The long 18th century was a period of intense investment in elite architecture in Britain which sustained an extensive craft culture in carving, modelling, and joinery. Yet decoration is largely marginalised or ignored by architectural historians. This antipathy to the enrichment of buildings is not particular to Britain and reflects a wider discourse on the architecture of many periods and places. By situating past and present attitudes to 18th-century decoration in Britain within a wider historiography, this paper reveals the prejudices which still attend the discussion of ornament and craft production in architecture. Conversely, it explores revisionist perspectives on craft and decoration and considers how they can inform architectural history and contribute to a more holistic understanding of building production. Despite a recent, widespread revival of interest in ornament, however, scholarship continues to privilege conceptual issues over the material practices of decoration. Disciplinary boundaries have militated against an integrated approach to architecture and decoration and historians of sculpture and architecture have overlooked significant common ground. Lacunae in the historiography of decoration in 18th-century British architecture call for approaches which integrate the analytical and methodological tools of architectural and sculpture history.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger and the architect Le Corbusier — two towering 20th-century public figures — each built for themselves small, sturdily crafted timber cabins well away from the cities of their busy everyday lives, to which they would repair annually to work in solitude and draw sustenance from their landscapes and locally archaic cultures. This article presents a close tandem reading of the architecture and inhabitation of Heidegger’s staunchly traditional Hutte on the upper slope of a deep-green Schwarzwald valley and Le Corbusier’s modern-ascetic Cabanon overlooking the beckoning azure waters of the Cote d’Azur. It draws on archival drawings and photographs, published and private statements, writings by others, and direct personal observations made in situ. These two unassuming yet inordinately significant dwellings seek to counter the overwhelming modern condition of ‘technicity’ by descending to the chthonic claims of the natural conditions, in alliance with Heidegger’s post-war essays co-locating building and dwelling, and Le Corbusier’s Le poeme de l’angle droit that indexes a descent down to the question of dwelling, essentially.

The comprador classes of the 19th- and early 20th-centuries were critical agents of global capitalism. As ‘middle men’ in the colonial enterprise, they enabled the development of imperial trade networks, negotiated the supply of labor that extracted profit from the local landscape, established new patterns of consumption and taste, and facilitated cultural as well as economic exchanges that were critical to the growth of Asian cities. In diverse treaty ports and colonial entrepots like Singapore, Batavia, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, compradors drew on a diverse vocabulary of intra- and trans-regional architectural forms, labor, materials, and construction techniques to build homes, offices, godowns, factories, and infrastructural networks that were legible to both European corporations and local populations. The travelling, sojourning perspective of the comprador allows historians to critically examine the fractured, multi-scaled geographies at play across global networks as well as what Raymond Williams has described as ‘the metropolitan interpretation of its own processes as universals’. This special collection examines the role of comprador patrons and architects as active participants in the production of the global modern built environment in the 19th and 20th centuries. The articles aim to create an understanding of treaty ports, colonial cities, and free trade zones not only as sites of local and foreign interactions but as incubators of new ideas about architecture and modernity in the global capitalist economy.

While every material artifact engages with time on various levels, palimpsests stitch together layers from several periods simultaneously. By physically expressing the passage of time, architectural palimpsests explicitly raise questions about the historicity of buildings. These questions concern cultural heritage studies and architectural historiography, and reverberate in renovation projects and design commissions. As yet, in architecture there is no theory that covers in a consistent manner the way palimpsests express historicity. This article approaches the diachronic essence of the architectural palimpsest, starting from the original use of the term ‘palimpsest’ in paleography. It distinguishes a set of features by which to explore buildings that can be labelled as palimpsests. By discussing the Cathedral of Syracuse through this lens, the article illustrates its various palimpsestic features and shows how an architectural palimpsest can embody resilience.

