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Translations from Drawing to Building

Robin Evans

RECEIVED
PRINCEP;R";XI?ERS(TY

OCT 3 1 1997
SCHOM OF ARCHITECTM

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts

5 Paradoses of thc Ordinary L\lol~.\nl Aloct?frvi

35 'l'hc Rights of Retreat and the Rites of Euclusion: Notcs 'fo~z ards the Definition of' IYall
1907 .\rchitc.c ttll-al .\s\oriatioii Pul>licatiol~s, London. ulicl,];lnc.~Er.rr115.

55 Figures, Doors and Passages

All riahts rl.u.nr.d. No p;~rt 01' thi.; Ix)ok may 1)r rcp~)(lucc(l ill any Sorm l)y ; u ~ y rlrctln~lir or ~nrchrll~ical I I W : I I I \ ' i ~ ~ c I ~ ~]>IIOIIM (li~ig 01)>i11q. rvc~~rtlil~y. or i111i)r111,11ion ~IOI.I .~ntl ~ I .~.t.tric\al) \\ithout prrmisrion in \\.ritil~g firon1 1111.~)~~I,Ii.ihcr.
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93 Rookeries and hiodcl Dwellings: English Housing Rcform and the hloralities of Private Space
1 19 Not to be Used for Wrapping Purposes:

Prllrtrtl and I>rrllridin Si~ig,~lx~rc..

A Review of the Exhibition of Peter Eisenman's


Fin d'Ou

'r Hou S

1,il)l.ary of (:1111yrr~r Cnt~losinai~~-Pul)lir ,rtinl~ Data


I<\.~nk. Rohin, 194+ 1!)!13

153 Translations from Drawing to Building 195 The Developed Surface: An Enquiry into the Brief Life of an Eighteenth-Century Drawing Technique

ISBN 0-262-.-~>1)27-S (111): alk. paper)

233 Mies van der Rohe's Paradoxic,alSymmetries


278 Robin Evans: Writings Robin ,lfiddkton
288 Bibliography Richard Dgord 293 Acknowledgements

I . 'Section' of the Great Hall at Syon House,by Robert Adam, 176 1

The Developed Surface


An Enquiry into the Brief Life of an Eighteenth-Century Drawing Technique
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This article is not so much the written exposition of an argument as the development of some ideas by writing them down. Much of the sense of it only emerged in the drafting and redrafting. These few prefatory words are to explain why such an enterprise should have been embarked upon, since it would not necessarily be obvious to anyone why the interiors dealt with, nor the way of drawing them, should warrant attention. English interiors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, although not within the compass of what is usually regarded as properly serious or significant in architecture, are, I believe, capable of providing what a good deal of material within that orbit has not been able to provide: evidence of strong interactions between things visual and things social, even if at what we are prone to consider (perhaps mistakenly) a lower level than the grand questions of architectural theory. This is largely due to the more explicit consciousness among the practitioners concerned that their work was socially and historically specific; that its ultimate justification lay as much within the milieu in which it flourished as in the generalized and unifying principles of a timeless art. It is true that some of the work reviewed is of modest intrinsic interest, satisfying little more than the demands of a prevailing domestic taste. The interiors of Repton, Smith, Landi and Richardson might be seen as elements in a social history, without any great merit attaching to them except as illustrations of some wider tendency or other. This is hardly the case with Roben Adam, and yet Adam, also, has become marginal to a neo-classicism increasingly envisaged in relation to theoretical texts. The quality of Adam's work has to be examined within a very different setting to that of Ledoux, Schinkel or Piranesi. Indeed, the admiration that Piranesi felt for Adam's talent, not entirely reciprocal, and derived from the early period of Adam's career while he was busy recording antiquities, could hardIy, even then, have been based on shared motives. We might say that Piranesi's

