 Hello everyone and welcome to the third talk in our spring research seminar series. My name is Rebecca Trop. I am the research and events convener here at the Paul Mellon Center and I'm very happy to introduce this evening's speaker, Alex Bremner, who is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh. Alex's research focuses on the history and theory of 19th and early 20th century British architecture with a special interest in British imperial and colonial architecture. His most recent book is Building Greater Britain, Architecture, Imperialism and the Edwardian Baroque Revival circa 1885 to 1920, which was published by Yale University Press in 2022. He is currently completing a new history of Victorian architecture for Oxford University Press for which he has received a Paul Mellon Center Senior Fellowship. We will have a Q&A following Alex's talk. For those in the room, you will be able to ask your question directly to Alex. We will have microphones we will pass around. And for those joining us online, please type your questions in the Q&A box and I will read them out for Alex to answer. So without further ado, I'm going to turn it over now to Professor Alex Bremner, who will be speaking to us about why Edwardian Baroque architecture matters, empire, identity and geopolitical rivalry. So please welcome Professor Alex Bremner. Thank you very much, Rebecca. And thank you also to the Paul Mellon Center for inviting me here to give this talk this evening. As Rebecca pointed out, my talk this evening relates to my recent book entitled Building Greater Britain, which you can see here, which is really a kind of new account of a particular movement in the history of British architecture now referred to as the Edwardian Baroque. Edwardian because it was seen to reach its height or apogee in the first decade of the 20th century, although as I explained in the book, it did appear before that and continued after it. And Baroque because many of its stylistic features we associate or the stylistic features that we do associate with it, were Baroque like in form, referencing in particular the architecture of the great English Baroque masters, as they later became known of the late 17th and early 18th century, such as Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawkesmore, John Van Buren, James Gibbs and so on. However, rather than give a lecture per se on the Edwardian Baroque this evening, what it is, where to find it and so on, I'm instead going to offer a kind of meditation on it, which is based more on the preface to my book than the actual contents of the main text in many ways. As you can see or saw, I essentially ask in the title to this talk, why does Edwardian Baroque architecture matter? Indeed, why does it matter? Because for such a long time it didn't. As I go along in this talk, I'll have some slides going in the background just to give you a sense of feel for what this kind of architecture is and looks like. And these are two classic examples of it. So what I'll attempt to suggest here is that it matters as a subject of architectural history now, or to put it another way, has come closer to the centre of our historical field of vision, not only because of its connection to and the insights it offers on Britain's national and imperial past, but also and intriguingly because of the questions it poses regarding contemporary geopolitical circumstances and the echoes that its context contains of the manifold predicaments we find ourselves in today and how architecture responds to them. So let me begin by outlining briefly how I got onto this subject in the first place because this is relevant really to why it might be seen as salient. Now I was attracted to this architecture, this movement as a locus of study because there was something odd even mysterious about it to my mind. In general histories of architecture it barely ever featured its whole. In histories of British architecture didn't get much of a mention either. Only in specific histories of Edwardian architecture did it get anything like the attention it deserved, yet walked down certain streets in the city like London and it's pretty much the only type of architecture that you'll see. Indeed most British towns and cities had still have at least one or several prominent examples of it. So why was it such a sort of blank spot in the history of British architecture so long? Well that Wardingbroke architecture so called faced two problems in particular in relation to modern architectural historiography. The first of these is that it tended to fall between stools or between the gaps of history in a way and the second is that leading historians of the mid 20th century, the likes of Nicholas Perzner, Harry Goodheart Randall and Henry Russell Hitchcock basically poo-pooed it at least for a generation if not more. Now in the case of the first of these problems scholars and historians particularly in the British context were attending to study either Victorian architecture or modern architecture therefore largely skipping over the two or so decades between these two major periods and movements. After all it was pretty clear what Victorian architecture was as it was for modernist architecture but what was Edwardian architecture? Was there even such a thing? Indeed and this brings me to the second problem. Hevesner said there was effectively no point studying architecture of the Edwardian period such as such like this because what applied in a Victorian period simply applied to it. While Goodheart Randall viewed it as vacuous, the Edwardian brock that is and not worthy of serious study, although interestingly when he mentioned this back in the 1950s he conceded that perhaps it was too close to his own time for a true perspective and that perhaps another 50 years or so needed to pass before anything useful or insightful might be said about it. It wasn't until the 1970s in fact that this kind of architecture began to be taken seriously by one historian in particular Alastair Service. The service began to study the Edwardian brock on its own terms indeed showing that it was something different to Victorian architecture per se that it had its own registers worthy of consideration. But being the 1970s and largely following the formalist traditions of art historical scholarship in Britain, he didn't have much really to say about the movements, wider social, cultural and political contexts. To his credit he did acknowledge that perhaps this kind of architecture had something to do with ideas of empire and British imperialism but stopped short of any kind of analysis of this connection in detail. So it wasn't until some time later indeed around 50 years later since Good Art Rendle made his initial comment on this that the wider context and cultural registers of the movement began to be explored. For me this was the most intriguing and fertile facet of Edwardian brock as a species of architecture and the key in many respects I would argue to unlocking