Since the inauguration of the Aula Academica in Ghent in 1826, its grand proportions and lavish decoration have impressed visitors. An examplar of tasteful, neoclassical architecture, the university building soon joined the list of Belgium’s canonical buildings. The Aula was the first commission of Louis Roelandt (1786–1864), a promising architect who had just returned from training in Paris at the Ecole speciale d’architecture under Charles Percier and Pierre-Francois-Leonard Fontaine. Through a detailed analysis of the design process, this article examines how Roelandt’s design forms part of an international architectural culture that understood not just the principles of composition but how composition combines with the ways an interior is used. Drawing on the example of a national pantheon commemorating important people, Roelandt created an ensemble in which architectural composition, interior decoration and the visitor’s path of movement contribute to the expression of architectural character.

This interview engages with Łukasz Stanek in a conversation that contextualizes the Special Collection in Architectural Histories on Marxism and architectural theory across the East-West divide. It follows Stanek’s keynote lecture for the conference Theory’s History 196X–199X: Challenges in the Historiography of Architectural Knowledge (Brussels, February 8–10, 2017) and his recent book, Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (2019).

In depictions of architects up to the 20th century, tools have always been the main marker of the profession. Tools not only served as easily recognisable iconographical attributes, but also came to embody architects’ professional identity. While architects have always relied on a wide array of tools, ranging from practical instruments and to conceptual apparatus, architectural history has only recently started to profoundly engage with their characteristics and function. The goal of the fifth thematic conference of the EAHN (Delft/Rotterdam, 22–24 November 2017, https://toolsofarchitect.com) was to promote a deeper cultural investigation of the tools of the architect and to acknowledge their agency in architectural culture. After three days of rich presentations and fruitful discussions, the study of tools emerged as a central theme of architectural historiography that requires more scholarly attention.

Without the benefit of cognitive or evolutionary theory, late Roman villa patrons and designers intuited their way toward houses that engaged and strongly affected the emotions of inhabitants and visitor participants. Through the lens of their unique cultural moment, they discovered and deployed strategies that respond to certain innate and universal human needs. These were the aspects of a formal language of design that arose from a competitive ‘architectural arms race’ among a newly minted elite in the era of the late empire, which left a heritage that echoes through the history of architecture. Through the application of methods in cognitive science we can recover some of those strategies and understand their effects with a new specificity. Cognitive science confirms, continues, and elucidates earlier discoveries in phenomenology and psychology, placing the embodied and active human agent into the center of the experience of ancient architecture.

Critiques of the cult of artists, life-and-work narratives, and the authority of authors over the meaning of their works not only unsettle the conventions of literary and art historical studies. They also challenge the importance of the artist museum and its architecture. Adopting Roland Barthes’ discussions of the ‘death’ and ‘return of the author’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s as a critical lens, this article examines how the architecture of artist museums reflects and contributes to the discursive construction of the resilient figure of the artist-author. To do so, the article compares the cultist make-up of the 19th-century Thorvaldsen Museum-Mausoleum (opened in 1848) with the resolutely work-centred museums of Van Gogh (1973) and Roger Raveel (1999). The architecture of the last two examples is significantly different, however. The Van Gogh Museum seemingly negates its monographic orientation, while the Raveel Museum amends a white cube logic with a reserved interpretation of artistic individuality and site-boundedness. Parallel to the institutional interpretation of a museum’s monographic mission, and the curators’ representation of the artist-life-work nexus in exhibitions, architecture is yet another element in a museum’s assemblage of an artist presented as a dead or revived author to its visitors.

This article examines Louis Kahn’s design for the New Yale Art Gallery as an exemplar of ‘building-in-time.’ The novel design breaks formally with then modernist-free architecture of the Yale campus, and yet complements and completes the existing structures of the art gallery, to which it acted as an addition. Kahn’s genius lay in his ability to find a solution within the problem itself — within the older buildings — in effect ‘rediscovering’ and bringing to bear ‘lost’ methods of building-in-time. He also might be said to have activated the properties of resilience latent in the existing art gallery.