Nicholas Hawksmoor Research Articles

William Bruce’s Hopetoun House and the arrival of Serlio’s unpublished ‘Sixth Book on Dwellings’ in Britain, c 1700

William Bruce’s Hopetoun House, begun in 1699, would have been Britain’s first centrally planned villa, had it been completed as specified in the original contract. The source of its plan has attracted much speculation but this article argues that the closest precedent is a plan in the first draft of Sebastiano Serlio’s unpublished ‘Sixth Book on Dwellings’, dating from the 1540s and preserved in an album, now belonging to the Avery Library in New York. The author demonstrated in an article published in 2022 that the album was in the ownership of the London sculptor, Francis Bird, by the early 18th century. The article here suggests that the original plan of Hopetoun House shows that the Avery Album was known to William Bruce by the late 1690s, and to James Smith; and that it was the source of the plan of Lord Burlington’s Chiswick House; and may have inspired projects by Nicholas Hawksmoor and James Gibbs.

The First Draft of Serlio’s Sixth Book and its Arrival in Britain, c. 1700

ABSTRACTThis article explores the provenance of the first draft of Sebastiano Serlio’s sixth book, on dwellings, written in the 1540s. It was acquired by the Avery Library at Columbia University, New York, a century ago and published for the first time in 1978. The article proposes that the manuscript and drawings remained in the vicinity of Paris until the late seventeenth century, when they were mounted and bound into an album that may have been sold by a descendant of Jacques Androuet du Cerceau I, either in Paris or the Netherlands. It goes on to demonstrate that, in the early eighteenth century, the manuscript was owned by Francis Bird, a leading British sculptor of his day, who collaborated with leading architects including Christopher Wren, James Gibbs and, possibly, Nicholas Hawksmoor.

Review: Da Gerusalemme a Pechino da Roma a Vienna: Sul Saggio di architettura storica di J. B. Fischer von Erlach, by Marco Folin and Monica Preti

Review: <i>Da Gerusalemme a Pechino da Roma a Vienna: Sul Saggio di architettura storica di J. B. Fischer von Erlach</i>, by Marco Folin and Monica Preti

Review: The Return of the Past: Postmodernism in British Architecture and Superstructures: The New Architecture, 1960–1990

The Return of the Past: Postmodernism in British Architecture Sir John Soane's Museum, London 16 May–27 August 2018 Superstructures: The New Architecture, 1960–1990 Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich 24 March–2 September 2018 Recent years have seen British architecture of the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s attract growing interest. The buildings of this period are becoming old enough to be the subjects of proposals for substantial remodeling or demolition, and so some of the key debates in contemporary British architectural conservation are concerned with them. At the same time, historians are increasingly keen to look beyond the trente glorieuses of the postwar British welfare state (i.e., 1945–75), which coincided with the high-water mark of modern architecture and planning. How were the architectural and urban principles of the previous three decades challenged and refined during the second half of the 1970s and the 1980s? Two complementary exhibitions mounted in 2018 explored this question, one showcasing the postmodern revival of historic forms and urban principles, and the other examining so-called high-tech architecture, which celebrated structural engineering and the use of mechanical services, fusing modernist enthusiasm for contemporary technology and flexible planning with an interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century engineering accomplishments. The Return of the Past: Postmodernism in British Architecture , presented at Sir John Soane's Museum in London, was curated by Owen Hopkins, who had previously curated exhibitions dealing with subjects ranging from the work of Nicholas Hawksmoor to that of Alison and Peter Smithson. The show took place principally in the museum's two temporary exhibition galleries, but it began in the adjacent Yellow Drawing Room. There, items from the permanent collection were juxtaposed with those brought in temporarily for the show. One of the giant yellow “egg cups” from the roofline of Terry Farrell's 1983 TV-am headquarters building in London echoed the color of the room, into which were brought chairs by Charles Jencks and others, while the painter Carl Laubin's dramatic depiction of Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones's reworking of the Royal Opera …

Hawksmoor's Vision of Wray Wood, Castle Howard

AbstractDespite an extensive literature on Castle Howard and its innovative landscape, few details have been known about the important naturalistic garden at Wray Wood. This article identifies four drawings attributed to Nicholas Hawksmoor as designs for the wood's rockwork and watercourses. Although these features have long since disappeared, building records, letters and visitor accounts confirm their existence and show that Hawksmoor was also involved in the display of the sculpture and fountains, with subjects drawn from classical myths and legends. His later designs for the two temples on the east wall of the wood further illustrate his personal vision of the woodland garden and of the sources that inspired its mythological theme. This article draws together all the evidence relating to the wood and considers it in the context of innovative European garden design and its transfer to England in the first years of the eighteenth century. The wood has usually been attributed in more or less equal measure to Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh and their patron Lord Carlisle, but the evidence indicates that it was Hawksmoor who took the lead in carrying out Carlisle's wishes.

