After the August break, join us for another seminar in our series co-supported by the Institute of Historical Research. For more information on the series click here.
The eighteenth and early nineteenth-century terraced house has long been regarded as a paradigm of modernity in architectural histories of Britain, Ireland and North America. Created for the upper and middle tiers of the social spectrum, they were largely built by what is still often regarded as the lower tier of the architectural hierarchy; that is, by artisan communities of bricklayers, carpenters, plasterers and related tradesmen. From London and Dublin to Boston and Philadelphia, these houses collectively formed the streets and squares that became the links and pivots of ‘enlightened’ city plans, and remain central to their respective historic and cultural identities. But while the scenographic qualities of Bath and the garden squares of London have long been admired as paragons of urban design, the typical brick house was, from at least the middle of the eighteenth century, widely disparaged as both a jerry-built commodity and an inferior manifestation of the classical idiom, the sine qua non of architectural design: writing in 1756, Isaac Ware condemned ‘the art of building slightly’, and in his final address to students of the Royal Academy in 1815, Sir John Soane dismissed London’s terraced houses as ‘so many brick-heaps piled one after the other’. As a general rule, artisan building was presumed to preclude good design. Taking a cue from a burgeoning revisionist scholarship devoted to early modern vernacular architectures and their relationship to the classical canon, this lecture will consider how design was ‘a preliminary necessity’ within the late Georgian building industry.
Conor Lucey is Assistant Professor in the School of Art History and Cultural Policy at University College Dublin, and President of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. His recent book, Building Reputations: Architecture and the Artisan, 1750-1830 (Manchester University Press, 2018) was awarded the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion by the SAHGB in 2019, and shortlisted for the Historians of British Art prize in 2020.
For the foreseeable future the SAHGB Seminars will be virtual events via Zoom. We will circulate joining instructions via email the morning of the scheduled event. Please complete the form below to register.
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