 Architecture is becoming increasingly difficult at this time. This is a painting from the early 19th century, but it pretty much sums up the conundrum that architects are finding themselves in in the later half of the 18th century. And that is, wow, there's a lot of stuff out there. And how do you choose? This painting is actually in the Toledo Museum of Art called The Architect's Dream. And it represents the architect over here, sitting on top of a column capital. He's surveying the possibilities. He's surveying the things that haunt him. Is this a dream or is this a nightmare? And you can see how landscape and qualities of light become tightly associated with styles of architecture. Here in the dark, forested, irregular terrain of this hill, we see gothic architecture. The towers of which seem to be quoted by the pointy pine trees that surround it. Over here, on the flat land, bathed in clear illuminating light, we have classical architecture. And looming behind that in a kind of giant, scary way, we have Egyptian architecture. So how do you choose? And this moment really becomes the conundrum that architects are in for the next 200 years, let's say. Or the architects are still in now. There is no longer an automatic style that is expressive of the ambitions of the age. You could look at Rococo and say, yeah, it's Rococo. That's what people do now. But with the Enlightenment comes in this recognition that people are not part of nature, but apart from nature. And looking back at nature and also looking back at history and therefore having to make these choices about which history they embrace. Crisis of style is an issue that we've already begun talking about really for the last few lectures. The kind of architecture we talked about at the beginning of this class seemed to proceed directly and inevitably from conditions of the culture and from conventions of architecture that had immediately preceded it. When we move into the 18th century, there is a kind of rupture. It could be the kind of paradigm shift that Thomas Kuhn talks about. Or it could be the change in epistem that Michel Foucault talks about. Issues that we discussed in earlier lectures. But suddenly there's a whole range of choice that architects have to make. And they make that choice with the aim of finding some way to make their architectural decisions mean something. Why choose one thing instead of another thing? How do you decide? How can you make your architectural choice not completely whimsical or arbitrary, but significant and important? That's what the big problem in the 18th century is. And we see here this painting by Thomas Kuhn, the architect's dream of the sublime representation of the vastness of scale of architecture and the vast sweep of history as tiny little midget architect sits on top of a gigantic column capital with his flimsy little pieces of paper holding his plans looking at the choices in front of him. The choices aren't just historical, classical, Gothic, Egyptian, but they're also locked into mood and atmosphere. They're also locked into landscape. And how does an architect react? Over here we have a kind of straightforward embrace of history because it's classicism. This is John Wood the Elder at the Royal Circus in Bath. Strictly speaking, John Wood the Elder and his son John Wood the Younger are continuing with Neapolitan architecture and they're not really wandering off into great historicist excesses which we'll see later on today. However, they take the Neapolitan style in an interesting direction and that is they apply it to the definition, not simply of individual buildings, but of urban fabric. This seems to follow naturally from developments that were going on elsewhere in Europe, specifically in France, with the great urban squares like Placefondon, for example, where the idea was to define a decorous urban edge and to sell that off as a kind of speculative real estate adventure and to allow individuals to build the houses behind them. Bath is an interesting town and a town whose economy lent itself well to this kind of speculation. Already in 44 AD the town was established as a bathing establishment by the Romans. It had natural hot springs, hence natural baths. This is the Roman Bath in the city of Bath. And the history might even go farther back than that. The legendary founder of Bath is King Bladud, who apparently was exiled from town because he had leprosy. And while wandering around, hurting his pigs on the outskirts of town, he discovered that the pigs were rolling in the mud and then he too rolled in the mud and mysteriously the leprosy went away. So the curative value of the waters in Bath go back a long way. And Bath, by the 18th century, was doing quite a booming tourist trade. Hence the desire to restructure the city. And to the woods, first John the Elder, then John the Younger, this task fell. I've decorated in green a couple of these interventions. Here's a square, here's the royal circus, and here's the royal crescent. Particularly of interest are the circus and the crescent. The former by John Wood the Elder and the latter by John Wood the Younger. These are all facade projects. Well, let's say site planning and facade projects. Each client got an individual architect to decorate the back. You can see the strong