Northampton Calling: A Conversation with Alan Moore

photo : joe brown 28 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 Q&A WORLDLIT.ORG 29 A lan Moore is the most celebrated comics writer living but doesn’t write comics anymore . For the past decade, he’s been working instead on his second novel, Jerusalem, a sprawling epic covering a span of time stretching to the heat death of the universe but contained geographically within half a square mile in Moore’s hometown of Northampton, UK, in an area known as the Boroughs. Using the rapidly eroding map of his own working-class neighborhood as a canvas, Moore spins a tale of life and afterlife, using narrative tools that include stream of consciousness, verse, playwriting, and Joycean glossolalia to boot. It is both the culmination of his life’s work as a writer and a radical departure for an artist known for them. So it was with great excitement that I sat down to talk with Moore about this crowning achievement of his career. Rob Vollmar: Jerusalem builds on themes and techniques that began in your work as early as From Hell but figured heavily in your first novel, Voice of the Fire, and, more recently, in your homage to your friend and mentor Steve Moore, Unearthing . Could you talk about psychogeography and how it came to play such an important role in your work? Alan Moore: Psychogeography would be the understanding that in our experience of any place, it is the associations, the dreams, the imaginings, the history—it is all the information that is relevant to that place which is what we experience when we talk about a place. That is what we’re talking about. We’re not actually talking about the hard bricks and mortar. Yes, that is all that we can measure in the material world, but that is not the essence of what we feel when we talk about a particular place that means something to us. It is always that psychological effect the place has on us that is going to be paramount , and that is psychogeography—a way of considering the landscape around us as more than its physical components, acknowledging that there is much more to all of this than the material world. The bigger part of our experience is spent in this vague, drifting, entirely immaterial world of associations. I suppose that the first time I ever heard that term, it would have been in the context of my first discovering the extraordinary Northampton Calling A Conversation with Alan Moore by Rob Vollmar 30 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 work of Iain Sinclair. During the early stages of From Hell, I had been sent a copy of Lud Heat, which was one of Iain’s early super-dense poems that are on the verge of turning into prose. He was dealing with his time spent maintaining the lawns and gardens of the churches in East London when he was working for the council. A lot of these were Nicholas Hawksmoor’s churches. Iain started to notice some alignments between these churches, which were suggestive. He put all this into Lud Heat. I was fascinated because this seemed to me to be a new way of engaging with place. Place has always been immensely important in all my work, even from the earliest days of my career. Even if a thing was a fairly average superhero narrative like Captain Britain or something like that that was set in this country, then I wanted it set in a real London that contemporary people would recognize. I was also very keen to have things like V for Vendetta set in a visibly real and accurate London. It wasn’t really until I discovered Iain’s work that I saw the kind of focus Iain was capable of that I had been missing, and I quickly understood that this wasn’t something Iain had invented. There were all sorts of people who had made “walking with an agenda,” as Iain calls it, into a kind of art form. There was Arthur Machen with his illuminating strolls around London. There were the situationists, the surrealists with their walks that would be like planned experiences. There were the flâneurs. There...

Review: Tributes to Pierre du Prey: Architecture and the Classical Tradition, from Pliny to Posterity, edited by Matthew M. Reeve

Matthew M. Reeve, ed. Tributes to Pierre du Prey: Architecture and the Classical Tradition, from Pliny to Posterity London: Harvey Miller, 2014, 288 pp., 129 b/w illus. €100, ISBN 9781909400122 “The classical tradition meanders in and out of the history of architecture, sometimes looping back upon itself as if to suggest that time has stood still,” Pierre de la Ruffiniere du Prey notes at the opening of Hawksmoor's London Churches: Architecture and Theology .1 In that book, du Prey explores how the buildings of the early Christians, although known to Nicholas Hawksmoor only through texts and drawings, inspired the idiosyncratic Anglican churches that Hawksmoor designed in the early eighteenth century. The question of renewed relevance that underpins du Prey's Hawksmoor study, as well as much of his other work, also ties together the sixteen essays of Tributes to Pierre du Prey , edited by Matthew M. Reeve. One of the strengths of this Festschrift is its coherence. An opening essay by Mark Wilson Jones lays out the stakes by posing a dual question: Why do the orders have the forms that they do, and why has that problem proven so intriguing for writers from Vitruvius to the present? He then surveys the various possible origins of three architectural elements—fluting, the Ionic capital, and the Doric frieze—to argue for a multivalent understanding of the orders. Although no single justification for the architectural form of the orders has been produced, Wilson Jones asserts that contradictory explanations can reinforce each other rather than cancel each other out. The title of Guy P. R. Metraux's essay, “Some Other Literary Villas of Roman Antiquity besides Pliny's,” recalls du Prey's book The Villas of Pliny from Antiquity to Posterity , a magisterial examination of the influence of Pliny the Younger's letters on country house design.2 Metraux supplies context for Pliny's letters, which describe Tuscan and Laurentine villas, by describing the letters of Seneca the Younger, written about forty years before Pliny's, and of Sidonius …

