Routledge Handbook on the Reception

of Classical Architecture

Book Proposal

Nicholas Temple, Andrzej Piotrowski & Juan Manuel Heredia (eds.)

Background
The topic of a ‘global’ reception and dissemination of classical architecture, which is the scope of
this edited book, is both daunting and critically charged. It calls into question assumptions that many
scholars have long taken for granted, in particular the one-sided perspective of some reception
theories concerning otherness or difference. Modes of reception imply giving. But is the giver also in
one sense a receiver? Did the Visigoths, Lombards or Franks, for example, simply receive the
classical tradition, or did they destroy it, steal it, or appropriate it? At the same time, what forms of
dissemination of classical principles were deployed in different parts of the world, and what
distinguishing practices can be identified in this process? Such questions need to be framed within
the broader issue of how Europe and the Levant received/inherited classical architecture from the
Greeks and Romans (via the Arabs and other equally complex channels), at the same time as
rediscovering this tradition within their own soil and culture(s). Once rediscovered and appropriated
in different regions this ‘tradition’ was then given to others (beyond the continent of Europe) through
the channels of missionary activity, trade, colonisation and even war. It is at this point that questions
of heritage become nebulous and subject to much scholarly debate and dispute as this book seeks
to demonstrate.

Given the significant cultural and political implications of these developments through time, which
have only recently been recognised, this book proposal inevitably disguises behind its generalised
title a significant body of unresolved and contentious issues concerning the definition and meaning
of classical architecture (and the questionable notion of a ‘classical tradition’) in different parts of the
world. The study aims therefore to disentangle many of these overlooked aspects of the subject by
taking both a specific/focused approach (relating to particular buildings, architects or regions) and a
general overview of the dissemination of ideas and practices (by tracing trading/communication
routes and trans-cultural exchanges). Such questions even have a bearing on particular regions of
Europe that have largely escaped the attention of scholars, as some chapters in this volume will
reveal. A ‘handbook’ implies the survey format, while the title of the book, "The Reception and
Dissemination of Classical Architecture", inevitably poses a rather unusual and critically loaded set
of questions, such as ‘who was the receiver, giver or disseminator in this process?’ and ‘did there
exist a particular paradigmatic model of classicism (textual or architectural), whether instigated for
political, ideological or cultural purposes, that served as an abiding influence or reference in each
case?’

Purpose and Scope

Our intention therefore is to compile a collection of essays that map sometimes unexpected
relationships among historical and contemporary findings that have important consequences for the
study of the historiography of architecture. At one level the essays in this volume aim to be a survey
of the dissemination and translation of classical architecture in different parts of the world. At another
level, some of the chapters seek in a less conventional way to interrogate definitions of ‘global’
history, as they pertain to the reception of classical architecture, and the role of the culture(s) that
we now identify as “the West” within this framework. This will be explored in the way architecture
variously represents power – through its tensions and conflicting relationships - in places where the
West (or those non-western powers who consciously drew influence from Europe) attempted to
define itself and dominate others. This second approach promises more than a survey of historical
information; it creates opportunities to critically juxtapose seemingly unrelated (sometimes
conflicting) scholarly findings.

Identifying the epistemological consequences of these changes in the reception and dissemination
of classical architecture is important in establishing a coherent editorial strategy for this investigation.
This inevitably involves not only post-colonial perspectives but ‘de-colonial’ ones as well. Theories
of de-colonisation largely focus on Latin-American regions, addressing issues of modernity by
responding to the social, political and cultural domination of Europe. Post-colonial scholarship, on
the other hand, has tended to draw upon Indian, Arabic and African situations. Some of the chapters
in this proposed volume will demonstrate this distinction, as it relates to reinterpreting and
appropriating classical architecture and culture. Importantly, ‘de-coloniality’ does not necessarily
assume a post-colonial condition as Walter Mignolo argues; but rather targets a recurring “coloniality
of being” (The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization, University of
Michigan Press, 2003).

Such perspectives bring into sharp focus familiar Euro-centric epistemological approaches to
classical architecture, manifested in its built heritage, languages, literature and visual arts. Indeed
examining the reception history of classicism in Europe (in the broadest sense) is often predicated
on the principle of a ‘latent continuity’, initially conceived under Renaissance Humanists but most
strongly advocated by German philosophical and philological circles from Hegel which contributed
in many ways to a distinctive German understanding of ‘classical heritage’. Literary aspects of this
so-called latent continuity are discussed in Lorna Hardwick’s recent edited book, Reception Studies
of Greek and Roman Literature (OUP, 2003) that begins with 19th century German notions of
reception history (Rezeptionsgeschichte), and the later influence of Hans Georg Gadamer's 'Truth
Method' on the development of a hermeneutical approach to interpreting historic texts.

For the purposes of this book we would consider the age of colonialism, and its impact on the
dissemination of a so-called ‘classical tradition’, as an important geo-political reference point when
considering what was an emerging European global perspective from the sixteenth century onwards
(Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions, Cambridge University Press,
2008). It seems clear however that this global perspective was in many ways the product of
colonialism itself beginning in the American continent. Peter Burke even argues that there was no
distinct European identity, as such, prior to colonialism (Peter Burke, “Did Europe exist before
1700?”, Journal of the History of European Ideas, Issue 1,1980, p21-9). From the perspective of the
reception of classical architecture, this inter-relationship between European identity, colonialism and
globalism raises interesting (indeed potentially profound) questions about the very status of the
‘tradition’ of classicism in the early modern age, and the assumptions of an implicit continuity.

A crucial question in this study must therefore be: where and when do we begin our survey? Do we
include Renaissance Europe as a recipient? By questioning the validity of a latent continuity (which
incidentally is one of the objectives of this edited volume), then classical architecture and its
associated ‘traditions’ must be treated as equally problematic in the European context as in say Arab
culture. Hence a 'global' perspective must inevitably assume situations and locations where classical
forms of representation were, at least initially, alien to the prevailing culture (even allowing for the
built legacy of Roman Empire in different parts of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East), and the
ways in which the powers of colonial rule and the persuasive actions of missionary work in the New
World and Asia sought to assimilate these classical forms and practices.

The shortcomings of Western historiography of architecture have already been identified in many
publications starting with the special issue of Journal of Architectural Education on “Critical
Historiography” edited by Kazys Varnelis in 1999, essays collected by lain Borden and Jane Rendell
in InterSections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories (Routledge 2000), and more recently
in Rethinking Architectural Historiography edited by Dana Arnold et al. (Routledge 2006). One of the
key issues is the problematic nature of the word ‘global’ or the notion of a ‘global history,’ when
applied to artistic or cultural work. In its common parlance, global shares many of the perspectives
that this study seeks to challenge; namely the preference for sweeping (totalising) generalisations
rather than specifics (or local situations) in regard to the values associated with notions of heritage,
tradition and culture in different parts of the world, and the assumption that Western models form the
only viable basis for making such judgements. David Summers admonishes the term, arguing that a
global history of art "is not possible, and not even desirable" (Real Spaces: World Art History and
the Rise of Western Modernism, Phaidon, 2003). Through our editorial process, and in our detailed
Introductory chapter to this volume, we aim to critically review and interrogate key terms (such as
‘reception’, ‘global’ and ‘classical tradition’), and highlight alternatives where appropriate. In the
particular case of global, our approach to this subject matter leads us to consider the word ‘world’ as
a substitute; the term opens up a richer historiographical and cultural field of enquiry when
considered in the context of the classical tradition and its varying interpretations.

Chronological and Geographical Structure

The main part of this book (Part III, see below) will consist of chapters that will be arranged
chronologically and in relation to geographical location; based on the traditional model of the world
divided according to continents. Importantly, European (XV- XVI) and American (XVI-XVII)
receptions belong to the same cultural horizon, of nascent mercantile/colonial/slaving capitalism.
When compared to America, however, the force of the diffusion of the classical tradition in China,
South East Asia and India, through imperialistic and later industrial capitalism, is not comparable in
spite of the fact that the migration occurred as early as the 16th century. In making this distinction
(which will be highlighted in more detail in the first chapter of the volume) we believe we could
develop a useful scenography of the different political, religious, intellectual and artistic influences
on classical architecture in the 'host' countries or regions. From these general investigations of
European influences in different parts of the world, more focused studies will emerge of the reception
and dissemination of classical architecture (thereby reversing the Eurocentric perspective by ‘looking
back’ to Europe).

Below is a summary of some of the key themes/topics to be explored in this study:

1) Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque and Neo-Classicism as reinterpretations of classical patterns

and canons before the modern age. We will outline how these stylistic categories were fully
developed during the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries to substantiate the broadly Hegelian
principle of affirming a sense of progress of western culture (and its related structures of knowledge)
through forms of political domination. Accordingly, by using this familiar terms the authors of this
book implicitly recognise how they underscore the political agency of architecture, and of classical
architecture in particular. At the same time many of the contributors will problematize these stylistic
categories as key aspects of their arguments.
2) Colonial politics/religion and power symbolism (this may involve studies tracing the evolution of
political forces/capital and their institutional expression in colonial centres).
3) Global reciprocity, hybrid frames of symbolic references in colonial and European architecture (for
example, to what degree Spanish Baroque imposed versus imported/absorbed architectural
patterns).
4) Modernist architecture and classicism as its symbolic justification; its reception in Western and
post-colonial environments.
5) Classical building forms and the global culture of consumerism (symbolic manifestations and the
emergence of the global-vernacular style absorbing classical patterns)

Many of these topics of course overlap, providing opportunities for more complex fields of research
(geographically, historically and thematically) as some of the chapters will demonstrate in this
volume. The period from the late 15th to the early 18th centuries has been identified as the first wave
of influence in this study, when aspects of classical learning were communicated through the lens of
Humanistic scholarship. These activities were largely facilitated by Church and aristocratic
patronage in Europe and by the missionary activities of the Franciscans and Jesuits in other parts of
the world (on the back of the trading and colonial enterprises of the Portuguese, Spanish and later
Dutch). From this first wave disseminated reformulations of classical idioms found in Central/South
America, India, China and Africa (Clossey, Salvation and Globalization). Key to this enterprise was
the exporting of large numbers of European architectural treatises (Alberti, Palladio, Serlio,
Scamozzi, Vignola etc) to different countries and regions of the world, and their translations and
reinterpretations, serving as references for building projects in much the same way as the use of
traditional building manuals. Tracing the dissemination this textual material, and its application in
different building projects, will also be considered in this study.

Then there is the second wave of influence, comprising Neo-Classicism and ‘Revivalist Classicism’
as stylistic idioms of power and authority in the later 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. This coincided
with the mercantile and colonial activities of the Dutch, French and British, with the emergence of
new nation-states and in the planning of capital cities and their institutions (eg. St Petersburg,
Washington DC, Cape Town, New Delhi and Canberra). Many of the earlier developments, and their
associated imperialistic and encyclopaedic agendas of control and mastery, consciously drew
influence from such notions as the ‘noble savage’ and the principle of native ‘acquiescence’ through
the power and influence of colonisation.

Finally, the 3rd wave of influence relates to developments from the inter-war period of the 20th century
to today, when we witness a series of less coherent relationships between the ‘legacy’ of classical
architecture and modern/contemporary architectural practice. Among the areas where this is more
consciously demonstrated (albeit with varying degrees of success) was under dictatorial regimes
during the interwar period (such as in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Shōwa
Nationalism in Japan). Significantly many of the principles emerging from this period drew upon
Humanist principles that were very much in vogue at the time (Ernesto Grassi, Giovanni Gentile and
Benedetto Croce).

Unlike artistic movements or architectural developments of the past, that facilitated in various ways
revivals of classicism, the 20th century was characterised by the efforts of individual architects to
convey certain affinities with classical principles in sometimes inventive or novel ways: through the
application of classical proportions, formal manipulation of surfaces and tectonic/material qualities
(eg. Le Corbusier, Adolf Loos, Louis Kahn, Sigurd Lewerentz, Jože Plečnik and Giuseppe Terragni).
Perhaps the most problematic phase of this final 3rd wave of development takes place in the late 20th
century, during Post-Modernism when we witness so-called ‘mannerist’ treatments of contemporary
architecture (James Stirling, Robert Venturi, Michael Graves etc), supported by Colin Rowe’s
particular (and unique) perspectives on the relationship between Modernism and Mannerism. Finally,
related to this Post-Modernist sensibility is the issue today of how iconic Roman and Greek style
buildings have been exploited as tokens of monumentality (and therefore of authority) by the culture
of mass consumerism.

These different ‘waves’ of influence, and their social, political and cultural implications, underlie the
studies presented in this volume. Whilst the chapters will not cover all these areas and periods they
will attempt in each case to examine the material expression of classical architecture, by referring to
particular examples, and where appropriate their related textual matter. Our intention however is not
to limit ourselves to purely linguistic or iconographic issues as has been the case in the past. Given
that this is a book about architecture, design and theoretical issues will be emphasised. For example:
how were the practices and principles of architectural ordering, arrangement, proportioning, visual
adjustment, propriety and economy understood, rejected, translated, transformed, acclimatised, or
simply identified as already present by the ‘receiving’ cultures? To what extent did these practices
and principles form the backdrop to different forms of resistance or cultural/artistic translation?

