleston Hall (Adam) 130–3, 136, 141
‘Invisible Monument’ (Isozaki) 285 Kenda, Barbara 25
I quattro libri dell’architettura (The Four Kensington Palace 16, 52
Books of Architecture) 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, Kent, Nathaniel 170
15, 16, 18, 22, 25, 26, 27n4, 28n47, Kent, William 65–7, 82n23; Arcadian
34, 129, 132 Hermitage with Satyr and Shepherdess
Isozaki, Arata 279–85; Kenzo Tange and 79, 114, 168; Detail of Antinous at
Atsushi Ueda 284 the end of the Long Walk 74; Dying
Italian Diary (‘Remarks by way of Painting & Gladiator 73–5; Elysian Fields 77, 78,
Archit’) (Kent) 67–8 168; Italian Diary (‘Remarks by way of
Italian Journey (Goethe) 241 Painting & Archit’) 67–8; picturesque
Italy 17, 26, 34, 38, 46, 54, 66, 70, 135; Richmond Hermitage 79–80,
71, 80, 86, 115, 116, 120, 124, 124, 168; The Stone Hall 19, 20,
129, 142, 154–6, 171, 192, 206–9, 29n56, 135; The Temple of the Mill
222, 241 and the Triumphal Arch beyond the
Gardens 75–6; The Vale of Venus 73;
James II (King) 18 Watery Walk and Cold Bath 74
Japanese Confucianism 280 Kenzo Tange and Atsushi Ueda
Japanese psyche 284 (Isozaki) 284
Japan isolation 280–1 Kerr, Philip 216
Japan-ness in Architecture (Isozaki) 283 Kew Gardens 127
jardin anglais 172 Keynes, John Maynard 212, 256
Jenkins, R. S. 260 Knight, Richard Payne 167, 169–70
‘Jerusalem Committee’ 271 Koetter, Fred 226
Johnson, Eugene J. 252n174
Johnson, Philip 213 Labour party 256
Johnston, Miss Elizabeth 161 La Diable Boiteux (Le Sage) 192
Jones, Thomas 155 Laird, Mark 45, 57n47
La Jolla 232, 236–8
Kahn, Louis I. 16, 204, 220, 250n100, Lallemand, Jean-Baptiste 117
253n186, 253n198, 288n70; Bath La Malcontenta 94
House 227, 230; discovery 223–7; Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 196n23
Fleisher House 228–30, 235, 236; La Mémoire Collective (Halbwachs)
Indian Institute of Management 233, 214–15
234; National Assembly Building 234, ‘The Lamp of Memory’ (Ruskin) 216

349
 in dex

Land and Landscape (Colvin) 257 liberal Enlightenment 256

The Landmark Trust 140 liberalism 257, 274
landscape 82n33 Liber Veritatis (Claude) 70
The Landscape, A Didactic Poem Library Dining Room 173, 175, 185, 186
(Knight) 170 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
landscape architects for Phase 1 of UEA Gentleman (Sterne) 167
(Colvin & Moggridge) 271–9 Ligorio, Pirro (Sacra Bosco) 36
Landscape with Ascanius Shooting the Stag Lincoln’s Inn Fields 163, 164, 173–9,
of Sylvia (Claude) 37, 39, 241 181, 183–9, 191, 193, 194
Landscape with an Old Man by the Sea The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters,
(Claude) 41 Sculptors, and Architects (Vasari) 33
Landscape with Arch and Waterfalls (Rosa) Livre d’architecture (Boffrand) 164
52–4, 70, 114, 169 Loch Leven Castle 114
Langley, Batty 72 Locke, John 45–7, 63, 64, 77
L’antichità di Roma (The Antiquities of Lodoli, Carlo 86
Rome) 6, 7 Loggia del Capitaniato (Palladio) 15–16
L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée en Lo inganno de gl’occi, Prospettiva pratica
figures (1719–1724) 166 (Accolti) 68
Lao Tzu 229 Lolla, Maria Grazia 89
Lasdun, Denys 222, 288n71; ‘scrapheap’ London 19, 21–3, 45, 55, 66, 69, 70,
of discarded models of the National 79, 115, 116, 121, 129, 130, 138,
Theatre 276; University of East Anglia 139, 141–3, 147, 147n2, 155–9,
271–2, 275–8 161, 163–5, 171–4, 176, 178, 180,
Latham, Charles 221 183, 184, 185, 188, 189, 191, 225,
Laugier, Marc-Antoine (Essai sur 257, 260, 264, 266–70, 275, 276
l’Architecture) 92, 110n23, 164, 166 Longinus, Dionysius 53–4
Learning from Las Vegas 224 lovers and monsters 32–6
Le Camus de Mézières, Nicolas 174 Lucchesi, Matteo 86
Le Corbusier 205, 206, 209, 210, Luti, Benedetto 68
221, 277 Lyotard, Jean-François 244
Lectures on Architecture (Morris) 16, 21, 22 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth) 157
Lees-Milne, James 22, 29n63,
29n69, 216 Macclary, John 76
Leeuwenhoek, Anton van 44 McCarter, Robert 232
Legault, Réjean 243 McCarthy, Joseph 223
Léger, Fernand 211 McCormick, Thomas J. 119, 141
Leo X, Pope 6–7, 33, 63 MacDonald, James 99
Le Roy, Julien-David 93 MacDonald monument (Piranesi) 99–101
Le Sage, Alain René 192 MacDonald, William L. 32
Les Edifices antiques de Rome McKim, Charles Follen 206–7
(Desgodtez) 125 Macmillan, Harold 260
Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de Magistrato della acque 86
la Grèce (Le Roy) 93 ‘Manifesto of Futurist Architecture’
Levine, Neil 243 (1914) 207