figureality of these spaces. And you can also see something that really distinguishes the couple of decades between John Wood the Elder's intervention and John Wood the Younger's intervention. John Wood the Elder is making a closed space. It is all about defining the urban space. It makes nice baroque connections to other elements within the city. But it really does keep nature out. Or the only nature that is allowed to participate in the space is a copse of trees centered in the circular space. We come over to the intervention by John Wood the Younger, the crescent. Very different attitude. We have here an open edge. We have an open engagement with nature. And in fact, the field here called Barton Field had a covenant on it that it was to perpetually remain unbuilt upon. And indeed, you couldn't even plant things there that would be higher than eight feet because they wanted to perpetually preserve views toward the Avon River, which runs down through here. And up here on top of the hill, we see another intervention by John Wood the Younger called Lansdown Crescent. Let me just say a few words about John Wood the Elder because you look at him and you think, this guy is Neapolitan. Therefore, this guy is rational. This guy is systematic. This guy likes methodology. This guy is modern. And maybe this is part of being modern. John Wood the Elder undertook a project to measure Stonehenge. This is completely consistent with 18th century archeological interest in things like the ruins of Rome or the ruins of Greece. And in measuring Stonehenge, he became very, very interested in this ancient culture, this pre-Roman culture of the city of Bath, very interested in the druids, for example. And of course, insofar as he was directly working with Stonehenge, very interested in Stonehenge. There are some interesting things to be said about the geometry of Stonehenge and the geometry of the royal circus. For one thing, the diameter of the royal circus is about 318 feet, which is the diameter of the Stonehenge, at least the Stonehenge as measured by John Wood the Elder. And notice how here we have an outer ring. This is an annular elevated ring surrounded by a ditch and an inner ring of the stones proper that we see down here. So too does Wood decide to plant a circle of trees, forming more or less the footprint of the actual stones of Stonehenge and allowing the buildings to splay out to define the limits of the annular ridge. So there's a lot of weird masonry going on here. And in fact, Wood, like many of the architects of the time, was involved in the masons and he's not so covert about it. There are all kinds of Masonic symbols decorating the cornice of this very nice, dorkly, articulated wall around the circus. Circus means round thing. It doesn't mean place for clowns and dancing elephants. By the way, this is what it looked like before they cleaned the facades. This photograph is probably from like 1982. And now the facades are cleaned. Most of England used to look like this because they burnt coal. The air was awful. And England looks quite different when you go back after they've cleaned the facade. I think this is interesting. I found this in a real estate advertisement for eight the circus. The rent would have been 5,500 pounds per month. But I think it's interesting just to see how these houses get laid out. Of course, houses will vary in width based on how much facade was purchased by the owner. This guy seems to have about three windows worth of width, which seems like a good amount. It's enough space to give you an entry way in. And notice here there's a little sunken area around here to bring light into the basement so that goods could be delivered directly into the servant quarters without going through the property. There's a little courtyard down that you walk over to the basement level. You have little storage rooms. This is the little entry into the house. Servant rooms down here. And then a quite straightforward unfolding of major rooms, one facing the square and the other facing the back garden. The same strategy of development took place for the Crescent. Jane Austen, by the way, in North Ranger Abbey and also in some of her other books, talks about visiting bath. It was the thing to do among well-heeled people in the late 18th century, early 19th century. It's an edge, and the opposite edge of that is nature. It opens up to embrace this great meadow pulling forward in front of it. Architecture no longer pulls itself away and delimits itself from the natural condition, but it completes itself through this embrace of the natural condition. And that's even a stronger statement up here with Landsdown Crescent, where the geometry of the form itself yields to the irregularities, the topography lines, and it becomes a kind of wiggle rather than a Crescent. It's an amazing thing. It's temple-ish on the end. It's extrudo-temple as it moves around. If you guys ever have to design urban housing and studio, this is a good tip to remember. When you look at this as a figure on its landscape, it seems to be all about this colonnade. But when you see how it actually engages the site, there's this sunken level, and this would have originally been sort of surface quarters that you bring in these slabs of beef or the kitchen maids go there