British Architecture

The influx of scholars to Britain in the mid-twentieth century, many of whom had fled persecution in Nazi-occupied Europe , meant British architecture was scrutinized for the first time in any depth by a set of intellectual and philosophical conventions that had not rested easily in existing British academic traditions. British architecture had not received much attention from European scholars. It provided neither examples of formal brilliance that would stand up to continental examples nor any significant influence on design in Europe - the traffic of ideas had for the most part been one way.

It is appropriate to begin a biographical dictionary of professional men by giving some account of the history of their profession. Indeed, the history of British architecture is bound up with its own practice, and the careers of those architects and master workmen who figure in this dictionary would scarcely be intelligible without some idea of the conditions under which they designed and built.

Style remains a principal concern of the histories of British architecture from the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century, if not up to the present day. Architecture and style are interlinked to the point that style can almost be believed to contain the essence of architecture, but if this were the case then style would constitute the subject of architectural history. Quite clearly it does not. Instead, style is one of the many orders of narrative open to the architectural historian.

If the architectural history of the British Isles was to have the same academic weight as its continental counterparts it required recognizable formal qualities which gave it distinction and allowed it to be read as signifying sets of social and cultural ideals of its builders, users, historians and its many publics past and present. It would also be preferable for these formal qualities to relate to the European canon of architecture - namely the classical style. The influx of European scholars into Britain in the mid-twentieth century opened up the possibilities for placing British architecture in its cultural and aesthetic context and seeing it a part of a broader intellectual history of culture. Not least here Rudolph Wittkower and Fritz Saxl's British Art and the Mediterranean first published in 1948 which, in the Warburgian tradition, presented a cultural and iconographic survey of the use of classical motifs across a broad chronological span. The typological approach adopted by Wittkower comprised the study of specific stylistic details or elements and provides an illuminating set of connections. His discussion of a type of window and door frame, with blocked quoins at regular intervals and a compact mass of three or five voussoirs in its lintel, demonstrates Wittkower's innovatory method of analysis of a motif that was extensively used in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British architecture.

Wittkower's cultural analysis of Lord Burlington and Palladianism emphasised the meaning of stylistic elements as cultural symbols which found its apogee in Wittkower's seminal work Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, first published in 1949. For the first time in these works, British architecture was linked with the architecture of Europe in formal and intellectual terms. This made a significant break with the inward-looking, insular empirical surveys of previous decades. But, importantly, whilst placing British architecture in its European context in formal terms, Wittkower did recognise that it is a repertoire of classical ornament that he identifies rather than a coherent self-consciously constructed style.