Arrangement of Chapters

The book is divided into three parts: I) ‘Thematics of Classical Architecture’; II) ‘Classical Architecture
and the Trading Routes’ and III) ‘Geographical and Historical Survey’. By way of a preamble to these
sections, the first chapter ‘A World Reception of Classical Architecture’ sets out the context of the
book, drawing upon the key themes and issues summarised in the narrative above. Written by the
editors, it outlines the reasons why undertaking such an ambitious investigation of a world reception
of classical architecture is necessary today, given the context of what has become an emerging
global historiography of architecture in general.

An important factor in demonstrating the relevance of our approach to this subject is that perceptions
and representations of the world, at the beginning of the European expansion (before 1492), were
remarkably similar across different regions of the globe, and were embodied in the principle of Orbis
Terrarum, or “island of earth” surrounded by water. Presenting therefore a ‘world’ reception of
classical architecture invariably prompts us to frame our investigations in the context of changing
perspectives of geography. This will initially be highlighted through a brief examination of
representations of the so-called Four Continents (before Australasia was ‘discovered’) during the
17th and early 18th centuries. Of particular interest will be the Jesuit treatments of geography which
inspired the frescoes in St Ignazio in Rome and the Wurzburg Residenz in Bavaria each framed by
monumental architectural elements to underscore the hegemony of this broadly Euro-centric
perspective.

The underlying principle behind this part of the enquiry is that European responses to the different
receptions of classical architecture in the world were in part registered (and judged upon) through
the hierarchical arrangement of the four continents, as portrayed in these and other frescoes. Such
hierarchical structuring of the (civilised/barbarian) world relates moreover to the organising systems
of quadrature and, following Dalibor Vesely’s clues (Architecture in the Age of Divided
Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production, MIT Press, 2004), to their
particular spatial arrangement and orientation. This in many ways underscores the capacity of
Baroque architecture at this time (identified by some as the first ‘international’ architectural style) to
centralise and ‘perspectivise’ the world reception of classicism, by effectively laying claim to that
tradition in different European locations/settings. We see this for example in the way the Wurzburg
complex is effectively a condensation of the rising global power of Europe; the perspective
engravings, executed during these years, show the monumental esplanade and Pillars of Hercules
facing west (as if a petrified Atlantic Ocean), whilst towards the east the rampart garden serves as a
reminder of the still present "Turkish menace."

A significant factor in the ‘global influence’ of classical architecture, as we will argue, is the manner
in which the Vitruvian corpus, and its later adaptations, quickly became an organising system of
material practices and of architectural knowledge from the Renaissance onwards, which could be
readily translated, revisited or absorbed whenever the West (or those non-western powers who
consciously drew influence from Europe) sought to influence or dominate others. This authority
moreover was later reinforced by Hegelian teleological principles that gave such dominance of
classicising influences a sense of inevitability or unavoidability in any imperial worldview, whether in
the USA, Europe or even Japan.

Drawing upon reception theory, the discussions presented in this first chapter are framed around
two related premises that will serve as points of departure in the studies that follow:

1) From initial investigations it seems unlikely that there was a coherent or unifying pattern of
dissemination of classical principles globally, and therefore no shared view or consensus about what
the classical ‘tradition’ actually meant in different parts of the world; whilst there was an attempt by
Spanish and Portuguese colonisers to systematise the presence of European architectural forms in
occupied lands, to serve as political and religious statements, there is little evidence to support the
argument of a uniform ‘ripple’ effect of these influences across the world. As Luke Clossey
demonstrates (Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions), the policies and approaches
of colonisers and missionaries in Asia and America were very different, reflecting contrasting
experiences of enforced or received cultural influences. These differences were variously manifested
in architecture, as we see for example in the particular situations in ‘New Spain’, during the 16th and
early 17th centuries, and in China during the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

2) By extension to 1) is the premise that what was being ‘received’ in the different locations of the
world was not necessarily the same perceived tradition of classicism. Correlative to this premise is
the question of precisely what was being ‘exported’ in the first place to the host or colonised region.
This could be determined in part by tracing the originating location(s) of the exported material or
ideas in Europe, through the channels of communication of merchants or missionaries; whether in
Portugal, Spain, Bavaria, France, Italy or the Netherlands. Whilst it must be recognised that under
the Roman Catholic Church, and the Jesuits in particular, there was an ambition to export universal
perspectives of architectural knowledge and practice through the missionary policies of the Collegio
di Propaganda Fide and Collegio Romano in Rome, which gave support to their ‘civilising’
(Christianising) propaganda, these were often in the end subject to adaptation and assimilation. We
see this demonstrated in different ways in the Zócalo Capitalino in Mexico City and the so-called
Western mansions (Xiyang Lou) in Yuanming Yuan in Beijing. The chapter then concludes with a
summary of the three sections of the book, and the order of chapters, outlining the key themes and
topics investigated in each.

This introductory chapter is followed by Section I of the book, entitled ‘Thematics of Classical
Architecture’, which comprises a collection of chapters that examine key themes in the history of
classical architecture, many of which extend across space and time. These studies trace the ways
in which ideas and practices of classical architecture were appropriated or reinforced in response to
specific cultural, social, religious and political influences. The chapters cover diverse issues relating
to classical concepts of moderation, the meaning of ‘divine’ nature (natura naturans),
spoliation/renovation, symbolic mediation, interpretations of the fornix as a classical ‘emblem’,
honour and servitude in plantation societies and classical idioms of power and culture in film. Hence
the aim of this section is to demonstrate the manner in which ideas disseminating from European
practices and traditions, and the principles/canons underpinning them, were transmitted, imposed or
inherited in different cultural or historical contexts.

In Section II, entitled ‘Classical Architecture and the Trading Routes’, the chapters examine how the
reception and dissemination of classical architecture, in different regions of the world, were initially
channelled through the trading routes of merchants and colonisers, particularly the Portuguese and
Spanish. These routes, and their stopping points across oceans, gave rise to varying forms of
‘sedimentation’ of classical references in the occupied regions, manifested in the form of mostly
utilitarian building projects such as fortifications, port structures/warehouses and plantation facilities.
Alongside, or in conjunction with, these developments was the more gradual dissemination of
European architectural knowledge through the export of architectural treatises and building manuals
along these trading routes, largely implemented through the missionary activities of the Jesuits to
different parts of the world.

The 3rd and final section of the book (‘Geographical and Historical Survey’) constitutes the main part
of the study and comprises a range of chapters that explore the reception and dissemination of
classical architecture in different parts of the world. Grouped according to continents, the chapters
are arranged chronologically in each providing opportunities for historical comparison between
successive chapters and by contrasting continental (geographical) developments. We have
deliberately avoided making any distinction between studies that deal with regional or city
developments of architecture and the initiatives/ideas of individual architects, given that both lines of
enquiry invariably intersect through particular building case-studies and their influences.

Conclusion
What potentially makes The Routledge Handbook of the Reception of Classical Architecture different
from other Handbooks on aspects of classical architecture, such as The Oxford Handbook of Greek
and Roman Art and Architecture, is its interrogation of the historical function of the classical canon
in architecture in different contexts. Our task therefore is to validate and problematize the subject,
substantiate it without diluting its challenge. Consider that, for a long time in the West, the classical
tradition in architecture had been synonymous with, or symbolic of, broadly state-controlled cultural
and political practices. Legitimized by the carefully crafted myths and the quintessentially Western
epistemology of the stately/imperial power of the Romans and cultural superiority of the Greeks, the
classical orders provided the visual vocabulary for the articulation of state-affirming meanings. This
was evident wherever power was centralized in Europe and in many cases in colonial locations. The
book aims therefore to reach beyond the studies of explicit imperial or colonial programmes by
considering sometimes little known aspects of global historiography of classical architecture.

Given the size of this book proposal it has only been possible to provide brief outlines of each
chapter. Through our editorial input these abstracts will form the basis of substantial and original
scholarly works that critically address the full spectrum of issues relating to questions of reception
and dissemination of classical architecture, both within and outside Europe. It should be pointed
out that the choice of contributors to this volume has been carefully considered by the editors,
based on their authoritative knowledge of the subject and what new ideas they can bring to the
debate.

Contents

Illustrations

Image Credits

List of Authors

Acknowledgements

Introduction
A ‘World’ Reception of Classical Architecture
(Nicholas Temple, Andrzej Piotrowski & Juan Heredia)

PART I: Transmission and Re-conceptualisation of Classical Architecture

1. The Fates of Fornix

(Juan Manuel Heredia, Portland State University)
The term fornix makes reference to one of the most ubiquitous architectural “motifs” stemming from
the “classical architectural tradition.” For ancient Romans “fornix” -and its many cognates- could
signify a whole host of things, all of them however always associated with some sort of arcuated
construction: ovens, arches, vaults, niches, vaulted rooms, arcades, brothels (as prostitutes offered
their services under street arcades - ergo fornication), and triumphal arches. This last meaning gave
name to one of the most popular “styles” of Roman antiquity. Indeed the “fornix style” was based on
the typical elevation of a triumphal arch, and consisted on a façade-module superimposing two
constructive “systems:” on the one hand an entablature resting on columns, and on the other an arch
resting on pillars. Given that the first is normally associated with the architecture of ancient Greece
and the latter with that of Rome, such a combination represented an ideal architectural synthesis
between those two cultures, a “fornication” of important political implications.
Although “perfected” in buildings such as the Colosseum and the Theater of Marcellus, one of the
earliest and most important examples of fornix architecture was the so-called Tabularium. Built in 78
BCE by Sulla, the general and dictator who conquered Athens, the Tabularium represented through
its combination of elements the dominance of Rome over Greece and at the same time exhibited
Rome as the legitimate heir of Hellenic culture. Soon afterwards the fornix motive became a staple
feature of Roman architecture, fragmentarily surviving -while “migrating” to many regions after the
collapse of the western empire, re-emerging during the quattrocento, reappearing with full force in
the early sixteenth century in the hands of Bramante, and disseminating around the globe in the
modern/colonial period. In the process, the original superimposition attempted by Republican
architects produced several significant offsprings. One of them came to be known as Serliana,
another as Colossal Order.
The significance of the fornix motive resided largely on the provocative juxtaposition of distinct and
unlikely tectonic orders, yet articulated in such a way that enriched the language and communicative
powers of ancient and later architecture (Onians 1990). This chapter will trace the history of this
motive across selected periods and regions -from antiquity to the twentieth century, and from Rome
to Mexico City- locating on the work of Le Corbusier and his contemporaries, one of its most recent,
unsuspected, and creative (if not always conscious) interpretations, now subverting its conventional
hierarchy, and transcending but never abandoning, its rhetorical and pictorial aspects for the sake
of greater spatial and topographical depth.

2. Transmission of Classical Ideas from the Middle Ages: from the Liberal Arts to
Hierarchies of Understanding
(Christian Frost, Birmingham City University)
In De Architectura, written by Vitruvius in the first century BC, there is little insight into the role
classical architecture played in symbolic mediation and, because the text offered a pattern many
later writers were to follow, the oversight has often been repeated. This essay will trace some critical
aspects of mediation from Greek and Roman culture that persisted in European culture and formed
a part of the classical legacy handed over by the medieval period to the Renaissance.
In writing the treatise Vitruvius’s main aim seems to have been to propose that different forms of
knowledge are the main basis for participation in Roman civic life. He begins the work suggesting
that the skills necessary for the making of architecture include those learnt though the liberal arts as
well as ‘directive’ knowledge applicable to the more practical, mechanical arts. Nevertheless, beyond
the section in the book advocating the link between the proportions of man and the design of temples,
at no point does he suggest that architecture may play a more significant role in the ordering of the
Roman city. Bearing in mind that the education he was advocating, with the seven liberal arts at its
core, was also judged necessary to develop the skills required for philosophy (considered the highest
form of study), a question arises as to why an architect would need to study these topics if they were
not represented at all in architecture?
For many Greek and Roman philosophers, of the seven liberal arts, the arts embracing ideas
(trivium) were ranked higher than the arts related to things (quadrivium) because they saw the
perceived world as a copy of divine exemplar, knowledge of which could only be approached though
philosophical discourse. When this sevenfold structure was transferred into Christian theology the
need to address the Creation ex nihilo and the Incarnation of Christ as realities, altered this hierarchy
placing the quadrivium—dealing with aspects of nature (Creation)--—at least on the same level as
the trivium-—dealing with ideas. The re-ordering placed architecture ‘in’ nature but also allowed it to
be interpreted through spiritual and material hierarchies—as in Cassian’s four readings of Jerusalem,
or Hugh of St Victor’s four readings of Noah’s Ark. This Christianised version of the classical world
was eventually harmonised in the thirteenth century most fully by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa
Theologia and St Bonaventura in his Itinerarium mentis in Deum. While both these texts do not
specifically mention architecture, they helped establish the theological and philosophical foundation
upon which the later revival of classicism was built.

