 Today we're going to discuss two architects who began their career closely associated with Christopher Ren, Nicholas Hawksmore and John Van Bra. And they're very different characters. Hawksmore is to England what Boromini is to Italy, and Van Bra is to England what Bernini is to Italy. And that is to say really different personalities. Hawksmore worked for Christopher Ren for 20 years. And it's up to debate whether Hawksmore learned at the hand of Christopher Ren or Christopher Ren, untrained in architecture, was able to take advantage of Hawksmore's knowledge of the trade in order to execute some of his buildings. If we look at the great three English Baroque architects, Hawksmore, Van Bra and Ren, Hawksmore is really the only one of the three who was a professional architect. In 1699, Hawksmore stopped working with Ren and began to collaborate with Van Bra on a number of projects, notably Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace. In 1707 he starts doing some projects on his own. Hawksmore has had a sort of bad reputation in recent years, or at least he's been the subject of a lot of intrigue and interest. There have been novels written about him. A novel by Peter Ackroyd called Hawksmore picks up on the idea that the murders of Jack the Ripper took place very near these Hawksmore churches. There's even a poem called Ludd Heat about a mythological king of England. And what it suggests is that there are codes buried in the Hawksmore churches that begin to give you Egyptian hieroglyphs full of great secret arcane knowledge. And probably one of the reasons Hawksmore had people thinking this way about him had to do with the fact that he was in fact a Freemason. And therefore there are all kinds of Masonic symbols that you see in his buildings, things like pyramids, things like obelisks. In fact, so many of them that some of Hawksmore's churches have been described as temples of dark forces. Van Bra, by contrast, was this very courtly gentleman. He would get fabulous commissions because he was so charming. He would say, I know you know nothing about architecture, but you're so charming and you're a gentleman. Build me a house and he would do it. Whereas Hawksmore came up through the trades. And as always is the case with generations succeeding generations. You always have to rebel against the thing that came immediately before you. Just as Wren discarded the muscular, mannerist language of Inigo Jones and the clear, simplified massing of Inigo Jones. So too did Hawksmore and Van Bra, the successors really to Wren's practice, assistants in Wren's office. So too did they discard the delicacy of Wren's language and pick up again the muscularity, the roughness and the stripped down classicism that they found in Inigo Jones. This is the basic biography of Hawksmore. He began to work for Wren when he was still a teenager and worked as a supervisor on a number of these projects. And then after that he began to collaborate with Van Bra and then he took on commissions on his own account. And because he was grumpy, the only kinds of commissions really that Hawksmore could get, well for the most part, were churches. More of these London city churches that had been destroyed during the fire and that had not been completely rebuilt in the campaign initiate under Wren. And they're really great churches I have to say. If we think that architectural styles move dialectically and that you skip a generation, it's almost as though Hawksmore and also Van Bra skip Christopher Wren and go back to Inigo Jones to pull out this kind of gutsy architectural language, these exaggerated scales of elements, heavy shadow line, this kind of overscaled cornice, this almost Giulio Romano manner of sensibility of things not quite fitting into the wall that they're contained in. So this is one of his churches, Christ's Church Spittle Fields, frequently known as Fabulous. What makes it so fabulous is, again it's modest, it's not a good part of town, he hasn't got much to work with and he just inflates the scale like crazy. Here's the plan, what we're looking at is this tower which is gigantic. The tower is as tall as the church is long, it's really quite amazing. And his method of making the tower is to in a sense be a good classicist, but to be a little bit crazy at the same time. He's a good classicist insofar as he's taking elements from the repertoire of forms in classical antiquity like triumphal arches. And he's also revisiting those forms as seen through people like Ceralio or Palladio. So we have this Ceraliano or Palladian motif down below. If you look at the development of the tower, he's really solving a kind of interesting problem of looking at a building type church tower that didn't exist in Roman antiquity and figuring out a way to make one out of bits of Roman stuff. Stacky, stacky, stacky, stacky, stacky. But it's not just random stackingness in the case of Christ's church spittle fields. It's stacking variations on a theme and the theme is triumphal arch. And it's stacking them so that there is this development from columnar to wall structure moving up. So down at the bottom it's columnar, it's the pure Ceraliana, it's just the frame of the thing. The middle level becomes more or less triumphal arch with an arch and openings on the side. On top you get basically just an arch and wall on the side. And then by the time you get to the little one here, you just have a little punch and blind windows. And a little pyramid on top. In fact, Hoxmer got into quite a lot of trouble for these stacking of pyramids on top of his churches. Even here, where it kind of looks like a regular steeple, I