work was theoretical and Adam's not. But this seems to devalue Adam's percipience, giving the impression that his architecturewas insufficiently intellectual, merely decorative and opportunistic. Likewise the comparison that would pit Piranesi's imaginary work against Adam's more practical activity, as if practical activity were necessarily an impediment to imagination. So it frequently seems, but only because we expect the imagination to have been given shape elsewhere (otherwise, amorphous and indefinite, what could get in its way?). As often as not, the imaginative in Adam's work arose from consideration of the trifling practicalities that frustrated other architects. This struck me while looking at successive plans by Chambers for Somerset House and by Adam for Harewood; where Chambers, starting with a magnificent Roman palace design, ended up with a far more subdued proposal, Adam, starting with an undistinguished plan, ended up, characteristically, with something much more vivid. I do not put this obselvation forward as a blanket justification of atheoretical postures among architects (far from it), but it does suggest that architecture's productive engagements are not always between explicit theory and form. It may be better to say that Piranesi's work, in all its visibility, was enmeshed in a nexus within which his polemical writing was also prominent; while Adam's, in all its visibility, was enmeshed in a nexus within which the social activities and proclivities of his clients were prominent. These are imperfect and clumsy formulations, but at least they avoid the pre-emptive degrading of visible things not already under the protecting aegis of theory, or whose forms are not clearly conceived independent of the client relation. Adam is, after all, very susceptible to the insult thrown by the English social historian E. F? Thompson at Colen Campbell, and through him at all successful eighteenth-century British architects: obsequiousness - Thompson uses the word toady. I have attempted, then, to displace the customary foci of interest, considering the interiors of the late eighteenth and early

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nineteenth centuries neither as objects of connoisseurship, nor as adumbrations of architectural theory, nor as moral counters for or against an ingratiating profession, but as visible entities within a particular area of human affairs. And within this area of human affairs they are meant to retain their visibility, not lose it. This evasive tactic of mine, trying to write a piece that was neither this, nor that, nor the other, in an effort to conserve a property so easily lost in passage from buildings to words, would have floundered completely were it not for the substitution of an alternative focus: the drawing technique. The re-focusing that this entailed may have made it possible for me (for the first time, I think, with any success at all) to treat the formal, spatial and visible on the one hand, and the social on the other, as involved in exchanges that do not atail the destruction or domination of the one 6y the othtx For is it not the case that the social is normally construed as a blinding affair which does not so much include the visual as digest it, squeezing out from its visibility the social significance that only then may be absorbed into the verbal metabolism of an existing body of knowledge concerning society? Beneath the allegorical frontispiece to Thomas Sheraton's Cabinet Maker and Upholsterer's Drawing Book, published in 1793, was the following inscription: 'Time alters fashions and frequently obliterates the works of art and ingenuity, but that which is formed in geometry and real science will remain unalterable.' This was an extraordinary sentiment to express in a book on household furniture, a commodity subject to relatively rapid obsolescence. What Sheraton was doing was shifting emphasis from the furniture itself, subject to the vagaries of taste, to the techniques of representing it, which he thought were not. As in architecture, so in furniture design: drawing was to be regarded as fundamental. The 'geometry and real science' to which the motto referred was the geometry required for drawing: that is what Sheraton's book was about. It contained instructions for the making of perspective and orthographic

projections of pieces of furniture drawn individually or grouped in situ within an architectural interior. It is ironic then, to say the least, that one of the architectural drawing techniques described by Sheraton was already, at the time of his book's publication, in mortal decline (Fig 2). Moreover, it was furniture makers like Sheraton himself who were inadvertently helping to force this sort of drawing into oblivion. In what follows it will be suggested that techniques of representation, far from being of permanent value, are subject to alterations of sense. Architectural drawing affects what might be called the architect's field of visibility. It makes it possible to see some things more clearly by suppressing other things: something gained, something lost. Its power to represent is always partial, always more or less abstract. It never gives, nor can it give, a total picture of a project, so in consequence it tends to provide a range of subject-matter that is made visible in the drawing, as opposed to all the other possible subject-matter that is left out of the drawing or is not so apparent from it. Now it may be that some architects can see beyond this field of visibility provided by their own drawings and it may be that others cannot, or choose not to, see beyond it. But whether it is the direct sponsor of the imaginative effort, as the axonometric has been for certain contemporary designers such as Eisenman, Hejduk and Scolari, or whether it is a counterpoint to the architect's vision - a technical proof of the imagination's plausibility - as orthographic sections seem to have been for some later baroque architects,' we have to understand architectural drawing as something that defines the things it transmits. It is not a neutral vehicle transporting conceptions into objects, but a medium that carries and distributes information in a particular mode. It does not necessarily dominate but always interacts with what it represents. As a formulation, though, this is far too inexact. How and where does this interaction operate? It is not a matter of simple causality.

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2. A plan and section of a drawing room, from Thomas Sheraton, T h e Cab& Maker and U p h o L c I m r ' sDrawing

E d , 1793.

