Review: Design and Plan in the Country House: From Castle Donjons to Palladian Boxes, by Andor Gomme and Alison Maguire

Abstract

Andor Gomme and Alison Maguire ; Design and Plan in Country House: From Castle Donjons to Palladian Boxes ; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008, 338 pp., 288 illus., 230 plans. ££50, ISBN 9780300126457 For Le Corbusier ( Towards a New Architecture , ed. F. Etchells, 1927) the plan is generator, and this belief lies behind Gomme and Maguire's long and idiosyncratic book. Plans do come before elevations, and anyone seriously wishing to understand domestic architecture should study plans before being seduced by blandishments of style and ornament. The focus of their study is sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when loose domestic planning of Middle Ages gave way in Britain to a more compact system that reached its apogee in forty years or so after restoration of monarchy in 1660. This is not a new field of inquiry. Domestic planning looms large in Mark Girouard's Life in English Country House (1978) and his Robert Smythson and Elizabethan Country House (1983), and more recently there have been Nicholas Cooper's perceptive and wide-ranging Houses of Gentry 1480––1680 (1999) and a stimulating chapter on seventeenth-century English villa plans by Patricia Smith in The Renaissance Villa in Britain …