think, there was a suggestion that he was crowning a Christian church with a symbol of paganism and thereby signifying that the gods of pagan antiquity were triumphing over Christianity. He develops this great rhetorical moment and even shows you that this is just the face of the building. The side of the tower I think is pretty amazing. You read it as a kind of slice and a scoop and a slice insisting on the frontality of this. The side and the back elevations pick up a lot of the language from St. Paul's Covent Garden of punching the window in a really severe way, punching it in with these round portholes, emphasizing the difficulty of the punch. Overscaling elements within the building like keystones get pumped up in scale. This is a different church by Hoxmer, but a similar strategy. This one is St. Anne Limehouse. Again, it's a simple hall church with a gigantic tower built by stacking different elements from the classical repertoire. And now seemingly stacking them in a willy-nilly fashion so that a temple shoots off in the wrong direction. Triumphal arch pops up this way. A little Baalbeck tower is over here. No longer a variation on the theme, but kind of an encyclopedia of possibilities within the classical repertoire. Gutsy rustication, simple punches, stripped down language, and a Wren strategy of floating sectional figures within a hall church. Probably the wackiest of all the Hoxmore London City churches is St. George Bloomsbury. And you look at it here and you see, well, it's not so wacky. It's a temple and a tower. But the relationship of the temple and the tower should already tell you something is amiss, given English typology that says you enter under the tower. You think this has got to be the main entry. Look at the big stairs. Here's the tower, and look how the church is organized. You enter under the tower and the transept gets this big portico. So that's an adjustment to the urban condition. Main street over here, pump up the facade, organize the church in this direction because you want to have the altar oriented in a certain way. It's also funny because of the double nature of this building, that it has two faces, one face toward the street, another face toward the smaller alleyway. There was a limited competition for this project. Wren, Van Bra and Hoxmore all competed. Van Bra actually won the competition, but Van Bra's plan was oriented in the long direction. And Hoxmore kept complaining that this was not proper, that the altar had to be in the east in a Christian church, and ultimately he got his way. And so we have this kind of double orientation for the building. That's really quite spectacular, with almost a perfect square in the middle. A perfect cube of space, in fact, that has been suggested to be modeled after biblical descriptions of Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. Something that the Freemasons are just crazy about. Fabulous, and let's look at the tower. This is another game of radical stacking, inspired by buildings like St. Ivo by Boromini, where a thing and a thing and a thing and a thing get stacked up to tell a story. A similar thing is going on here. Again, classical things like the temple, classical things like the pyramid, but so many of them, and in such kind of radical juxtaposition, that it no longer seems classical at all, but quite mannerist. The pyramid in Hoxmore St. George Bloomsbury is even more explicitly a pyramid, even more explicitly derived from antique sources, specifically the mausoleum of Halicarnassus. Of course, Hoxmore, unlike his peers, never had the grand tour, never got to look directly at European sources, and instead had to rely upon prints and books to try to get some sense of history. So this looks like, in fact, the mausoleum of Halicarnassus as drawn by Fischer von Erlach. There's another interesting thing about the pyramid that Hoxmore selects for St. George Bloomsbury, and that is it's a very tapering pyramid, kind of like Fischer von Erlach's pyramid. It's got a collection of odd things like lions, unicorns, and the prints on top. And for another, the shape of the tower, the shape of the pyramid, looks almost like an upside-down keystone, or at least a keystone as repeated again and again and again in the work of Hoxmore. So there's this kind of mannerist visual punning, substituting one thing for another thing, pulling things out of their conventional syntax, changing their scale, changing their function, which Hoxmore does again and again and again. Here's an example of how he makes a window, giant keystone popping up the window, technique from Giulio Romano, where the keystone simultaneously seems to support one thing and then break into the thing above it. One more little Hoxmore church. This is St. Mary Walmouth. This is a variation on the theme of the square. So at the base, you have wall, wall, wall, with little columns popping out of the wall, beginning to suggest that within the wall, there's the possibility of another system, stacked on top of that square double column, suggesting that within the field of same, there's the possibility of double, stacked on top of that double elements that reprise the basic geometry of the lower thing. Quite fabulous, quite amazing rustication, really gutsy, out Palladio's Palladio. There is a kind of deliberate crudeness of the massing, a deliberate exaggeration of wall-ness or punch-ness or an attitude not so much about synthesizing and disguising the joints that were so clear in an architecture that comes under Wren, but rather an exaggeration of disjunction. So in many ways, we have a coming back to the language of the mannerists