From John Hejduk to Nicholas Hawksmoor

The representation of space with photography is an inherently impossible task. This undertaking is comparable to the path of a traveller who seeks to grasp the horizon. The line of the horizon is i...

From the shadows: the architecture and afterlife of Nicholas Hawksmoor

From the shadows: the architecture and afterlife of Nicholas Hawksmoor

‘The Basilica after the Primitive Christians’: Liturgy, Architecture and Anglican Identity in the Building of the Fifty New Churches

AbstractThe London churches built by Nicholas Hawksmoor – the architect required by the Commission for the Fifty New Churches to provide a template for the new churches according to the principles laid down in 1712 – are often regarded as the idiosyncratic creations of the architect’s individual genius. They were, however, as much the creation of the particular intellectual, theological and political context of the late Stuart period, an expression of a high church attempt to reconnect the Church of England with the early centuries of the Christian Church, particularly the great basilicas built under Constantine and Justinian. Conservative in intent, they were at the same time fed by the new spirit of intellectual enquiry led by the Royal Society and the expansion of global trade at the start of the eighteenth century. These express a new Anglican denominational identity as the inheritor of the ‘purest’ traditions of the ‘primitive’ church, ancient yet modern, orthodox and, at the same time, reformed: one that still influences discussion across the Communion today.

Sir John Vanbrugh: storyteller in stone

Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726) was by turns a businessman, soldier, playwright, herald and the architect of some of the most important country houses of his era. In this engaging and beautiful book architectural historian Vaughan Hart draws on these diverse interests to examine afresh Vanbrugh's surviving, destroyed and unrealised buildings as well as his designs executed in collaboration with Nicholas Hawksmoor. It was the fate of these buildings to be at first maligned and then misunderstood. Hart outlines the contemporary political and social events which influenced Vanbrugh, and shows how his strikingly original houses such as those at Seaton Delaval and Grimsthorpe can be interpreted through reference to classical mythology, renaissance fortifications and medieval houses. In explaining why Vanbrugh's buildings look the way they do, his novel architectural forms are understood for the first time as expressions of the visual and psychological theories of his friend and fellow Whig, Joseph Addison. Hart also demonstrates that true to the principles of architectural decorum and heraldry, Vanbrugh attempted to celebrate the character and achievements of his patrons through these forms and their ornament. New interpretations are offered of two of Vanbrugh's most famous works, Castle Howard and Blenheim. As a dramatist it was Vanbrugh's declared intention for those visiting Blenheim to read the Duke of Marlborough's story through the form and iconography of the house, and in consequence Vanbrugh emerges here as an accomplished storyteller in stone.

The City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren (review)

