To European travellers before the industrial age, gatehouses were an omnipresent architectural form. Whether at the entrances to cities, residences or religious houses, they signalled to the passer-by the wealth and prestige of the corporation, household or institution that they served. This article addresses the subject of gatehouse architecture in England, a kingdom in which a distinctive tradition of such buildings was ingeniously and enthusiastically developed through the Middle Ages and beyond. It aims to explain why gatehouses commanded such interest for English patrons, and the ways in which these buildings illustrate the changing practice of architecture from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries. For the purposes of the discussion, the term ‘gatehouse’ is to be broadly understood. It can refer to any entrance structure that amounts to more than simply an opening in a wall or a decorative archway. One distinctive feature of the gatehouses discussed here is that they all stand in close proximity to the building or institution they serve. In this detail they may be distinguished from the gateways or lodges characteristically erected along the perimeters of parks and estates from around 1700 onwards as points of entry to far-distant residences.

In a section of a chapter on the historiography of Gothic architecture in the formerly Byzantine-ruled territories of the eastern Mediterranean entitled ‘Perspectives and Future Directions’, Tassos Papacostas summed up the relative lack of impact that this traditionally marginal field of medieval artistic production has had on wider arthistorical discourses. In asking why ‘western’ medievalists should ‘bother to look’ at Gothic buildings in the East, he argued that these buildings are of interest to them primarily from the point of view of the cultural, technical and financial processes involved in the transfer of western artistic idioms and models to lands hitherto steeped in an altogether different architectural and artistic tradition. However, it is also the case that, while the prevalent trend in the study of medieval architectural monuments in the eastern Mediterranean prioritizes the local context and how it affected the artistic process, this need not preclude the possibility that at least a few of these buildings could challenge long-held assumptions about western European developments and open new perspectives on them, if approached with the right questions in mind.

This article focuses on a recently identified and hitherto unpublished drawing of Seville Cathedral, recently located in the Bidaurreta convent (and thus described in this article as the ‘Bidaurreta drawing’). This document is of international importance as it constitutes a rare example of a medieval drawing of a Gothic cathedral, and is indeed the oldest known complete ground plan of any Gothic cathedral. It is also the only plan preserved intact that depicts any fifteenth-century Gothic building in Castile. The drawing, which this article suggests dates from the third quarter of the fifteenth century, is a modified copy of a 1433 plan of Seville Cathedral. It records the building as it was in 1433 and some of the subsequent changes, undertaken as part of a building campaign that ultimately lasted until 1506, by means of which the cathedral took on its present form: 126.18 m in length, 82.6 m in width and 30.48 m high (Figs 1-2). This article traces the reconstruction work in detail by examining the original documentary sources, many not previously discussed in English, together with the evidence of the drawing itself.

Research over the last twenty years into seventeenth-century elite British architecture has questioned the view that Classical designs were the preserve of a narrow group of royal and aristocratic patrons at the Stuart court, and also that Inigo Jones was a ‘lonely genius’ misunderstood in his own lifetime but prophesizing the true Classicism that was to bloom in the eighteenth century.

The role of patrons in defining architectural styles has also been analysed, and it has been noted that Classicism was not the only style they favoured. For earlier historians, a perception that Classical architecture was an advance upon the Gothic style of medieval English buildings led to discussions of ‘Gothic survival’ or ‘Gothic revival’ and of a ‘Battle of the Styles’ in sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings, with such patrons as Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676), who commissioned and renovated buildings in Gothic style, being viewed as a ‘curiosity’ for not employing Classical style.

Despite the revived attention that James Smith's (c. 1645–1731) career has received since Howard Colvin's 1974 study of his Palladian drawings, his life and his work remain stubbornly enigmatic. An architect working in late seventeenth-century Scotland, Smith was a member of the Scots College of Rome before renouncing his Catholic faith and devoting himself to the creation of some of the country's most important architecture of the post-Restoration period. A scarcity of concrete evidence about his European architectural training contributes to his mystique, though progressive movements in the field of Scottish architectural history indicate that this dearth will be rectified in due course. Still, the extraordinarily varied character of his known works refutes easy categorization into the simplified brackets of ‘Baroque’, ‘Palladian’, or the more contentious ‘Neoclassical’, and so makes a coherent assessment of style difficult.

In 1872, the ageing and increasingly enfeebled Robert Willis, Jacksonian Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and pioneering architectural historian (Fig. 1), made his Will. To his nephew, John Willis Clark (1833–1910), who was to act as joint executor (Fig. 2), he bequeathed some Italian statuary and up to fifty volumes to be selected from Willis's valuable library. He also made what was to prove a more onerous bequest, leaving his nephew all his ‘manuscripts, plans, tracings, drawings and notes’. The Will added that ‘he shall be at liberty to publish such of the same as he may from time to time see fit’. The nature of these notes was left unspecified, but Clark himself had no doubt as to what his uncle intended. The younger scholar was expected to complete the work which had already occupied at least twenty-one years on Willis's death in 1875 and was to fill eleven more.

