IN THE HISTORY OF ART the term ‘style’ has been a long-lasting one; in fact, of all signification systems, it must rate as one of the most successful. It is taken as axiomatic that each and every work of art ‘possesses’, or enunciates a style. Among the different media of the visual arts, it is architecture which seems most strongly and most clearly connected with the concept of style. At the very least, a limited range of such style labels is quite widely known. As early as 1833 John Claudius Loudon held that ‘by the employment of style in an edifice … the architect gains a positive beauty at once, because thousands of spectators in Europe and America … have some crude ideas of what is Grecian and what is Gothic’.1 Much the same can be said about the applied arts, certainly those which are closely tied in with buildings, notably all branches of interior furnishing. And yet, upon closer inspection, the homogeneity of the system of ‘style’ dissolves into a number of quite diverse factors. Moreover, all these factors went through a complex process of creation and development.

This contribution seeks to explain a phase in the history of the formulation of ‘style’ in which the geographical component, in particular, seemed of overriding importance. Place – the locality where the work in question was made – is held to have been a major factor in shaping a work of art, particularly a stationary one, such as a building. This contribution traces some of the controversies regarding the formulation, and eventual acceptance, of several geographical style labels.

IT IS VIRTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE to move through a European or American city without passing memorials that prompt us – if we notice them at all – merely to scratch at some fading memory. Instead of recalling civic or national heroes, important events, or victories in battle, we see the erosions of time, the way they make way for the daily pulses of urban movement, or how commerce corrals them into corners where they can grow old invisibly. Even the most familiar memorials, ones that we use repeatedly or ritualistically to cultivate a sense of collective recall, constantly confront obsolescence and alienation. Who are these strangers and how did they get that way? How, moreover, are we to understand them in their ever-changing states?

Memorials and cities have a conflicted relationship, the latter often sacrificing the former to its changing speed, scale, material reality, or, just as importantly, modern disregard. This disregard has taken the shape of movements against traditional memorials, even against the project of memorialization itself. At other times it has overflowed into outright disgust, ending in acts of iconoclasm or wilful destruction. Most often, it takes the form of neglect, arguably the most damning dismissal of all because it entails forgetting – the precise thing memorials are supposed to ward against. Neglect, however, is difficult to study, and even harder to historicize. Beyond the mere process of forgetting, which one can find in literal deterioration, as when nostalgic patina turns into irreversible destruction, neglect is also quite literally a passing matter.

THE HOSPITAL of Saint-Jean at Angers is remarkable for being one of the most extensive extant complexes of its kind from twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe (fig. 1). Like most early hospital foundations, it lies on the margins of the city, in this case on the north bank of the Maine, across the river from Angers itself. It is not only exceptionally complete, but also unusually well documented. The cartulary, published by Célestin Port in 1870, illuminates the lives, deaths and anxieties of many of the hospital's patrons and inmates. Some twenty years after its foundation, it was provided with a detailed set of statutes, among the earliest pertaining to a hospital to reflect the concerns of the reformists in the Church around 1200, concerns which would issue in the provisions of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Nevertheless, between text and architecture lies, as ever, space for interpretation.

The hospital was founded around 1180 by Stephen de Marçay, seneschal of Anjou for Henry II. Stephen and his brother Reginald were important patrons in Anjou, founding the Grandmontine house at Angers, for instance. It is clear that Stephen was the founder of the hospital; a papal bull of 1181 explicitly states that this is the case, and insists further that Stephen and his descendents should govern – have regimen of – the house. Henry II seems to have been jealous of the social prominence that this brought Stephen de Marçay and his family and, when Henry issued two charters confirming the foundation in 1181, he tried to claim that he had founded and built the hospital himself.

GIVEN THAT Eric Fernie has always shown an interest – not universal among medievalists – in the modern, this contribution to a volume in his honour offers an investigation of the concept of innovation, or novelty, in Romanesque architecture in England. Three approaches suggested themselves, namely a review of the place of what has been regarded as innovatory in English Romanesque in the historiography of medieval architecture; an investigation of what appears to have been picked up as an innovation worth repeating in England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; and finally, as a preliminary to this, a look at the written sources from the eleventh and twelfth centuries which make claims for novelty or originality in English architecture, a small group of texts that has frequently been invoked to show the impact of the post-Conquest building boom on contemporary observers. In the event, this written material proved sufficiently fertile to provide the whole matter of the paper, and while this by no means pretends to be a comprehensive survey of all the relevant contemporary references, by examining the contexts in which they appear, it enables a number of conclusions to be drawn about their nature and their aims.