by coming back more closely to what Inigo Jones was doing. I mean, you look at the rustication on this church, St. Mary Wollnath, and it looks very much like the kind of rustication we saw in the work of Julia Romano or in Bramante's House of Raphael. I just want to show you one more Hawksmore building, because I find this to be a curiosity, a glimpse into what's to come. This is a college for Oxford University built by Hawksmore, and the colleges at Oxford University are residential, but they also have some classrooms and chapels. They're sort of self-contained educational units within the larger educational institution of Oxford University. So this is being done in 1710. This is an 18th-century building. It's a strange appearance for an 18th-century building. It says though Hawksmore is going back in quite a direct way to the architecture of the Gothic period. And I can understand why he would do that. If you look around Oxford, it is primarily a Gothic campus. It is an institution that was established in the Middle Ages. And so Hawksmore seems to be interested in finding an architecture that will fit in. But to make something in the Gothic style is a radical move, because Gothic is not the architecture embraced by the Renaissance. It is not the architecture that connects to this great trajectory of reclaiming philosophy and art and truth and mathematics that the Renaissance put forward. But rather it is an architecture that is really associated with a kind of northern sensibility or even a barbarian sensibility. It's the architecture of the forest, of druids dancing in the forest. And one reason that Hawksmore might do this, in addition to wanting to have an architecture that is consistent with the architecture of the rest of the campus, is that he's actually building in the north. This is a place historically associated with a different kind of architecture than, say, Italy. If Italian architects want to reclaim a moment of glory, then it makes sense that they would look back to their own moment in history where they were building pantheons. If architects in England want to similarly connect back to a piece of their own history, then maybe Gothic architecture makes more sense. This is a very early moment for Gothic architecture to be developed, but we'll see more and more of it as we move into the 19th century. I mentioned that there were two architects working for Wren, for example, the Naval College in Greenwich. One was Hawksmore and the other was Vanbara. Vanbara and Hawksmore couldn't be more different. Hawksmore was a stone cutter. Vanbara was a gentleman. Vanbara was commissioned to be an officer in the army when he was 22 years old. He traveled all around the world. He was arrested for being a spy, imprisoned in France briefly, imprisoned in the best deal for that matter. And ultimately in 1696 he went to England and became a playwright and an impresario and a charming guy who got invited to all the best salons. In 1699 he became an architect. Now that's a crazy biography. That would be a crazy biography even for you guys where there's quite a lot of opportunity to pick and choose and change careers. But in that period it was really quite extraordinary. He became an architect because people just said, Vanbara, you're so charming. Build me something. That's not exactly true, but when he came back to England he began to dabble and build things. This is a project that he built for himself, Goose Pie House. It's a funny name and apparently Goose Pie means the thing you make out of all the stuff left over in your pantry. So you're not really planning a recipe in a coherent way, you just throw the stuff in. This is how I cook. My refrigerator goes into my food and clearly this is what he's doing too. Goose Pie, it's highly eclectic, right? It doesn't cohere into a knowable thing. There's a little bit of arch. There's a little bit of castle. There's a little bit of smooth. There's a little bit of rusticated. There's a little bit of temple, but not quite a temple because there's a little bit of arch in the middle of it. It's a Goose Pie House. Vanbara did another house for himself, Castle Vanbara. And this is even wilder. And here, like Hawksmore, he's beginning to make explorations into the local vernacular, the vernacular of the Gothic. While the plan of All Souls College Oxford is really quite classical, quite symmetrical, quite regular, so much so that it's even organized around a square courtyard, Vanbara's Castle Vanbara plays with asymmetry, plays with the ability of the building to kind of snake along the landscape and reveal these eccentric massings and these picturesque placements of turrets. It's not entirely random, though. I mean, this is really the kind of Gothic architecture that probably couldn't have been done during the medieval period but could only be done when revisited through a classical sensibility. Because look at how clearly Vanbara establishes a center. He establishes a center and then has a kind of push-pull deformation in each direction from that centric organization. But you refer to the idea of a kind of A, B, C, B, A clear center that extends into the landscape only to deform that center. Clever. So as I said, Vanbara got these great commissions. The Duke of Marlborough said, I'd like a new house in Oxfordshire. I think you could do something for me, a guy who was imprisoned in the Bastille that has no formal training in architecture. And Vanbara says, well, sure, that's not hard for me. I can certainly do something for you. Vanbara got his commission to design Blenheim Palace in a quite extraordinary way. He had been through half a dozen