3. Section of York House, Pall Mall, by William Chambers, 1759.

A technique of drawing does not compel designers to do this or that; there are too many ways round it. Its influence, though strong, is too local for long strings of instrumental effects to be hung on it. More likely it is a matter of things belonging in sets, of a type of drawing being conducive to a certain range of taste, lending itself to a certain kind of social practice, a certain arrangement of space, a certain pattern of planning. Such a set of related practices is described in this article, which sets out neither to increase, nor to diminish, the importance of drawing, but only to show it embedded in a nexus of other events. The subject of what follows is, therefore, as much the nexus in which the drawing technique was situated as the drawing itself?

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In the middle years of the eighteenth century a new way of representing interiors was to be found turning up more and more frequently in pattern books and design drawings. In technical terms,

this was not a profound break from earlier methods, just a modification of existing techniques so they could be applied to a new subject-matter: the room. At that time the customary way of showing an interior was to section a building. It was also customary to restore a sense of spatial recession into the resulting flat projected surface by casting shadows. In this kind of drawing the interiors are shown as an accumulation of contiguous spaces, but only one wall of any normal room is shown. A typical architectural representation of a palace, villa or house would involve plans, major elevations and a section. Invariably the exterior would be more fully described than the interior. From the mid-eighteenth century interiors began to be more amply described. Three drawings, all orthographic projections and all, as it happens, from the late 1750s, show three different ways of extending the range of what was represented of interiors. The most accomplished is William Chambers's famous section of a town house for

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4. Section o f the stair hall, Wardour Castle, by James Parrie, 1770-76, drawn by George Byfield.

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Lord Derby in Pall Mall (Fig. 3). Cornforth and Fowler tell us that this was one of the first architectural sections in England to show wall coverings, colour scheme and decor.3The second is a sketch elevation byJames Stuart of part of one wall of the dining room at Kedlestone, which the same authors say is the earliest representation of mobile furniture in its architectural setting. It is not much of a sketch but the content is novel.' The third is a drawing of a stair hall by Thomas Lightoler, published in Th Modern B u i l d e r ' s Assirtunt (Fig. 5).5The plan is shown in the middle of a group of four elevations which look as if they had been folded out from their upright position and flattened into the same place as the plan. At this stage, unlike the others, the Lightoler drawing involved no new content but was a relatively unfamiliar sort of representation. In descriptive geometry, folding out the adjacent surfaces of a three-dimensional body so that all its faces can be shown on a sheet of paper is called developing a surface, so we will call the kind of drawing done by Lightoler the developed suface inhior. It became a

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way of turning architecture inside-out, so that internal rather than external elevations were shown. Earlier drawings of a similar kind can be found in the seventeenth century, illustrating town squares or formal gardens with their perimeter elevations folded out. These had most probably evolved from the common, but primitive, cartographer's practice of laying elevations of buildings, landmarks and trees flat on a map's surface to facilitate recognition. The seventeenth-century examples described a border-land between interior and exterior. They illustrated things that were unequivocally outside, but which shared one characteristic of interiors; being enclosures of one sort or another. The novelty of the later eighteenth-century application of this technique was that it made actual individual rooms the subject of architectural drawing, rather than the enlarged room-like areas of gardens and squares. l l four walls of the recTo go back to the Lightoler drawing: a tangular stairwell are shown connected to the side of the plan they originate in. Five discontinuous planes are therefore represented in one plane and the illustration becomes completely hermetic; nothing outside can be shown - in this case, not even the thickness of the walls. It is an imploded representation that discloses more of the interior and less of everything else. Like the conventional section, the developed surface interior is a three-dimensional organization reduced to two-dimensional drawing, but it is much less easy to restore apparent depth, because while the section merely compresses space, the developed surface also fractures space and destroys its continuity. Look at George Byfield's section of the stair hall at Wardour Castle (Fig. 4) and it is easy imagine the space with the room; not so the Lightoler drawing. The much simpler staircase is shown four different ways, but for all the multiplicity of views it seems flat and resistant to interpretation. What the Lightoler drawing does do, though, is dwell lovingly on the inside faces of the box enclosing the stair. In the 1750s, 1760s and 1770s the developed surface interior was