EXPLAINING BUILDINGS, as Eric Fernie impressed on me as a student, is a prime duty of an architectural historian. Doing so with reference to an architect's particular design philosophy and creative process can, additionally, help account for the differences between their buildings and those of other architects, especially if this approach can be supported by informed contemporary testimony. Explaining Michelangelo's buildings in this way presents a sizable challenge, but, as I have argued in a case study elsewhere, they would appear to owe much of their remarkable character to his attitude towards imitation, an attitude that was fundamentally different from those of other architects of the period. Unlike architects who based their designs closely and recognizably on particular ancient – or modern – prototypes of agreed merit, Michelangelo instead viewed his as the products of a transformative process that involved the assimilation of many different models. This approach, as manifested in his designs for the New Sacristy (begun 1519; fig. 1) and especially the Laurentian Library (begun 1524) in Florence, was to an extent recognized by Michelangelo's devoted biographer, Giorgio Vasari, when he declared (1550) that Michelangelo had conceived their designs in a way ‘quite different’ from those who worked ‘following common usage and following Vitruvius and the works of antiquity’, and famously remarked that he had broken the ‘ties and chains’ that had previously kept architects on a ‘common road’. Yet although Michelangelo's approach was a radical departure from the practices of his contemporaries, it was not entirely without precedent, since it was in some respects anticipated by that of his Florentine predecessor, Giuliano da Sangallo.

IT IS READILY OBSERVED that people take their architecture with them. In the process of colonizing North America, unmistakably northern European styles and techniques of building were transported across the Atlantic. Further south, it was the architectural traditions of the Iberian Peninsula that were exported to Latin America. We can interpret this as a desire on the part of the emigrants involved to make a new home by replicating the essentials of their old one, or (less cosily) to imprint their culture on recently acquired territory. The two motives are clearly not mutually exclusive, and though they do not appear to sit very comfortably together it can be argued that familiarity and control are two sides of one coin. That said, it is rarely the case that the architecture of a colony is exactly like that of the homeland, and one purpose of this essay is to explore why that might be so in the case of two major buildings constructed in England in the aftermath of the Norman invasion of 1066: Colchester Castle and Lincoln Cathedral. Two points will emerge, of which one is the possible impact of ‘deep’ history, particularly the Roman past, on Anglo-Norman architecture. The other is that we may understand more about the motivations of the patrons and designers of these monuments by an oblique approach to their decision-making processes than by any that can be directly documented.

OVER THE LAST THREE MILLENNIA our planet has been increasingly covered with buildings. Humans are not the only species to reconfigure their environments, but we are special in the speed and variety of means by which we have done so, and in the deliberation involved in the process. That last point is crucial, for there is no likelihood that snails forming their shells ‘deliberate’, and scant evidence that birds building their nests do. Even beavers constructing dams are likely to be genetically programmed to do so rather than consciously deciding. Although Christopher Wren thought that the ‘Project of Building is as natural to Mankind as to Birds’, people come from a stock, the great apes, with no tradition of this project. As a working hypothesis we might suppose that, though our capacity to build is inherent, our inclination to build is opportunistic and imitative. It involves making the most of available resources and learning from observation, including watching the activities of other animals. Critically, what the process has enabled is our colonization of territory where nature, especially the climate but also dangerous creatures, might otherwise have been too threatening to our safety. Ultimately it has enabled us to format our landscapes, socially and conceptually as well as materially, distinguishing civilization from wilderness, culture from nature.

ST LAWRENCE at Godmersham in Kent is principally renowned as the church attended by Jane Austen when staying at Godmersham Park. For the medievalist, however, it is better known for its tower (figs 1 and 2). This has an apse projecting from its east wall, prompting some to describe it as a survival or adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon tower-nave arrangement, as at Barton-on-Humber (Lincolnshire) and Earl's Barton (Northamptonshire). This paper will attempt to show that the tower at Godmersham was never free-standing, however, and that it is an excellent illustration of the deliberate use of architectural iconography, hitherto unrecognised.

The tower at Godmersham lies at the division between nave and chancel, on the north side of the church, and the large arch connecting it with the nave gives it the character of a transept arm. The building has a wide south aisle built in 1865. The chancel is very slightly narrower than the nave. Some early masonry survives to each side and it is possible that an apsidal east end was replaced during the early thirteenth century by a flat east wall displaying lancet windows.

The north and west walls of the nave and the earliest parts of the north and south walls of the chancel have been dated to the Anglo-Saxon period on the evidence of the rubble and Roman brick quoins at the north-west corner of the nave, and because of the use of a local ferruginous sandstone which, it is argued, would not have been employed after the arrival of the Normans and their Caen limestone.

WHENEVER AND WHEREVER in the world settlements took on characteristics we now associate with cities, we can find architectural images that reflect the community's social, even emotional, priorities. One of the earliest is the wall painting reconstructed from a shrine at Çatal Hüyük (c. 6500 bc) representing a town plan with recurring rows of architectural units set beneath a black silhouette thought to represent an erupting volcano. It seems as if the orderliness of the man-made environment, the regularity of the city's layout and the neatness of the dwellings was intended to guarantee the transformation of the volcanic threat into an agricultural benefit. Instead of fearing being burned by lava, the community could enjoy the promise of soil fertilization.