and deliver there. You're able to organize multiple stories, and in fact there's this little sunken garden down here in front of the house, and that's a kind of good strategy for making an edge if you ever have to deal with that. Notice how steeply sloping the lawn is. One thing that's great about that is that you get an incredibly beautiful view toward the river, because the topography helps enhance the view. There's also a ha-ha in place that further articulates the division of the space of Barton Field. There's a number of catches-catch-can, lots of different ideas going on here, and quite different from the fronts. In the original scheme, 30 houses, organized with 114 20-foot-tall ionic columns, all facing toward the river, and some of the properties, even at the outset, determined to be rental properties so that tourists coming to take the curative waters at Bath would have a place to stay. This is a cartoon by Thomas Rollinsen running down to take the waters at Bath and having a little bit of difficulty because the slope is so steep, so all of these poor people who need to take the cure just can't quite negotiate the hill, the wheelchairs are running wild, ha-ha-ha. Nothing like 18th century humor. You may have noticed that the buildings in the Circus and the Crescent are all built out of the same creamy limestone, which is called Bathstone. The use of the same material throughout the town gives incredible unity to the city. There are a lot of other things that are tightly knitting together the urban fabric, like the cornice heights are kept constant, or the articulation of buildings with the kind of consistent classical language at least throughout the major swath of space, from the square to the Circus to the Crescent. The man who owned the quarry of the Bathstone wanted to showcase his beautiful material, and he engaged John Wood, the elder, to build him a house. And the house is prior park. This is really fabulous Neopolladian house. Sir Nicholas Pevesner, one of the great architectural writers of the 20th century, says this is one of the most perfect examples of a Neopolladian house in England. And the situation is what we've come to expect from these wonderful romantic gardens with Neopolladian houses on top of them. Nice little Palladian bridge here, and so forth. We mentioned before that there was no longer simply one historical style that you could pull from, but there were many historical styles. And you picked your historical style really based on what feelings you wanted to promote. For example, if you wanted to make a church, chances were good that you would now pick a Gothic style, because Gothic was the style of religious architecture that grew up in England, English Gothic, English Christian Gothic architecture, whereas classical architecture has stronger associations with pagan antiquity, and therefore not such a good style for a religious institution. However, if you're making a government building and you want to represent the values of the government, you might make a classical building because you have these great moments of democracy, flourishing in Greece or republicanism, flourishing in Rome, and to connect, to associate, to conjure up feelings about those societies, you could pick styles. In domestic architecture, it's kind of just catch-can, any association is possible. Here we're looking at an early moment in Gothic revival by Horace Walpole, 1749. Horace Walpole is a great patron of the arts. He is a diplomat and spends a lot of time in Italy. He made a grand tour. You have to figure out how to get across the Alps. So Horace Walpole was carried across the Alps in a sedan chair. If you like nature but you don't like hiking, get some of your friends to carry you across the Alps in a sedan chair. This is a sedan chair. In this case, there's a young lady being carried in the sedan chair through London with her plume sticking out. Conveniently, there's a trap door for such occasions. But many tourists were carried through the Alps in sedan chairs. The reason you would go through the Alps instead of taking a ship which would seem like a more congenial way to get to Italy from England is that in the sedan chair you would have the experience of the sublime. You would be confronting nature in all of its magnificence, the splendor of the Alps. Of course, you wouldn't be walking. You'd be sitting in the sedan chair, and the people carrying you would be confronting nature in an even more brutal and upright manner. Walpole, for Strawberry Hill, his house on the outskirts of London picks the style of Gothic revival. And you look at this and you think this is a kind of fake Gothic revival, or let's say it's the look of Gothic revival but not the structural value of Gothic revival, even the quality of light and quality of dematerialization that you would expect to get in Gothic revival. We get the Gothic wall paper stuck to the ceiling and then just bearing wall architecture. And this is what it looks like on the exterior, crenellated in a Gothic style, but pretty much punch windows everywhere you go. This is sort of Gothic-y, but not very Gothic-y. It is a rectilinear room with little pointy things imprinted on the surface. There's a real Gothic over here where we have an architecture that is skeletal, where we have