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initial revision considerations. topics: (bolded - lots of work needing done)

Inigo Jones, The Banqueting House Wren as a man St Pauls Oxford Blenheim Churches - Wren Churches - Hawksmoor Hampton Court Castle Howard Chelsea Greenwich The political landscape of the 17th C The Monarchy Architectural Language Hawsmoor Vanbrugh The Baroque Country House

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Hampton Court!

Key ideas - medieval fabric being dealt with, both Wren and Vanbrugh’s plans (getting rid of the whole thing?) monarchy-politics involved with William’s reign, Wren’s bit - a separate building? The fire as a way of a new level of study, Hercules !! the palace as compared to our other ‘palaces’ , greenwich, chelsea. 

Wrens court - my favourite bit of Wren architecture we have seen, I think. I still love it! it just had such a lovely atmosphere to it, maybe because I have such a soft spot for these old tudor palaces, they make me feel like I’m a kid again and my parents are dragging me around Longleat or Windsor Castle or wherever. It feels like you’re encased in a small old English town, with all the battlements and turrets and you’re moving from one court to the next through confusing corridors, all very fortified. So the Wren facades felt like a wonderful oasis. I think they felt like a little bit of everything that wren and the other architects we’ve been focusing on have been doing - I love the completely symmetrical, regulated fenestration because that’s what I loved at Chelsea. The quad-like feeling strengthened by the medieval-esque round-headed arched collonade felt like the oxford colleges - particularly trinity. Especially with those lovely carved figurative keystones! And the contrast between the white stone and the red brick. The balustrading is so Palladian/Jonesian (and the urns projecting above start to bring to mind Castle Howard and Blenheim) bit with that wonderful whimsy of the ornamental lions skins (v elizabethan!) and the hercules painted roundels. I felt it blended wonderfully into the skyline of the older fabric of the palace, too - absolutely not disruptive, just different.

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Castle Howard - 29/11/2019

I definitely think Castle Howard is my favourite country house now - even including Stowe, maybe. Okay maybe not including Stowe. 

North facade. I think the key concepts of this house is : Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor as an architectural team, key issues of authorship there. Geraghty’s ideas of the treatment of the facade - applied ornament vs showing architectonic depth? E.g with the quadrangle rustication seen to left of pic. The follies in the garden, particularly in Levine’s article with the arguments about the space of them all and the three stages of history being represented.  Interior - arches and arches and arches - telescopic idea, use and role of the painting in the main hall vestibule. That sense of grand space and size particularly when you climb the stairs and are at the level of the capitals, very interesting. Difficulty of the space - need for those side courts as domed vestibule renders main building pretty much useless in terms of living space.  Also - really interesting, how the landscape reacts and sits in discourse with the house, would like to do more reading on this. 

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The Chapel at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea

Why is this chapel so interesting to me? I think it synthesises a huge amount of Wren’s architecture, while also being a bit divergent and interesting for different reasons. First of all, the shape of course isn’t particularly ‘Wren’, with the traditional pews and long nave, facing an apse; nothing like some of the centralised auditoriums he is so famous for. The high focus on the apse, with the coupled-columned aedicule and huge painted half-dome (painting by Sebastiano Ricci) echos traditional Gothic churches. However, Wren’s Baroque idiom is visible through the sweeping curve of the wood panelling behind, the false carved masonry really reminding me of St Pauls - perhaps it’s the swags, and the simple, unornamented yet thick architraving. That colour contrast between the dark wood and the white ceiling reminds me a lot of so many of the city churches and their rich furnishings - and only serves to heighten the effect of the light from the massive fenestration - that to me is the centrepiece of the whole chapel; the bright, clear-paned windows. When we went to visit St Stephen Walbrook, I tried to unpack why the effect of the dome was so astounding - and to me, I believe the tall, almost human-height column pedestals and the dark wood running around the wall at the same height utterly seperate the lower and upper parts of the interior - the true interior begins at eye level, just above your head, and you feel that the domed space is floating above you, rather than you standing within the space. The separation of lower interior and upper is clear in this chapel, too, and Wren has achieved a similar effect with the simple, clear barrel vault ceiling lit so beautifully with windows that rise above your head. 

