{"title":"The Abbotts and Their Book: A Dynasty of Decorative Plasterers and Their Work in Devon, c. 1580-1727","authors":"J. Saunt","doi":"10.1017/arh.2021.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/arh.2021.12","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The 'Abbott Book' is a seventeenth-century pocketbook of over three hundred pages of drawings and notes on decorative plaster and paint made by members of the Abbott family of Devonshire. It has a long and contested history. From the 1920s through to the 1950s, it was given sixteenth-century origins and described as a compilation made by several generations of the Abbott family. During this period, the book's drawings were used to attribute much sixteenth- and seventeenth-century decorative plaster in the south-west of England to the Abbott dynasty of plasterers. Then, through the 1980s and 1990s, the Abbott story was revisited and dramatically revised. The book was declared a post-1660 work and previous notions of several generations of Abbotts creating it were dispelled. The whole work was reattributed to one man, John Abbott, who was born in 1642 and died in 1727. As a result, plasterwork across the south-west was reattributed to an anonymous 'Devon School' of plasterers and, with its new and dramatically shortened lifespan, the book's usefulness as a source for the broader practices of plasterwork in the period was diminished. Using new evidence relating to watermarks, the genealogy of the Abbotts, the plasterwork they produced and the print sources they used for drawings in the book, this article rewrites the Abbott Book story. It restores the notion that the pocketbook was used by several different members of the Abbott family — at least three and possibly four — over the 150 years between c. 1580 and 1727. By providing a logic and a timeline for its complex compilation pattern, it allows the drawings in the book to shed new light on the design and production processes of seventeenth-century plasterwork not just in Devon, but also in England as a whole.","PeriodicalId":43293,"journal":{"name":"ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY","volume":"3 1","pages":"285 - 320"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85517722","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Modernism and Cultural Politics in Inter-war Austria: The Case of Clemens Holzmeister","authors":"M. Rampley","doi":"10.1017/arh.2021.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/arh.2021.14","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines the work of the Austrian architect Clemens Holzmeister. A leading representative of Austrian architecture between the wars, and a significant figure in the i95os and i96os as teacher of the new generation of Austrian architects including Hans Hollein and Gustav Peichl, Holzmeister presents a perplexing image. In the i920s, he played an important role in the early architectural projects of Red Vienna, but in the following decade he endorsed the Austrofascist regime of Engelbert Dollfuß and Kurt Schuschnigg of i934-38. This article argues that his work presents other interpretative challenges too, for he was a prolific designer of churches, which have seldom been integrated into wider narratives of modern architecture. However his work is viewed, it was an important barometer of wider cultural and political currents in inter-war Austria, in particular the country's attempt to construct a meaningful identity after the collapse of the Habsburg empire. The aim of the article is not to rehabilitate or recover Holzmeister, but to consider the light his work casts on inter-war cultural politics in Austria, as well as the broader questions over the implicit value judgements that inform histories of modern architecture.","PeriodicalId":43293,"journal":{"name":"ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY","volume":"150 1","pages":"347 - 378"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88872853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Giovanna Guidicini, Triumphal Entries and Festivals in Early Modern Scotland (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 349 pp. incl. 23 colour and 45 b&w ills, ISBN 9782503585413, €90","authors":"I. Campbell","doi":"10.1017/arh.2021.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/arh.2021.19","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43293,"journal":{"name":"ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY","volume":"24 1","pages":"409 - 410"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74313132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"William E. Wallace, Michelangelo, God's Architect: The Story of His Final Years and Greatest Masterpiece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), xi and 279 pp. incl. 57 colour and 33 b&w ills, ISBN 9780691195490, £25","authors":"D. Hemsoll","doi":"10.1017/arh.2021.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/arh.2021.18","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43293,"journal":{"name":"ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY","volume":"15 4","pages":"407 - 409"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72429789","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dickie Bateman and the Gothicization of Old Windsor: Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole","authors":"Matthew Reeve","doi":"10.1017/S0066622X0000246X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0066622X0000246X","url":null,"abstract":"Mr Dicky Bateman was a typical eccentric, who resembled his friend Horace Walpole in his Gothic affectation, and [John] Wilkes in his impious buffoonery. In one of the witty characterizations for which he is justifiably famous, Horace Walpole described the subject of this article — the transformation of the villa at Old Windsor owned by his friend, Richard (Dickie) Bateman — as a bout of one-upmanship between two men of taste: ‘[I] converted Dicky Bateman from a Chinese to a Goth […] I preached so effectively that every pagoda took the veil’. He later described the change of the style of Bateman’s house in terms of spiritual affiliation: Bateman’s house had ‘changed its religion […] I converted it from Chinese to Gothic’. Here as elsewhere in the early years of the Gothic Revival, Walpole serves as principal interlocutor, providing keen, if sharply biased, insights on many significant building projects in England. Walpole positions himself as a teacher and Bateman as a disciple whom he convinced to change his tastes from Chinoiserie (‘the fashion of the instant’) to the Gothic, the style ‘of the elect’. Walpole’s clever allegory of stylistic change as national and religious conversion was based in part on the fact that he provided the conduit for Richard Bentley and Johann Heinrich Müntz, two of his closest designers in the ‘Committee of Taste’, to design Gothic additions for Bateman between 1758-61. Rebuilt and expanded in the fashionable mode of Walpole’s own Strawberry Hill and by its designers, from Walpole’s perspective at least, Old Windsor as remodelled for Bateman served to reinforce his role as arbiter of the Gothic taste and Strawberry Hill as its paradigm.","PeriodicalId":43293,"journal":{"name":"ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY","volume":"12 1","pages":"97 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90314459","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Spike Bucklow, Richard Marks and Lucy Wrapson, eds, The Art and Science of the Church Screen in Medieval Europe: Making, Meaning, Preserving; Boydell Press (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2017), 360 pp. incl. 62 colour and 77 b&w ills; ISBN: 9781783271238; £75","authors":"Christine Faraday","doi":"10.1017/arh.2020.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/arh.2020.11","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43293,"journal":{"name":"ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY","volume":"70 1","pages":"313 - 314"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80287891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Discovering the Byzantine Art of Building: Lectures at the RIBA, the Royal Academy and the London Architectural Society, 1843–58","authors":"N. Karydis","doi":"10.1017/arh.2020.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/arh.2020.9","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Although British architects played a major role in the rediscovery of the Byzantine monuments of Greece in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, earlier interest in the subject has remained obscure. Four lectures, read at the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Royal Academy and the London Architectural Society from 1843 to 1857, reflect a lively interest in Byzantine church architecture in the mid-nineteenth century. Delivered by Charles Robert Cockerell (1843), Edwin Nash (1847), Thomas Leverton Donaldson (1853) and John Louis Petit (1858), these lectures constitute some of the earliest attempts in England to explore both well-known monuments such as Hagia Sophia and lesser-known churches in Greece, Turkey and elsewhere. The manuscript records of these lectures show that influential British architects were not only familiar with Byzantine monuments, but were also able to look at them from the viewpoint of the designer and the builder. Emphasising the potential of Byzantine architecture to inform new design, they paved the way for the Byzantine revival, half a century later, and for the systematic investigation of Byzantine architecture from the late nineteenth century onwards.","PeriodicalId":43293,"journal":{"name":"ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY","volume":"32 1","pages":"171 - 190"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85990056","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beatriz Colomina, X-Ray Architecture; Lars Müller (Zurich, 2019), 200 pp. incl. 277 col. and b&w ills; ISBN: 9783037784433; £30","authors":"Albena Yaneva","doi":"10.1017/arh.2020.25","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/arh.2020.25","url":null,"abstract":"beyond London to the reality of practice across Britain. It is a timely study, too. Boom Cities is ultimately about ‘a local response to a national debate about cities, and [...] deindustrialisation’ (p. ). Blackburnwas thus ‘wrestlingwith problemswhich remain intractable and pertinent: how to mould private investment towards giving a new role to a city whose meaning had been tied up with a now defunct industry’ (p. ). Discussions of city centres today frequently invoke the idea of crisis and the need to reinvent the urban core, albeit now in the face of e-commerce and the climate emergency, as well as continuing social inequalities and debates about the role of the state versus private developers. In this context, there is surely much to be learned by revisiting the s.","PeriodicalId":43293,"journal":{"name":"ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY","volume":"04 1","pages":"343 - 345"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86333768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Concrete Architecture: A Lost Opportunity?","authors":"D. Yeomans","doi":"10.1017/arh.2020.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/arh.2020.10","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract When reinforced concrete was first used in Britain for framed buildings, it was treated in the same way as steel — that is, in terms of a simple grid of columns and beams. It took some time for one of the advantages of reinforced concrete to be realised, namely that it could be handled as a series of planes with walls and floor plates, which overcame the problem of intrusive beams and columns in domestic interiors. This essay explores the causes of this delay, as well as the work of the engineers who introduced architects to the architectural possibilities of reinforced concrete. In the immediate postwar years, when reinforced concrete was favoured over steel, there was a return to simple grid structures.","PeriodicalId":43293,"journal":{"name":"ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY","volume":"27 1","pages":"257 - 282"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83319391","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}