Abstract:
The history of Gothic Revival architecture has rarely been interpreted through an environmental lens. Although scholars have considered the spatial conditions concerning adaptation and control, both in Europe and the wider world, this analysis has not extended to consideration of how the formation of neo-gothic architecture itself, both theoretically and materially, may be understood in the context of the Anthropocene. Yet a number of the Victorian Gothic Revival’s leading practitioners and critics were aware of the movement’s peculiar modernity in this regard, linked as it was to industrialisation and environmental degradation.
Modern Gothic was in part a response to what was perceived as anthropogenically induced climate change, and the social upheavals that came with it. Indeed, some of the movement’s theoretical registers, including developments in geological science, were deeply entrenched in both local and imperial extractive economies, especially the mining of coal as the foundational energy source behind the awesome power of mechanical rotary force. Even the evolutionary understanding of botany, which Ruskin had linked so poignantly with Gothic architecture, echoed with urgency through the ages in the ‘carboniferous’ compaction of fossilised prehistoric plant matter, situating the perceived botanic integrity of the Gothic in a tragic chronology that would result in its industrial-scale combustion.
In this lecture Alex will explore how we might interpret the modern Gothic Revival as a unique outcome not merely of industrialisation but of the carbon-based economy that drove it, suggesting an ecocritical historiography that foregrounds its environmental allusions and discontents.
Speaker Bio:
Alex Bremner is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, c.1840-1870 (2013) and Building Greater Britain: Architecture, Imperialism, and the Edwardian Baroque Revival, c.1885-1920 (2022). He is currently completing a new history of Victorian architecture for Oxford University Press.
Recording:
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