350
 index

Man, Paul de 63, 66 monsters, lovers and 32–6

Mantua 26, 36 monument 219, 294
Maratti, Carlo 66 monumentality 214–20; problem 210–14
Marble Hall 130, 132 Monument Court 184, 185
Mariette, Pierre-Jean 93 Monumenti antichi inediti
marine climate 243–4 (Winckelmann) 89
Marinetti, Filippo Tomasso 207 ‘Monuments to the Honour of Great
Martin, John 190 Men’ 161–6
Maser 11, 12 monumentum 219
Mathematical Principles of Natural Moore, James Carrick 158
Philosophy (Newton) 49 Morgan, Luke 35
‘The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa’ 225 Morris, David B. 72
Matthews, John 179 Morris, Robert (An Essay in Defence of
mausoleum 127, 154–66, 176, 179 Ancient Architecture) 16, 21, 22
Mausoleum of Hadrian 97, 166 Morris, Roger 115
Mechanism of the Heavens Mrs Bouverie and Mrs Crewe (Panofsky) 51
(Somerville) 158 My Architect, A Son’s Journey 204, 246
Meeting House 232–6
Memoirs (Soane) 178–9 Nagasaki 279
Merchant, Carolyn 44–5, 302n10 Nagel, Alexander 7
Metamorphoses (Ovid) 93 Napoleonic Wars 156, 165, 190
Meyers, Marshall D. 244 National Assembly Building (Kahn) 233–5
Minister for Reconstruction 256 National Theatre 275, 276
Minor, Heather Hyde 33, 90 National Trust 216
Miscellanies in Verse and Prose natura naturata 238–9
(Dennis) 54 ‘The Need for a New Monumentality’
Mock, Elizabeth 213 (Giedion) 211
Modern Architecture: International Nelson, George 211
Exhibition (Hitchcock) 213 ‘Neo-“Classicism” and Modern Architecture’
Modern Gardens and the Landscape (Rowe) 225–6
(Kassler) 237 Netherlands 44, 129, 221
modernisation 280 The New Brutalism 258, 282, 286n17
modernism 213, 258, 299 Newman, Barnett 244
modern memory 296–7 New Principles of Gardening (Langley) 72
Moggridge, Hal 273, 288n84; see Newton, Isaac 49, 119
also Colvin & Moggridge (landscape The New Vision (1928) 210
architects for Phase 1 of UEA) New York 213
Moholy-Nagy, László 210 ninth Earl of Pembroke (Herbert) 21–3
Moll Flanders (Defoe) 64 Nolli, Giovanni Battista 95, 96, 102
monere 219 non-Catholic cemetery 99–100
Monk by the Sea (Friedrich) 242 Norfolk 19, 23, 52, 135, 258, 259,
Monk’s Cell 181 271, 274
Monk’s Parlour 174, 181–3 North to South Section (Adam) 130, 132,
The Monk’s Yard (Soane) 2, 174, 181–6 133, 142