3. Spoliation and Renovation in Humanist Thought: Ornament from the Perspective of

Architecture
(Clare E. L. Guest, Trinity College Dublin)
This essay considers the presence and discussion of despoiling and aggressive appropriation within
the narrative of continuity in Renaissance classicism and its Roman sources. This discussion has its
core in the theme of triumph and is fundamental to rhetorical and artistic handling of ornament, as
isolated fragment and token of continuity. The essay opens with Roman accounts of the constructive,
constitutive role of triumphal spoils in the urban context, moving to the status of earlier Roman
ornament as itself a spoil in late antiquity, exemplified by the discussion of reuse of antique temples
in Theodosian Code XVI. Here, the perceived iconographic neutrality of ornament permitted it to be
conserved and re-used, becoming through reuse a sign of the continuity of civic culture within a
transformed religious context. A statement of continuity is thus founded on a rupture, with the
ornament as carrier of this contradiction. The central role of ornament in Humanist depictions of civic
life, such as Bruni’s Laudatio Florentiae Urbis, should be considered in relation to this underlying
contradiction.
This complementarity of despoiler and despoiled reappears with Humanist antiquarianism and civic
renovatio, at times deployed in highly aggressive language. The triumph is again crucial to urban
‘recovery’, although it shifts to become a temporal triumph against an antagonistic perception of time,
in which historical endurance takes on a heroic character and recovery is invested with an almost
supernatural aura, in the necromantic Humanist topoi of beings returned to life or recovered from
Hades. The ubiquity of triumph as topos and mode (as well as genre) leads in turn to discussion
about the arrangement of spolia and to the triumphal arch as ornamental support and axial frame.
The arch thus has a dual role: it organises and displays the heterogeneity of ornaments conceived
as historicist fragments – this trophy or candelabra ornament will transform into the metamorphic
grotesques, where historical detail is absorbed into historicist fantasy. As framing device, the arch
denotes the presence of perspectivity and designates the schematic, conceptual nature of the field
within which Roman architecture is to be restituted. Theatre becomes the privileged locus for this
restitution, with its mixture of scenographic, conceptual and ludic/festive elements. The essay
concludes with Serlio’s Libri as the place where these relationships are presented – and as the point
where architecture is abstracted from its engagement with civic particularities to become a print
medium, supposedly capable of export and dissemination irrespective of local conditions.

4. On Moderation: Architectural Manifestations of an Ancient Philosophical Concept

(Esra Sahin Burat, Mersin University)
This essay looks into the reception of a classical philosophical tradition in architecture, more
specifically, into the continuous appropriation of the ancient concept of "moderation" by the architects
from ancient to contemporary times. Moderation was an overarching concept in several fields of
ancient learning, establishing a common ground for their communication. It was variously expressed
as the justice, good-mixture, equilibrium, due-proportion, or simply "the median" of the opposites in
physiological, medical, artistic, and ethical theories. Its main tenet was that ‘properness’ or
‘goodness’ in a particular situation could be defined with respect to the relationships with an
encompassing framework. It was incorporated into the architectural theory of Vitruvius as a key
concept which allowed situating the discussion of architectural concerns within the cosmic order.
Vouchsafed to Arabic scholarship during the Middle Ages and transferred back to Europe during the
translations made from the 11th to the 13th centuries, it was revived in Alberti’s theory of building
art. Its modern restatement and elaboration was put forth most forcefully by Le Corbusier. This essay
investigates the architectural manifestations of the classical virtue of "moderation" in the works of
these architects, with the purpose of highlighting the continuity of a qualitative, situational, and
representational understanding in architecture, which has stood in contrast to the positivistic,
quantitative, or formalistic attitudes.

5. Neoclassical Aesthetics and the Study of Mexican Antiquities

(Oscar Flores Flores, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)
The interest on ruins and antiquities has been a constant of western culture. Yet it was only until the
18th century (with the publication of the Encyclopedie, the founding of art academies, and the
institutionalization of neoclassical models as the canon of beauty) that this interest acquired a more
comprehensive character. It derived from the belief that the study of the natural sciences and the
arts -based on theories of classical origin- was inherent to the formation of an enlightened person.
The discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and later at Paestum, were key in the consolidation
of antique taste, a cultural phenomenon having a great impulse thanks to the publications of Le Roy,
Woods, Caylus, Winckelmann, Piranesi, Milizia, and Mengs. Indeed these authors were responsible
for setting the theoretical premises of neoclassicism both as an artistic style and a system of values.
The idea of renovating Graeco-Latin models as paradigms for 18th century art resulted in different
paths of interpretation. The concepts of the past and of tradition fitted well into a general desire to
achieve an ideal beauty. Similarly, the restoration of Roman ruins and their consideration as models
was one of the most significant aspects in the shaping neoclassical aesthetics. The Vitruvian
postulates and the canonical buildings of the Renaissance entered into dialogue with academic
culture in the creation of a new architectural grammar. The then popular notion of “common good”
became as important as the Vitruvian triad, firmitas, utilitas and venustas. The study of ancient ruins,
of Renaissance buildings, and the scrupulous analysis of architectural treatises, created a new
architectural culture that resulted in turn in a great number of theoretical writings. Vitruvius’ authority
was both doubted and became the subject of erudite translations and interpretations.
This is the context of the work of Pedro José Márquez (1741-1820), a Mexican Jesuit expelled from
his country, who during his almost forty years of the exile in Italy dedicated a significant part of his
time to the study of the Vitruvian text. Working under the patronage of the Spanish ambassador to
Rome, José Nicolás de Azara, Márquez not only gained access to a superb research library, but
also entered into contact with a select group of people that shaped 18th century Italian culture.
Márquez gained recognition in Europe (and became member of academies in Spain and Italy) thanks
to a series of books written in Italian and dedicated to the study of Roman architecture. But as a
reaction to the negative views of many enlightenment scholars regarding the history and nature of
the American continent (in an episode that came to be known as the “Dispute of the New World”)
Márquez later drew attention to the study of Mexican antiquities through two small books: Saggio
dell´Astronomia, Cronologia, e Mitologia degli antichi Messicani (1804) and Due Antichi Monumenti
di architettura Messicana (1804). Thanks to these works the Aztec Sun Stone, the Coatlicue
sculpture, and the pyramids of Tajín and Xochicalco became known in Europe.
Notwithstanding the importance of those recently unearthed works Pre-Columbian art and
architecture had already been tacitly present in his own books. On the other hand the classical
learning that he acquired, first in Jesuit schools and later through his study of Vitruvius and of Roman
ruins gave him enough elements to tackle Pre-Columbian art and architecture under the premises
of neoclassical aesthetics. Márquez for example compared the Pyramid of the Niches in Tajín with
the Arch of Janus Quadrifons in Rome; the laconicums of Roman houses with the Mexican
temazcales; and the use of columns by Greeks and Mexicans alike, which for him was proof of a
common cultural origin. These are only examples of the ways in which José Márquez employed the
grammar of classical architecture to render visible the values of Pre-Columbian art in the Europe of
the Enlightenment, with the intention of inserting it into the streams of Universal History.

6. The Persistence of Natura Naturans from Classical Architecture

(John Hendrix, Roger Williams University)
In architecture, natura naturans is contrasted to natura naturata. While natura naturata is the direct
mimesis of nature, natura naturans is an indirect or idealized form of mimesis, the imitation of the
forming principles of nature rather than the forms of nature themselves. According to Plotinus in the
Enneads, it is the purpose of all the arts to not just present a “bare reproduction of the thing seen,”
the natura naturata, but to “go back to the Ideas from which Nature itself derives” (V.8.1), in the
natura naturans, the ideal imitation of the forming principles of nature. The natura naturans refers to
the concept of nature rather than nature itself, and an idea of beauty derived from the concept of
nature rather than nature itself. These ideas originated in classical Greek culture and persisted in
architecture until the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century; they have recently been
resurrected in contemporary Bioconstructivist theory for computer-generated forms. This essay
explores the concept and influence of the natura naturans in architecture throughout history in the
writings on art and architecture of Plato, Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas, Leon Battista Alberti, Federico
Zuccari, Giovanni Bellori, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Francesco Algarotti, Quatremère de
Quincy, Marc Antoine Laugier, Friedrich Schelling, Georg Hegel, and Geoffrey Scott.

7. Classical Themes in the Architecture of the German Avant-garde

(Matthew Mindrup, University of Sydney)
This chapter examines the complex underlying influences of classical ideas in German Avant-garde
art and architecture with specific reference to Kurt Schwitters. The Hannover Merzbau, one of the
most significant contributions to the avante-garde of the 20th century provides a unique point of entry
into a critical point of contact between Greek classicism and the early twentieth century art and
architectural avant-garde. Shortly after the end of the First World War, Schwitters invented Merz in
December 1919 as a method of making art using found objects. Contrary to the exploitation of
chance by his Dada peers in Zurich and Berlin, Schwitters selected and rejected his materials
depending upon how they contributed to an ineffable Ausdruck (Expression) emerging in their critical
evaluation as art. In the tradition of Aristotle’s hylomophic combination of material and immaterial
form, Schwitters’ Ausdruck was contingent upon an interpretive strategy by which his materials must
be able to Entmaterialisiert (dematerialize) their immaterial identities, he called their Eigengift (inner
content) and take on new ones as art.
Schwitters’ anagogical approach to his materials was employed most famously by the Abbot Suger
during the thirteenth century as a method for modelling the ineffable in the materials of religious art
and architecture. For Suger’s inspiration, the fifth century Alexandrian Christian mystic, Dionysius
the Pseudo Areopagite, his peer Plotinus and the Greek philosopher Aristotle before, the term
‘anagoge’ (to elevate) did not have its beginnings in Christian mysticism, but described an
interpretive method whereby a matter is elevated in its intelligibility. Schwitters’ contribution to the
modelling practices of architects during the twentieth century is a form of anagogical interpretation
which is not employed to contemplate an otherworldly realm of Platonic Forms or an invisible order
underlying the creation of all things but an immaterial idea discovered by the architect as a guide for
making of architecture.
By the end of 1923 Schwitters, who studied architecture at the Technische Hochschule in Hannover
for two semesters, extended his Merz art to architecture as a method for modelling and constructing
buildings. Compared to early twentieth century architects who cast models or constructed buildings
according to preconceived designs, Schwitters developed the Hannover Merzbau, which he also
referred to as the Kathedrale des erotische Elends (Cathedral of Erotic Misery), in situ. Following the
method for ancient Greek Temple design that Schwitters studied at the Technische Universität, he
initiated the construction of the Merzbau with the assemblage of an anthropomorphic column as a
model for the construction of the entire edifice. In the same way the Greeks composed their columns
based upon on the measures of men, women and maidens, Schwitters crowned his column with the
death mask of his son Gerd to signify the dematerialization of found objects as the ‘measure’ to be
applied to the transformation of materials in his new architecture. It was Schwitters’ approach to
materials that his friend, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy applied to the Bauhaus curriculum the same year. This
chapter seeks to explore the classical roots underlying this significant transition in architectural
design practices during the early twentieth century.

8. (Re)invoking Humanism in Modernity: Architecture and Spectacle in Fascist Italy

(Nicholas Temple, University of Huddersfield, & Eleni Tracada, University of Derby)
This chapter examines the intellectual and creative intersections between modern perspectives of
Renaissance humanism and the architectural developments and ceremonial practices in Fascist
Italy. The first half of the 20th century witnessed an unprecedented flowering of scholarship on
Renaissance humanism. Much of this entailed a productive dialogue between Italian and German
scholars and philosophers. Evidenced in the writings of Giovanni Gentile, Benedetto Croce, Eugenio
Garin, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Martin Heidegger and Ernesto Grassi, these intellectual endeavours
demonstrated not just a desire to acquire a deeper understanding of Renaissance culture but also
reflected differing attitudes towards the shifting political and ideological climate in Germany and Italy
at the time. The writings that disseminated from their exchanges during the interwar years were to
have a far reaching impact not just within academia but also in relation to architectural developments
in Italy. This chapter sets out to examine this relationship by exploring the reception of Renaissance
humanist ideas in Fascist architecture and spectacle, as a kind of by-product of the more explicit
interest of the Fascist regime in the architecture of classical antiquity. Such a relationship has not
been properly understood or documented. The chapter will be divided into two parts: the first will
focus on Florence, the ‘birthplace’ of Humanism, examining the influence of its legacy on Fascist
identity through a study of stage spectacles and Humanist scholarship, in particular the activities of
1) the Società del Rinascimento del Libro founded by Enrico Barfuci in 1929, and 2) the Centro di
Studi Rinascimentale founded in 1937 by a group of poets, politicians and architects including
Giovanni Papini, Gustavo Giovannoni and Alessandro Pavolini.
The second part will examine the works of key Fascist architects; such as the ‘classicist’ Gustavo
Giovannoni and the Italian Rationalist Giuseppe Terragni, in the context of their varying interests in
Humanist concepts of civic space and rhetoric.