the pointy things deriving from a structural logic of the pointed vault bringing the forces down to the ground and you can begin to see immediately what a simulacrum of the Gothic, something like Strawberry Hill is. But probably Walpole's not so interested in making it Gothic. What he's interested in doing is associating it with the Gothic, conjuring up the feelings, conjuring up the moods in a Gothic building, but also having a cozy domestic space. The most fabulous and most interesting of all the Gothic revival buildings is Fodd Hill Abbey for the client William Beckford. William Beckford is an author of Gothic novels, and Gothic novels are these scary novels that have to do with the margin of the normal. They have to do with the paranormal. They have to do with Frankenstein or Vampires or Scary Monsters. Beckford actually wrote Gothic novels and one of them is called Vathic. The plot of Vathic has to do with this very wealthy, sensually self-indulgent caliph. So already setting it in some exotic part of the world plays well to the idea of the Gothic novel. And what he wants to do is build a house for himself. One part of the plot of Vathic is the building of the Caliph's mansion. And it is to be a house that engages all the senses. The critique here is that there should be a room where visuality is celebrated. A room where tactility is celebrated. A room that has to do with pleasant smells. A room that has to do with pleasant tastes. A room that has to do with extraordinary surfaces to touch. So that's quite a client. And Beckford's loaded tons of money. And this is what he builds. We only have drawings of it because it fell down. And one reason it fell down is that it wasn't constructed well. It was built immediately. And he had a lot of money and he kept telling people build it really fast. Build it really fast. And the builder said, but the foundations need to settle. We need to do this at a certain pace. We can't go any faster. He said, here's more money. Build it faster. So they built it really fast and it fell down. And Beckford said, here's more money. Build it faster. And they built it really fast and it fell down. Beckford eventually gave up. But look at this. This is an example of historical eclecticism. Because we've seen Gothic. We studied Gothic. Look, here's Gothic. This is what Gothic looks like. It doesn't quite look like this. Does anything here look familiar at all? Or could anybody begin to describe what the organization of Fontale Abbey is? It's an amazing plan. And no answer is wrong. You could look for a form that you recognize or you can look for a type that you recognize. Words. A type of course is something familiar like a villa, a basilica, a palazzo. A form is something like a cube, a four-square grid, a nine-square grid, an oval, a circle. And a model is something that you copy. The thing that you emulate and you try to imitate as directly as possible. So can anybody see anything that's making the different pieces of Fontale Abbey hang together? Ryan. Good. I'm just going to repeat what you said because I don't think people heard you. He's saying it kind of looks like a Gothic church plan, but the pieces are all over the place. And insofar as it's fragmented and the pieces are all over the place, certain pieces of it remind you of different things. You kind of see things that look like a tower, which would be over here. You kind of see things that look like church apps over here. Even in the spindly way that a volume attaches to a linear piece, it kind of looks like the Charlemagne's chapel at X-Lesh-Appel. I can only remember the French name at the moment. Anybody else have a take on this? Max, your hand is out. It's got a crossing tower. It's got this big cross, cruciform plan and a big tower on top of the cross. This is a weird plan, right? It's sort of like Gothic architecture laid out over Cartesian coordinates. Hyper-rational, Cartesian coordinates, what could be easier. X, Y, and Z. But it's crazy insofar as it breaks apart the kind of syntactical logic of any individual building. Anybody else see anything in here that they can kind of recognize? Because it's kind of a catalog, a kit of parts of things that you might have in the Gothic period. You might have, for example, a castle with these little turrets at the edge. You might have a little cloister with a little refectory at the edge. You might have a cathedral with an apps at the edge. You might have some hulking big processional stairway. So all the pieces that you expect to have in Gothic have been rearranged and recombined and repositioned to create a new whole and to create a new whole that is familiar but also de-familiarized at the same time because the disjunctions are so radical. Here's what it looks like during that brief, great moment before it fell down. We see here the opening that looks like a church but in fact the whole thing is a giant stairway and whoopsie daisy, it fell down. But here you can see the thing that looks like the little castle-aided part over here. This is what the section would have looked like. It would have been the greatest thing in the world. So sad that it fell down. Another figure who was important at the time and also dealt with landscape is Humphrey Repton. And Repton really finds himself at a certain