Reviewed by: The City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren Nigel Yates The City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren. By Paul Jeffery. (New York: Hambledon Continuum. 2007. Pp. xx, 385. $35.95. ISBN 978-1-852-85142-2.) This is a paperback reprint of a book first published in 1996; its author died within a year of its original publication. It is a meticulous account of the subject, with 188 well-chosen illustrations in the form of plans, engravings, and photographs. Particularly valuable for the church historian are those illustrations that show the interiors of some churches before Victorian restoration. The book is divided into two roughly equal parts. The first part provides a general introduction to Wren’s city churches, the second a detailed account of the fifty-eight churches plus St. Paul’s Cathedral (the cathedral and fifty-one of the churches were rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666), including those that are no longer standing. For the historian of London or architecture, this is an exceptionally useful and detailed book. A major problem with these churches is distinguishing those designed by Wren from those designed by his assistants, notably Nicholas Hawksmoor and Robert Hooke. Paul Jeffery unravels this problem with great skill. Where he is less comprehensive is in his discussion of the buildings’ original furnishings and the alteration of these in nineteenth-century restorations. Unusually, most of the churches were designed without thought to the furnishings, which were then commissioned from local craftsmen. It is therefore impossible to say much about the original liturgical focus of the buildings. Jeffery assumes that most pulpits and reading desks were placed in the traditional early-seventeenth-century position, more or less adjacent to the altar, and that they were only moved into the middle of churches in the mid-eighteenth century (pp. 156–57), but cites no evidence to support this assumption. The likelihood is that pulpit and reading desk were placed in different locations in different buildings, according to the wishes of those commissioning the furnishings; for those churches in which the pulpit and reading desk are known to have been in a central position by the mid-eighteenth century this may have been their position from the start. [End Page 392] Inevitably, there is some discussion of the long-term future of Wren’s surviving city churches, with only twenty-three of the fifty-one rebuildings still surviving as complete entities. The various attempted solutions, such as the creation of guild churches in 1952 and the recommendations of commissions under Sir Denys Buckley in 1970 and Lord Templeman in 1994, are carefully evaluated, and Jeffery’s conclusion is that no hasty or ill-considered actions should be taken in the future. Within the text there are a small number of omissions or curious comments. The one on page 158 that “services of holy communion (not then referred to as ‘mass’ due to association with Catholicism) were less frequent than nowadays” seems out of place in a work of this scholarship. The comment on the sale of fittings from St. Antholin’s in 1874 (p. 208) might have been expanded to list their new owners; some are still in the parish church of King Charles the Martyr, Tunbridge Wells. The early-twentieth-century Anglo-Catholic embellishment of the parish and pilgrimage church of St. Magnus the Martyr, London Bridge, is not noted (p. 259), although the late-twentieth-century reordering of the parish church of St. Stephen Walbrook is (p. 342).These minor inconsistencies and infelicities do not, however, detract from the overall value of this first-class work of reference, and the publishers are to be congratulated for reprinting this book. Nigel Yates University of Wales, Lampeter Copyright © 2009 The Catholic University of America Press

Schooled by Wren, or a School by Wren? The Conception and Design of Christ’s Hospital Writing School, London

On 2 March 1692, Sir Christopher Wren visited the governors of Christ’s Hospital in London, bringing with him a design for a new writing school to be erected on the Hospital’s Newgate Street site. Seven drawings for the school building survive in the Wren collection at All Souls College, Oxford. However, rather than suggesting Wren’s authorship, these drawings are customarily attributed to his pupil and long-time assistant, Nicholas Hawksmoor. It is generally accepted that Hawksmoor received delegated commissions from Wren by at least the early 1690s, but, although the draughtsmanship and stylistic evidence of the Writing School drawings suggest consistency with this interpretation, the surviving documentary evidence by no means proves Hawksmoor’s involvement. In fact, Wren’s name appears no less than thirteen times in the surviving Hospital minutes of 1691 to 1696, while Hawksmoor is never mentioned.The Writing School designs are briefly described in most architectural histories of the period, although they are considered remarkable more for heralding a shift in architectural taste than for the building shown in the drawings or for the social and ideological impulses that impelled its creation. This article considers the Writing School in the context of contemporary debates and anxieties concerning the provision of education for the poor, and within the wider sphere of late seventeenth-century charity-school building. Wren’s involvement is considered in relation to his philanthropic interest in the charity-school movement. The article concludes with an analysis of the designs and building history of the Writing School, and, on the basis of previously unpublished eighteenth- and nineteenth-century graphic sources, discounts Giles Worsley’s suggestion that Hawksmoor added a pediment to the final design. Wren and Hawksmoor’s specific responsibilities for the conception, design and execution of the building are considered, and it is argued that, although Hawksmoor was responsible for most of the surviving drawings relating to the project, Wren directed the process, taking responsibility for all designs produced in his office and claiming authorship for the drawings produced.

The Church East and West: Orienting the Queen Anne Churches, 1711-34

This article presents the results of an investigation carried out to determine the orientation of seventeen churches and one church plan that are directly or indirectly associated with the 1711 and 1712 Acts for Building Fifty New Churches (for London). The buildings represent an important episode in the history of western ecclesiastical architecture, the visible manifestation of a Tory government-High Church plan to rekindle a "purer form of Christianity" based on the "primitive churches" of the Near East. Our data indicate that few, if any, of the buildings were aligned using the rising or setting sun on important Christian feast days, the method adopted by many of the medieval church builders. Whether this break with tradition was deliberate or not is a matter for conjecture. Nicholas Hawksmoor seemed particularly keen on getting a "correct" alignment and did so for three of his six sole-author buildings. In fact, we suggest that two of Hawksmoor's churches at St. Anne Limehouse and Christchurch Spitalfields, and James Gibbs's St. Martin-in-the-Fields, were so accurately aligned that the only feasible technique for achieving this was through the use of declination-corrected compasses. We speculate that the scientist Edmond Halley provided information and logistical assistance to Hawksmoor.