351
 in dex

Norton, Charles Eliot 210 18, 22, 25, 26, 27n4, 28n47, 34,
Norwich 275, 277, 278 129, 132; Loggia del Capitaniato 15–16;
nostalgia 41, 42, 223, 256 and Palladianism 125; Teatro Olimpico
Nuova pianta de Roma (Nolli) 96 66–7; Villa Barbaro 11–12, 133; Villa
Nuremberg 257 Emo 10–11; Villa Poiana 10–11; Villa
A Nymph 181 Rotonda 25–6, 66, 225, 229
Panini, Giovanni Paolo (Gallery of Views
Observations on Modern Gardening of Ancient Rome) 68–9, 87, 91, 115,
(Whately) 168 131, 150n82, 181
Observations sur l‘architecture (Laugier) 164 Panofsky, Erwin 41–3, 51, 241
octahedron 239 Pantheon 131, 132
Old Dividend Office (Soane) 192 Paolozzi, Eduardo 260
‘On German Architecture’ (Goethe) 215 Paradossi per pratticare la prospettiva
On Growth and Form (Thompson) 239 (Troili) 68
On the Art of Building in Ten Books Parere sull‘architettura (Piranesi) 93, 106
(Alberti) 33, 63, 93–4 Pasticcio in the Monument Court
On the Magnificence and Architecture of (Soane) 185
the Romans (Piranesi) 93 Pastoral Landscape with the Arch of Titus
‘On the Modern Cult of Monuments: Its (Lorrain) 37, 40–1, 241
Character and its Origin’ (Riegl) 218 Pastorals (Pope) 49
On the Modification of Clouds (Howard) 159 Patio and Pavilion 260
On the Sublime (Longinus) 53–4 Paulsson, Gregor 214
opera rustica 94 pavilion 18, 32, 62, 78, 129, 139, 144,
Opinions on Architecture (Piranesi) 93 227
Ordnance des cinq espèces de colonnes Pennsylvania 97, 204, 208, 227–30,
selon la méthode des anciens (A 236, 238
Treatise on the Five Orders of Columns Peri Hupsous (Longinus) 53–4
in Architecture) 93 Perkins, A. M. 184
The Origin of German Tragic Drama Perrault, Claude 93
(Benjamin) 219, 220 Pevsner, Nikolaus 207, 222, 257–9
Osaka 284, 285 Philadelphia 204, 205, 208, 209, 223,
Osservazioni di Gio. Battista Piranesi sopra 228, 231, 239
la Lettre de Monsieur Mariette 93 Philosophiae Naturalis Principia
ouroboros 166 Mathematica (Newton 49
Ovid 35, 38, 93, 110n25 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of
our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Palazzo della Ragione 13 (Burke) 54–5
Palazzo Te (Romano) 35–6, 67, 94, 283 physical historian 220, 300
Palazzo Tomati 99, 155 physical novelist 300
Palladian architecture 169 piano nobile 19, 21, 24, 135
Palladian villa 50, 62, 232 Piazza Campidoglio (Kahn) 208
Palladio, Andrea 6–12, 227–8; Basilica Piazza dei Signori 13, 14, 16
Palladiana 12–16; The Four Books of Piazzale dei Cavalieri di Malta (Piranesi)
Architecture 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 101–2

