PS03 Neo-Medievalism Studies: New Directions for Architectural Historians

This paper discusses a form of medievalism in which medieval artefacts and associations played very little role. This was neither the neo-medieval dream-world of chivalry nor the utopia of a revived medieval life-world of piety and restored hierarchy. In fact, far from a backlash against industrialism or its disavowal, in this case ideas and images of the medieval were almost entirely directed by the methods and intellectual constructs of industrialism itself. This was the case, though it has been insufficiently recognised since, with Robert Willis’s nineteenth-century accounts of medieval architecture in which medieval buildings were understood, I will argue, through transposed models of industrial technology. Closely related to the Cambridge scientists William Farish and William Whewell, Willis deployed the methods and forms of drawing, invention, and description that he had developed in this culture, a culture closely familiar with the technological innovations of contemporary industrialists. In Willis’s accounts of medieval buildings, contextual information drawn from the documentary record is kept almost entirely separate from architectural analysis; it is in this latter that the idea of the medieval building as ‘protean mechanism’ (sometimes also called ‘membrology’) is given analytical depth. Several aspects of this approach are focused on in this paper: the use of isometric projections; the idea of the building as kit-of-parts; the deployment of detailed description using specialised vocabularies; and Willis’s invention of the cymagraph to measure medieval mouldings. As an approach that effectively colonised the medieval building so that it embodied instrumental reason, Willis’s medievalism mirrored and was complicit with capitalism’s alienation of labour, as well as with the forms of abstraction required of professionalization. Much of this became deeply lodged in the discipline of architectural history as it emerged in nineteenth-century Britain.

The historical center of Rome was transformed in the first half of the twentieth century. Significant acts of sventrimenti were executed to reveal ancient monuments and introduce new streets, government buildings, and residential blocks. Large swaths of the city’s medieval residential fabric were eliminated, which led to the lacuna that we have today about how people lived and worked in Rome during the Middle Ages. Yet, at the same time, many of these structures were made “more medieval,” leading to the present scholarship’s disinterest in the authenticity of these structures. The head superintendent of monuments for Rome and Lazio during the Fascist period was the Turin native Maria Barosso, a highly regarded artist, archaeologist, and archaeological illustrator. While Barosso’s contribution to the documentation of medieval Rome is relatively unknown today, her work reveals the complex layers of Rome’s architectural and urban palimpsest hiding in plain sight before many of these structures underwent heavy-handed restorations or were eradicated. This paper examines Barosso’s watercolor perspectives of Rome’s demolition, revealing the transformation of the city's center and the loss of Rome’s medieval residential architecture.

In the nineteenth century, the promotion of Christian values became part of British imperial policy and Gothic spires started to appear in the skyline of settlements scattered all around the empire. In the colonies, clergymen of all Christian denominations resolved to build churches recalling the ancient structures of the Middle Ages not only as a matter of fashion, but because the choice of one style over the other signified a belief in a definite body of ideas. The Church of England consistently used the Gothic Revival as a marker of English civilisation, while Roman Catholics held medieval Gothic in high regards given the leading role that the pioneering architect and Catholic convert A. W. N. Pugin had played in its modern revival. As a matter of fact, Catholic authorities never universally recognise the Gothic as the only true Christian style, but, despite this, in the colonies of the British Empire, Catholic bishops erected monumental churches inspired to their European medieval counterparts to rival the architecture created by Anglicans. Among the most spectacular results of this phenomenon in the Asia Pacific region are the cathedrals built in Hong Kong, Yangon, Melbourne and Sydney, where Catholics drew on medieval sources to challenge the Church of England's association between Gothic and Anglicanism. The paper provides an account of the architectural staging and spatial implications of the expansion of Catholicity in the nineteenth century. By exploring the reasons that underlay the exploitation of medieval forms for monumental architecture, it argues that the forceful presence exuding from Gothic forms served multiple purposes. For the Catholics these included the marking of a changed social and economic status and the gain of political and clerical authority within the British colonies of the Asia Pacific region.

The Collegiate Gothic movement in American universities at the turn of the twentieth-century has been long marginalised, dismissed as a curiosity or derided for being derivative. Scholarly interest has increased since the 1980s, but interpretations vary widely, from antimodernism (Lears) and racial Anglo-Saxonism (Lowe), to cloistered community (Turner) and romantic pragmatism (Betsky). More recent accounts have focused on single institutions or individual architects, and what emerges from this body of work is a new sense of the breadth and diversity of the movement, suggesting that wider-ranging comparative studies are needed. This paper aims to make a start in that direction through an analysis of four representative institution/architect pairings, in the process reconsidering the underlying architectural and cultural dimensions of American Collegiate Gothic. The focus will be on Princeton (Ralph Adams Cram), Washington University in St Louis (Cope & Stewardson), the University of Chicago (Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge), and Yale (James Gamble Rogers). In comparing stylistic, typological, and programmatic factors key differences emerge, and yet reactions to these new campus environments were remarkably consistent. In contrast to later dismissal, contemporaries took their praise to the point of ecstatic excess. Invoking Matthew Arnold’s famed ode to Oxford’s dreaming spires, the virtues of Collegiate Gothic were extolled by the critic Montgomery Schuyler and many others, among them students, administrators, and the wider public. Whether motivated by conservative antimodern goals or a progressive outlook, these institutions drew on the distinctive emotional appeal of a distant medieval past, using the imagery of mirage and enchantment as a mediation of present realities. What emerges from this comparison is a complex relationship between the medieval and the modern, as well as wider questions over the American built environment and the perceived conflicts between urban and rural values that were foundational to the country’s cultural narrative.