Hampton Court: a social and architectural history

Hampton Court - probably Britain's most important secular historic building complex - is a fascinating collection of buildings, gardens and parks spanning seven hundred years of history. A centre of court life and politics from the late 15th to the middle of the 18th century, a place of architectural innovation, the site of the most ambitious formal gardens ever built in Britain, Hampton Court is still, in many respects, a mystery both to the historian and to the interested visitor. This is a history of Hampton Court and of its gardens and parks, revealing the full complexity of its remarkable building history and illuminating the interplay of court life, politics and architecture. The history of the building is taken right up to the beginning of the 21st century. The 20th-century story of Hampton Court is one of conservation and of changing attitudes towards opening up the complex to the public. It covers everything from the agonizing discussions as to whether to build public lavatories to an account of the private enterprise that caused an octogenarian to make a personal fortune out of opening the maze to the public. It includes also the story of the terrible fire of 1986 and its aftermath. Social history and architectural history sit side by side in this account. New and important attributions are made to the architects Hugh May, Nicholas Hawksmoor, William Talman, Colen Campbell and Edward Blore, amongst others. Moreover, the palace and its setting are placed in their European context and their long-term architectural significance is gauged. The book is illustrated with original paintings, prints and drawings, and a specially commissioned suite of plans and reconstructions reveal the evolving form of the buildings.

Review: Nicholas Hawksmoor: Rebuilding Ancient Wonders by Vaughan Hart

Review: Nicholas Hawksmoor: Rebuilding Ancient Wonders by Vaughan Hart

Castle Howard and the Emergence of the Modern Architectural Subject

Undertaken at the turn of the eighteenth century by John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor for Charles Howard, the third earl of Carlisle, Castle Howard began life as a grand country house linked to a traditional formal garden but soon evolved into what has come to be acknowledged as one of the first, if not the first, English landscape garden. This essay focuses on the outbuildings in their landscape setting in order to show how the strange and evocative mood they create in the beholder grows out of a new subjectivity that reveals important insights into the shift from classical to early modern ideas of architectural representation. Unlike previous studies, which have explored the role of the patron, the relationship to contemporary English culture, and the social and economic forces acting upon the design, this one attempts to place the work-and define its significance-in the broader context of the development of early modern architecture.

:Hawksmoor's London Churches: Architecture and Theology

Six remarkable churches built by Nicholas Hawksmoor from 1712 to 1731 still stand in London. In this book, architectural historian Pierre de la Ruffiniere du Prey examines these designs as a coherent whole - a single masterpiece reflecting both Hawksmoor's design principles and his desire to reconnect, architecturally, with the purest days of Christianity.

Comparable Institutions: The Royal Hospital for Seamen and the Hotel des Invalides

When Nicholas Hawksmoor recalled the circumstances of the building of the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich (Fig. 1), begun in 1696, he twice made the point that the achievement of magnificence was part of the architectural brief. In his Remarks on the Founding and Carrying on the Buildings of the Royal Hospital at Greenwich , published in 1728, he noted that it was the desire of the foundress, Queen Mary, ‘who had a great Passion for Building’, ‘to build the Fabrick with great Magnificence and Order’. Later, as if defending a position, Hawksmoor noted ‘her Majesty’s fixt Intention for Magnificence’. Queen Mary had died in 1694 but her husband King William III, respecting her wishes, had ensured the continuation of the project under the architectural guidance of Christopher Wren who was assisted by Hawksmoor in this great endeavour.

The Campaigns for Christ Church, Spitalfields and Nicholas Hawksmoor, 1960–1995

The following paper gives a first-hand, account of the Hawksmoor Committee's efforts, beginning in 1960, to save Christ Church, Spitalfields from a threat of demolition, and to establish Nicholas Hawksmoor, its architect, in the pantheon of British architects. The latter purpose was secured by 1966; but although Christ Church's future became safe, sufficient funds for full restoration are only now in sight.In 1995, English Heritage offered nearly half a million pounds; then in April 1996, the National Heritage Memorial Fund announced £2,441,500 for Christ Church, and a further £500,000 came as a gift from the Monument Trust of the Sainsbury family charitable trusts. Even these huge sums will not be enough to complete the necessary works, and fundraising will need to continue—for the crypt, the organ and the churchyard. The Friends of Christ Church, Spitalfields have launched an appeal for the rest. Work will now start later this year and the fabric should be complete for the millennium.Important buildings, it is argued, need bodies of ‘Friends’, both to ensure their survival and to provide the alternative and additional uses that the ‘system’, however well it operates, cannot.