This is an online only event.
Free
Abstract:
Since the Renaissance, architectural writers have often conceived the subject in terms of the design and the designer - prioritising them over the social context, the materiality of buildings, the methods of construction employed and their life in use, which usually involves physical alteration. Architectural history has normally been written primarily in terms of single-period buildings that embody a unified design.
In Medieval culture, however, different views seem to have obtained. Many medieval buildings, including most of our cathedrals and many castles, churches and houses evolved over centuries, and this development can be read in their fabric. The masons and carpenters who built them, and society at large, evidently had a capacity for understanding buildings in a quasi-organic way as things which change over time and express this development, inside and out. Yet such attitudes sat alongside quite different approaches; Perpendicular churches often impress us by their unity and consistency of design. However, we have no documentary evidence for how contemporary society thought about these matters at all - only the buildings. Medieval buildings may seem familiar, but they embody ideas which architectural history has rarely engaged with, detained as it has been by the post-Renaissance conception of architecture as disegno.
Speaker Bio:
Steven Brindle has worked for English Heritage for 35 years as a historian and an Inspector of Ancient Monuments. His publications include Brunel, the Man who Built the World (2005), Windsor Castle, a Thousand Years of a Royal Palace (as editor, 2018), and Architecture in Britain and Ireland 1530-1830 (2023), joint winner of the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion for 2024.
Registration:
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