its history and meaning. In other words if it didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to the likes of Pesna and Co then when properly placed within its cultural and geopolitical contexts it suddenly makes quite a lot of sense I think. In this respect it was something of a consciously responsive or reactionary kind of architecture and one that served as a type of barometer if you will on how the British saw themselves and their place in the wider world. Now the first point to make in relation to this is that the advent of the Edwardian brock clearly did not occur in a political vacuum indeed the geopolitical environment was vexed very vexed. The era of great power rivalry at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries you know between the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, the United States and later Japan had put Britain on notice raising concerns over its authority and competitiveness into the future. This naturally caused a great deal of anxiety or what the historian John Darwin has called a certain fear of falling which was felt in sectors as diverse as finance, politics, the military and scientific and technical innovation. The anxiety or this anxiety stemmed primarily from the realization that the United Kingdom once the world's leading industrial power was no longer on top of the world it had been caught up to and even passed in its manufacturing capabilities as well as in its share of global trade. So decline looked inevitable so governments in both Britain and its colonies considered what options were available ensuring up their position. In other words what were they to do both individually and collectively. Formal political unity was one idea that was proffered so called imperial federation but actively promoting close of social economic and cultural ties was considered a more sort of realistic and effective means of keeping the British world and its common interests in unison. This anxiety was also behind the rise of the so-called new imperialism that characterized British politics for some decades from about the mid-1870s up until the First World War. Now architecturally it was the Edwardian Baroque that stepped forward to meet this challenge, this anxiety, this fear, this new and revitalized imperial horizons provided the nervous energy as it were that animated Edwardian Baroque architecture or at least that's my contention. It is as you can see here on the screen a vigorous and powerful some said manly type of architecture. I'll come back to that idea in a moment an architecture that was determined to project strength or ideas of strength. Now through this it created something of an ascetic bulwark against real and imagined imperial decline. It presented a face as it were of muscular engagement that sought palpable reassurance over the solidity and continued sway of British global intervention in all its forms. In this regard the Edwardian Baroque was both conceived of and promoted as an architecture of empire. It was a style that Aston Webb one of its leading proponents had hoped would be appreciated the world over as quote representing this wonderful empire end quote or what Herbert Baker that imperial ultra had fancied as quote a common imperial style end quote. But all of this was a kind of illusion a bluff even it was connected to a type of identity politics that may have appealed to indeed shouted about the glories of Britain's rise to world dominance now slowly adding away but as I say was in fact rooted in fear suspicion and a certain degree of self-loathing. So the sense of confidence that it projected was reactionary and therefore somewhat hollow I would argue. It was what might be called a form of architectural chest beating as the great and aging guerrilla that was the British Empire faced challenges from upstart rivals all over the world. Now we have to remember just on that point we have to remember that this architecture approached its epige around or during the Second Anglo-Bore War which lasted from 1899 to 1902. Although Britain eventually won this conflict leading to South African unification in 1910 it was looked at lose for a while especially early on in the conflict. How was it many people asked that basically malicious style bands of what were effectively nothing more than Africans farmers could bring the might and organizational power of the British army to its needs. All sorts of reasons were given including the physical degeneracy of the British male who for generations had been reeling from the effects of industrialization poor nutrition and housing and generally lacking in a healthy constitution. Here came a crisis in British masculinity of John Bull full of pluck and vigor as someone who rather turned out to be a wizened and scrawny runt. The mirage of British invincibility was hanged by a thread until the breakthroughs at Maith King and Lady Smith in 1900 witnessed an outpouring of jingoistic fanfare providing not only military relief on the battlefield abroad but also psychological reprieve back here in Britain at home. In many ways the bull war was or is what these days we would call a kind of proxy war between great great greater powers in this case Germany and Great Britain. If larger conflict indeed loomed the question was was Britain prepared for it the specter of a rising Germany haunted the corridors of power in Britain with some talking of imminent invasion even the so-called antagonism between Britain and Germany only served to heighten tension and fear but the Edwardian Baroque was more than a mere sort of front in the sense that it was seen to embody an essence of Anglo-Britishness. It was an architecture that was understood as signaling a kind of vigor that was sober measured and sensible therefore representing a form of sort of controlled assertiveness. As Reginald Blumfield one of the leading advocates of the movement once remarked and he said that you know form-making designing of details planning and buildings were all important for the architect but and I quote architecture itself is something very much greater something beyond all this. Now these were traits there's some of these things I'm describing to you here about this architecture these were traits according to some of these advocates of this movement who perfected Renaissance architecture the likes of Inigay Jones, Christopher Rand, Hawkes, Morvanne were and so on. These were apparently the true were apparently true English gentlemen, patriots and their architecture was an inflection of this identity and the civilization that it stood for. This was understood as qualitatively different to the architecture and people of other nations and cultures which were by and large perceived as either culturally stunted or effeminate in some way. So here both gender and race were sort of thrown into the mix around discussions of this kind of architecture. The Edwardian Baroque was not just any kind of architecture or any kind of classicism