being used by architects with domestic commissions. In the hands of the Adam brothers, however, it became a basic mode of production and, one might also say, a basic mode of apprehension. The portfolios of Adam drawings that survive are replete with them (Fig. 1). Certainly they never usurped plans and elevations, but there was a distinct move away from the shaded or tinted general section as a carrier of information about the interior, as favoured by William Chambers, towards highly worked exhaustive individual room portraits using the developed su~face.~ A good deal of Adam's work involved additions to, or conversions of, existing buildings. In such circumstances individual description of rooms made some sense. Yet even when dealing with commissions for completely new buildings he would produce characteristic paper-thin fold-out designs for each interior. To find out why this, too, made sense, it is necessary to look at the layout of the major floor as a whole. A comparison between the principal floors of a typical Adam house plan and a typical plan by James Gibbs indicates the considerable change that had taken place in the organization of domestic space within little more than a generation. Gibbs's plans, always much the same, thoroughly consistent, involve a sequence from a main salon, via ante-chambers, through chambers to closets (Fig. 6).Four radiating routes can be plotted from the public salon in the centre to the remote terminating closets in the wings; a fundamentally hierarchical arrangement, exactly and syrnmetrically graded from centre to edge, from capacious grandeur to privileged seclusion, four times over.' Both late baroque and early Palladian plans tend to be of this sort. In Adam's domestic plans, which are not so consistent, the rooms are also in sequence but the radial array has disappeared. Instead, in several of hi major works, the rooms are joined in a circle. Look for example at the designs for Syon, Saxham (Fig. 7), Culzean, Luton Hoo, Harewood, or Home House: access through the major

5. 'Section' of a stair hall by Thorn- Lightoler, o d n n &daWs rrom llu M Assirmi, 1757.

6. Principal storey of house at Milton, from James Gibbs, A Bwk oj Archibclurc, 1728.

7. Principal storey of

Saxham House, by
Robert Adam, 1779.

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accommodation is strung out into a ring.8 There is little real difference between the relationship of the rooms, one to another, when they are circuited this way. The hierarchy all but disappears. Only the major points of entry can be marked out as intrinsically unlike the others. Wherever you may be in the circuit, like a mouse in a wheel, you do not change the way the rest of the ring relates to you. You are always, as in certain recent cosmologies, looking at the back of your own head, so to speak. If you walk out of a door on one side of an apartment, you will presently return through the door on the opposite side. This essential equalization of territory within the ring, which could easily have brought with it the prospect of inescapable sameness, was in fact the basis of an orgy of variations on a theme. If, like beads on a string, all the rooms are the same in their overall relationship to one another, they are made different in every other conceivable respect. In Gibbs's work the rooms are all serially ranked in size and square or nearly square in the plan; there is little

need for further description. In an Adam plan or a plan by William Thomas, James Wyatt, Thomas Playfair, John Carter or Henry Holland, they are, with scant regard to overall symmetry, made deliberately into a medley of unique and distinct shapes: square, oblong, apsidal, circular, oval, quatrefoil, cruciform, hexagonal or octagonal. They are now also distinguished by use: dining rooms, breakfast rooms, parlours, tea rooms, withdrawing rooms, card rooms, music rooms and picture galleries. And by decor: green rooms, chintz rooms, rustic rooms, Etruscan rooms and so forth. The increased variegation of usage and effect is the counterpoint to a transcending homogeneity of space. A concatenation of interiors of magnified individuality dispels any sense of latent sameness; each room is its own little empire of activity, allusion and colour; each a totally encompassing enterprise. Once we recognize the strategy of pitting individuality against equality we can understand why the developed surface interior drawing was so appropriate to the houses and villas of the 1770s' 1780s and 1790s.

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8. The with furniture as of 1782, Osterley Park, by Robert Adam, 1775-9.

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For that degree of difference to flourish in adjacent spaces they have to give very little of themselves away before the moment of entry. To preserve their precious identity, so easy to dilute, they are forbidden to mix, Apart from the restricted information disclosed by the enfilading of doors (an archaizing glimpse of unity), interiors are introverted and boxed in. Doors might open out onto one another but spaces rarely do. Their qualities have to be carried in memory like so many countries recollected by a traveller. In this way, too, they tend to be the same: the less they have to do with each other in terms of spatial interpenetration, the more of themselves they are able to conserve. They are therefore experienced more vividly as a temporal series than as a spatial series. We have noticed already that developed surface representation obliterates the connection between an interior and its surroundings. With its exclusiveness accentuated, an interior so drawn can flourish on its own identity and need receive none of its attributes from its relationship to anything that impinges upon it from outside, which