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sorting out English Baroque Folder 

Every seminar/buildings section: -Image and interior, labelled etc -Mindmap of key concepts -plans, sketches  -Seminar Notes -Readings -Reading Notes -Final page: Key questions, anticipated exam questions Quizlets, and flashcard of basic info - dates etc.

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Blenheim (late entry!)

It was interesting how i really didn’t like Blenheim when I first got there - and genuinely I think that’s because of the management of the site (WHY is it so expensive to get in good lord!!) but, now, I really do think I like it - for the same reason I like Greenwich, I like seeing these variations on English Baroque. Put this ‘palace’ next to another ‘palace’ from the course, Chelsea, and its such a wonderful comparison to make thinking that they really were built in the same kinda time - let me remind myself of the dates - Blenheim finished 1722 and Chelsea 1690s. The photo above reminds me how its all telescopic, all folded out, like some of Wren’s spires, and I think St Pauls dome. 

general thoughts: Hawskmoor and Vanbrugh mixing, and their particular type of Baroque. Looking forward to comparing this to other country houses.

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st pauls - friday 15th november

I really like (and have been trying to keep in mind) the idea of St Pauls as a thread throughout the course, and after the seminar today, I have it strongly in mind as a wonderful case study as to what ‘English Baroque’ is. I still feel that I don’t know much about the building and thats primarily because I had no time to do the reading this week, so I’m going to go back and read them and I think make some huge diagrams or something. But the triforium tour was SO useful and just great. Seeing the great model surrounded by all those drawings will undoubtedly be a highlight of the course. I really found it interesting to compare not only the outside but the photos from the INSIDE of the great model with the St Pauls that finally got built - it really does look to me like Wren had his way in the end. Also the ingenuity of the dome was wonderful to consider as we walked up.  General thoughts from the seminar - Downes’s ‘movement, rhythm, tempo’ quote, interior vs exterior - illusion? trickery?, what makes this building baroque not classical? Focusing on the various plans - pre-fire, warrant, great model. From where has Wren taken these ideas - borrowed from Bramante etc. Calling back to old fabric of the building - gothic height inside, the layout, the Inigo Jones call-backs. How does this building play out on the political and religious stage? also - key - primary sources! Perhaps a good idea to write out a list of these ; all the letters, the plans, phrases from architects, public records... there was lots mentioned but I can’t remember much. 

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Although we are all in agreement on how erudite and interesting Anthony Geraghty’s writing is, previous to reading his chapters on the Sheldonian, I read his essay in Rethinking the Baroque - ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Drawing Technique of the 1690s and John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding’. I thought it was absolutely one of the best pieces of art historical writing I’ve ever read; I’ve been wanting to sit and quantify why I find it so wonderful, in the hopes that I can try and emulate it - so I thought I’d post it here!

My personal tutor told me that the only definable thing separating a 2:1 (my cosy abode) from a 1:1 (the dream) is the clarity and simplicity of your essay writing. Geraghty opens with a simple statement of what he is going to do. There is no overflowering of language or romantic preludes. Within the first paragraph he aligns his analysis with Heinrich Wölfflin’s description of the Baroque as ‘painterly’, setting up Hakwsmoor’s drawings in a dialogue between Wölfflin’s ontological and epistemological distinctions and Wren’s linear drawing style. He also very quickly structures his essay - first part being based on architectural theory and Wölfflin’s distinctions, second part being Hawksmoor’s drawings in reference to Locke’s essay - the essay being contemporary and therefore entirely relevant, no explanation really needed on why he’s bringing it in. In the final sentence of the first page, he hints at what we may discover by the end - a rethinking of the possibility of the ‘English Baroque’.