point needing a job and being good at sketching. So he decides to be a consultant for people who want to have these new modernized gardens, these new informal gardens. While Walpole's Strawberry Hill and Wyatt and Befford's Fonteil Abbey pick Gothic as the one style to use, any style was possible. We saw that in the eclectic assortment of garden pavilions already in the earlier part of the 18th century gardens like Stourhead and Stowe. Some of his writings provide an insight into what kinds of criteria motivated the decisions about what style to use. This, by the way, is Humphrey Repton and this is his business card. He shows himself out in the field surveying. He has a lot of workers here with shovels and wheelbarrows and they're doing what Humphrey Repton did, which is move heaven and earth to make the view more agreeable. And by heaven and earth, I mean move trees, transplant fully grown trees, make a lake, bring in a village, add elements to the landscape to take away its beariness and to increase the picturesque qualities. This image, I think, is telling. It shows us a distant tower and one thing that Repton did because Repton's projects were often of a smaller scale than the kinds of extremely grand projects that other landscape architects like Bridgeman and Kent dealt with. Because Repton's projects were a smaller scale, he often had to borrow vistas so he would cut swaths of space through to collect views together. But Repton's real genius had to do with how he promoted his projects because unlike, say, Capability Brown who had a large contracting company and was able not simply to suggest design proposals, but also to execute design proposals. Repton operated simply as a consultant, but he was able to convince clients of his ideas by presenting them with these red books. They're called red books because, well, here's the cover, look what color it is, it's red. And the red books are just flip books. Like, you see something that looks like this and you say, well, this looks kind of good. I don't know if you can see this little line here. But what you do in the red books is you see the unimproved version and then you flip something over and you see the improved version. It's unimproved and this is improved. I think. I'm thinking that. I don't know. I don't have good taste as Humphrey Repton. The improved version tends to shy away from single trees and instead favor clumping of trees, things in threes and so forth. The improved version tends to favor view lines. This does rather than axes to organize your space. I'm quite sure that this is the improved version where here you have this little straggly stream and you flip over the little flap like in a children's book and suddenly you see what could happen if only Mr. Humphrey Repton could get the commission to consult on your garden. Well, this is fine. This is a nice meadow, but it's a bit thin. It's a bit bare. What if we were to plant an edge of trees and put a little temple there? What if we got some more cattle so that we had more staffage in the picture? And what if we really cleared out of view toward this church in the distance? These are some machines that Repton might have used. These are devices for transplanting fully grown trees because Repton couldn't wait 50 years for the landscape to come into its full glory. It was much more agreeable to have the landscape ready to go on day one. Some of the terms that Repton uses in his discussion of architecture are character. What are the qualities of the house? What's its character? What associations do you get by looking at this house? How does it make you feel? How does it work with its landscape? What landscape would be appropriate? What kind of vistas can you command? Large organized views and what kinds of agreeable elements can be added to increase the picturesque value of the whole? You always know you want to have some cattle or sheep or a nice little bridge in the foreground. This is another one of the red books with the before and the after qualities revealed to you. Here Repton has provided a lake to break up the monotony of the meadow and given us some little eye catching elements like a little bridge to arrest the movement of our eye as we move through the landscape. Repton makes all kinds of suggestions about associationism associating one kind of style with one kind of feeling and plays up these strong emotions. Here he's saying time will get you but here he's also saying all these houses in some way are variations on the same theme. Here in the background on the far side of this picturesque lake we see a series of different architectural styles. A castle on a hill a gothic house down by the water's edge. Some kind of fortified house a classical house and here it almost looks like the house has some kind of mobile dome on it which would not be surprising because part of the character or part of this embrace of history at least in the part of the English has to do with making quotations from various parts of the vast English Empire which was at its height in the 19th century. Grecian, very agreeable gothic craggy terrain stone forest dark sky domesticated animals wild animals. I think this is probably the most telling of Repton's plates. This is from a different book he did called character of houses. Throughout