352
 index

Picasso, Pablo: Guernica 213; Violin 219 ‘The Problem of a New Monumentality’ 211
The Picture Room (Soane) 174, 177–82, profession of architecture 160
189–92, 276 Public and Private Buildings Executed by
picturesque 134 Sir John Soane (Gandy) 180–1
picturesque gardening 65, 70–1, 174
The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View quadratura 68
(Hussey) 272 quadraturisti 69
Pinto, John A. 32 Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park 270
Pioneers of the Modern Movement
(Pevsner) 207, 247n23 A Rake’s Progress 178
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 88, 98–109, Ramsay, Allan 93
109n4; Le Antichità romane 90, Raphael 6–7, 14, 33, 63, 66, 70, 80,
91, 96, 102, 122, 164, 196n43; 94, 131
architetto veneziano 86–7; Blackfriars Rayner, Steve 302n10
Bridge 121; II Campo Marzio dell’ Recherches sur l’origine, l’esprit et les
Antica Roma 96–8, 122, 133, 188, progress des arts de la Grèce (1785)
235; Carceri 87, 235; MacDonald 166
monument 99–101; Piazzale dei The Recovery of Eden 44–5
Cavalieri di Malta 101–2; Santa Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la
Maria del Priorato 101–9; ‘una nouva peinture (Du Bos) 90
architettura antica’ 88–91; Vedute di Remains of the Old Castle of Osterly in
Roma 88 Middlesex, one of the seats of Robert
Pitzhanger’s ruins 182, 183 Child Esq (1774) 136
Plan of a circular pavilion 144 Renaissance appreciation 33
The Plans, Elevations and Sections; Renaissance architects 9, 25, 93, 160
Chimney-Pieces, and Ceilings of Renaissance treatise 297
Houghton in Norfolk (Ware) 19, 22 Repton, Humphry 169
Plato (Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Revett, Nicholas 124
Menexenus, Epistles) 8 Reynolds, Joshua 51–2, 154
The Pleasures of the Imagination (Addison) Rezzonico, Cardinal Carlo 101
47, 54 Rezzonico, Monsignor Giambattista 101
Pliny, ‘Letter to Gallus’ 10, 35, 49 RIBA see Royal Institute of British Architects
Plug-In City (1963–1964) 272 (RIBA)
Poggio Bracciolini 8 Richardson, Charles James 137, 139
Poiana Maggiore 10, 11 Richmond Hermitage (Kent) 79–80,
Ponte Magnifico (Piranesi) 155 124, 168
Pope, Alexander 47–50, 72 Ricoeur, Paul 167
‘The Post-Modern House’ (Hudnut) 298 Riegl, Alois 218
post-war modernism 258 Ripley, Thomas 19
Poussin, Nicolas (Et in Arcadia ego) Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh
37–43, 51, 52, 241 and Rome (Fleming) 141
Price, Uvedale 167, 169–70 Robin Hood Gardens (Alison and Peter
Prima parte di architetture e prospettive Smithson) 266–71
(Piranesi) 89, 109 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 54, 64

353
 in dex

Robinson, Dickon 269–70 to 295–6; in reverse 266–71; Soane in

Roethlisberger, Marcel G. 40 193–5; wandering among 177–84
Rogers, Ernesto N. 221, 222 The Ruins of Paestum (Major) 179
Roman architects 125, 210 The Ruins of Palmyra (Wood) 124, 297
Roman Catholic Church 131 Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor
Roman House (Arens) 126, 240 Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia
Romano, Giulio (Palazzo Te) 35–6, 67, (Adam) 122–7, 130, 140, 233
94, 283 Ruskin, John 158, 159, 215–16, 239
romanticism 156, 244 Rykwert, Joseph 86
Rome 2, 6–13, 17, 20–2, 27, 32, 33,
37–42, 46, 47, 49, 52, 65–7, 69–72, Sacra Bosco (Ligorio) 36
78, 86, 88, 90–109, 115–37, 141, The Sacred Theory of the Earth (Burnet) 54
142, 155, 164, 171, 172, 175, 179, Saint Basil 107
182, 189, 204–10, 212, 217, 218, Salk Institute for Biological Studies (Kahn)
223–5, 227, 231, 235, 276, 278 231–2, 236, 238
Roosevelt, Franklin D. 212 Salmon, Frank 116, 121
Rosa, Salvator (Landscape with Arch and The Saloon 130–5, 142, 147
Waterfalls) 52–4, 70, 114, 169 Sandrart, Jakob von 72
Rosenblum, Robert 244 San Giorgio Maggiore 66
Rothko, Mark 209 Sannazaro, Jacopo (Arcadia) 42
Rousham 73–6, 78, 83n49, 169, Santa Maria del Priorato (Piranesi) 101–9
175, 263 Sant’Elia, Antonio 207
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (The Confessions Sauter, Florian 238–9
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau) 16, Scalfarotto, Giovanni 86
172, 186 Scamozzi, Vincenzo 17, 22, 67
Rowe, Colin 225–6, 259–60 Scarsdale, Lord 144
Roxana (Defoe) 64 Scenographia 96–7, 122
Royal Academician Laura Knight 195n2 Scheemaker, Peter 73–5
Royal Academy 154–7, 160, 161, 164, Schlegel, Friedrich 193
166, 168, 170, 171, 177, 179, 182, Scienza nuova (Vico) 86
184, 187, 188, 190, 191 ‘scrapheap’ of discarded models of the
Royal Engineers Airfield Construction National Theatre (Lasdun) 276
Company 272 Scully, Vincent 206, 209, 223–6, 228,
Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) 233, 246, 247n33, 252n177
173, 213 The Seasons (Thomson) 49–50, 157
Royal Society 44–5, 156, 173 Second World War 206, 207, 260, 272,
ruination 94–5 279, 289n105
Ruined Antique Shrine (Adam) 138 sensationalism 173
Ruined Temple (Adam) 138 Sert, José Luis 211
The Ruin of Styles 283 Servandoni, Jean-Nicolas 174
Ruin Room (Clérisseau) 118–20 The Seven Lamps of Architecture (Ruskin)
ruins 80–1, 294–5, 296; beauty of 215, 216
227–31; climate in 184–6; England in Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper,
187–92; history in 186–7; monument third Earl of (Characteristicks of Men,