I very much enjoy the quick historical structuring Geraghty gives to his Wölfflin quotes - placing them in a linear dialogue with Plato and Vitruvius without overcomplicating the source, simply presenting to us the problem - “things as they seem” versus “things as they are” and whether an artist can present the two. He states that the purpose of Hawksmoor's drawings is to model perception, then factor this experience into the design. “Hawksmoor was conversant with the Vitruvian tradition of optical refinement”

He then, quite easily, relates this to Wren’s wonderful - 

“The architect ought, above all Things, to be well skilled in Perspective, for, everything that appears well in the orthography, may not be good in the mode, especially where there are many angles and procedures, and everything that is good in model, may not be so when built, because a model is seen from other station and distances than the eye sees the building”

He also brings in Panofsky, and Robin Evans (who talks on Renaissance and early modern europe), so now without too much heavy reading (and only 3 pages in!) we have a pantheon of theorists, contemporary and not, giving voices to his argument. Panofsky’s inclusion gives depth to the theoretical side, throwing in considerations of psychophysiological space, a swirling combination of Wölfflin’s ontological and epistemological distinctions - “it (space) is as much a consolidation and systematisation of the external world, as an extension of the domain of the self.”

Key language such as perspective and orthogonal drawing is used over and over again to solidify the key thoughts of the text, and to keep a strong thread going.

Next, Geraghty explores a select collection of Hawksmoor drawings which, more than just being strikingly wonderful examples (particularly - Hawksmoor’s unexecuted design for rebuilding whitehall palace, 1698!) they are not overwhelming in amount - there are four together, to be exact. 

He continually takes stock and updates his argument - “So, I would suggest that Hawksmoor’s drawings of the 1690s conform to Wölfflin’s description of Baroque because Hawksmoor is striving to depict the effect of buildings”. How does he not make this tedious? In the previous pages/paragraphs, he has devoted all text to describing the development of the idea with no reference to the original argument, making the update a well-needed tying down of his argument. 

He then goes on to say… “but not entirely”. 

“How can it be, when the design is so dramatically truncated, and then pen and ink technique is so essential diagrammatic?” It seems to me so far that he has set out a framework, a lovely methodological grid of ideas and theorists and then is filling in the grid with Hawksmoor, stretching him across the theory grid. 

Then he adds in Locke - simply describing why he is relevant (“the role of judgement in sensory perception, and locke;s distinction between primary and secondary qualities”). In the same paragraph, he negates too plain of a comparison, but lays out that Locke characterises Hawksmoor's drawings conceptually. Four paragraphs or so are dedicated to a simple layout of Locke’s theory, with no mention of Hawksmoor at all. Then he sets out “compare the primacy that locke affords to sensory knowledge with the more subjective aspects of hawkwamoors drawings”, immediately bringing in an image - a tower study of St Pauls. I also enjoy how at this point in the essay Geraghty introduces some really enticing, complicated and a bit arty concepts - light that facilitates vision, so without light there would be no perceivable form. Without this, the tower would cease to exist. He brings back his past argument - this St Pauls tower is not only subjective, main portion is orthogonal. Gerarghty brings in a second instance of Locke - the last few pages or so grappling with only his blank paper idea. Locke's second category of knowledge - acquisition, reflection. This is where Hawksmoor's drawings lie. 

“Hawksmoor’s sensory engagement with the world around him, reflected through the process of drawing, allowed him to pre-empt the experience of looking at unbuilt buildings. Nevertheless, it remains the case that Hawksmoor is not looking at St Pauls, he is conceiving it, and he is conceiving it with the subjectivity of the beholder already in mind, which he need not have done”

“Object does not precede the subject, as it does for Locke. Nor as we have seen does subject precede object. Subject and object are combined.” And he links it DIRECTLY to those perpective and orthogonal drawings. 

In conclusion, Geraghty’s article succeeds due to his very narrow and clearly defined focus - one essay, one architect, perhaps five images in total. However, complicated and nuanced readings are peppered in, allowing for further in-depth study but coming to an easily understandable conclusion that was really set out from the beginning. 

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oxford - 4/11/2019

Oxford was so wonderful! I have been there only once before and during that one-day trip I didn’t care about the architecture at all - if anything, I was slightly underwhelmed by Oxford, perhaps because I knew nothing about it and did not care to learn... (I was about 16!) It was wonderful to study the colleges etc from an architectural point of view, and I’m very glad it was good weather :)  I don’t particularly think it will be useful to write down my thoughts on EVERY site we visited (maybe I will continue to do that through the next week) but I will write about the stand-out sights.  St Johns College: Canterbury Quadrangle. 

