Power and Virtue: Architecture and Intellectual Change in England 1660û1730

by Li; Shiqiao

• ISBN13: 9780415374248
• ISBN10: 0415374243
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-12-19
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This is the first full-length study on the connections between English architecture and intellectual change between 1660 and 1730. As new ideas developed in post-Restoration England across the realms of politics, culture, academia and morality, so too did architectural expression of these ideas.Power and Virtuearticulately engages English architecture with notions of power and virtue in terms of empirical knowledge on the one hand and humanism and virtuosi on the other. Aimed at an academic readership in history and theory of architecture and the history of English architecture, this unique study will also interest those studying the ideas of material culture.

Author Biography

Li Shiqiao is Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Table of Contents

Illustration credits	p. vii
Acknowledgements	p. viii
Introduction	p. 1
Experimental knowledge and the use of architecture	p. 15
Knowledge for power	p. 18
'Let use be preferred before uniformity'	p. 31
Desiring to be modern	p. 45
The political use of architecture: magnificence, divine mysteries and delight	p. 55
Magnificence: Wren and the English court	p. 60
Divine mysteries set in brick and stone	p. 66
Architectural delight and strangeness in the proportion	p. 75
The sense prior to other senses	p. 83
Platonism in England	p. 84
Virtue, moral sense and taste	p. 99
Faith in an unsurpassable past	p. 112
The virtuoso as the second maker	p. 122
Shaftesbury's 'science of design'	p. 123
Closterman, Matteis and Gribelin	p. 133
Gardens and architecture	p. 147
Reconstituting taste in architecture	p. 157
The virtuosi	p. 160
Defining taste through critique	p. 173
Notes	p. 193
Bibliography	p. 230
Index	p. 242
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