Join us for another seminar in our series co-supported by the Institute of Historical Research and organised in collaboration with the Oxford Architectural History Seminar. For more information on the series click here. Christine Casey delivers the last of 2020's Architectural History Seminar series with a bold argument for the importance of ornament, decoration and materiality in architectural history
While ornament has recently undergone a revival in architectural history, theory and practice, scholarship has tended to focus on conceptual issues rather than the actual material practices of decoration. Materials, media and practitioners are of considerably less interest to scholars than the meanings and messages which the work is seen to convey. ‘Decoration’ remains pejorative, in contrast to its more cerebral corollary. Disciplinary boundaries have played a role in the exclusion or side-lining of decoration from architectural history. The separation of sculpture and architecture into discrete areas of enquiry and the division of pictorial from architectural concerns militates against a holistic view of early modern architectural production. This paper will discuss sustained antipathy towards surface decoration in architecture, review trends in revisionist scholarship and raise questions about the place of materials and making in the study of early modern architecture.
Christine Casey is a professor in architectural history at Trinity College Dublin and leads an Irish Research Council Advanced Laureate research project (CRAFTVALUE) which focuses on craftsmanship in eighteenth-century architecture, . From 2017-19 she directed https://makingvictoriandublin.com/. She has published widely on architecture and decoration including the definitive reference work on Dublin city, Dublin (Yale University Press, 2005) and Making magnificence: architects, stuccatori and the eighteenth-century interior (Yale University Press, 2017) For the latter she was awarded the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion of SAHGB(2018). A member of the Royal Irish Academy and an honorary member of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, she is a board member of several national organisations for architectural heritage and has held numerous international research fellowships. In 2021-22 she will hold the Parnell Fellowship at Magdalene College, Cambridge.
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