I wasn’t quite convinced by Morgans vitriolic hate of this quad. Although I felt the stark contrast between this Laudian indulgence and our recent focus on Wren’s subtle, subdued classicism, on first thought I found the building wonderfully interesting to consider how Wren would have considered this modern architecture - how did he react, respond, copy or reject this? Same with Wadham college’s architecture. Also, the site is just wonderfully, incredibly nuanced and interesting - from adding religion to balance out the symmetry of the spandrel allegorical figures, to the masque-like Elizabethan ornament and the wonderful figure of architecture with her mural crown - I wonder if Wren saw this figure and considered the future of his studies. It’s such a banquet of religious and political intricacies !! I would love to actually write out a full piece based off my notes for this - I feel, due to the length of the readings and my own mistake in not doing them until the weekend before, where I was also back in my family home and having to cope with my brother annoying me all day, I didn’t come into St Johns knowing a lot about it - save from problematic idea (it must have been from Gerarty?) the idea that Wren picked up where Laud left off after the wrestoration. 

Sheldonian Theatre

With Clarendon building in the background... 

Again, I feel like I have SO MUCH to learn still about the Sheldonian even though I read that WHOLE text on it.. the plan is to print out the texts we had for Oxford and go through them slowly and laboriously... but with the rounded north facade I really liked the way the building sort of hid what was inside - but yet prepared you for the function of it, the drama and theatre. Save for the painting scheme (which really isn’t something I should be thinking about too much!) I also found the interior enjoyable, first as middle ground between Wren the professor and Wren the architect (of course, as if there was such a thing!) and also as a playing space getting ready for Wren’s ecclesiastical architectural ventures. It feels like all the Wren buildings so far have been playing spaces, experimenting and toying with varying ways to approach, consider and refabricate the architectural conundrum laid down so long ago by Jones.. i’m just hyping up for my essay here. But I found the south facade to pose a problem for me, and I think I can finally put it into words - I am very much a fan of the classical temple front seen from a distance, approached, changed and distororted and reformulated as you move up to and around the facade (hence why I love country houses with picturesque landscapes, with long drives giving you a parthenon-esque view of the villa!) yet the Sheldonian does not offer you that normal viewing mode, obviously due to the very historic urban fabric of Oxford - the divinity school is right there, the building is surrounded, there is no way to change or enlarge the site given. And yet Wren wanted to produce a classical architectural form that gives mind to the dignity, gravitas, importance of the ceremonies taking place inside (the grand conclusion of your time at Oxford!) so the temple-front to the South makes sense, yet as I approached it from the curved and very soft North entrance, I felt it was way too heavy. And we had to stand so close, crane our necks! The entrance ended up feeling extremely wide, and because the front elevation wasn’t strong enough for my liking, due to the spatial confines, it all felt extremely heavy. Morgan now informs me that he thinks it is aptly centrally projected. I disagree.

(photo not mine - from Geograph.com!) If Wren’s rule of having centrally projecting fronticepieces, projecting ‘up and out’ is derived from Palladio... perhaps I am letting my preference for pure Palladianism get in the way of my opinions of the building ! But I don’t think that is purely the reason why it feels heavy to me. The flanking blind arches and niches, hiding the corridors and stairways I think, give the facade a thick and squat feel that perhaps is more Vanbrugh and Hawskmoor than Wren! I love Wren for his lightness. But regardless, all of this does not necessarily detract from the wonderfulness of the building because as you walk around all that heaviness is completely gone - and inside, it feels light and Elysian with this huge painted ceiling. Particularly, standing in front of the Broad Street entrance, I was struck by how the rusticated arches, with those seamless illusionistic blocks leading into one another, give the building an extremely organic and antique feel - continued with the Palladian cracked-earth effect on the South facade (the name of which I will search up again in Gerarty). A quandary of a building!

All Souls College 

I don’t think I need to restate too much how wonderful it was to see those DRAWINGS ! Also i’ve just spent a while browsing the wonderful digitised collection (putting the links here so I don’t lose the websites) and theres so much to work from. I’m for some reason particularly fascinated by this unexecuted hawksmoor - 

“Design for a large house with a giant order”. Very Blenheim-y with the giant, monumental orders. Also depicted here on the back of another sketch - the urn-like firework projections above the wing cornice! 