but a gentlemanly Anglo-Saxon type of classicism and that was important for these architects to suggest to their audiences. Even where other national idioms were drawn upon be they French or Italian or German it was the underlying composition the so-called grand mannerism of British architecture that was seen to shine through. So again it's this kind of thing that Blomfield which I mentioned just earlier just just now when he said that architecture quote unquote was something much greater something beyond and outside of all those finicky things to do with design and data he's really talking about this kind of these kind of underlying sensibilities. I'll just give you a flavor of what he meant by that. I'll turn to a passage from a lecture by John McCain Bryden another of the key advocates of the revival of Renaissance architecture as it was referred to at the time. Here's a quote from this lecture by Bryden I think it's worth quoting in full because it really does capture I think the essence of what this architecture was seen to be about. So he says here the 17th century was now drawing to a close it had been a wonderful century. The country had made immense advances in all that makes for the greatness of a nation. It was no longer a question of England and Scotland but of Great Britain. The East India Company had been incorporated and made great progress in the formation of what ultimately became our empire in the East. England's colonial empire had been founded by the settlements in the Carolinas and the New England States. The beginning of that greater Britain which has come to be such a factor in the civilization of the world. In literature we have the immortals Milton and Bunyan and Dryden in science the mighty Newton and Harvey and Flamsted the founding of the Royal Society and the Royal Observatory and everywhere and enlarged and increased commerce through 60 years of it all Wren worked away at his architecture. With the death of Wren may be said to have closed the early English Renaissance which had lasted about 100 years. It had now become firmly established as the national style the vernacular of the country. Such classic as this could never be found anywhere but in England. We must recognize that we are here in the presence of an English classical style as truly the embodiment of the civilization and the life of the people. A living working architectural reality as much a part of England as its literature or its great school of painting. The nearest to us in time and in similitude of requirements. A great mind of artistic wealth open to all who have eyes to see hearts to appreciate and understanding to apply to the necessities of our day end quote. So the second thing here is that issues of identity were as you can see front and center in the revival of English Renaissance architecture or what we now call Edwardian Baroque and that the discourse around notions of race and cultural agenda was in so many ways characteristic of its own self perception. Importantly this sat within and spoke to the wider new imperialist agenda of British commercial and political rejuvenation. No doubt the intentions of architects to express something about Britain's greatness and identity commercially and politically was genuine enough just that at the back of it lurking in the psychic shadows as it were of the national conscience everyone kind of knew that all was not well. The environment was threatening the edifice fragile. This is I think what makes Edwardian Baroque architecture fascinating actually. It is as Blumfield had said this something very much greater and beyond the art of architecture itself. Now don't get me wrong. I think the architecture too is interesting and beautiful in some respects. I could talk a lot about the ins and outs of the architecture but I think it's the ideas behind this kind of architecture that make it both captivating and topical I think. So just come back to the book. So in the book I essentially trace this sort of underlying angst through various scenarios concerning the application of this architecture both in Britain and its colonies. You know and sort of engaging with this idea as part of the book says this idea of building a greater Britain right. Engaging themes such as governance including political ideology, the constitution and rule of law, memory and memorialization, the economy including its imperial extension and technological innovation encompassing communication and transportation. Infusing each of these categories is the ever present leaven of social and cultural identity nation and empire. So back to this idea of the preface of the book that I mentioned at the very beginning of this talk and why this architecture may be seen to matter. Now it's sometimes said that to draw parallels between different periods and history is folly. Despite whatever similarities there may appear to be the fundamental contextual differences present too great an interpretive divide to bridge in any easy or meaningful way. The challenges thrown up by such a divide are of course greater the longer the two periods are separated in time but it's a natural human instinct I would suggest to draw such parallels as frivolous as they and sometimes be. They help us make sense however tenuously of our own times and to place events in the long view. Perhaps there's nothing else they encourage us not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Now although clearly problematic historiographically they can often do serve all sorts of purposes from the personal to the political. In this sense they have a certain rhetorical power. Moreover in our current age of presentism and rampant identity politics they are often marshaled in an effort to make history relevant. Now when I set out to undertake this study which is really quite some time ago it's now bordering on 20 years or more. It was far from my intention to draw any kind of contemporary comparison let alone to make history relevant and indeed that's not really the purpose of the book even now. But as research on the project unfolded and indeed accelerated in the years prior to publication the wider geopolitical context changed before my very eyes changed before all of our eyes so much so that it became almost impossible to ignore the many uncanny parallels between the language that characterized debate during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods and that of our own time. This was especially the case with respect to the new imperialism and the contemporary political scene both in Britain and in the wider world. As I delve deeper into the primary sources and contemporary literature what struck me was a form of speech predicated on a deep-seated anxiety if not confusion over Britain's place in the world. This included endless ruminations over what its influence was and ought to be and how best to achieve continued supremacy whether it be economic, cultural or both. The idea that Britain and the British were a kind of