careers by the point that he was working in London as a successful playwright. And at the end of a play, The Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill came up to him and said, Jolly good play, would you like to design a house for me? Churchill was not born Duke of Marlborough. He was given the title of Duke of Marlborough for service to the state. He was from a noble family but of minor gentry. Churchill had just celebrated some great victories for the British nation in the War of Spanish Succession and had been given a plot of land in Oxfordshire and funding from the state to build himself a house. There was a bit of a spat going on between Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough and John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough about who the architect should be. Sarah Churchill wanted Wren to be the architect but John Churchill had seen Castle Howard and knew that this was an architecture that properly represented his aspirations. The house is full of gossip. It's not simply the squabbling about architects between Sarah and John Churchill but it gets really interesting toward the end of the 19th century when you have Charles, 9th Duke of Marlborough living in this house and finding that Glenham Palace is falling to ruin. And of course, as a gentleman, he was not allowed to work. There was only one possible source for a man of his situation to look toward in order to improve his financial situation and that was to marry well. And that he did. The marriage of Charles, Duke of Marlborough to Consuelo Vanderbilt, the heiress to the American railroad fortune that was the stuff of gossip and legend for decades afterwards. A great negotiation took place. Consuelo's mother wanted her to be a duchess. She wanted her to be European royalty. The girl was locked in her bedroom until she agreed to the marriage and the terms of the marriage were this, $2,500,000 cold to cash down to Churchill and an annual income assigned to each of them for life of $100,000 a year. This was a spectacular amount of money for the time. And it seems a little bit cheesy but this is what saved Blenheim Palace. With this money repairs could be made, the roof could be fixed, the gardens could be tended and Blenheim Palace for that reason is preserved to us today. He builds Blenheim Palace, which is a giant palace. I believe this is where Winston Churchill was born. It's that fancy. It's worth looking at it in its gardens. This is the original organization of the gardens where Blenheim Palace commands one of these great axes, one of these great axes, the likes of which we saw in France, in places like Volovikon and Versailles and also the likes of which we've seen in Germany and Austria, in places like Schloss Nymphenburg or Schoengrün because the idea of the Versailles garden became all the rage in the Borough period. When we look at it here in this contemporary photograph we don't quite see what we have over here in this plan and that is because adjustments were made later on in the 18th century and adjustments had to do with making the garden more informal, making the garden more apparently irregular, allowing the garden not simply to be ruled by geometry but to be ruled by view. And view, not in the sense of this is my Kona vision, this is my axis down the middle, but view toward the picturesque. What objects catch your eye when you look into the garden? The answer to that becomes things like irregular clumpings of trees or little pavilions or follies sprinkled into the garden. So a lot of the regular features in the original scheme get softened as we move forward. But let's look at the original scheme because like Hawksmore, Van Bure too jumped a generation and looked at the gutsy muscular language of Inigo Jones and comes up with these strong massing statements, strong attitude about rustication and a seeming delight in the disjunction rather than the synthesis among parts. This is a drawing of the entry court of Blenheim Palace right over here. And here's the gate right over here. Look at this gate and you have to say this kind of is Porta Piaesque. And by Porta Piaesque, I mean, there's a Michelangelo sensibility here not only in terms of the attention to material presence but also in terms of the language, this hyper redundancy. Here's an opening. Oh no, here's an opening. Here's a gate. Oh no, here's a gate. Excuse me, here's the gate. There's this superposition of motif upon motif upon motif, the density of which reminds us of Michelangelo's moment. Here at the Porta Pia, we see the kind of super redundancy or multiple expressions of a singular theme that we see reproduced again in the gatehouse of Blenheim Palace. Even the way Blenheim Palace itself pulls apart in one sense reminds us of, say, Volovicon, the notion that an axis shoots through the equities, these outbuildings, are left on the side showing us the trace of the building that slipped away in the form of an entry court and that you also have a slippage, a kind of telescoping of space toward a center and a popping out of a pavilion along the garden axis. This is the standard playbook of how a Baroque country house gets organized. Notice also this attitude toward pavilionization, where instead of having a uniform wrapper, we get these little pavilions popping out all over the place. At Blenheim, it's kind of interesting because it's almost synthesizing two traditions. One tradition, the Baroque tradition of the pavilions popping out, but another, the English tradition of the castellated country house that you have your little towers, reminding you of feudal days when the castle itself was