Tomorrow I shall do my Blenheim entry...

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I am being forced by Morgan to post this

14/10/2019 - Tasting Rubens

Eau de Rubens has surface notes of sweet peach and rose, a feminine prelude that gives way to dynamic bursts of tonka bean and spiced cinnamon, held in a cradle of dark Merlot grape. As you stare, notes of bergamot and seductive jasmine give way to a magnetic, lingering heartbeat of cardamom and amber.

Our poorly constructed step-ladder spines are very much not designed to look up; we’ll cast our eyes heavenward to momentarily check the weather, to glance at a chandelier, to remark on neoclassical moulding, but extended gazing at a Baroque ceiling painting feels like a chore. It’s hardly easy for the artist, either — I often think of poor Sir James Thornhill, martyr, painter of the Painted Hall ceiling. Pain-ter. Up a huge ladder for twenty years. Rubens didn’t bother with craning his neck or lying backwards on a ladder for the Banqueting Hall ceiling — he was far too busy getting knee-deep in the canon. The Banqueting Hall was built and served to house the Elizabethan indulgences of masques; yet as the new, wonderful ceiling paintings were put up, so ceased the masques. The soot from the candles would have damaged the paint. As I lay back on the floor of the Banqueting House à la a relaxed Mr Thornhill, the spiralling symposium of Rubens above tasted to me like ozone, like collected soot, like the rising hot air from the hundreds of tourists that pass through, breath that has the luxury of curling up alongside the work. The conservators of the Painted Hall’s ceiling have only just finished up meticulously scraping away of this airborne life detritus, removing all evidence of unworthy humanity from the Elysian oil scenes.

Samson and Deliah, The Assumption, The Garden of Love, all these carry the antique-varnished, greyed ash smell of old Baroque art with those pitch shadows. And while looking at Samson and Delilah makes me wrinkle my nose and grimace at the sheer grotesque mass of it, the work doesn’t to me stink of human bodies and sex, as the narrative would have you imagine. The wooden interior (mahogany?) and the heavy indigo curtain is humid, moisture-soaked as cold wood in hot rooms often is. It smells like the face-powder actors wear, like hyper-sweet musky perfume that smells complex on the first spray, but leaves only a lingering stain of synthetic vanilla bean, that sticks to your clothes and coats.

Poetry gives the visuals of art with the added treasures of words, clustered together, eternal yet anxiously transient. Literature — an art owned by all, tangible and consumable to the lower classes, eaten page-by-page. Music, universal. When paintings collect politics like layers of cemented varnish, music can be shook of its historical dust like a rug and whittled down to its original beauty within seconds. But do any of these delights engulf the senses as much as painting? Rubens’s Honeysuckle Bower is a plate on which is served the intoxicating sugar-sweet trappings of the honeysuckle, the feel of the dark and rooty grass on which the couple stand, the barely-caught giggle of Isabella Brant. Her smile is eternally on a verge. It is forever dusk. The honeysuckle is forever blooming. Even my presence, my hot breath and greedy, starving stare feels like soot on the paint, dirtying up the fresh fabrics and detracting from the love, licking all the perfume from this preserved moment.

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Chelsea and Greenwich Seminar

Initially, I really struggled with the readings for this seminar, it felt like the Stevenson reading went completely over my head and also I could grasp was the main comparisons between hospitals and palaces and some extra little points here and there. I think I still need to do a lot more study to extrapolate the actual information I can transfer into an exam paper or essay, but I do feel a lot more confident in talking about both sites now.

Main things I am still thinking about:

The Chapel at Royal Hospital Chelsea: I really loved the idea of this as a sort of synthesis of all the various experiments I have seen Wren do so far. The apse with the painted half-dome felt like a balanced, pared back St Mary Abchurch - a dome suitable for the use of the chapel, still absolutely stunning, but I felt Abchurch to be almost too much? The wonderful wonderful wonderful play with light in the chapel with the huge, round-headed windows with CLEAR GLASS !! And the barrel vault, Romanesque, swiped from ancient Roman sources but with none of the heaviness. Perhaps I could do my essay on this chapel???