is exactly why at that moment in history the developed surface drawing became so useful a method of describing interior space. In a circuit plan it is the equality of parts that is fundamental. The differences have to be forced into existence afterwards, one by one, room by room. The developed surface interior makes it much easier to contrive these differences by detaching the room from its situation. The developed surface belongs with the circuit of rooms because it provides the right conditions for the countervailing production of differences within an arrangement that has quietly done away with the hierarchy of the plan, and done away also with the relational differences between rooms implanted in that hierarchy. With the four walls arranged on a single sheet, sometimes supplemented with a carpet design, a floor pattern or an outline plan or, alternately, all six surfaces illustrated in separate drawings, the developed surface and its derivatives offered an opportunity to saturate interior surfaces with ornament (Fig. 8). Insipid vignettes, grotteschi, bas-reliefs, filigree plasterwork - mostly employing a consciously etiolated iconography such as that published by George Richardson, one of Adam's assistants - were part of a subsidiary industry of Adamesque mural dec~ration.~ The developed surface also offered the opportunity for an unexampled unification of the one interior. Drapes, furnishings, fittings, wall coverings, plasterwork, floor and carpet all beg to be drawn. They are not extras to be added after the essential architectural shell has been constructed, not foreign items to be imported into a readymade cavity. They are the things that the developed surface invites the draughtsman to describe. Because of its inclusion and unification of all these heretofore diverse elements, the Adam interior has justifiably been called total design, but one has to qualify that: it was total design of an enveloping suface, the empty space contained within was left undescribed and untouched. Nevertheless, anything that could be pulled towards this enveloping inner surface of the

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room would be absorbed into it, or flattened against it as if some centrifugal force had thrust it out and pressed it there. Use of the developed surface induces facile, specious, superficial architecture that sucks as much of the world as it is able into its flatness. Covering, still very heavy in English Palladian architecture, much more ponderous in the work of Kent or even Chambers, becomes in Adam, Wyatt and their imitators a web of lightly embossed arabesques (Fig. 9). Entablatures and pilasters turn into near flush gilded edges. Furniture is pushed back to the wall and dwindles into a series of modest extrusions out of the mural surface.'" It is a painterly architecture that compares with the developed surface, intent on illusion, but it is not the illusion of depth that is sought, it is the illusion ofjlatness. Recesses and niches are shallow or made light, their shadows muted, as in the grand salon at Syon, appearing to be trompe l'oeil, never threatening to dissipate the tautness in the flat wall. Where more considerable ruptures occur, as, for example, in the Alcove Room at Audley End or the Library at Kenwood, the illusion of flatness is maintained, even heightened, by a familiar variant of the proscenium principle. Used in the theatre to create apparent depth, the architectural frame is here used by Adam as a kind of edge stiffening which isolates the opening from the principal wall surface, then forces whatever is behind into a collapsed, exhaled space of minimum depth. Compare the Audley End Alcove Room with the model from which it derives: the French alcove recess so common all over Europe in the early eighteenth century. In the older French arrangement the head of the bed, or day-bed, would normally be placed on the back wall, facing directly outwards into the room. Not only was the recess deeper, its depth was accentuated by the orientation of the bed and, most significantly of all, by the posture of the figure occupying the bed at right angles to the wall plane. In the Alcove Room at Audley End the body of the reclining figure that occupied the day-bed, like the conventional-

9. Ceili~ig plan or tl~r


Music Room, Home House, by Robert Adam, 1777.

ized empanelled bas-reliefs round about, lay in the plane of the wall, incorporated into an aesthetic unity. There were, though, distinct limitations to this technique. The developed surface interior, as has already been said, disrupts the continuity of the space it represents. Cuts have to be made between adjoining walls so as to splay them flat. To read the room as an enclosed space it is necessary to mentally fold the walls up out of the paper. It would be subversive to this thinking of the drawing into a space to fiddle with its basic, box-like geometry, and that explains why in Adam's designs the paper box is wherever possible kept intact. The Music Room at Home House, for example, has three apsidal bays inscribed in the window wall; voluptuous shapes neatly hemmed in by the rectangular wall edge. The drawing of the ceiling shows how effortless was the progression from the semicircular apsidal heads of the three projecting bays to an entire surface of circular motifs that appear to develop out of them (Fig. 9).12But, in the event, the bays have no such relation to the

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ceiling, being neutralized within the frame of the window wall. The ceiling circles disappear inconclusively into a modest corner moulding which represents the real structure of the room: the inviolable rectangular frame. This moulding was the conceptual tape that bound the severed surfaces back together. Voluptuous elements were inevitably held in check within the frame, even when the illusion offered by the developed surface drawings themselves suggested otherwise. So if one difficulty was in seeing across the discontinuities opened up by the drawing technique, another was in seeing through the continuities apparent in the drawing but not transferable to the space it represented.