a fortified place. Or notice here how when we look at the location of these castles here on the garden facade, we think, well, this establishes corner, this establishes edge. But when we look at the castles on the entry court facade, they've been dislocated from the block of the building. They're giving us further information that there is deformation, there is punching. So here we have a symmetrical facade, tower, tower, tower, tower, and woo, all this stuff has moved through. Better views of that strange little entry gate that we have at Blenheim. And some of the language, some of the hyper-rusticated language that Van Bure uses here, like giant keystone, Giulio Romano-esque keystone, or extreme rustication on this gate. Van Bure did another major country house, this one in Yorkshire, called Castle Howard. Castle Howard distinguishes itself in many ways from Blenheim, but one way, for example, to distinguish between the images is that Castle Howard was for a Catholic client, and because of that, Van Bure thought, well, let's give them a dome. Catholics love domes. Every time they have a chance to build a church, there's a dome, so let's give them a dome. So Castle Howard has a dome in its central space, right over here. A lot of similar strategies are going on, the kind of axis creating a courtyard, flanking out buildings, and then the palace popping through. As a point of reference, this is Vaux-le-Vicombe, the outbuildings, the evacuated ground plane, the castle being displaced, the ovalized object being further displaced, and a courtyard carved in the middle, and we can see that model followed pretty closely in Blenheim and in a transformed way at Castle Howard. Think about Castle Howard that I really find interesting. Well, the house is great, but the landscape is also great, and what makes the landscape so interesting is that it's almost as if certain strategies that we've seen used in cities, like 6th to 5th Rome, of organizing your view. You find an obelisk, you follow the obelisk. Find another obelisk, you follow the obelisk. This notion of vista, or the grand view, is being used to organize your procession through the landscape. This is the house over here. This is the entry point, and throughout your procession, on this big axes, you find a series of these gates, these follies, or these obelisks that begin to turn your attention toward a different direction. These are some of the things you see as you approach the house. Here is a rustic gate with tapering pyramid-like forms, and beyond that you see the pyramid gate. So topography is being called into play in conjunction with axes to move people through the space by engaging their view with objects beyond, like an obelisk, or like ruins. Here's a detail of the pyramid gate. The wings to the side were added a bit later. It was originally meant to be this strange little hybrid of two typologies, the pyramid marking a spot and the gate permitting passageway through it. And here's another pyramid out in the meadow. Its function was simply to mark a spot. There's a statue of one of the revered ancestors inside of it. Even when you're finally at this point and turn toward the house, your view doesn't line up on the house, but it lines up on a monument up here on a hill. It's a strange idea about moving through a garden, particularly given the way that we've been moving through gardens. Manorist gardens in Italy, Baroque gardens in France, where an axis is stipulated, you follow that axis, and things unfold on either side. Here we are, we come in, and there's this little pyramid gate. So from a distance, we see a pyramid, and as we actually approach it, we find that it's a gate. And notice that in the distance beyond here, we see another point. And that helps us make our next turn within the space. This is where we've made our turn onto this road. Here's the house, and our eye goes up to this folly on top of the hill. Let's use the word folly. A folly is really just something to organize your view in a garden. It could be a little pavilion, it could be a little statue, it could be a little obelisk. It could even be something that's specifically designed to stir emotions in you, like, say, a fake ruin. Like, oh, nature broke this piece of architecture. My heart thumps. We find a kind of obelisk, we're moving along, we find a kind of pyramid just out in the middle of the meadow. We're moving along, we find a kind of gate, which is axially aligned with that pyramid gate, kind of pyramidal, kind of temple-like, with this super-rusticated language. We have kind of obelisks, kind of pyramids, super-rusticated gate, and we finally come to the house of Castle Howard. It's an experience of moving you through the landscape, and even after you come to the house proper and move beyond the entry approach, you continue to find a series of follies, garden follies. This building is the temple of the Four Winds. And the idea is you sit in here and breezes blow in all directions, and you have a spectacular picnic. Good idea. And this is a mausoleum. This mausoleum, by the way, is designed by Hawksmoor, because Hawksmoor is contributing to this project, and it's kind of Tempietto-esque, but it's Tempietto-esque in a really severe, stripped-down language. All of the little delicate flourishes that you would find in Bramante's language are removed, and instead it presents itself as this impenetrable mass. And it's good that it's an impenetrable mass because there are dead people inside. It's a mausoleum. You do not want to go in there. So we're beginning to see a new sensibility happening here, and that is a sensibility for the picturesque.