9. Ventri Architectus: Reproducing Classical Idioms of Power and Culture in Film

(Renée Tobe, University of East London, Tracey Eve Winton, University of Waterloo)
This chapter examines how classical architecture in Rome has been represented by means of
images of architectural texts, models and other architectural works in order to mobilize power
relations through its representations. Peter Greenaway’s film, Belly of an Architect (1987),
foregrounds a number of tensions and complexities spanning between historical classicism,
neoclassicism, and its appropriations. The film juxtaposes classical architecture in the form of
Agrippa’s Pantheon with the formalist and more abstract neoclassical style of Étienne-Louis Boullée
(1728-1799). Central to a discussion of imperialist and Fascist politics lies a nostalgia for Rome’s
glorious past, anchored by monuments received as a ‘picture postcard’ expression of classicism.
Greenaway’s film opens by a juxtaposition of images, illustrating Adolf Loos’ statement that only two
parts of architecture belong to art, the monument and the tomb. Both of these feature conspicuously
in statements about the lost power of emperors like Hadrian, and the power of Fascism. The filmic
Rome points to itself, representing both the Caesars and Mussolini, fetishizing history and glorifying
architectural expressions of power. Central to the film is the Vittorio Emmanuel Monument built in
1911-35 by Giuseppe Sacconi. Its language demonstrates Boullée's influence as a mediator of
architectural form between classical Rome and Fascist Rome, while in addition, Mussolini’s office
and his balcony directly faced it. Stourley Cracklite is an American architect curating an exhibition of
Boullée’s architecture while, unbeknownst to him, his Italian counterpart (named for the Roman
Emperor Vespasian who built the Colosseum) siphons off funds to restore Mussolini’s Fascist
modernist architecture. Exteriors and interiors become interchangeable, in order to control the mise-
en-scène and create tableaux vivante that correspond to both Romantic paintings and the
neoclassical architecture of Albert Speer (1928-1981) who mentions Boullée in his writings. A scene
at Augustus’ Ara Pacis references Bernardo Bertolucci’s Fascist commentary in The Conformist
(1970) and the seat of power under Caesar Augustus. The film deliberately excludes Rome’s sensual
Baroque settings, and one feels an absence of life. Greenaway intended an outsider’s view of Rome,
so that the iconic classicism of the Pantheon acts as a backdrop for a Neoclassicism supplying
efficient solutions to pragmatic problems, such as how to create a language of dominance and
power. The play between the actual Pantheon (place for “all gods”) and the film’s sense of God’s
absence — expressed in the maquettes and celebration of Boullée (a Deist) imply the disinterested
deity of the clockwork universe as a model for the architect who designs without appreciating future
impacts of the work. The Age of Reason and Italian rationalism along with the Enlightenment ideas
with which the film begins and ends become entirely subsumed in the course of the narrative with
the past glory and intrigue of the Caesars, whose mania, crimes and passions resulted in Rome’s
glory and greatness.

10. The Inhabited Column: Louis Kahn and the Modernist Revitalisation of Classicism in
North America
(Darren Deane, University of Westminster)
Louis Kahn’s stated aim of giving the wall a “consciousness”, and that a column “wants to be hollow
[...] to put something inside” (Twomby, Louis Kahn: Essential Texts) is the focus and starting point
of this chapter. It re-examines Kahn’s dematerialisation strategy from the perspective of the inner
revitalization of classicism. Inhabiting the interiority of proportioned structures and components,
filling them with human circulation and environmental substances (the “smoke eaters” of the
Richards Medical Laboratories, 1965), will be interpreted in terms of its continuity with late 19th
Century debates on the expressive transmission of materia inherited from Alöis Riegl and Adolf Loos,
the latter’s Chicago Tribune Tower Competition entry of 1922 consisting of an inhabited Doric order
column. It will be argued that the foundations to Kahn’s sensibility of hollowed classicism was
conditioned by a paradigmatic shift from the ‘part’ to the ‘element’ that emerged in Romantic
philosophy. When based on a reconception of the elemental, vitalist order of architectural parts, the
aims of Kahn’s Modernism can be reassessed as a quest for greater historical and environmental
agency. The outcome was a type of architecture capable of registering the creative tension between
the modernist category of material ‘element,’ as opposed to the classical notion of formal ‘part.’
Viewed through this lens the paper will go on to elucidate the background process whereby
architecture adjusted its relationship to history from one of representational metaphor, to a
performative re-figuration of tradition.

PART II: Classicism and Hybridity

11. The Lebanon: A Levantine Locale of Hybrid Appropriations of the Classical

Architectural Heritage
(Nader El-Bizri, American University, Beirut)
The theme of this essay will be set on Beirut as a situational case-study for a phenomenological
investigation of the adaptive appropriation of the classical Levantine heritage, starting with Roman
Berytus and proceeding through the integration of its physical vestiges and architectural motifs within
myriad styles and architectonic elements from Arab, Ottoman, Tuscan, French and modernist
provenances. The concretised locales of such inquiry are public cum civic spaces and missionary
educational institutions as they were interlaced with religious settings (Roman temples turned into
Christian basilicas, then converted into mosques, mausoleums, or small museums, etc., or
archaeological sites demarcated in Ottoman, French mandate, and postcolonial epochs, including
the Lebanese post-war reconstruction of downtown Beirut). Such analytics will be articulated around
architectural representations, their symbolic orders, local interpretations, physical-material
manifestations, and embodied lived experiences. This will be set against the background of probing
the phenomenon of inheriting Mediterranean cultures and of influences from the Fertile Crescent
and Anatolia, and the way they figure in negotiating the hybridity of identities in the Levant, their
intra-confessional contestations, and the entwined canons that underpin them. The architectural
phenomena would be therefore entangled with concepts and notions that are derived from
philosophical ponderings over the intercultural transmission of knowledge and the reception of
culture in Levantine intellectual history and its classical lineage (Greek-Roman-Byzantine-Syriac-
Arabic-Latin).

12. Classicism AFTER Classicism: Avatars of the Classical Tradition in Romanian

Architecture (Ana Maria Zahariade, Ion Mincu Institute Bucharest)
This working title recycles Nicolae Iorga's phrase “Byzantium after Byzantium” (Nicolae Iorga
Byzance après Byzance, continuation de l' « Histoire de la vie byzantine, Bucharest, 1935, translated
into English by Laura Treptow, Center for Romanian Studies, 2000) since this rhetorical devise could
suggest more than its creator has intimated. Under this heading, the historian documented the three
centuries of survival and particular revivals of the Byzantine civilisation after the Ottomans conquered
its centre. This gives a hint about the local backdrop against which emerged the classical architecture
in the three regions making the present Romania. Still, the parallelism with Iorga’s book stops here,
since there is no real similarity between the Byzantine phenomenon and the fortune of the classical
tradition in these regions. While they preserved the Latin structure and lexicon of a common
Romanian language, their culture and architecture withdrew from this source, following other
formative paths. The consciousness of Latinity took hundreds of years to awaken (until the late 16th
century), while their quite rich antique Greek and Roman built heritage, buried or despoiled,
remained inert till the end of the 19th century.
What we may call, with certain circumspection, “classical architecture” in Romania is a kind of tardy
classicism lacking the classical tradition, a classicism-after; hence the capital letters used for this
word in the title, changing the emphasis in Iorga’s formula. Despite appearances, this capital AFTER
did not mean mere design frivolity or randomness; it also was a longing for an ideal, for a clearer
geometry, for moral purity; it acquired an axiological value that played an important role in the local
cultural and architectural modern discourse; sometimes endowed with “national” traits related to
certain social strata and to an ideal of social stability, it underlay the traditionalism-modernism
debate. This ambiguous, though undisputable prestige explains not only the “classical-vernacular”
architecture typical of Bucharest and other sub-Carpathian cities, but also the recurrent and belated
use of classical architecture, politically manipulated in various ways. Therefore, the AFTER in the
working title also suggests the frequent and incidental reiterations of classical forms in Romanian
architecture, even anachronistically recent.
The paper will trace the sinuous history of the classical tradition (design and discourse) in the three
Romanian regions, and to identify its landmarks and their specific connotations. For instance:
- the earliest echoes of Renaissance (late 16th century/Transylvania; late 17th century/Walachia);
- the classical hybrid (a “fusion”, as it would be called today) used to express both modernisation
and the identity of the new state (from the end of 18th to the WW2);
- the architectural discourse that substantiated the practice (in the architectural theory taught the
School of Architecture, used in the aesthetic debate, exposed in the architectural magazines and
architecture histories, advocated by G.M. Cantacuzino’s Simetria, etc.), and its equivocal relation to
the cultural/literary discourse (Iorga’s moral classicism, the longing for classicism in literary theory
and philosophy of culture, G. Călinescu’s representation of the classical architect, etc.);
- the latest political imposition of classical forms (Stalinist classicism and its discourse, Ceausescu’s
national classicism). Finally, the paper will try to bring into question the avatars of the Western
classical tradition in Romanian architecture, in a country where such tradition did not really exist.
Maybe the title should be Avatars of the Classical Tradition in Romanian Architecture.

13. Architectural Mannerism in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Beginning

of the Modern Era
(Andrzej Piotrowski, University of Minnesota)
In this chapter, on architectural mannerism, that seemingly dubious stylistic category, provides
access to little known cultural phenomena of the sixteen and early seventeen centuries. During that
period not only Western military and economic powers colonized the world but it was also the time
when new modes of thinking emerged in Europe. The Classical age, as Michael Foucault termed it,
ended when people learned to question the traditional kinds of order. This chapter will argue that
buildings played a key role in these processes. Architectural mannerism is difficult to define within
traditional taxonomies because it reflects the diversity of artistic and symbolically-charged
experiments characteristic of that time. In places where ideas motivating Protestant Reformation
coincided with new economic and social relationships, designers explored the rules of classical
architectural traditions to tease out and subvert political assumptions behind them. They also revived
representations of deeply repressed pre-Christian and non-Western religious traditions and, in this
way, destabilized the Catholic control over symbolic practices. Mannerist forms were instrumental in
these processes because they simultaneously subverted—on a non-verbal level—the unspoken but
dominant assumptions and evaded strictly verbal scrutiny. Using architectural examples from
Poland, Italy and the Ukraine this chapter will discuss how it was possible. The study will also
address a more general epistemic issue: why non-verbal but representationally crucial aspects of
material production remain so little known.

14. Classical Canon vs. Eastern Adriatic: Provincial Antiquities and the Early Modern
Periphery of Europe
(Jasenka Gudelj, University of Zagreb)
The area of Eastern Adriatic, namely regions of Istria and Dalmatia, during the Early Modern period
represented the very fringes of the Catholic Europe, a long stretch of Venetian territories interrupted
by Habsburg Littoral (Kvarner) and the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik). This major maritime
passage towards the Near East featured small urban centers hosting important antiquities, such as
Pula and Split. The local classical heritage was interpreted in the 15th and later centuries by visiting
and local humanists, as well architects and architectural theorists, such as Sebastiano Serlio, Andrea
Palladio or Johann Fischer von Erlach. The proposed essay will explore how the Roman buildings
of Pula, Zadar and Split were used or omitted in the shaping of the classical canon of the
Renaissance. Moreover, it will deal with the question on how in turn this classical canon devised
through architectural treatises was delivered to the maritime centers of the Eastern Adriatic and read
by both professionals and patrons of architecture. Finally, through examination of the built Early
Modern architecture in the area, the very notion of a classical canon in the peripheral context will be
examined, departing from the categories elaborated by Croatian scholar Milan Prelog of active and
passive negation of antiquity.

15. 18th and 19th century Classicism in England: John Soane’s Disembodied Décor
(Yue Zhuang, University of Exeter)
On Soane’s interiors of Bank of England, Daniel Abramson (Building the Bank of England, Yale,
2006) suggests that Soane’s ornamentation seems to rob classicism of its fundamental,
anthropomorphic metaphysic, lacking fundamental bodily ‘form and grace.’ ‘His disembodied décor
denied classicism its supposed basis in the human form and therefore its claim to natural, universal
authority.’ Soane’s bodiless ornamentation later arguably became a source of both modernism and
postmodernism.
Recognising Soane's polymath interest in both geology (catastrophism) and antiquarianism as well
as architectural language and semiotic theory, my study provides insights into Soane’s contribution
to a particular 'modern' rendering of classicism as shown in this innovative decoration, by highlighting
his use of an 18th-century geological concept of ‘first principles’ and its implications for the status
and meaning of classical architecture in England at the time.
Replacing the Renaissance faith in changeless, divine proportion, this geological concept of ‘first
principles’ attributed power to the ongoing movement of the earth, namely, the eternal natural
operations (‘the perpetual cycling of the fire and water in and around the Earth, the simultaneous
perishing and coming into being’, Athanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus, 1665) and the natural
operations of the mind (i.e. imagination and signification). This long-standing hermetic notion of ‘first
principles’ as a process of simultaneous creation and destruction, held considerable influences in
the minds of European artists and patrons in an age of both geological and social turbulence from
the 17th century to early 19th century. Speculated to be the outcome of geological ‘first principles,’
classical orders were seen as the petrification of subterranean water or fire (e.g. Ledoux’s Saltworks
of Arc-et-Senans, Chaux).
Soane’s unpublished manuscript ‘Crude hints towards a history of my house in Lincoln Inn Fields’
(1812), a text mirroring his house-museum, reflects the geological ‘first principles’ and their
associated images such as fossil motifs (or real fossils) and rock strata (Zhuang, Et in Arcadia Ego:
funereal imagination and landscape theory in 18th century Britain, Edinburgh, 2013). This essay
draws from the ‘Crude hints’ manuscript to demonstrate how Soane ingeniously introduces
geological ‘first principles’ into extant decorative figurations (e.g. linearity in 18th century architectural
decoration or the use of ammonites as a kind of natural volute) to ‘re-write’ them in a particular kind
of way, thus re-inventing an ideal language of architecture. In one sense, this new language process,
radical for its time, was received as ‘alien’ by an uninformed public, but it was familiar to the hermetic-
minded antiquarians and architects.
Just as Soane’s ammonite fossils straddle the boundary of natural being and cultural object, so
Soane’s bodiless (abstract, linear, negative) decoration is a language that delivers its own being—
an auto-monument, a sign referring to itself. The bodiless décor, on the one hand, is Soane’s willed
projection of his individual self’s mnemonic continuity onto a world now indifferent to such continuity
(a world with his own family trauma, with the Royal Academy perceived to be against him, and with
the architectural profession commercialised). On the other hand, the abstract ornament manifests
the natural law of capitalism as a catastrophe which involves simultaneously the processes of
creation and destruction (as with the tenure of Soane as architect for the Bank of England). Soane’s
neoclassical language is ideal for a world that can be made to preserve markings (as Walter
Benjamin’s fossils), but not meanings.