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Manners, Opinions, Times) 16–17, Speer, Albert 257

46–8, 52, 53, 115 Spenser, Edmund 78
Shakespeare, William 168 Steele, Richard 47, 63–4
Shenstone, William 70, 82n32 Sterne, Laurence 99, 167–8
The Shepherd of Banbury’s Rules To ‘Sticks and Stones’ 268
Judge of the Changes of the Weather, Stillman, Damie 122
Grounded on Forty Years Experience The Stone Hall (Kent) 19, 20, 29n56, 135
(Claridge) 50 The Stones of Venice (Ruskin) 215, 217
Sketch for Landscaping the Park at Stowe 77, 78, 80, 168
Kedleston (Adam) 137 Stowe Hermitage 80
Smith, James 114 Strasbourg 215
Smithson, Alison and Smithson, Peter Stuart, James 124
222, 225, 250n113, 286n28; sublime 52–5, 245
characterisation 225; Hunstanton ‘The Sublime is Now’ (Newman) 244
Secondary Modern School 258, 259; ‘submitting to the seasons’ 260–6
Robin Hood Gardens 266–71; Upper Sugiura, Kõhei 283
Lawn Pavilion 261–6 Sullivan, Louis 223
Smithson, Robert 225 Summerson, John 27, 166
Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Swedish East India Company 128
Mouth 242 Swift, Jonathan (Gulliver’s Travels) 18,
Soane, Eliza 163–6 19, 65
Soane, George 176 Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees,
Soane, John 154, 155, 163, 276; The and the Propagation of Timber in His
Breakfast Parlour 173–6, 185, 186; Majesties Dominions (Evelyn) 45
The Dome Area with Soane’s bust 174;
Dulwich Picture Gallery 162; exterior tabulae ansatae 99
163; gardening 166–73; The Monk’s Tafuri, Manfredo 13, 108
Yard 2, 174, 181–6; Old Dividend Tait, A. A. 114, 139, 147n3
Office 192; Pasticcio in the Monument Talmudic principle 244
Court 185; The Picture Room 174, The Tatler (Addison) 78
177–82, 189–92, 276; Triumphal Taylor, Robert 189
Bridge 154, 155 ‘teaching document’ 265
Soane Museum Act of Parliament Teatro Olimpico (Palladio) 66–7
(1833) 176 ‘technology of the self’ 66–70
Society for the Protection of Ancient Telluris Theoria Sacra (Burnet) 54
Buildings 216 The Tempest (Shakespeare)190
Society of Dilettanti 124 Temple of Ancient Virtue (Kent) 78
Somerville, Mary 158 Temple of British Worthies 77, 78, 183
Sonnabend, Martin 51–2 Temple of Clitumnus 120, 182
South Front 22, 135, 136 Temple of Liberty (Gibbs) 78
Soviet Union 210, 213 Temple of Modern Virtue 78
Space, Time and Architecture (Giedion) The Temple of the Mill (Kent) 75–6
207, 210 ‘temporary’ 181
Spanish civil war 213 Ten Books on Architecture (Vitruvius) 8, 9

