Architects and the Building World from Chambers to Ruskin: Constructing Authority

This study peers behind the veil of architectural styles to the underlying social microcosm of the ‘building world’ of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, to examine how the fragile authority of the architect took root. Bringing to architectural history methods more familiar from studies of the social content of poetry and painting, Brian Hanson is able to establish new, and often surprising relationships between many of the key figures of the period - including Chambers, Soane, Barry, Pugin, Scott and Street - and to shed new light on lesser figures, and on agencies as diverse as freemasonry and magazine publishing. John Ruskin in particular emerges here in an entirely new light, as do his arguments concerning ‘The Nature of Gothic’. Following recent rethinking of the pace of industrialisation, and the dynamic between the metropolitan centres and the more slowly evolving ‘fringes’, Hanson concludes that in some respects Ruskin was closer to William Chambers than to William Morris.

• Completely new view of key figures of the architectural debates of the Georgian and Victorian periods in England • Places Ruskin in a larger context, suggesting new alliances between him and the classical tradition, the PreRaphaelites, and Arts and Crafts Movement • Applies the techniques developed by art historians concerned with social content of poetry and painting

Introduction; Part I: 1. ‘The shadow of their wings’: the architect among builders John Gwynn; (i) William Chambers; The example of Chambers; 2. ‘The poetry of architecture’: the architect above builders Joseph Gwilt; (ii) John Soane; The example of Soane; Part II: 3. ‘Mystery and craft are gone by’: the poet’s descent a language of men; 4. The pictorial art; ‘never condescended’: coming to terms with new disciplines Charles Barry; (iii) Pugin; A. J. Beresford Hope and the Ecclesiologists; Part III: 5. ‘Conjunctive all’: the sharing of knowledge in building John Britton; (iv) The artizan; 6. ‘Orthodoxy of practice’: The Builder and a new freemasonry Josiah Hansom and The Builder; (v) Alfred Bartholemew, The Builder and the Freemasons of the Church; (vi) Bartholemew’s College; Godwin’s Builder; Part IV: 7. Ruskin’s changing prospect: Ruskin, Leeds, Lamb, and Loudon; (vii) The poetry of architecture; Modern Painters I and II; The Seven Lamps of Architecture; Part V: 8. Ruskin’s descent: Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle; (viii) The Stones of Venice: James Fergusson and E. L. Garbett; Ruskin in 1854 and 1855; Ruskin and the PreRaphaelites; Part VI: 9. Incarnation: Ruskin, G. G. Scott and the architectural museum; (ix) Ruskin, Acland, and the Oxford Museum; Deane and Woodward; PreRaphaelite painters and sculptors and the Oxford Museum; Part VII: 10. Ruskin’s reception: the 1850s and 1860s: John Pollard Seddon and the ‘puginisation’ of Ruskin; (x) G. E. Street: father of the Arts and Crafts; E. W. Godwin - the ‘art-architect’; The architectural museum in the late 1850s; The failure of the Oxford Museum; Ruskin’s lectures to architects.

‘… the scholarship is impressive …’ Architecture Today