Part III: Dissemination of Classical Architecture

16. From Serlio to Tolsá: The Classical Architectural Tradition in Mexico (16th to 18th
Centuries)
(Luis Javier Cuesta Hernandez, Universidad Iberoamericana)
It has long been held that the classical architectural tradition was poorly or badly understood in
Mexico during the Viceregal period. Some have even argued the existence of “overlapping
chronologies” in an effort to explain the absence, lack of knowledge, or inadequate comprehension
of that tradition in Mexico (Bailey 2005). Viewed from methodological perspectives closer to a
“center-periphery” logic -and distant from postcolonial ones (Mignolo) or the most recent tendencies
in artistic geography (Da Costa Kauffmann)- it seemed as if the architecture of Viceregal Mexico
should have “complied” with a series of a-priori obligations, which nevertheless resided more in the
minds of researchers than in those living in that visual culture.
Fortunately several recent studies have contributed in a powerful way not only to dismiss that idea
but also to demonstrate exactly the opposite, namely, that the classical tradition had an extraordinary
vitality in the formation of the culture and architectural imaginary of that period. New Spain not only
had knowledge of the existence of that tradition through imported texts coming from the Old World,
nor did it merely demonstrate that knowledge mimetically, but also produced its own theoretical texts
and adapted that knowledge to its own representational needs.
This text will unpack in a panoramic way (from the 16th to the 18th centuries) all those problems
implicit in the reception of the architectural classical tradition in New Spain (visual, theoretical, or
literary), while focusing on very concrete aspects that range from built works, ephemeral architecture,
architectural projects, and practicing architects.

17. From Fischer von Erlach to Adolf Loos: Classicism in Austria

(Ross Jenner, University of Auckland)
The principal question this contribution poses concerns key moments in the architecture of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, from J.B. Fischer von Erlach to Adolf Loos: what is the significance of the
classical tradition in its key works, in particular Loos’ culminating buildings, interiors, projects and
writings?
At the beginning of the introduction of the classical tradition and the founding of Baroque architecture
there, stands the figure of Fischer von Erlach. His treatise, Entwurff einer historischen Architektur
(1721), was unprecedented, posing together Egyptian, Babylonian and Greek, followed by Roman
architecture, then a third book covering the whole of Asia. The publication reveals the vast range of
his learning, amassed over years of practice and illustrated by engravings with explanatory notes,
some of the archaeological reconstructions being at the forefront of his time. In conclusion, he added
his own achievements, which he regarded as the logical continuation of the Roman tradition of
architecture. It is precisely this tradition that is put on display at the Karlskirche, as it is known in
Vienna, built after his death by his son Joseph Emmanuel. The building is eclectic, all its precedents
having been previously shown in the Entwurff, but with a compositional rigour in a “fugal
counterbalance”, in an aggregation of self-contained elements comparable to his colleague Leibniz’
monads and with a Schauseite, display face. Every single element is heavily charged with historical
reference, the most obvious being to St Peters in Rome but also to the Roman temple of Jupiter and
Peace, to the historiated columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius and to Constantine’s second Rome
in the guise of an allusion to St. Sophia with minarets. More generally, reference is made to the
pillars of Hercules and the two columns of the temple in Jerusalem. In the Karlkirche, Charles VI is
presented as worthy successor to Solomon and David, Caesar and Augustus, Constantine and
Justinian.
This contribution will then briefly examine Gottfried Semper’s neo-renaissance practice in Vienna
and, in order to understand Loos and his contemporaries, something of his theory: the differentiation
between what he calls tectonics and stereotomy and the question of frame and raiment, the classical
tradition in architecture being nothing without columns and trabiation. From there discussion will
move to Otto Wagner and those of the Sezession as regards their attitudes to the classical tradition.
Finally, how could Loos’ response to the competition for a building for the Chicago Tribune (1922),
which remained only ever on paper, have been in the form of a single, giant Doric column in polished
black granite, hollowed out in twenty-one stories on an eleven storey high hollowed base? Loos’
domestic works have been defined by Italian philosopher, Massimo Cacciari, as “an indefatigable
interrogation of the Roman domus”, a proposition that has not yet actually been examined but will
be. Then, there is the question of ornament. Having “delivered humanity from superfluous
ornaments”, Loos recognised in classical ornament a particular function: “The teaching of design
should start from classical ornament. Classical ornament plays the same role in the teaching of
design as grammar.” Throughout his writings there are innumerable references to Greco-Roman
antiquity. In fact, this, alongside the England and America, is a key signifier of the Other (das
Andere). Whilst the former signify the new, Loos invokes the culture of Greco-Roman antiquity to
highlight the continuity of modernity: “One feeling simply cannot be erased from our memory: the
recognition of the intellectual superiority of classical antiquity […] for we are classicists in thought
and feeling.”

18. China (16th-18th Centuries): Renaissance Humanism and Chinese Architecture

(Hui Zou, University of Florida)
Ancient Roman Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture was rediscovered, translated, illustrated and
passionately interpreted by Renaissance architects and humanists to establish architectural
principles based on Neo-Platonism. Referring to Vitruvius and implying the Greek myth of Daedalus,
Renaissance authors, such as Luca Pacioli, Sebastiano Serlio, Giulio Camillo and the Jesuits
theorized the significant interaction among divinity, geometry, theater, labyrinth, and memory in
architecture. Serlio’s theory of satiric stage and Camillo’s project of the memory theater were
metaphorically applied by the Jesuits in their illusory perspectival stage designs for the Qing emperor
Qianlong during the 18th century. The Jesuit architectural praxis in China thus became the earliest
historical case for the embodiment of the Renaissance memory theater in Chinese architecture. The
Renaissance tradition of architectural memory and theatricality, entangled with the Daoist cosmology
and labyrinthine paradise in Chinese gardens, reemerged in modern China through cross-cultural
works such as Feng Jizhong’s “humble but all beautiful” teahouse, Steven Holl’s theatrical
community, Tang Hua’s mystic public spaces, and I.M. Pei’s mnemonic geometrical architecture.
Such a humanist tradition fulfilled through ecstatic cultural encounters is sustained as a poetical
resistance to the Chinese contemporary architecture and urbanism that is based on the technical
worldview. This cross-cultural tradition for architectural memory and theatricality establishes a
historical criticism against the monocentric formalism of the “Western” order (typically mistaken as
“modernity” or “modernization” in East Asian countries) craved in the Chinese Beaux Arts, socialist
realism, and homogeneous urbanism. The chapter concludes that the revival of Renaissance
humanism in Chinese architecture emerges from its own historicity and will continuously unfold its
horizon during an age when memory and cultural differences are being flattened.

19. The Reception of the Classical Tradition in North American Architecture

(Richard Guy Wilson, University of Virginia)
Classicism whether defined as various stylistic manifestations, details, or organizing principles is one
of the mainstays of American identity. Indeed it might be said it is the National image, for what are
the two best known buildings in the United States? The US Capitol and the White House. Classicism
has a long history in the United States ranging from very early importations by the English and the
Spanish in the 17th century, frequently in the form of details to full-fledged classical revivals with
many stylistic names in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Copies of foreign classical buildings
waned in the 1920s but was replaced by a “stripped” or “modernized” classicism in the 1920s-40s,
which did have some European counterparts in France, Italy and Germany. While “Modernism”
(which has many names and spellings) is usually taken as a displacement of classicism in the United
States after World War II, any examination of the so-called “International Style” (a term and style
invented at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932) any examination of the work of architects such as
Philip Johnson, Edward D. Stone, Jon Johansen, and Gordon Bunshaft (SOM’s leading designer),
and others shows a reliance upon principles that go back to the ancients and also Palladio. Even a
designer such as Frank Lloyd Wright who is always taken as the ultimate American rebel, displays
classical principles in his work. A new theoretical interpretation of classicism emerges in the 1960s
with the writings of Colin Rowe. Post-Modernism (another and contentious stylistic term) emerges
and the work and writings of architects such as Robert Venturi, and or Michael Graves displays a
classical relationship. Finally, and certainly very controversial among many contemporary architects
is the continuation of a full-fledged classicism in the work of firms and individuals such as Robert A.
M. Stern, Fergusson & Shamiamian, Fairfax & Sammons and others with houses, churches and
schools and numerous governmental buildings.
Although much of the American classical tradition is indebted to the English and French
interpretations which arrived in the form of books, pictures and schooling, there are other heritages
such as the Spanish in the American Southwest and Florida. The Spanish, largely through their
missions brought another interpretation of classicism which remerged in a stylistic manifestation in
the period 1880 to the 1930s and in some ways continues today. In addition to architecture classicism
appears in American town planning—from the grid of Philadelphia to Savannah, and the radial
schemes of the French as in Washington, D. C. Also to be noted is garden and landscape design
and the decorative arts, and also the ornamentation of many buildings.
Most histories of American architecture divide it up into periods and or stylistic categories such as
“Georgian,” Neo-Classical,” Greek revival and etc. While this essay makes some reference to this
nomenclature it will not be the focus. The focus will be on how classicism emerged and then
remained for many centuries and how it was transmitted through books, travel, schools and other
ways and how its meaning changed over time.

20. Classical Tradition in Portuguese Architecture: From Plain Style to Vernacular Modes
(José Manuel Fernandes, Universidade de Lisboa)
In the Indian Ocean areas, Portuguese classical / Plain Style / vernacular architecture gradually
assumed a number of special local features and characteristic modes, very much in connection with
the strong, diverse and ancient local urban cultures (Swahili, Hindu, Muslim, Chinese, Japanese,
Malayan, etc). This masculine coastal architecture, whether military, religious, civic or domestic,
was built using local stone together with land architecture, defining plastered, whitewashed and
colored facades (inspiring the original so-called “Indo Portuguese” style, and/ or a Christian Classic-
Indian architecture). Recreated into new forms and typologies this architecture spread along a
significant / extensive coastal urbanization and city building in Mozambique, Gujarat, Maharasthra,
Goa, Kerala, Sri Lanka, Coromandel, Bengal, Malacca, Macau, Timor, Nagasaki - where renewed
styles, typologies and forms were relevant, from 16th to 18th centuries. The maritime spice trade
form India, scaling Africa and Azores - was the basis for a long lasting urban and architectural
system, mostly set in coastal areas, and supported by an essential system of fortifications.

21. The Classical Tradition in Australian Architecture 1788-1934

(Peter Kohane & Mark Stiles, University of NSW)
This chapter will survey the transmission and reception of the classical tradition in Australian
architecture from its beginnings in 1788 to its late flowering in the nineteen twenties and thirties. In
such a short account we will concentrate on the three earliest colonies of New South Wales,
Tasmania and Victoria, which saw the bulk of the buildings produced in this tradition and its ablest
practitioners. We will provide an extensive bibliography to guide readers through the other work to
be found in Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia. We will briefly touch on some of the
following themes: the background of the Enlightenment and English Palladianism, the effects of
climate, the government as patron, Australian nationalism, the resistance to an imported culture of
the elite, and competition with the Gothic Revival. Following this introduction, the chapter will be
divided into five sections:
1. New South Wales and the Age of Macquarie 1788-1850 - Rudimentary architectural
beginnings in a penal colony; Governor Macquarie and Australia’s first architect, the gentleman
convict Francis Greenway; the first notable public buildings in Sydney and Tasmania; the influence
of Sir John Soane on Greenway and his contemporaries.
2. Victoria in the 1850s: the Gold Rush Decade - Prosperity and the first grand public buildings
in Melbourne; Joseph Reed and the Geelong Town Hall; J J Clark and the Treasury Building; Kerr &
Knight and the Parliament Building; the gold rush towns of Ballarat and Bendigo; the influence of
3. C R Cockerell on architects in Victoria - New South Wales in the 1860s and 70s: James
Barnet and the Colonial Architect’s Department
4. Barnet as the major figure in Sydney architecture 1865-90; the dominance of the Colonial
Architect’s Department; Barnet’s enormous legacy, 1400 buildings in 25 years; Barnet as stylistic
adaptor; five principal buildings: Sydney General Post Office, Lands Department, Colonial
Secretary’s Department, courthouse complexes at Bathurst and Goulburn.
5. Boom Period: Melbourne in the 1880s - Exuberant late Victorian eclecticism; the International
Exhibitions of 1881 and 1889; continued dominance of architects trained overseas; emerging
critiques of classical culture in Australia.
In the final phase (1890 – 1934) I will examine: Walter Liberty Vernon in Sydney; the first architecture
schools; late flowering of classical studies in Australia 1910-1940 coincides with the building of three
war memorials, all designed by locally-born architects : Melbourne 1928-34, Sydney 1929-34,
Canberra 1925-41.