With the development of cities and the intensification and complication of commercial and legal interaction within and between them, visible and tangible symbols of authority, legality and identity became a requirement. These materialized as flat objects about the size of a hand made of stone or metal (mainly bronze) carrying an image in sculpted relief. The image was to be printed on clay or wax and could be attached to a document for legal purposes or carried as a passport to avoid paying tolls. These items, now known as seals, were employed from the Neolithic period onward in Sumerian city-states, in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, the Indus Valley and China, and were widely used in the Greco-Roman world. Individual cities often chose to represent themselves with architectural features considered to be distinctive of them, simultaneously reflecting and highlighting local preoccupations.

MUCH RECENT WORK on the epistemology of art has centred on the mysteries of the creative process, which has come under critical scrutiny from psychologists, philosophers of aesthetics and the art historian. Does creativity in art call for special talents that distinguish the artist from the general run of human beings? Do ‘truly’ creative artworks add something of interest to the world – something above the routine and the derivative? Can the art historian dare to identify creativity in art with durable and constant appeal – or will s/he fall back on explanations of the creative in terms of the contingencies of social class, historical circumstance and gender difference?

Such questions raise special difficulties for the art historian, for whom the whole concept of agency has, in the last quarter century, become a battleground. The traditional, common-sense view that the meanings of works of art lie in the meanings given them by their creators can no longer be sustained. Psychoanalysis has confirmed what our experience tells us: that we have no means of knowing the inner complexities of our own psyche, let alone the inner experience of an artist and the ‘authentic’ meanings his work contains. Postmodernist deconstruction has alerted us to the ambiguities of the self and the complexities of self-expression by questioning the model of a stable consciousness and by situating meaning in a potentially endless process of ‘inter-textual’ signifying.

EVERYONE knows that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Similarly, if there is one thing that the twentieth century has taught us, it is that it is untrue to say that the camera cannot lie. It lies all the time. Consider the photographs that newspapers keep on file depicting famous people frozen in an expression, gesture or context that is damaging to their image, and that gives a false impression of them. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, that may not be a lie exactly, but it is surely a visual inexactitude.

And monuments no less than people are subject to manipulation, as this paper will explore. That manipulation can be innocent – or not so innocent. A good example of that proposition is the Dome of the Rock, built, as its foundation inscription records, by the Umayyad caliph ‘Abd al-Malik in AH 72/AD 691 and situated in the Haram al-Sharif, the vast precinct which also contains the site of the Temple of Solomon (fig. 1). There is no need to dilate here on its first century of life, a topic that has, perhaps unfairly, dominated the history of scholarship on this building. Instead, this paper will examine aspects of its afterlife – past, present and future – in the particular context of how it has worked as a symbol. After a brief survey of some of the many modern photographs that use it for the purposes of one agenda or another, the paper will discuss – again briefly – how the Dome of the Rock has fared in the Muslim, the Christian and the Jewish past.

THE GROWTH OF THE CITY FROM 1840 UNTIL 1900

The South Australia Colonisation Act 1834 (UK) provided for the operation of local government in the colony and the Municipal Corporation Act 1840, passed by Governor Gawler, made Adelaide the second oldest City in the British Commonwealth outside Britain itself. Only Toronto in Canada, established in 1834, is an older local government.

The first elections for the ACC were held in October 1840 and James Fisher was elected as Mayor. The economy became depressed and the ACC failed financially after little more than a year. The affairs of the City were transferred to a City Commission consisting of five persons nominated by the Governor. The Commission had the power to levy rates and was responsible for maintaining the streets and bridges as well as constructing sewers and establishing waterworks.

William Light's original plan had identified some uses to be located in the Park Lands, as described in Chapter 1. Schedule J to the Municipal Corporation Act for the City of Adelaide 1849 clarified that the Park Lands were under the care, control and management of the ACC except for Government Reserves, which included West Terrace Cemetery.

By the 1830s there were substantial railway lines in Britain and one criticism of Light's Plan for the City was that he made no provision for the inevitable impact of a railway. However, Mary Thomas has noted that Light considered a railway to the port would be required. The Adelaide City and Port Railway Act 1850 allocated land for a railway to be built to Port Adelaide which would go through the Park Lands to the west of the City from a terminus on North Terrace. Construction started in 1852 and the railway was the first major alienation of the Park Lands.

THE CITY OF ADELAIDE AND THE STATE OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA

In Scene I of Act III of William Shakespeare's play Coriolanus, Sicinius asks:

‘What is the City but the people?’

and the citizens reply:

‘True, the people are the City.’

I come from a long line of Welsh Methodist Ministers, which meant going to Chapel in the valleys twice every Sunday for services. At the beginning of his sermon my father would provide a text for the congregation to focus on while he was preaching. But before starting his sermon he would repeat the text for emphasis. Thus, ‘What is the City but the people?’ ‘True, the people are the City.’

In this book I argue that there was a particular relationship and balance of power between the Council of the City of Adelaide (ACC) and the State government of South Australia (State), mainly because of the influence of key individuals. I focus on the interplay between personalities and the politics behind the scenes of strategic and statutory planning in the City during the 21-year period from October 1972 until December 1993. During this time the City had its own planning and development control system separate from the rest of the State. But I ground my analysis of this period in an historical perspective of the founding of the City of Adelaide and the Province of South Australia in 1836 and their development until 1972.