unique breed with special qualities including a genius for managing affairs and people as well as facilitating trade was prevalent. When one throws in the Irish home rule debate the cultural theories concerning Anglo-Saxondom especially the idea of kinship between Britain and United States then the language and strategies marshaled in aid of Brexit for example suddenly seemed if not hackney then at least well worn. As I listened to and read debates and discussions in the media day after day, month after month over what Brexit meant and how it was going to transform the United Kingdom's fortunes the echoes of a previous era really did reverberate persistently in my ears. The attempt by some to draw on historic Commonwealth connections as justification for Brexit a kind of empire 2.0 as it was quickly parodied was but one very example of this kind of thing. Now I should say that as an Australian living in Scotland I have to say I had no particular interest in Brexit to be honest as I might say I had no horse in that race or dog in that fight as it were either way the result for me at least was the same. I didn't really see myself as British or European let alone Scottish despite my comparatively ancient Scottish ancestry and to this day I still always do travel with my Australian passport I don't have a British passport so now being in the other queue at airports there's so many complained about and bizarrely didn't expect somehow is something I'm very well used to. So this afforded me I think a certain degree of let's say sentimental detachment which in turn allowed me to be something of a sort of dispassionate observer. In other words I could see and appreciate both sides of this argument of this debate but as I watched that debate unfold following sometimes cringing at the various tactics put forward I was reminded that in certain fundamental ways British attitudes had not changed all that much in more than a hundred years. It seemed to me that whether recalling Disraelian, Rosbarian, Churchillian or later there I say Johnsonian notions of British pride and pluck a distinct width of self-righteous swagger mingled with a perceptible if not predictable aroma of xenophobic suspicion has always failed the air of British cultural and political debate which kind of this image is from the early 20th century but this kind of excitement is something that kind of I was kind of reminded of this kind of thing around the sort of fanfare and angst regarding Brexit. It's a paper one example. Now as I mentioned among the biggest problems facing Edwardian Britons was the geopolitical tensions caused by great power rivalry. Having lost its perch atop the summit of civilized industrial nations by the 1870s, Britain struggled in fact to recalibrate its relationship with the rising powers of an expanding Russia, a post civil war United States and a newly unified Germany. The ultimate outcome of these tensions would be the devastation of the First World War. All the while further east and ambitious and belligerent Japan was fast increasing both its territory and its military capacity threatening British interests in the Asia Pacific. Again these events are not so different from the predicaments we face today only with a new constellation of great powers strutting across the world stage this time played out in a contest between the democratic alliance of the United States Europe and their partners including NATO and the authoritarian axis of Russia China and Iran. How it will end this time nobody knows but with nuclear weapons in abundance the stakes could hardly be higher. Therefore looking through the research material of this bygone era of the Edwardian times I couldn't help but see something of the wider concerns embedded in these tensions reflected straight back at me. Just as colonials in places like Australia and New Zealand worried about Asian invasion what was otherwise referred to at the time in shorthand as a yellow peril. Today we hear about fears of Chinese and Russian neo imperialism as resource security ever growing national pride and paranoid geopolitical strategizing provide a pretext to financial coercion media propaganda wars political interference and even full-scale invasion. All consequences one might say of this kind of new era of post-truth that we sort of live in today. Now I'm not saying that these threats aren't real because they are it's just that they have more than a kind of minor echo about them when looking back at the Edwardian period. So now that Britain is alone in these choppy waters with no empire to lean on and facing its own internal divisions the dilemma seems heightened to me. Although geopolitical strategizing is characteristic of most if not all periods in history one senses that tensions are now peaking in a way that if comparison were to be made is perhaps more similar in some respects to the late Victorian and Edwardian periods than in any time since including in the lead up to the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War enhanced by the penetrative and reverberant capacities of digital technology and here I'm thinking of social media and the like the diplomacy quote-unquote of competitive moral virtue and military sabre rattling is getting a new lease of life. Again there is something unnervingly familiar about all of this even if the these specific circumstances are different. If this were not enough the late Victorian and Edwardian periods also witnessed a race for the development of and control over communications technology somewhat reminiscent of the contest over digital technologies we are currently experiencing and this is one of the major things that I tackle in the book. Now this concerned of course back then telegraph technology and the laying of submarine cable infrastructure in particular. By the 1880s Britain had a sizable command over world communications in this regard but would go on to create as you can see here its own all red line spanning the globe passing only through British controlled territory and protected waters in order to obtain a totally secure closed circuit. As tension between the Great Powers escalated anxiety over communication security likewise increased reaching fever pitch by the end of the century that is the end of the 19th century. Once more it is possible to see clear parallels here between national security interests and the installation of fifth generation of 5G telecommunications infrastructure in our own time. The similarity consists primarily of who owns installs operates and therefore regulates and potentially manipulates such technology. However now it is China in the driving seat with the upper hand in terms of technology transfer leaving Western democracies to ponder how to plug the apparent security deficit. Moreover we hear of Russian submarines patrolling the North Sea and there were reports of this only the other day and again in an effort among other things to identify and map undersea telecommunications