22. The Classical Tradition in Nineteenth Century New Zealand

(Robin Skinner, University of Wellington)
This chapter considers projects following classical tradition that were produced in New Zealand in
the nineteenth century. Architects who practiced there arrived with varying training: a few had
studied in Britain, some had trained under established architects, while many came as aspiring
builders. In the colonies, where class and professional boundaries were more fluid, it was possible
for men who had not been articled to an architect to break into the profession more easily than it was
in Britain. Some had worked in Australia or the United States before arrival in New Zealand. Some
would have owned or borrowed architectural texts, or attended lectures at Mechanics’ Institutes.
Almost all would have access to illustrated secular journals from Britain and Australia and –
importantly – to architecture journals from London. This chapter considers the economic, social,
cultural and professional networks within which these men operated. Investigating specific case
studies, it assesses the circumstances of production and how completed projects were understood
in their locale and, at times, abroad. In an architectural culture where timber construction
predominated, some buildings were praised while others were condemned for their incorrect
materials, composition and detailing. This criticism, which has often continued to the present, has
remained largely unexamined and is the subject of particular scrutiny in this chapter.

23. The Revival of Classical Architecture in Greece (1830-1860): Educational Institutions

in Athens by Christian Hansen, Lysandros Kaftantzoglou and Stamatios Kleanthes
(Nikolaos Karydis, University of Kent)
The establishment of Athens as the capital of the independent Greek State in 1833 represented an
unprecedented architectural challenge for Greek and Western European Architects. Many of those
who travelled to Athens in the following three decades contributed to the vast programme of urban
renewal which gradually transformed the Ottoman Town to a European Capital. These architects
were required to serve a national ideology that disdained Greece’s Ottoman past and sought to
assert a direct link with classical antiquity. New buildings had to establish a connection with the
revered relics of the ancient city, which were gradually starting to be rediscovered (Cole, 1835). The
emergent neo-Greek buildings became landmarks that shaped the character of the city, providing
the models for the development of neoclassical architecture in Athens during the 19th century. The
early stages of this development have been studied by Johannes and Biris (1939), Russack (1942),
Travlos (1967), and Bastea (2000), who have identified the key architects and interpreted their work
in its cultural context. These authors have emphasised the common objectives of the architects of
neoclassical Athens and the similarities of their buildings. Still, the differences between their design
approaches have received less attention, and can only be deduced from the comparative study of
publications dedicated to individual architects such as Scully (on Kleanthes, 1963) and Panetsos
(2014). As a result, it is difficult to grasp the typological and morphological pluralism that
characterised the revival of classical architecture in Athens. The fact that this pluralism generated
fierce debates is often overlooked. This paper will attempt to distinguish the heterogeneous design
patterns that make up this architectural development. To achieve this, the author will examine the
approach of three of the major advocates of Greek Neoclassicism to the design of the following
educational institutions: the University by Christian Hansen (1839), the proposal for the Arsakeion
Boarding School by Stamatios Kleanthis (1840s) and the Polytechnic by Lysandros Kaftantzoglou
(1859). These buildings will be used as case studies to understand each architect’s use of the
classical orders, choice of ancient precedents, and design partis. Differences between these
buildings will be interpreted by reference to different educational backgrounds, models, and patrons.
This will help to gain a better sense of the variety of architectural idioms that marked the early
development of the classical language of architecture in Athens.

24. Russian Architecture and the Classical Tradition: The Twentieth Century
(Richard Anderson, University of Edinburgh)
The classical tradition played a decisive role in the development of Russian architecture in the
twentieth century. Before the First World War and the October Revolution, Neoclassicism emerged
as a response to the alleged exhaustion of the stil modern, as art nouveau was known in the Russia.
The generation of architects who came of age amid the rapid architectural developments of these
years—Ivan Zholtovskii, Ivan Fomin, the Vesnin Brothers, among others—would define the course
of early Soviet architecture. Indeed, Zholtovskii would promote Palladian ideas until his death in
1959. Fomin would develop an approach to architecture that he called ‘Proletarian Doric’. While the
1920s witnessed a widespread move away from explicitly classical principles, the ensuing decades
saw an active attempt to synthesize the classical tradition with advanced construction techniques.
This enriched approach to design became the target of Nikita Khrushchev’s efforts to de-Stalinize
architecture in the 1950s, but classical principles and forms continued to have an impact on Russian
architectural culture throughout the second half of the twentieth century. We see this both in the
conceptual turn to classicism in the work of many of the so-called ‘paper architects’, as well as in the
buildings produced for the contemporary Russian elite. This contribution seeks to provide a map of
the shifting roles of classical architectural principles in Russia over the course of the twentieth
century.

25. Visions of a Classical World in the Nordic Countries (1901 – 1966)

(Harry Charrington, University of Westminster)
This chapter considers the interpretation and production of classical architecture in the Nordic
countries from the early- to the mid-twentieth century. It argues that two competing approaches to
the classical tradition developed. Firstly, an architecture that, emerging from Neo-Renaissance
eclecticism of the late nineteenth-century, reasserted the formal autonomy of classicism. Secondly,
a practice that, rooted in National Romanticism’s search for a modern, national architecture,
unraveled classicism into a morphology of environmental relationships and taxonomy of spatial and
formal types. The Chapter explores how largely Germanic sources, ranging from Jacob Burckhardt
to Richard Dedkind, Alois Riegl, Gottfried Semper and Heinrich Tessenow, as well as Paul-Marie
Letarouilly, mediated contending understandings of the classical tradition – alongside the older
certainties of Durand and Palladio. Similarly, correct analyses of, and esquisses derived from, the
academic canon vied with travels in the footsteps of Goethe’s Italian Journey. Architects sought out
the ordinary and variable architectura minore, and recorded its adaptiveness, and unifying and
contrasting effects of materials and surface, rather than any abstract qualities. A consideration of
milieu as much as buildings that Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz’s 1915 Woodland Cemetery
exemplifies.
Nordic architects also looked back to their own earlier neo-classical architecture, in particular the
period prior to industrialization, as well as to vernacular assimilations of classical motifs and tropes
into local ontologies of construction. The former included the romantic classicism of Andreas
Kirkerup and Gottfried Bindesbøll, and the rationalism of C. F. Hansen in Denmark, as well as
Schinkel’s pupil C. L. Engel in Finland. The latter mirrored the German Neue Sachlichkeit in its
assertions of the Doricist authority of farmhouses, barns, gables, as well as what Alvar Aalto
identified as the power of the sparse iconography of ‘Motifs from Times Past’. From Edvard
Thomsen’s approval of Adolf Loos’ Ornament und Vebrechen in 1913, Nordic Classicism echoed
the simplification inherent in modernism, and, enabled a famously ‘easy’ shift to functionalism. For
those indifferent to authenticity, it also enabled an oscillation between the two, and the interpretation
of modernism as a classical evolution. However, where earlier projects deployed stylistic tropes to
impart a suggestive presence, the works that follow after the hiatus of the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition
and its aftermath draw no attention to their sources, nor demand recognition; they simply reiterate,
and invite, the same patterns of public life. Trusting in what Aalto’s friend Ernesto Rogers called
preesistenze ambientali, and first-hand experience, form becomes a kind of anamnesis, conveying
type through affinity, rather than literal geometric reference. At the same time, opposition to this
‘architectural amnesia’ among those less indifferent to ideas of autonomous authenticity, continued
among resolute neo-classicists such as J. S. Sirén, or modernists such as Aulis Blomstedt and Sven
Markelius.
The chapter maintains that, in the ongoing construction of the built environment, the two approaches
are rarely distinct, and are at times, complimentary. The chapter examines the evolving trajectories
and relationships of leading architects such as Kay Fisker, Gunnar Asplund, Sigurd Lewerentz, Alvar
Aalto, and Erik Bryggmann, as well as the intense personal and institutional contacts that developed
between Nordic countries, such as at the 1923 Gothenburg Jubilee Exhibition, and shared journals.
Reference to, often comparative, studies enable the illustration of the representational practices
within the contingencies of the buildings themselves. These include Carl Petersen’s 1915 Fåborg
Museum (1915), Asplund Villa Snellman 1918, Ragnar Östberg’s Stockholm City Hall (1923) and
Hack Kampmann’s Copenhagen Police Headquarters (1924), Asplund’s Woodland Chapel (1920)
and Lewerentz’s Resurrection Chapel (1925), J S Sirén’s Finnish Parliament (1930) and Martti
Välikangas’s Käpylä Workers’ District (1925), Asplund’s Stockholm Library (1930) and Aalto’s Viipuri
Library (1935), Asplund’s Woodland Crematorium (1940) and Bryggman’s Resurrection Chapel
(1941), Alvar Aalto’s ‘Elastic Standardization’ (1941 onwards) and Aulis Blomstedt’s ‘Canon 60’
(1960), Aalto’s Säynätsalo Town Hall (1951) and Lewerentz’s Klippan Church (1966).

PART IV: Classical Influence through Colonialism, Trade and Servitude

26. Honor, Space, and Servitude: From the Origins of Architecture to the Plantation
Society
(Charles Burroughs , State University of New York at Geneseo)
In a largely unnoticed passage, Alberti takes issue with Vitruvius’s utopian vision of the origin of
architecture: a community gathered around a fire inventing architecture and language together.
Instead, Alberti insists on the primacy of the articulation of space and the assignment of different
functions (implicitly also people) to separate areas with a household or larger unit. As Alberti knew,
gender-based as well as status-based separation was standard practice in ancient societies.
Disruptions of this practice incurred loss of face, indeed of honor. In Renaissance classicism, the
body metaphor for a residence fostered the identification of honorable parts, to be displayed, and
“dishonorable,” to be concealed. At times, areas occupied by servants counted in the latter category,
but sometimes in the former. In New World plantation societies, in which the recourse to classical
idiom naturalized social difference and exploitation, both solutions occurred – English planters
preferred to keep slave quarters hidden, but in Spanish and Portuguese/Brazilian contexts, the
display of slaves was common, if not usual. This article will review the evidence for the cultural
differences between slave regimes and their significance for a full understanding of the classical
inheritance.

27. Classical Tradition in Portuguese Architecture: From Plain Style to Vernacular Modes
(José Manuel Fernandes, Universidade de Lisboa)
As a peripheral country in the extreme southwest of Europe, Portugal experienced a special, adapted
and specific understanding of classical ideas, styles and modes. Vernacular tradition was always
present in the different systems of building and in its diversity of typologies. Simplification of built and
design codes was a general tendency. And such tendency mingled with classical inputs. As the
Portuguese “seaborne empire” grew, these modes, typologies and systems were exported and in a
certain way unified into the Plain Style manner. But in each region of the world colonized by
Portuguese, classical architecture assumed special local features and characteristic modes. Within
a common Lusitanian Plain Style / vernacular pattern, specific classical forms and typologies were
differently experienced in northern and southern Portugal (Oporto / Minho, Lisbon area and Alentejo
/ Algarve).Then they were firstly exported and recreated in the North Atlantic archipelagos colonized
by Portuguese since the first half of the 15th century: Madeira, Azores, (also Canary isl.), Cape
Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe islands (total around 30 islands). Also along the Morocco coast,
and the Guinea Gulf, a number of fortified factories was built. This insular and coastal architecture,
military, religious, civic, domestic, was built using black volcanic stone and whitewashed facades
(inspiring an “Atlantic Baroque”, as Frederic Mauro stated) and was somehow a starting point to the
next steps, in the extensive urbanization and city building in Brazil and Angola, where renewed
styles, typologies and forms were relevant, from late 15th to 18th centuries. Slave trade, sugar
production and export (gold and diamonds in the 18th century) – allied to the spice trade form India,
scaling Azores - were the basis for a long lasting urban and architectural system, mostly set in coastal
areas but also set inland in Brazil an Angola (Minas Gerais and Kwanza).

