In search of the pointed arch: Freemasonry and Thomas Hope's 'An Historical Essay on Architecture'

Abstract

Gothic architecture and Freemasonry were integral to Thomas Hope's often ignored history of architecture. While Hope was known as a leading exponent of neoclassical connoisseurship and design, his emphasis on the development of the pointed arch and its critical place in Gothic vocabulary points to significant changes in his thinking at the end of his life. In the Historical Essay Hope seemed to respond to scientific and organic themes that were to develop and deepen in the nineteenth century. His discussion of the role of Freemasons in building medieval churches highlighted a successful working process that would emerge in a different form as the 'team' design process of early twentieth century modernism. As Martin Bressani of Carleton University in Canada comments (in a letter to the author), 'By showing Gothic to be a legitimate architecture, created thanks to the rational and searching minds of Freemasons, Hope liberated practice from the idealizing (or universalizing) forms of neo-classicism, toward new experiments.'