The Painted Hall: I have really mixed and unformed opinions about the painted hall. On the one hand, it is clearly aesthetically wonderful and I am going to use it as a big tool to start to bolster my knowledge of the monarchy of the period - it’ll be nice to apply it to the painted scenes rather than just write out lineages etc on paper.

Looking back out of the window from the Queens House:

“A perfect example of what the English can do with formal design when they feel like it. The axis is one of the best in Europe… it depends on Wren’s observatory, with its almost Jacobean outline, rising off-centre on the hill behind. So nature has the last word after all.” (Nairn)

I am still very interested in using the Royal Naval College complex (selection of buildings? Grand building scheme developed over time? Odd pick-and-mix of English architecture? (can’t take credit for that phrase, that was Morgan’s)) as a map and sounding board, to track and explore the various iterations of the classical, all stemming from that initial ‘problem’ of Inigo Jones - I really loved what we were saying about Jones just throwing classicism into the year and leaving all these different juggling-balls for architects of the future to catch and try and develop into something. We were discussing this sort of momentary great expansion - beginning slowly with Jones and then the various smaller developments (that lovely text - Peter Guillery’s ‘Suburban Models, or Calvinism and Continuity in London’s Seventeenth-Century Church Architecture’ which smashed apart this non-continuity from the Elizabethan to the classical) and then a flurry of all this building !!!!!!!! And all this experimentation, Wren throwing up these huge domes, Vanbrugh going a bit mad with it all, and then very quickly it all being stripped back again, Wren being out of favour (am I right in remembering that it took right up until the 19th-20th C for St Pauls to become truly liked again by the public?) and ‘dull’ Palladianism regaining a firm grip on English architectural vogue.

Current actual academic thoughts about the seminar rather than just musings

Obviously key is the palaces and hospital idea - ‘tale of two hospitals’. New civic charitable responsibility being proposed by the monarch, who obviously post-restoration was playing a delicate field - why build palaces for the king and face backlash when you can build the same palaces, with the same political function, just with a different ACTUAL function - housing the sick, and this refers to Christine’s ideas about who are the visitors and who are the inhabitants. Ideas of decorum are strong - thing of Evelyn’s quote about whether its quite right to be housing the sick in such lovely buildings, and that wonderful poem about wanting to go mad just so you can stay in Bethlem, and the inhabitants thinking they are princes and kings just because of the architecture. Interesting thinking about this from our point of view where hospitals are so far from these architectural ideas - although Wrens clear glass, light etc are all still there. Also looking back to our Wren seminar, considering his background in ‘physick’ (perhaps a rewatch of the Gresham College Geraty lecture is in order) so the medical field was not unknown to him.

‘Architecture has its political Use; publick Buildings being the Ornament of a Country’

I am off to write up my field notes from the seminar now, which I completely expect to be utterly illegible.

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Canaletto, The Thames from Somerset House Terrace towards the City c.1750-51

I feel like we should firstly have this painting up somewhere in Vernon Square, and secondly, that it’s a wonderful backdrop for our Wren week on the course... seeing the spires is just great. I kinda wish London still looked like this. Tear down the skyscrapers!

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the city churches - 25/10/2019

The city church tour was really fun, and I can’t believe I’ve only been to St Stephen Walbrook before - I’d never been inside St Mary Abchurch!!!!  Key thoughts - necessity of drawing plans when you’re looking at a building (will finish these today I think), SOURCES - critically interpret your sources, what was used to put together your presentation, what you omitted (purposefully or not?), how sources change over time. Post-war sources will be looking at a different church most of the time.

My main thought after the seminar was that I need to get a handle on my architectural vocabulary. Maybe Summerson’s Classical Language of Architecture will help with that. Also, my plan is to make detailed, heavily labelled diagrams of all buildings we visit/ are relevant. I’ll go back and start from the Banqueting House with this.

Also, I definitely think a return trip to the churches is in order, not 100% for learning purposes but just because its so lovely to see how MANY churches Wren designed!! What a task!! I still think Walbrook is my favourite though, however, weirdly, Lothbury is coming up a close second because of its wonderful reserved facade and understated tower, the intimate, slightly crowded interior... I like buildings that really really show history and have changed use and direction a hundred times, and Lothbury seems to me to be a museum of Wren church fittings now.