28. Dismemberment of the Orders and their Reassembly across the Oceans: Persistent
Architectural Identity of Portuguese Building in Overseas Settlements over Four centuries.
(Pedro Guedes, University of Queensland)
By the 1630s, a century after the Portuguese first built their trading posts, fortified settlements and
plantations on the edges of three continents, the seaborne empire was well established in the spice
trade, in other high-value goods from Asia and had already developed profitable sugar estates along
the coast of Brazil. In addition, the Portuguese Crown sponsored Catholic missionaries who carried
the Faith well beyond their formal jurisdictions. In all these places buildings with a distinct,
recognizable character were being erected following simple rules applied across a spectrum from
the most humble dwellings to the grandest public structures and churches. This chapter will focus
on the unifying elements of an architecture with a flexible attitude. Its use of parts of the Classical
vocabulary, sometimes eloquently at other times garbled and abridged, occasionally blended with
local character, contributed to the creation of buildings with both unique yet familiar attributes. This
lasting architectural identity transcended styles and fashions.
29. Azorean Early Modern Architecture: An Idiosyncratic Approach to the Classical
Tradition
(João Vieira Caldas, Universidade de Lisboa, & Isabel Albergaria Universidade dos
Açores)
The Azores Islands, located in the mid-North Atlantic Ocean, were a crossing point of trade and
culture from the beginning of early modern age to the Second World War. The Atlantic winds
favoured a route passing through the archipelago for ships returning from sub-Saharan Africa, India
and America. With the development of Portuguese colonization, it became a mandatory stop for
water and other goods, namely when traveling to and from Brazil. The main period of this
intercontinental exchange — from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries — coincides with the
intercontinental spread of classical forms following the Renaissance endeavours to bring them back
to light. The way they were interpreted in the architecture of the Azores reflects the crossing of
European classical models with altered versions of those models that emerged in Portuguese and
Spanish colonies. Mixing these influences with a regional apport generated an original classical
“style”. Our main goal is to develop and disseminate knowledge about this peculiar classicism,
through the study of the use of architectural orders on Azorean church facades.

30. Singapore (19th-20th Centuries): The Architecture of ‘European Town’: A Neo-

Classical Outpost in the Malayan Straits Settlement era,1822 – 1929
(Raymond Quek, De Montfort University, Leicester)
Following the dismissal of Colonel William Farquhar and the return of Stamford Raffles to Britain,
the Jackson plan of 1822 was imposed and divided early Singapore into territorial divisions, largely
based on ethnicity. The choice location at the harbour front was ‘European Town’, in effect a site for
the receipt of Neo-classical architecture and urban infrastructure that sought to recreate within the
humid tropics a townscape that would serve the fledging governance, commerce and trade of what
would become a Crown colony and a municipality. This chapter explores the establishment of the
civic quarter and its architecture and issues around translation, construction and realisation. This
study includes the Palladian residences and seats of governance of the early European colonists,
and the supporting neo-classical architecture that made ‘European town’, through the collective
efforts of the British Military (Royal Engineers), the East India Company, the Christian missions and
the mercantile philanthropists.

31. Classicism as an Ideological Trope: The Administrative Headquarters of the Japanese

Colonial Government in Korea
(Jin Baek, Seoul National University)
While the presence of classical architecture per se is very limited in (South) Korea, one occasion
that was and is very important in the history of modern architecture regards a Renaissance style
building designed by a German architect. The architect was indeed hired by the Japanese colonial
government. The building was the headquarters for the colonial government. This was one of the
earliest and the most shocking presence of classical architecture translated through the Neo-
Renaissance style in Korea. This towering, stone-covered building with reinforced concrete structure
had a dome, two courtyards, and was symmetrical. What is most shocking, however, was that the
building stood in front of the main governing hall of the Yi Dynasty, the last kingdom of Korea before
the advent of Korea as a modern nation. The building was exactly the colonial device to confirm the
dominant ruling status of Japan over Korea. It is intriguing that the Japanese colonial government
adopted the Western style for the propaganda of the status. What is furthermore interesting is that
the building survived several decades, and even operated as the headquarters of the Korean
government after the acquisition of the liberation. It finally became the object of harsh debate in the
late 1990s as it was the symbol of the colonial past. Most politicians and citizens fervently supported
the idea of dynamiting it, while a group of architectural historians and a small number of intellectuals
thought that it was better to keep it for one reason or another. In the end it was demolished. This
story may not be exactly about classical architecture per se. However, it was only through this neo-
Renaissance style building that we perceived what was called classical architecture for the first time
in Korea. Furthermore, its relationship with colonial tactics, with the national identity of Korea, and
with the post-colonial treatment of the colonial past seems to formulate a very rich source in creating
a readable story.

32. Herbert Baker, New Delhi and the Reception of the Classical Tradition
(Soumyen Bandyopadhyay, University of Liverpool)
This chapter aims to assess the work of the British architect, Herbert Baker for the imperial capital
of New Delhi, in the context of the reception and rereading of the classical project and the classical
tradition amongst both the imperialists and the colonized. The reception of the classical tradition in
India assumed a character distinct from other British colonies as a result of a long-standing history
of interaction with the Classical world, as well as the sheer immensity of its diverse historical, literary
and material culture traditions. With the consolidation of the British Empire in India, European
classical traditions assumed attributes and resonances they did not possess in Europe. The work of
the renowned Bengali poet and playright, Michael Madhusudan Datta demonstrates the reception of
Graeco-Roman classics within the resurgent indigenous literary tradition of the mid-nineteenth
century and an aspiration towards a seamless syncretism. British colonial enterprise repatterned
Indian knowledge system through its formulations of Indian culture that reshaped understandings of
the history of Indian culture and also led to particular constructions of classical India with peaks and
significant troughs. This broader classical project that reshaped Indian culture, and the conscious
reception of the classical tradition in India, prepared a more aware but also a critical ground for the
eventual introduction of the design of the new capital. The chapter will argue that Baker’s designs in
New Delhi were attempts at establishing dialogues between the Western classical tradition and the
imperial formulation of a classical Indian tradition. As a consequence of this, the chapter will also
assess the extent to which Baker managed to achieve a cohesive architectural product.

PART V: Historiographical Investigations

(Europe)
33. Classical Revivalism in Scotland
(Ian Campbell, Edinburgh University)
Leaving aside a handful of Roman remains, Scotland experienced waves of classical revivals
beginning with the late seventh-century Pictish king Nechtan asking to borrow masons from
Northumbria to build him a church ‘in more Romanorum’. Around 1100 there were claims that St
Andrews was a second Rome, which inspired the dimensions of its cathedral and the planning of the
town. Round arches and columns found in buildings such as Aberdeen and Dunkeld Cathedrals from
around 1400 anticipate those used by Brunelleschi and paved the way for the Italianate Renaissance
to influence Scottish architecture from the mid-fifteenth century. In the next century, French influence
began to predominate but the influence of Du Cerceau’s pattern books until the mid-eighteenth
century has only just begun to be acknowledged. Scots dominated eighteenth-century British
architecture, from Colen Campbell and James Gibbs to Robert Adam, while one of the world’s
greatest Greek Revival buildings, Thomas Hamilton's Royal High School, was erected in the early
nineteenth century, in the midst of the Edinburgh New Town(s), the world’s largest conglomeration
of classical town planning. Even long after the Gothic Revival had dislodged its hegemony in
England, classical styles across the board, from ancient Roman to Baroque and Rococo still inspired
Scottish architects, most obviously, Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, into the twentieth century, although
perhaps the last great example of classicism in Scotland Is not a building but Ian Hamilton Finlay’s
enchanting garden at Little Sparta.

34. Un-classical Forms of Late Roman Architecture and the Roman Baroque: Borromini,
Contini and the New Classical Tradition
(Giuseppe Bonaccorso, Università di Camerino)
This chapter examines aspects of 17th century architecture in Italy in the context of a perceived
inherited classical tradition from the ancient world. Its focus will be the work of Francesco Borromini
who was not only a profound innovator of architectural form and space, but his architecture is often
characterized by stimulated references to ancient architecture, especially post-Hadrian examples.
Typology and late-antique forms provided him with a range of elements he knowingly isolates,
elaborates and transforms to create a highly original architecture. The late-antique tradition, with its
plani-volumetric innovations, provided Borromini with the inspiration for designs of the elements of
architectural orders, the sequence of elevations, the geometries of ornaments inside vaults, the
genesis of oval plans and representative verticalisms of new urban focal points.
The present contribution aims to shed new light on the Borromini’s approach to the classical tradition,
given the circulation of knowledge concerning frequently quoted models in Asia Minor in early 17th
century Italy and Borromini’s own research in Rome (Orti Liciniani and S. Costanza, for example),
highlighted among published works (such as the Antichità Romane by Pirro Ligorio, and texts by
Andrea Fulvio, Giacomo Lauro, Vincenzo Scamozzi and Giovanni Battista Montano). Moreover, the
inquiry will include other works by architects of a similar sensibility to Borromini, and his later 18th
century epigones (such as Francesco Contini, Andrea Pozzo, Gabriele Valvassori and Francesco
Bianchi).

35. Patronage and Power: The Reception of Neoclassicism in France during the First Half
of the Eighteenth Century
(Louise Pelletier, Université du Québec à Montréal)
When he won the competition for the West facade of the church of Saint-Sulpice, the first
neoclassical project in Paris in the early 1730s, Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni (1695-1766)
anticipated by more than two decades Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture (1753) that
established the theoretical foundation of the new style in France. Since Servandoni spent his early
adulthood in Rome studying under Giovanni Paolo Pannini and Giuseppe Ignazio Rossi, it is usually
assumed that the Italian influence gave raise to the early onset of neoclassicism in France. Between
1714 and 1719 however, Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, was also in Italy doing the Grand
Tour and probably met Servandoni, for the latter spent some time in London in the early 1720s and
gravitated in Burlington circle before settling in Paris in 1724. As we know, Burlington was directly
involved in developing neo-Palladian buildings in England, an influence that is not negligible in
understanding the genealogy that led to Servandoni’s neoclassicism. It similarly signaled a return to
the simplicity of nature and a reinterpretation of the classical tradition. But neo-Palladianism also
became associated with the political power that opposed royal absolutism in Britain at the beginning
of the eighteenth century, the Whigs party. Paradoxically, Servandoni had personal ties in Paris with
British expatriates from the court of James II Stuart, the Catholic King of England in exile. The
Jacobites, as they were known, made up an important part of the population of Saint-Sulpice Parish
at the time; they also were openly at war against the Whigs and what they stood for. After the last
Jacobite uprising and their crushing defeat at Culloden in 1746, Servandoni disappeared from Paris
for almost a decade. He remained very active, however, working for high profile political figures such
as the kings of England, Spain, Poland and Portugal. The political powers of Europe shifted many
times during Servandoni’s life as alliances were made and broken. Following the trail of the architect
who introduced neoclassicism in Paris through his peregrinations and the highly politically charged
commissions he received from opposing factions suggest that Servandoni may have played a role
that went far beyond the introduction of neoclassicism in France; his shifting political allegiance
reveals some ulterior motives.

(Asia and India)

36. China (16th-18th Centuries): The Importance of Texts for Italianate Architecture in the
Early Stage of Jesuits’ China Mission 1583-1759
(Xiao Jing, Shenzhen University)
This study elaborates the Italianate origins of the early Jesuit architecture in China – Taixi as the
locals named it – and the process of its transformation and adaptation. According to Louis Pfister’s
book Notices Biographiques et bibliographiques, we could see a potential driving power equipped
by the official Jesuit teaching Ratio Studiorum, particularly that of mathematics. For Jesuits in the
Far East, architecture was not simply a transferable subject in terms of oral teaching and onsite
practice. They had to prepare the learning in the Jesuit Collegiate and bring a handful of architectural
books through the journey. We examine the catalogue of Jesuit collection in Beitang (the St.
Saviour’s in Beijing) and narrow the reading list of architecture and horticulture to around forty books
which fortunately have e-copies of identical versions in the database of the National Library of
France, Paris. The origin of this source could even be traced back to the very time when missionary
Matteo Ricci conceived of his chapel and library in Guangdong Province. On the other hands, the
list includes many prestigious writings by the authors like Jacopo de Vignola, Vincenzo Scamozzi,
Sebastiano Serlio, Andrea Pozzo and Andrea Palladio. It testifies the overwhelming Italianate
patronization of architectural theory in the form of printed knowledge to assist the construction of the
early Jesuit residents and churches in the east.

37. Indo-Portuguese Architecture in Kerala during the 16th and 17th Centuries
(Helder Carita, Ricardo Espirito Santo Foundation, Lisbon)
In Cochin, located on the western coast of South India, as well as in the interior regions of Kerala, it
is possible to find classic European architecture due to the Portuguese influence, in which the Jesuit
missionaries played a crucial role. Developed during the 16th and 17th centuries this architecture
underwent an interesting process of adapting to the climate and to local aesthetic standards amidst
a phase of intense cultural interaction.