This article focuses on the relationship between ornamental iron and the civic in British market halls, a subject which has been overlooked in the existing literature on their architectural development. Like many other forms of nineteenth-century retail architecture — shops, bazaars, arcades and department stores — market halls embraced the new architectural possibilities suggested by iron: increased floor-spans were made possible by wrought-iron joists, which could span greater distances than timber ones; the strength of cast-iron columns allowed larger openings in the external walls; and the increased availability and lower cost of glass meant that these openings could be glazed, allowing greater visibility of commodities. Yet, unlike much Victorian retail architecture, which was usually privately financed, market halls were explicitly articulated as public spaces. As such, there were problems in assimilating iron-and-glass structures into established notions of public architecture. In 1878, The Building News, in a discussion of London’s market buildings, argued that they should be ‘different from huge railway sheds and Crystal Palaces’ because their status as public buildings required some form of ‘artistic’ treatment. For many architects of market halls — in common with other new building types in the Victorian period, such as pumping stations, railway stations, exhibition halls and warehouses — the solution lay in a dual architectural identity: an exterior structure built in conventional building materials such as stone and brick, harmonizing with existing urban architecture; and an interior space supported by an independent iron-and-glass structure.

The architectural historian Roderick Gradidge, referring to the 1900s, wrote that ‘in architecture there have never been such opportunities for younger men as there were at the turn of the century’. Arnold Mitchell is an architect typical of those who took advantage of such opportunities, a man (women were yet to have the chance) who saw the economic and aesthetic potential for new architecture, both nationally and internationally. Understanding the nature of architectural practice should not be reliant solely upon knowledge of the stellar architects of any given period. It depends upon integrating others, one or two rungs down the ladder but who achieved success in their own sphere, into the corpus examined, in order to achieve a fuller understanding of the profession.

Walter Sykes George (1881–1962) (Fig. 1) was a remarkable Anglo-Indian architect. Obituaries in Indian and British journals cast him as a ‘Renaissance’ man: an artist, Byzantine archaeologist, architect, town planner, philosopher, historian, public intellectual, humanist, Modernist, even an Indian nationalist. He features prominently in one recent history of modern architecture in India, a rare accolade for an ‘Anglo-Indian’ architect — an architect born in Britain who practised and lived for much of his life in India.

When considering the evolution of twentieth-century church-building, two topics are inescapable — the Liturgical Movement and developments in Modern architecture — and this article therefore argues that in order to appreciate the evolution of the twentieth-century Catholic parish church it is essential to take both liturgical and architectural developments into account. It focuses on such churches in Belgium because that country played a particularly important role in developing relevant theory, Belgian clergy having been founding members of the Liturgical Movement. However, the movement took more than half a century to develop fully there, during which time other initiatives also appeared, such as Domus Dei (the Belgian Diocesan organization for church-building, set up in 1952) and Pro Arte Christiana. Moreover, other factors — ecclesiastical, social, economic, political and cultural — also prove to be crucial in reaching a full appreciation of twentieth-century church-building, for instance, the impact of diocesan guidelines for church-building, and of bodies such as Catholic Action (Katholieke Actie) and Parish Action (Parochiale Actie). This article demonstrates that, despite few apparent formal similarities (if any) between churches built in Belgium before and after World War II, the developments of the inter-war period were fundamental to post-war developments in Belgian church-building.

On 28 February 1933, the Modern Architectural Research (MARS) Group was founded as the English chapter of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) by Wells Coates, Edwin Maxwell (Max) Fry, David Pleydell Bouverie, P. Morton Shand, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, and John Gloag. Historians have viewed its subsequent activities variously. There has been a tendency to sneer at its work in the 1930s and to praise its influence on the evolution of Modernism in the post-war years. Nonetheless, there is a consensus that, at the very least, the coming together of Coates and his allies provided, as John Summerson later recalled, ‘a focus, a point of illumination, in a cultural scene which was confused and overcast'. In reaching this conclusion, scholars have sketched in a pre-history of the Group and have established a basic chronology of earlier attempts to organize collective activity around the promulgation of a modern design or architectural culture in England. These efforts began around 1924 with a short-lived initiative by Christopher Hussey of Country Life, and were followed by the Twentieth Century Group, founded in 1930 by the Cambridge don and modernist patron, Mansfield Duval Forbes. The existing accounts of this activity are not inaccurate, but they are incomplete. Moreover, although they imply a trajectory towards the ultimate founding of MARS, they contain little consideration of how, why, or under whose direction, this process might have taken place.

Connections between ideas of ‘child-centred’ primary education and the design of schools were arguably closer in post-war Britain than any period before or since. These relationships provide a commentary on the role of public architecture within a British post-war social democracy that combined the social objectives of architectural Modernism with an awareness of, and continuity with, preceding reformist movements for the advancement of public health and education. The ‘social’ aspect of the post-war school-building programme stemmed not so much from the application of labour or technology to processes of building, nor even the equitable distribution of common resources, but rather from the ability of the designer to shape and articulate processes of teaching and learning within the locus of the welfare state. Social and pedagogical ends were often pursued to the almost total exclusion of architectural self-expression. If this ‘humane functionalism’ was rooted in an understanding of the activities and experiences of learning, it was dependent on a multi-disciplinary, investigative and creative collaboration between architect and educational ‘client’.

In 1974, Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein, of the leading Glasgow practice of Gillespie, Kidd and Coia (GKC), were announced as the winners of the competition to design the new Robinson College, Cambridge, which had been endowed by the businessman David Robinson. The first (and principal) phase of their design was completed in 1981. Robinson remains the most recently created college in Cambridge, which had seen a flurry of new foundations since the mid-1950s, including Churchill College, Clare Hall, Darwin College, Fitzwilliam College, New Hall, and Wolfson (originally University) College. In addition, Robinson was the last major project by its architects, who had assumed the creative lead at GKC in the early 1950s and were subsequently responsible for a series of significant religious and institutional buildings in both Scotland and England. The firm was wound up in 1987, a move that has been described as ‘a tragedy for Glasgow and for Scottish architecture’.