infrastructure in order to sabotage it in the event of conflict just as the Royal Navy had done with respect to German telecommunication cables in the early 20th century. So there's precedent for this. Now this tension has taken on its own 21st century aspect via extension into space where future battles may be determined by who can knock out enemy satellite installations the fastest. Now how any of this if at all feeds into current architectural discourse is yet to be determined and there's a question I think for a future generation of historians to consider. These days such anxieties it seems to me overridden and dominated by those concerning climate change which has had a very palpable impact on architectural design especially within the last decade and in schools of architecture as the climate emergency has been ramped up in our collective conscience. Other issues around contemporary identity politics which again has resonances with the past only with regard to different sets of registers I think this time round but what's clear as my book demonstrates is that such concerns did have an appreciable impact on architecture in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Indeed it may be more accurate to say that architecture enjoyed something of a kind of co-productive relationship with such concerns or to put this another way some of British architecture's theoretical ambitions were coterminous with concerns of this nature. Now I'm not invoking these parallels as a means of justifying the study in any way but merely to highlight the seemingly enduring power of architecture to speak to us through time in strange and unexpected ways. The architectural historian Siegfried Gideon once said that I quote the backward look transforms its object and that history cannot therefore be touched without changing it end quote I think that's true but sometimes the past reaches out and touches us by surprise as if guiding us to ponder afresh the dilemmas of our own age providing something of a prism through which they are projected as a kind of morbid refraction. Many years have elapsed since this architectural phenomenon that is the Edwardian Baroque was studied in any serious or systematic way when as I mentioned earlier Alistair Service produced his spate of publications on the topic in the 1970s. The conditions are now right for its reappraisal both in part and in full. In this sense Edwardian Baroque architecture reverberates with us in a different way now I think even from what it might have 10 years ago somehow it speaks to us again in a way that our ears were not previously attuned or well adjusted to here perhaps it has a new kind of immediacy I feel. Again it's this the sensing of these kind of strange historical parallels and resonances that makes Edwardian Baroque architecture a particularly rich and interesting subject of study. Long ignored in the mainstream of architectural history the Edwardian Baroque now has a new and somewhat irresistible claim upon our attention seems to me thank you and thank Alex for this really really rich talk and a lot of things to think about and as you all are gathering all those thoughts and all those questions I thought I would just kind of pick things off. I've written down a lot of notes that probably don't make much sense to me anymore but there were just a lot of things going through my head as you were speaking about all this and I have heard you talk about this book before but this was very different and I really appreciated the the different things that were coming out from this and I was really struck by you talked about you know the glories of world dominance even though they were waning at that point when Edwardian Baroque emerged and also you talked about you know that it signaled vigor and controlled assertiveness and gentlemanly classicism but also you know it's showing insecurity perhaps and I found that very interesting that this idea of the Baroque at least by the you know the mid 18th century is considered excessive the excesses of the Baroque and the kind of you know fantastical you know it's pushing pushing the boundaries of what is appropriate and then to at the turn of the 20th century to consider that those excesses as a positive and I'm not really sure what my question is goodness but this idea that something that had been seen as a negative now when we're trying to show that our empire is doing really well and everything's great is to harness something that had been considered a negative and now saying look at the excess we have and the cornucopia and the and I'm curious at what stage in your research on this did that connection of insecurity and let's project something kind of come out well it's interesting isn't it how styles periods movements of architecture have no fixed meaning and the history is going to in fact be rewritten and are often rewritten according to the needs of a given society so that quote I gave you from John Bryden is an attempt to extract something out of the original Baroque and reframe it and put it in this political context as well so that's one thing these these architects these I won't say theorists there were some some of them like Bloomfield and Bryden and others who wrote about this architecture tried to explain what it was all about so they I think that for them the Baroque was something which acted to a certain kind of English identity so someone like Herbert Baker for instance talked a lot about this how you saw Ren as this great English gentlemanly kind of architect someone who although his architecture had sort of Baroque flourishes was undergirded with a certain kind of rational sober sensible geometry the all these characteristics of the architecture somehow mapped on to character traits of of of the Englishman and British paper right so they're trying to map and devise these symmetries so whilst all the time in the background it was quite clear that Britain was it's well said this was under threat and everyone here everyone knew this this is why I say that architects don't live an existence of sort of vacuum that people like all of us they read the newspapers they understand what's going on so all this stuff is percolating through their minds and it's coming out in various ways through this architecture so I gave that one quote but there were dozens and dozens of them like that which again speak to these kind of anxieties I think about what British architecture should be because this was also the time where architects like the Brydens like the Bloomfields and Aston webs and so on felt that British architecture had lost its way so by the time you get to the 1880s and think well what is British art what's it doing was it seems to be eclectic beyond recognition it needs to get a grip and start to form a coherent image of what Britain and its architecture should be I think that's what really sort of under underlies all of this just about identity I think in many ways but I also love the idea of getting