The Royal Society of Arts

Abstract

Designed by John and Robert Adam in 1774, the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) is the earliest example in English architecture of purpose-built headquarters for a learned society. Described at its opening as ‘beautifully simple without meanness, and grand without exaggeration’, it underwent numerous architectural transformations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Today, the London-based RSA combines research and practical experimentation in the spheres of Community and Public Service, Design and Enterprise, Learning, Cognition, and Creativity, drawing on the knowledge and experience of the RSA's 27,000 Fellows in 100 countries. They hold public lectures and seminars, and publish reports, pamphlets and a quarterly journal. This paper investigating the recent works by Matthew Lloyd Architects contains a brief historic overview of the building with a chronology of alterations, an explanation of the original brief and its evolution, and the restoration principles for the five Georgian town houses of which the RSA is composed. The paper's focus is on the restoration of the important Grade I Listed Great Room and the discreet insertion of twenty-first-century technology within the historic spaces, but it also looks at the Vestibule, the Great Stairs, and the Anteroom to the Great Room, as spaces pertinent to the Great Room itself.