(The Americas)
38. Vitruvius and Solomon in America: A Reconciliation of Classical and Christian
traditions in Renaissance New Spain: The Treatise of Fray Andres de San Miguel
(Santiago de Orduña)
This text seeks alternative views regarding generalized and obscure interpretations held during the
Spanish Renaissance in colonial America (From De Bry to Mignolo). The reconciliatory spirit of some
representatives is reviewed, mainly in the field of architecture, and more specifically in the work of
architect and writer Fray Andres de San Miguel. It is argued that the reconciliation between Classical
and Christian visions is especially relevant in the context of the Spanish colony and mostly regarding
indigenous pagan cultures. We will first discuss the influence of Italian mannerism on Spanish
architects and treatise writers, through the multiple interpretations of the Vitruvian text. Next, we will
look into an interpretation of the place held by these ideas regarding the vindication of Catholic faith
hosted by Spain at that time, and symbolized by the image of the Temple of Jerusalem (Mainly
concerning the "providential" coincidence between the expulsion of Muslims from the peninsula, and
the "discovery" of a "New World".). We will speculate on the profound meaning of this relationship
with regards to its most eloquent consequence in the Baroque synthesis. In this sense, the Baroque
of the Counter-Reformation is not seen as a style in itself, or as an "improvement" of classical
models, but as the significant synthesis of the Christian mystery of incarnation, and the mystery of
cosmic order embodied in the architectural idea itself.
In this sense, and as a conclusion, our text proposes, on one hand, that the Vitruvian system of
proportionality and the ideals of symmetry, strength, and beauty would ensure a harmonious
relationship between the building, the people and the cosmos; while, on the other hand, the
incarnation of the divine model represented by Solomon´s temple, would ensure its metaphysical
transcendence.

39. Thomas Jefferson: American Architecture and the Landscape

(Carol William Westfall, University of Notre Dame)
The achievements in architecture of America’s third president are well known. Histories of
architecture normally immerse his buildings in a chronology of changing styles in European buildings,
and what he carried back from his nearly five-year sojourn in Paris is given undue emphasis. So too
the well-known value he placed on Palladio is exaggerated. It is more important to emphasize his
recognition that architecture is the face of politics. To that end he set out to create a distinctly
American architecture. He adapted the principles and canons of classical architecture within the
legacy of English rather than Continental traditions to serve and express the new nation’s
constitutional order just as his fellow Founders’ did when constituting the new nation. He explicitly
explained that he intended to provide buildings for his countrymen to imitate (using the word with its
classical meaning) and that would achieve distinctiveness and stature for the new nation among the
old nations of the world. Especially notable, but overlooked or misunderstood, is the extent to which
he drew on American precedents for fitting his buildings into the landscape and his role in L’Enfant’s
plan for the new national capital.

Notes

Bibiography

Index

Book Specification
Total number of chapters: 39 (each having a word-count of 6300 incl. notes) – 245,700
Introduction: 7,300
Image Credits: 4,000
List of Authors and Editors’ Biographies: 5,000
Bibliography: 7,000
Index: 6,000
Total 275,000 words
(We estimate that there will be a total of 156 illustrations, 4 per chapter)

Readership
This proposed book would be of interest to academics, students and professionals in a wide range
of disciplines and fields of enquiry such as architecture, the fine arts, landscape architecture, urban
design, architectural/urban history, early modern history, geography, cartography, sociology, political
science, philosophy, religious studies, cultural studies, economics, Latin American studies and Asian
studies.

Regarding suitability of the publication for academic programmes of study, we feel the book would
be most suitable for post-graduate level courses in geography, globalisation, architectural
history/theory, urban history, art history, cultural history, Asian studies and Latin American studies.
The study of the early history of globalisation, and the impact of trade and missionary activity on the
reception of European traditions in different regions of the world, is a growing field of academic
research highlighted in such recent publications as Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the
Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge University Press, 2008), Saskia Sassen’s Territory, Authority,
Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press, 2006) and Thomas
DaCosta Kaufmann & Catherine Dossin, Circulations in the Global History of Art (Routledge,
2015).Our publication will make an important contribution to this growing field of scholarship by
revealing the multifaceted nature of the reception of the classical tradition in architecture, in its
varying manifestations across the world.

The Market (Competing and Complementary Publications)

Given the global reach of our book proposal, the work could be marketed not only in Europe and the
USA but also in Russia, Africa, Australasia, Japan, China, India, South East Asia, the Middle East
and Levant and South America. There is currently no publication available that examines the
reception of the Classical tradition in architecture in different regions of the world. The nearest
subject areas relate either to general historical surveys of classical architecture or reception studies
in the visual arts. Below is a selection of these published works:

(Studies of Classical Architecture)

John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture (Thames and Hudson, 1980)
This classic study of the ‘language’ of classical architecture has served as an essential reference
since its first publication in 1963. Limited to the European context, the study outlines the essential
principles of classical architecture through textual sources and built examples, as well as tracing the
impact of the tradition on modernism. Whilst a significant work of synthesis, the book assumes
universalising principles of classical architecture which our publication aims to challenge by tracing
the very different ways classicism was ‘received’ and appropriated in other regions of the world.

Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, Classical Architecture: The Poetics of Order (MIT Press, 1986)
This book provides a primer in the study of classical art and architecture, in particular the way in
which classical buildings were assembled. Examining the rich analogies between the generative
principles of classical architecture and the poetics of music and drama the book traces these
relationships through the writings of Aristotle, Vitruvius and Renaissance humanist discourse. The
book considers classical principles as a coherent system of architectural thinking. Hence, the authors
do not consider any issues relating to how this tradition was interpreted, resisted or appropriated by
different cultures and civilisations outside Europe (and the ancient classical world) as our
investigation aims to address.

George Hersey, The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture: Speculations on Ornament from
Vitruvius to Venturi (MIT Press, 1988)
This work considers the reasons for the persistence of the classical orders throughout history, and
why they still carry significance in the contemporary world as we see in many civic and corporate
buildings. The book is essentially an essay in the ‘recovery’ of the meaning of the classical tradition,
arguing that the past four centuries have witnessed a dismantling of this tradition through excessive
formalist priorities. Questions however of how such meanings were re-interpreted, and indeed
adapted, by societies and cultures outside the geography of the established classical world are not
considered by Hersey.

(Reception/Global Studies)
Lorna Hardwick (ed.), Reception Studies: Greece & Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
This book serves as a useful reference for examining the methodological approaches adopted in
reception studies of the classical world in different cultural contexts and geographical regions. Whilst
not specifically about architecture, the essays in this volume alert us to the ways in which images
and textual sources of the classical world have been exploited in the modern world for social and
political purposes – whether as the basis of popular resistance or as models of authority – in such
diverse locations as Africa, the Caribbean and the USA.

Clemente Marconi (ed), The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Art and Architecture (Oxford
University Press, 2014)
Published under the Oxford Handbook series, this book examines Greek and Roman Art and
Architecture through a thematic approach to historiography influenced by Hans Georg Gadamer’s
model of hermeneutics; that all forms of interpretation are historically situated. As stated in the
Introduction to the book, the study aims to “examine key theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and
directions of research in this field.” Even though the book not structured geographically or
chronologically, as is the case in our book proposal, many of the approaches adopted by the authors
find parallels in the chapters of our study. Identifying areas of intersection (and conflict) between
reception theory, anthropology, sociology and hermeneutics, when applied to the classical tradition
in architecture, can provide a useful critical framework for addressing the complex relationships
between broadly European perspectives of classicism and those found in other regions of the world.
Hence, whilst recognising the value of this publication as a key source of varying approaches to the
subject, it does not provide a global coverage of the reception of classical architecture as our
investigations aim to achieve.

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (ed.), Toward a Geography of Art (University of Chicago Press, 2004)
and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Catherine Dossin, Global History of Art (Routledge, 2015)
Thomas DaCosta has emerged in recent years as an authority in the study of the geographical
influences on artistic creativity, in particular during the early modern period in Europe, Asia and Latin
America. Reflected in both publications (above) Kaufmann’s research reveal both opportunities and
challenges for our book proposal; problematic, in terms of the dangers of oversimplifying or
generalising relationships between artistic works in different regions and cultures of the world, and
potentially productive in offering theoretical frameworks for examining the genesis of ideas and their
exchange across geographical distances. Kaufmann’s research nevertheless provides an important
standpoint for critically reviewing (and testing) different methodologies and approaches relevant to
our book proposal.

As outlined in the commentary of his Toward a Geography of Art, Kaufmann (and his co-authors)
present “a strategy that highlights the processes and connections among cultures, and also responds
to the dynamics at work in the current globalized art world.” Whilst a useful source Kaufmann’s
published works do not take as their focus the issue of the reception of the classical tradition in
architecture in different parts of the world as we aim to achieve in our book.

Lenia Kouneni (ed.), The Legacy of Antiquity: New Perspectives in the Reception of the Classical
World (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013)
This edited book builds upon the rapidly growing field of classical reception studies, particularly in
the areas of material culture, textual sources, and performance in different cultural settings. Rather
than examining these influences from a specifically geographical perspective, the essays in this
volume take different historical periods and their artistic developments (such as Byzantine, medieval
and modern) as the basis for tracing the influences of antiquity on particular cultures and world-
views. Some of the essays in this volume will be useful in framing some of the topics addressed in
proposed book. Importantly, the study of the reception of classical architecture forms only a small
part of this book, and in any case largely limited to Rome (Trajan’s Column).

Timescale for Delivery of Manuscript

With one exception, all chapters for this book have yet to be written and there will be substantial
editorial work throughout the period of the project. Considering the demands required in undertaking
such a project, and existing/planned commitments of the editors, we estimate that we will be able to
deliver the final manuscript with illustrations (and supporting copyright permissions) by the end of
January 2019. A priority for all the British contributors and one of the editors (Nicholas Temple) is
that the book must be published by no later than November 2019. This is for reasons of the
Research Excellence Framework (REF2020) in which academics in the UK are required to submit
their research ‘outputs’.

Editors’ Biographies

Nicholas Temple
Nicholas Temple is currently professor of architecture at the University of Huddersfield, having
previously been professor and head of the school of architecture at the University of Lincoln. He has
taught and lectured at a number of universities in Europe and the USA, including as an assistant
professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and a visiting lecturer at the Moscow
Architectural Institute. A graduate of Cambridge University, Temple won the Rome Scholarship in
Architecture (1986-88) at the British School at Rome and was a Paul Mellon Rome fellow in 2012. A
qualified architect, fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the Royal Historical Society and elected an
Academician of the Academy of Urbanism, Temple was recently short-listed for the International
CICA Bruno Zevi Book Award 2014 for his publication renovatio urbis: Architecture, Urbanism and
Ceremony in the Rome of Julius II (Routledge, 2011). He has published a number of books on the
history and theory of architecture and urbanism, including, Disclosing Horizons: Architecture,
Perspective and Redemptive Space (Routledge, 2006), and co-edited The Humanities in
Architectural Design: A Contemporary and Historical Perspective (Routledge, 2010), Architecture
and Justice: Judicial Meanings in the Public Realm (Ashgate, 2013) and Bishop Robert Grosseteste
and Lincoln Cathedral: Tracing Relationships between Medieval Concepts of Order and Built Form
(Ashgate, 2014). In 2015 Temple was invited to be a collaborator on a National Endowment for the
Humanities Summer School in Rome at John Cabot University and is currently working on a British
Academy/Leverhulme Trust funded project on a translation and commentary of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s
3rd Commentary.

Andrzej Piotrowski
Andrzej Piotrowski, professor of architecture at the University of Minnesota, USA, was educated in
Poland and worked as an architect in Poland and the United States. As the Director of Design, he
provided the curriculum development oversight at the School of Architecture, UMN. In his Jeffrey
Cook Award winning (IASTE 2015) scholarship Piotrowski combines theory and history of
architecture but focuses specifically on the epistemology of design. Covering globally framed issues
of architecture, religion, politics and culture, his findings have been presented in many architectural
and cross-disciplinary conferences. Author of Architecture of Thought (UMN Press, 2011) and co-
editor of The Discipline of Architecture (UMN Press, 2001) he also published in academic and
professional venues such as Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review (2015), Spaces and
Flows (2014), The Territories of Identity (Routledge, 2013), Camera/Constructs, (Ashgate, 2012,
2014), The International Journal of the Constructed Environment (2011), The Humanities in
Architectural Design (Routledge, 2010), Objets et Communication MEI (2009), Architectural Theory
Review (2008), Medieval Practices of Space (UMN Press, 2000).

Juan Manuel Heredia

Juan Manuel Heredia is an assistant professor of architecture at Portland State University. He
studied at Universidad Iberoamericana and received an MS and PhD from the University of
Pennsylvania. He has taught at Universidad Iberoamericana, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de
Mexico, the University of Pennsylvania, and Mississippi State University, as well as lectured at the
University of Lincoln (UK), the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and Universidad Veracruzana.
His work has been published in Arquine and Bitacora (Mexico), On Site Review (Canada), Arkitekten
(Denmark), and the Journal of Architectural Education. He co-organized the Second International
Architecture and Phenomenology Conference in Kyoto (2009) and The Place of Theory in
Contemporary Architectural Practice and Education conference in Bangkok (2013). His research
focuses on Latin American architecture, including a book project on Mexican modern architecture.
With Miquel Adrià, he is coauthor of the book Juan Sordo Madaleno (1916–1985), published
bilingually by Arquine.