a grip is always is interpreted so differently at different points in time you know in the early 20 or the late 19th century that's interpreted one way and in the 18 or 19th century completely different way of getting a grip and reacting against what has been going on I have plenty more questions but does anybody else want to jump in at this point yeah yes I'm for the excellent lecture and I just kind of want to jump off from Rebecca there and continue this question about the Baroque because as you showed with that incredible little kind of quote from builder Ran was framed as a Renaissance architect as a classicist and the Baroque during this period was sort of term of abuse um you know for highly theatrical sense orientated Southern European architecture of Spain and Italy it's not really until Sackville sit well with Southern Baroque art you know sort of begins to reclaim this style so I'm sort of curious one who term who coins the term Edwardian Baroque and two what kind of explanatory power does this name this identification give us the calling it Edwardian accessism for instance doesn't um yes that's interesting so what I should say to start with is that this term Edwardian Baroque is a modern art history term it wasn't used by the architects at the time they referred to this architecture as English Renaissance or Renaissance revival so they saw the likes of people from many gay Jones onwards through the middle of the 18th century as Renaissance architects um so that's how they saw it and of course they did actually write a bit about European architects of the what became known as the Baroque period the Bernini's of this world and so on and Boromini's and they spoke about them in sort of derogatory terms as I use the term in the lecture effeminate they describe these architects and their architecture as effeminate in some way therefore un English unmanly un masculine etc etc where does it come in when does the Edwardian Baroque as a term appear well that's later in the 1930s and 40s when professional art history starts to sort of take off in Britain when you had German scholars especially coming over to Britain in the 30s people like Vickova who were studying the Baroque and other English historians picked up on these Baroque studies and said well hey we've got actually our own Baroque quote unquote architects really written the Rens and the Hawkes and Laws and Vambers and so on so let's call them um English Baroque um and then by the time we get to the 60s and 70s there are books being written our studies being undertaken on in quote unquote English Baroque architects so the terminology had changed quite a bit by then and so this guy Alice the Service who I mentioned who wrote about this architecture in the 1970s he basically made the term Edwardian Baroque popular others had kind of mentioned passionate mentioned English what he called I think English 19th century Baroque always at least these these terms are floating around but service really solidified this term Edwardian Baroque and I think it's what's been used ever since I didn't think I did contemplate briefly whether I should jettison this term for something different but I thought actually it does has a certain efficacy right and it makes sense um and it's also connects it directly back to um the as it were original Baroque period of centuries previous thank you again lots of thoughts percolating but I wanted I was thinking about um contested heritage and particularly debates around sculpture and public monuments and statuary often sit outside buildings such as you know governments um government buildings etc and and that's obviously been a topic of great debate across the world in particularly in the last few years but I was wondering whether architecture has been in the same cross currents and you showed the image of the building in Pretoria and that these these buildings still often operate as seats of power and government and yeah part of kind of daily contemporary life and don't seem to have been caught in the same kind of let's just use the culture wars terminology for ease and so what why is it that um this which is a you know a contested heritage that you say it's about identity and global politics why why is it or is it that architecture is immune and yet sculpture perhaps maybe because of its presentational qualities sort of is bearing the focus of of of those debates yes interesting thing to ponder I mean I think my instinct is to say that it's mostly a practical matter buildings are much harder to deal with than statues or paintings and things like that um they a lot of these buildings I showed on the screen still exist are still being used in various ways in the countries that they exist in um they've been repurposed in various ways but they still exist and I've heard of no attempt to knock them down or you know sort of um refurbish them beyond recognition anything like that I think that people have to accept that perhaps there isn't there is this idea that buildings have no like I said before and my answer to Rebecca's question they have no fixed meaning right they their purposes and meanings can change with the people use and occupy them the classic example that would be New Delhi has there ever been a greater symbol of British imperial power than that urban setting I don't think so yet it wasn't demolished it was simply taken over and repurposed and became the infrastructure for the new independent Indian state sure some of these symbols that were easily movable were taken away like statues of royalty and so on but the buildings remained and they were actually are magnificent buildings they kept and simply repurposed and became part of a new story a new narrative about um the new Indian nation going forward so I think buildings are more difficult to deal with on the one hand but also they offer this ability for repurposing that perhaps it's more difficult for statues I mean statues and paintings can be I mean my views you don't have to tear them down you can you can explain and you put some I'm of the school of retain and explain so you can do certain things with them without having to destroy them but buildings are of another order I think which is difficult to deal with so I know we have some questions coming in online but I wanted to jump on that in terms of structurally I imagine that Edwardian Baroque architecture is quite different from early you know 18th century architecture I'm guessing there's iron involved and things like that how does that work in terms of conservation do these buildings stand up the same way um yeah are there issues of of different cores to them um I think main the one all the ones I've shown here were pretty well built when all the I've been to see all of these buildings and they have held up extremely well they were well put together um they were there was use of modern materials so steel frame concrete and so on so that was how they look um as it were historic on the exterior they were