his consulting and Repton consulted on more than 400 projects including the house of Jane Austen's mother he would often make suggestions about changing the facade making the appearance of the house more sympathetic with the landscape that the house was situated in and you can see that here A-B-C-D-E-F essentially from an architectural point of view if you were drawing plans the plans would be almost the same for all these houses it's just switching out the style so it's an incredibly modern sensibility an incredibly eclectic sensibility and in the expansion of possibilities to all of history meaning is beginning to slip away and people are becoming fairly desperate increasingly as we move forward into the 19th century this notion of historical eclecticism becomes more and more prevalent it's a tricky thing like how do you make a choice and you begin to make a choice based on things like character this is an image of a square in the town of Plymouth and I think it's so ridiculous this is what this town looked like in 1821 Greek revival building Egyptian building Gothic building and some kind of giant column standing up there the world became less unified in terms of architectural style and both from a classical point of view and a romantic point of view both from a gothic revival point of view and a classical revival point of view these strong historical images are being brought brought into play I like this one a lot this is an imaginary project from Gandhi where he's building a skyscraper at least he's drawing a skyscraper how is he thinking about the skyscraper and it's kind of an archaeology of styles not a very good archaeology because he has Gothic down at the bottom and then various orders and then a little bit of Renaissance and then a little bit of French Baroque at the top but he's just suggesting the possibility that all these things are available in fact he's even using things like light to further emphasize the associations that these styles give you Gothic is dark and scary the Renaissance and Baroque styles are up in the light this drawing from John Sohn's office of a church, church plan church styles and this is a really good example of the notion of romantic classicism because some of these buildings are incredibly classical some of these buildings are incredibly Gothic but they all have their heightened by a strong relationship to landscape and an idea of the picturesque that these are not isolated buildings to be seen and understood as discrete entities but they're somehow wrapped up in an atmosphere and creating moods John Sohn's office did all kinds of great things like that so the study of aesthetics becomes more and more and more amplified and more and more directly applied to architecture we have a number of characters who are really philosophers and we could say that Edmund Burke didn't care about architecture he was just interested in the aesthetics in an abstract sense but people like Payne Knight who writes a book called or essay called studies of the picturesque landscape and its relationship to architecture where he's thinking very specifically about how certain landscapes could begin to create different moods here above we have a classical landscape sunshine and meadows and here below we have a gothic landscape shadows and thickets for example the architect John Nash is a good one to look at for this because early on in his practice he teamed up with Humphrey Repton Nash is working here at the turn of the 19th century he had a sort of miserable life I have to say his first wife kept cheating on him she was a cheating woman but she cheated in a funny way she would like adopt children and produce them and say this is your baby and he would say how is that possible it is I just had a baby and pretty soon he sent her off to live with relatives in Wales and eventually she died then he married another woman who was about 25 years younger than he was and she was a great beauty and also a cheating woman but in that case it turned out to be a better arrangement because the Prince Regent thought she was lovely and then she married the fourth and if George the fourth admires your wife you get some really great commissions it turns out these are some houses that Nash did in collaboration with Humphrey Repton on the landscapes there are all kind of variations on a theme and you might say well that can't possibly be true they all look so radically different but if you notice here this classical house Rockingham house it is basically a symmetrical plan A, B, A with a pavilion in the middle and over here we have Aquilite Hall which more or less just is gothic or let's say Jacobean vernacular it reverses the pavilions pavilion, not a pavilion pavilion or this one, Cauchem House variations on the same thing the thing that gets differentiated is the style which one do you want you want it classical, you want it gothic, I can do it I think all of that is really interesting the interior of Cauchem House and what I think is new about this with respect to other things we've seen is that it's using materials that wouldn't have been available to an earlier generation of architects these are some industrially produced iron works little spindly iron columns little iron balconies and so forth iron brackets there is an opening up