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 in dex

tetrahedron 239 University of East Anglia (UEA) 271–9

The Thames above Waterloo Bridge 159 University of London 225
Theorie der Gartenkunst (Theory of Garden University of Pennsylvania 227
Art) (Hirschfeld) 241 Unpublished Ancient Monuments
‘Things of a natural kind’ 45–9 (Winckelmann) 89
This is Tomorrow 260 Upper Lawn Pavilion (Alison and Peter
Thompson, D’Arcy 239 Smithson) 261–6
Thomson, James 49–50 ut pictura poesis 63, 174
Thoughts on the Defence of Property 170
Three Revolutionary Architects: Boullée, The Vale of Venus (Kent) 73
Ledoux, and Lequeu (Kaufman) 223–4 Valeriani, Domenico and Giuseppe 87
Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Vanbrugh, John 16, 72, 123
Epistles (Plato) 8 Vasari, Giorgio (The Lives of the Most
The Times (1944) 256 Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and
Tivoli 7, 32, 67, 78, 88, 98, 142, Architects) 26, 33, 64
184, 188 ‘Vasi, candelabra, cippi, sarcophagi, tripodi,
Tokyo University 282 lucerne, ed ornamenti antichi’ 98
Tõmatsu, Shõmei 283 Vasi, Giuseppe 88
tomb, garden of architecture 175–7 Vedute di Roma (Piranesi) 88
Towards a New Architecture (Le Venice Biennale 268
Corbusier) 205 Venturi, Robert 224–5
Tower Hamlets council 269–70 Vers une architecture (Le Corbusier) 205
Trauerspiel 219 Via Appia illustrata ab urbe Roma ad
Trees for Town and Country (Colvin) 274 Capuam (Labruzzi) 164
Trenton 227, 230 Vicenza 6, 9, 13–18, 25–7, 66, 67
Trenton Bath House 227, 230 Vico, Giambattista 86
Trissino, Gian Giorgio 6, 13 View of the Consols Transfer Office (Gandy)
Tristram Shandy 167, 168 188–9
The Triumphal Arch beyond the Gardens View of the Soane Tomb 171, 172
(Kent) 75–6 villa and ruin 62–3
Triumphal Bridge (Soane) 154, 155 Villa Barbaro (Palladio) 11–12, 133
Troili, Giulio 68 Villa Emo (Palladio) 10–11
trompe I’oeil (Adam) 116, 118, 135 Villa Medici 206
Tuileries gardens 172 Villa Poiana (Palladio) 10–11
Turnerian Picturesque 169 Villa Rotonda (Palladio) 25–6, 66, 225, 229
Turner, Joseph Mallord William 158, 159, The Villas of the Ancients Illustrated
177, 184, 242 (Castell) 49
Tuveson, Ernest 46 Violin, Picasso 219
Virgil (The Eclogues and The Georgics) 10,
UEA see University of East Anglia (UEA) 38, 41, 42, 49–51
UK government 256 Vitruvius (Ten Books on Architecture) 8, 9
‘una nouva architettura antica’ 88–91 Vitruvius Britannicus (Campbell)
‘unintentional monuments’ 218 16–18, 22
United States Consulate 236 ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’ (Goethe) 215

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 index

Walpole, Horace 29n63, 52, 70, 73 Windsor-Forest (Pope) 49

Walpole, Robert 19–24, 29n73 Wine, Humphrey 39
‘wandering among ruins’ 177–84 Wittkower, Rudolf 103, 225, 259
Ware, Isaac (The Plans, Elevations and Wood, Christopher S. 7
Sections; Chimney-Pieces, and Wood, Robert 124
Ceilings of Houghton in Norfolk) Woodward, Christopher 165, 191
19, 22 Wootton, John 49
Warwick Vase 98–9 Wordsworth, William 157
Water House 21–7, 30n74, 30n76 The Works in Architecture of Robert &
Watery Walk and Cold Bath (Kent) 74 James Adam (Adam) 122–4, 135,
Watkin, David 11, 32, 33, 89, 161, 164, 136, 141
173, 182, 196n36, 198n89 World Fair 285
Weimar 240 World War 206, 218, 221, 256
Westernisation 280 Wren, Christopher 16, 44, 123, 256
Western tradition of memory 217 Wu Hung 80, 128
Whately, Thomas 70, 75, 168, 219
Whitechapel Gallery, London 260 Yale University Art Gallery 224, 259
Wilcots, Henry 233 Yang Tingbao 204, 246n4
Williamson, James 244 Yates, Frances A. 217
Wilton-Ely, John 120
Wiltshire 261–3 Zuccari, Federico 69
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 89, 92, Zucchi, Carlo 86
119–20 Zucker, Paul 211

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