quite modern structures and had lots of modern technology in them and this is one of the um the sort of means by which the architects celebrated them let's just say that these are great modern buildings um what's interesting is that around the same time the early 20th century we started to see the beginnings of of modernism with a capital M as a style um but these buildings were as modern technically speaking as many of those modern buildings were aesthetically run so they and if you if you go to Whitehall now you'll you'll have seen that the old war office has just been completely renovated and turned into a five-star hotel and um I didn't have to rebuild it they basically just um refurbished the interior and exterior and this guy the exterior been replaced a little bit it's from what I understand I didn't have any major structural issues that needed to be dealt with we had a question we have a question online from Wilson Yao who asks what were the circumstances or patterns of Edwardian Baroque being willingly embraced by or forced upon the white colonies and the rest of the British Empire um well I wouldn't say that it was forced on them because what was happening at this time is that there was a lot of movement of architects and architectural expertise around the British world architects as well as other professionals were quite mobile um so some of these buildings I showed here were in fact designed by British architects were immigrated to Australia or New Zealand or maybe Canada um and began working either in departments of public works or setting up private practice because they were trained in Britain they they took those ideas with them the most contemporary um fashionable ideas and architectural with them to these places and of course these governments wanted more than up-to-date buildings so if you look at the what's written in the press about these buildings when they're being designed and built they often hinge on this idea of um are we getting a good modern up-to-date building as we might expect that home quite a bit in Britain so concerned about they weren't getting second-rate buildings which is why they were keen to employ these British architects with the latest knowledge but of course you also have to remember that there was um a sort of ecology of professional uh literature at this time that was circulating around the British Empire so with you know the trade journals with the um professional journals and so on ideas were moving quite easily and freely between Britain and the colonies um so although some of these ideas might have taken a few years to catch on eventually they did and so those buildings I showed in Derven for instance of Brisbane or New Zealand were pretty much contemporary with with these buildings in Britain. Yes Neil Jackson. Well thank you Alex that really was very interesting and such a nicely presented visual um sequence of images I've been trying to arrange my thoughts and I don't know if I can really come up with a question but it's maybe more of an observation which I was trying to uh try to end with a question mark. You um were looking at the pictures I think you were suggesting that this type of architecture started in the 1880s I can't remember what that particular building was 1888 or something um and it was in 1882 that the law courts on the strand in London were finally opened which of course is a building in the Gothic tradition and I think in the back over 19th century architecture there are very very few buildings in England which I would say were successful and which were in the big public buildings I should say which were successful and in the the Gothic style the House of Parliament are the biggest but that has puging remarked for us just to the details on a classical body so we can exclude that but beyond that there's very very few and when they did in the later part of the century the third quarter or so start to move into um big public buildings they tended to veer slightly off a pure Gothic line such as at the Natural History Museum and adopt something more Romanesque or 15-20 years later I'm thinking now of the Roman Catholic Cathedral by Bentley which again is Miss Antein and my feeling is that it's very much the revival of the Anglican church and the um the opportunity for Roman Catholic churches to be built which really drove mid-19th century architecture as a in terms of architectural expression and so as a sort of ecclesiological vehicle and here I'm pushing aside all those non-conformist buildings which um were very much in the um classical style but with the buildings you're showing we're changing gear and we're not looking at ecclesiastical buildings we're looking at public buildings we're looking at town halls and libraries and art galleries and railway stations and all that sort of stuff and it seems to me that once religion in a sense had been satisfied through architecture then the architects or public or financiers whoever the government turned to something else and this is a consolidation of what is British perhaps through this remarkable collection of very large and very fine buildings that's not really a question it's a sort of a thought about what you're saying but would you agree with this that 19th century was driven by ecclesiastical architecture and the interest in ecclesiology and the Anglingon revival and all that and by 1880 we have this sort of tremulous area which is described now as Queen Anne revival which is neither one thing nor the other but quite pretty and then there's a a move into gear once more with people like Thomas Graham Jackson and the examination schools in Oxford and we start to you know these are people trained in the Gothic tradition are we starting out to see these great classical monuments coming out I think there's a question in there at the end yeah I think I mean you know I think it's true to say that particularly through the middle decades of the 19th century Gothic was in the ascendancy for sure and that was mainly as you say through the ecclesiological revival which was very very powerful I think emotional as well as intellectually impact on a generation of British architects like the George Edmund streets and Butterfields and these kind of people and a bit later Alfred Waterhouse and this filtered through into his secular buildings as well so if we were to point to some grand public buildings in the Gothic style we might point to in fact regional or provincial town halls which did more of that kind of thing than in the metropolis itself but these things kind of ebb and flow so by the time we get to the 1870s and 80s the Gothic revival is still there it's still being used for ecclesiastical buildings but its star is beginning to wane a bit and the reputation of Britain's classical architects begins to start rising again we have this so-called cult of Wren coming up through the 1880s and 90s and suddenly at the younger generation of architects at that point became interested in that