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

In this book Sir John Summerson charts the development of architectural theory and practice from Elizabeth I to George IV. Questions of style, technology, and the social framework of architecture are resolved as separable but always essential components of the building world. Men of genius and buildings of fame emerge: Inigo Jones, Wren, Vanbrugh, Adam, Soane; Hampton Court, St Paul's Cathedral, London squares and the terraces and crescents of Bath. Appendices deal with Scottish architecture before the union and buildings in the thirteen colonies of America. The book is a companion to Ellis Waterhouse's Painting in Britain 1530-1830 and Margaret Whinney's Sculpture in Britain 1530-1830; colour plates have been added to this new edition. Book jacket.

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

The British terrain is a gold mine for the student of architecture. Ranging in era from ancient times to the present day—from Stonehenge to the Millennium Dome—this volume's 76 entries include palaces, castles, bridges, churches, country houses, and various public buildings and monuments, as well as such well-known features of British architecture and design as terraced houses, suburban semi-detached houses, and public telephone kiosks. Detailed yet accessible to nonspecialist readers, the alphabetical entries also provide cross-references and lists of additional information sources in both print and electronic formats. Appendixes list the entries by location, architectural style, and architect/designer; explain the defining characteristics of major British architectural styles; and discuss the importance of the Crown, peerage, and Parliament in British architectural history. Besides a detailed subject index, the volume includes a timeline, a general bibliography, a glossary of architectural terms, and an introduction that traces the development of British architecture from prehistoric and Roman times to the 21st century. Written by an associate professor of architecture at Oklahoma State University, Architecture of England, Scotland, and Wales, part of Greenwood's Reference Guides to National Architecture series, presents architectural biographies of these countries' most famous and significant structures.

Through Creole houses and merchant stores to sugar fields and boiling houses, Jamaica played a leading role in the formation of both the early modern Atlantic world and the British Empire. Architecture and Empire in Jamaica offers the first scholarly analysis of Jamaican architecture in the long 18th century, spanning roughly from the Port Royal earthquake of 1692 to Emancipation in 1838. In this richly illustrated study, which includes hundreds of the author's own photographs and drawings, Louis P. Nelson examines surviving buildings and archival records to write a social history of architecture. Nelson begins with an overview of the architecture of the West African slave trade then moves to chapters framed around types of buildings and landscapes, including the Jamaican plantation landscape and fortified houses to the architecture of free blacks. He concludes with a consideration of Jamaican architecture in Britain. By connecting the architecture of the Caribbean first to West Africa and then to Britain, Nelson traces the flow of capital and makes explicit the material, economic, and political networks around the Atlantic.

The Gentleman's House analyses the architecture, decoration, and furnishings of small classical houses in the eighteenth century. By examining nearly two hundred houses it offers a new interpretation of social mobility in the British Atlantic World characterized by incremental social change.

Humphry Repton (1752–1818) remains one of England’s most interesting and prolific garden and landscape designers. Renowned for his innovative design proposals and distinctive before-and-after images, captured in his famous “Red Books,” Repton’s astonishing career represents the link between the simple parklands of his predecessor Capability Brown and the more elaborate, structured, and formal landscapes of the Victorian age. This lavishly illustrated book, based on a wealth of new research, reinterprets Repton’s life, working methods, and designs, and examines why they proved so popular in a rapidly changing world.

Whereas the past decades have seen a profound reconsideration of eighteenth-century visual culture, the architecture of that century has undergone little evaluation. Its study, unlike that of the early modern period or the twentieth century, has continued to use essentially the same methods and ideas over the last fifty years. Articulating British Classicism reconsiders the traditional historiography of British eighteenth-century architecture as it was shaped after World War II, and brings together for the first time a variety of new perspectives on British classicism in the period. Drawing on current thinking about the eighteenth century from a range of disciplines, the book examines such topics as social and gender identities, colonialization and commercialization, notions of the rural, urban and suburban, as well as issues of theory and historiography. Canonical constructions of Georgian architecture are explored, including current evaluations of the continental intellectual background, the relationship with mid seventeenth-century Stuart court classicism and the development of the subject in the twentieth century.