of other architectural possibilities based on the capabilities of these new materials that are present at this early moment in the industrial revolution think about what columns look like if they're made of stone they're heavy, they're ponderous things here we don't even have columns we just have these iron brackets cantilevering the balcony out or we do have columns, they're very very thin we get lots of that stuff happening in these various Nash houses like we have this fake gothic but it's really just metal work hanging from the ceiling, very thin I think this is a great little Nash project it's a series of houses built on the outskirts of the town of Bristol Blaise Hamlet look at the plan, this is a picturesque plan and what makes it picturesque well one thing is no big axes but how does that make it picturesque how does that in and of itself make it picturesque and one answer is that as you walk along this meandering path your view is constantly changing you're not lined up on one thing and you proceed through that path seeing the same thing ever closer but rather each time you meander there's maybe a little folly out here that catches your eye or maybe a slot of space through to a thicket over here so your view constantly changes it's deliberately irregular it's deliberately interested in giving you different ways to see these houses with respect to the landscape and the houses themselves pick up on the English vernacular just means the local style the English vernacular will change from town to town if there's a town that has red clay at the river banks then you'll probably have red brick architecture if there's a town that's near a limestone quarry then you'll probably have limestone architecture one thing that you see all over England is the idea of the thatched roof and these houses built by this fancy architect Mr. John Nash have thatched roofs to further connect them to the landscape to further amplify the picturesque value of these houses and they're totally cute right, look at that doesn't look like an architect design that it looks like some hobbit lives there this is Mr. Nash's second lovely wife Mary the one who didn't keep bringing strange babies into the house but the one who may have had a dalliance with the Prince Regent she is a lovely lady and this is what you get when you get a good looking wife like that who has simply no faithfulness in her bones you get a project to restructure the center of London big project this is Regent Street Oxford Street, Piccadilly Circus Regent's Park everything in black is a project which is pretty amazing some of the projects are simply shaping the storefronts giving this city a kind of unified clarity rather than letting it look ramshackle with buildings of different kinds you face the streets so that you get this notion of an edge even cornice heights even material with variation within the system picking up on Wood's idea at Bath that we looked at before the Royal Crescent and the Royal Circus where the project of the architect is not the design of individual buildings but these great edges through the city this is the path of Regent Street and Regent Street is picturesque it meanders it has the same ability to constantly change your view and transform your view and reposition you in the space that that meanderin path at Blaise Hamlet had now granted this is old fabric that's getting reconfigured but if your patron is the Prince Regent George IV you can pretty much cut a street anywhere you want I would say and he chose to make this deliberately ambling and there are certain moments where the street terminates or bends it's where the street bends and there's a little church here all souls Regent Street so this rounded church becomes a kind of pivot an eye catcher if you want to use the terms that the landscape architects use walk down here you see the little tower redirect and you see this green swath of space opening up into Regent's Park and notice what his intervention in Regent's Park was it's kind of spectacular it is to design the edges there are two kinds of things that go into Regent's Park most of them are these things called terraced housing and terraced housing basically just means row housing it means housing with party walls that make a continuous edge and there are a number of these terraces that really give this grand wrapper to Regent's Park then there are a series of villas that are scattered around in Regent's Park that act as little follies that reflect the view together in a particularly strong way this is the plan of Regent's Park where you can see all these terraces coming in through here other things in Regent's Park like the zoo and you're probably familiar with Regent's Park from works of literature that you have come into contact with like 101 Dalmatians this is the park where they walk pongo and perdita and the dogs tangle up their leashes don't look at me like you don't know what I'm saying you know exactly what I'm talking about and so here it is so it's a kind of grand thing and it's the same kind of grand ambition we've seen other monarchs have we've seen 6th to 5th think Rome needs a facelift let's operate on the city as if it were our project and not individual buildings or Louis XIV or even Henry IV Paris needs a facelift let's operate on the