heritage that tradition as opposed to the Gothic but at the same time they tried to peg it to indigenous origins right just like the Gothic in the mid 19th century tried to ground itself in indigenous mythology so to where these architects but with classical architecture which is really a foreign import but as you saw from that quote by Brydon he would claim that in the hands of these great Renaissance masters it had been vernacularized and become a British form of classicism so in both these cases I think again identity is at play there somewhere and they kind of ebb and flow so so at this point in time tendency I think especially with big public buildings that's my sense anyway all right thanks for your talk um yeah my question sort of um thank you to the last one actually um I think the when we're talking about the concept of Baroque is quite a as I say quite a paradoxical one because um you know Wren was drawing on these um like I would say French mainly French and things at the time and then a few decades later there would be a whole shift towards palladiumism and call for like a more clean custom in in Britain and I think when we're talking about this period um what struck me when reading about it is that a lot of um architects when they um they all had overwhelming sort of art art and craft and um gothic training but they were practicing classicism um later in their careers and I was just wondering were there sort of like a did you come across any sort of debate about what Englishness actually is in this period because you have one hand you know um when gothic revival was um this sort of official style in the Victorian period people were also calling it very English you know looking at sort of medieval gothic architecture of course um and were there sort of an attempt to combine vernacular architecture with the classicism in this period did you come across any example as well um like well there's two parts though first is um this issue of what's an Englishman right um which again is not a fixed um uh concept so it's different in the night 19th mid 19th century to the latter part of an Edwardian periods I mean lots of people were talking in various other contexts about what constituted English the Englishness but in terms of architecture itself within that domain there were certain architects which would go on about this the classic example would be Herbert Baker he was always going on about what's an Englishman what's an English architecture how do these two things intersect and overlap with each other how can we identify an English architecture based on certain cultural traits and characteristics um he wrote a few essays on this kind of thing so people were definitely thinking about it um he would point to things like some of the terms I used here like us that um English so-called English Baroque was of a different order to continental Baroque he would say it was more staid more circular more rational etc etc and these were considered to be also coincidentally surprisingly um character traits of of you know the good old Englishmen so to speak um so they're trying to do that kind of thing arts and crafts well yes it's true to say some of these mean Baker again is a classic example it's someone who is an amateur of the arts and crafts someone who's trained it trained in that tradition someone who designed many houses in South Africa that are arts and crafts and really find specimens of arts and crafts and architecture yet went on to design something like the union buildings in Pretoria um and I think both in that building and in the Bank of England building and there are straight inklings of certain arts and crafts sensibility which creep into it at certain points through the use of materials in certain ways it's a bit more suppressed obviously because the grand manners of the classicism must speak come through and speak the loudest but there in the details and some of the interior decor the arts and crafts is still prevalent so there is something of a overlap between these things and again Baker would say that the arts and crafts is also a kind of English tradition which he wanted to incorporate into his architecture yeah I just think that's interesting the idea of whether they're I assume there are parallels throughout history of how you describe a proper English gentleman or an Englishman and proper architecture I imagine they're probably a lot of the same words are used for both um anyone else with a meal sorry sorry I don't want to dominate but it occurs to me um if we're talking about the architecture of empire which I think you're doing that buildings just like this existed in their scores um if not their hundreds in Japan in the early part of the 20th century um during the Meiji era up to 1912 and the Taisho era era after that and it was very much this sort of architecture that uh Japan was using to demonstrate its westernization and also to um show its its power and wealth when it started to create its empire so we get them across the Japanese islands and also in what is now Korea and bits of China so this was seen as an architecture of um empire by other empires yeah I think that's very interesting but especially the Japanese example because of course at this point in time Japan was also as you say its own um empire of the rising sun and you know where that led but um they were keen to um show how they were going through processes of modern modernization and it's interesting they settled on this kind of architecture or architecture like it uh to express that um uh that movement I think there's a bunch I know there's people that people have written on on that kind of architecture in Japan um and around that guy is it just Joseph Condor or is that his name the guy who was one of the leading educators and practitioners of young Japanese architects in this kind of architecture but it would be interesting to see or to try and understand how um how these young architects were looking back to Britain in particular into a certain kind of architecture or to emulate a certain kind of architecture in the context of these um uh political and economic um happening so I don't I'm not I'm not sure I've come across any scholarship which looks at the relationship between these two things only work that kind of talks about those buildings uh in the context of Japan or say in Shanghai or wherever I'll say they've been um joining the dots a bit further afield would be I think a really useful exercise actually so I'm realizing that we have we've been talking for quite a while um and I know that our online audience unfortunately cannot join us for the next stage of this evening um but uh for those of you who are here we can continue this conversation in the ante room um next door where there are drinks um but uh before we do that I would like I would hope everyone would join me in um thanking Professor Alex Brumner again for this really you know inspiring um reflection on this period of architectural history