city and so these interventions by Nash in the center of London work in the same way with a significant difference while the projects in Rome and Paris were very interested in imposing order through the axis Nash's work on London seems more aimed at softening the edges and making it picturesque the structure of Regent's Park isn't so much an imperial manifestation of the power of the state as it is a gift to the citizens of London a romantic park not for the exclusive use of aristocracy but now for everyone in the city to enjoy these are just some of the terraces fabulous classical revival buildings white edges with beautiful porticoed entry ways consistent cornice heights throughout but variable style which I think is a really brilliant idea having consistent cornice heights throughout these different projects gives them unity but it doesn't make it deadeningly same you get variety but you also get a sense of the things belonging together here's a little contemporary cartoon done of John Nash to indicate what a silly man he is this is the little All Souls Church on Regent Street where the axis bends and ha ha look at that so funny this is Chester Terrace like very picturesque these views open up and frame views beyond more of Cumberland Terrace Park Crescent and so forth probably one of the most interesting projects at least I think one of the most interesting projects that Nash did was not part of the restructuring of London but another project for George IV the Royal Pavilion in Brighton if you look at the dates here early 19th century this is really when England as an empire was great the sun never sets on the British empire the Royal Pavilion in this town of Brighton tries to somehow reference the different parts of the empire in its style Brighton by the way is a seaside town so this is a kind of holiday house for the king you can kind of get a clue about what's going on by looking at this image this is the cover of a book interestingly called Royal Pavilion there's a kind of Indian-ish quality sort of Taj Mahal-ish with little minarets and little onion domes and all kinds of eclectic recombination of pieces that would never happen in India for example or never happen in an Islamic country but just reimagined crenellations here look distinctly British Gothic, pretty great looking though and you have to say what's his secret and part of his secret is this is one of those same old classical plans that we've seen Nash trotting out for any style at all with a very clear idea of A, B, C and over here beyond this boundary kitchen quarters but essentially it's the same plan he always uses a little bit larger I think what makes this building really special is A, the language and B, the material here in order to build these kind of bizarro domes he's got to resort to different materials than would have been available in traditional architectures so he's using a lot of metal a lot of iron, a lot of framework a lot of perforated metal surfaces to get this lacy quality and to get it fairly cheaply because of the advances in British industry at the time for example here you see a column and this is a cast iron column that looks like some kind of vegetal column when you cast them you can make a lot of them the section is one of the most extraordinary things in the scheme the interior spaces he wants to conjure up the sense that you're inside a tent that this is some kind of architecture of the deserts you move through India into this desert landscape you're inside a tent and it's easy enough to do if you have these iron trusses hanging underneath an iron dome you get this vast, fabulous sweeping space the language is really really interesting for a number of reasons one reason is it's pulling together this wide ranging series of images from the British Empire two it's doing it in metal it's also inventing to a certain extent it's inventing variations on the theme of how nature becomes architectural you can kind of see that over here in this column that we looked at and you might think we've been seeing vegetal columns we've been seeing columns that look like nature since Egypt when we saw lotus columns or columns that looked like bundles of reeds or even the Corinthian column and the idea of acanthus leaves but here it becomes much much more explicit almost as if to say no no this is really just nature look at the chandelier it looks like the top of a palm tree up here look at these columns these look like a little cross between Asian umbrellas and little palm trees and it gets really explicit when you go into the kitchen where the columns look like this these are shiny metal tubes together with palm fronds on the top those are the columns it's great in fact the whole kitchen is pretty great the method of bringing say half a slab of cow into the kitchen is to open up these big windows here and to lower the slab of cow down into the kitchen because it's just too cumbersome to walk through an entire palace carrying half a dead cow and you sometimes need that for the feasts a really good example of an architect who is pushing the envelope in the 19th century both in terms of trotting out every historical eclectic reference he can and also in transforming it through an engagement with new materials that perforce lead to new spatial possibilities