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Circuits of rooms were being described in plans while circles of walls were being described in developed surface drawings of interiors: their coexistence in so many projects during the late eighteenth century might lead us to conclude that they are equivalent, yet they are not. Their only similarity lies in the fact that they are laid out in a ring. The circuit of rooms is a suppression of expressed centrality. Passing through the apartments of such a building, the occupant is unaware of what constitutes its centre - a feature of Adam's work noticed by Horace Walpole, who wrote of Osterley that it was 'the palace of palaces and yet a place sans crown, sans coronet'.I3 The developed surface, on the other hand, is a way of spinning architecture and its appurtenances out to the periphery of available space, consequently opening up a void in the centre of the room, towards which everything faces, non-specific and empty yet very much in evidence, the more so, in fact, because of the withdrawal of all else to the perimeter. Odd, even so, that in this apparent geometric similarity lay the real difference that would lead to the extinction of the developed surface drawing and the kind of interiors associated with it. In planning there had been a quiet and remarkably thorough,

if local, disestablishment of hierarchy. The effects of the toppled pyramid could be enjoyed only by the privileged occupants of the principal floors of large houses - hardly radical within the wider politics of the time yet significant all the same. The contraction and occasional disappearance of the central hall or salon was one aspect of it, the redefinition of sequence in terms of activity to be undertaken rather than social gradation was another. Who occupies a space within the confines of this precious milieu becomes less important than what is done in it, hence the proliferation of tea rooms, retiring rooms, powdering rooms and the like. The only organizing forces in the circuit plan, apart from the quest for variety as such, are weak ones; the passage from room to room corresponding to the passage fmm pastime to pastime through the course of the day (a strong organization would only have supplanted the tyranny of decisive social division with the tyranny of decisive temporal division), and the tendency to draw more reflective pursuits away from the more boisterous. Both were carried over from earlier practices without compromising the circuit plans, which retained their fundamental difference from the hierarchical plans that preceded them. Curiously enough, no such fundamental reorganization had occurred in the internal structure of the room. The method of description had changed, but it was the overall distribution of the house that this had helped to transform. Furnishing gives an indication of the way rooms are used. Throughout the eighteenth century the tendency had been to do as Adam did and spread it round the edge. The developed surface drawing could hardly show anything other than peripheral furnishing, but paintings, inventories, catalogues and surviving pieces from the period confirm that it was the characteristic distribution. Around mid-century these wall-dependent items begin to whittle down to a teetering fragility, elegant and ephemeral, and, like camp furniture, to which they bore a resemblance, they become easy to move around. For some time, though, they continue to be

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attached to the wall. When the V&A Museum furniture and woodwork department was restoring the Etruscan Room at Osterley Park, it ascertained that the top rails on the chairs listed in the 1782 inventory stood in alignment with the surrounding dado and were painted as a continuation of it. Other correspondences were discovered between the decoration of the chairs and the wall surfaces (Fig. 8). This seemed evidence enough, but, to underline their provisional status as free-standing elements, the rears of the chairs were painted plain white, while front and sides were meticulously painted with miniature Etruscan motifs." However easily they might be moved into the open floorspace of the room, they were painted as if they did not belong there. Stranded from the parent wall, their position was indeterminate and dependent on the drift of intercourse. The peripheral ring of chairs in particular was a longestablished formation. In Daniel Marot's well-known designs for the furnishing of a palace, published in the 1690s, a ring of chairs is to be found in nearly every room.'With Chippendale, Hepplewhite and Adam furniture, the seventeenth-century bulk is quite gone, allowing defacto freedom to escape this arcane arrangement, but the magnet of convention is still strong. When the room is empty the furniture reverts to the wall. During the last three decades of the eighteenth century, a brief equilibrium was achieved between house planning, the method of representing interiors, and the distribution of furniture. They formed a set of interrelated procedures and practices: it would be useless to speculate as to the causal priority of one over the others. They simply belonged together, each lending stability, value or intensity to the rest. The only suggestion of anything unsatisfactory was a minor equivocation over the placing of furniture, which was effectively mitigated by making it light enough to move around. This minor equivocation, however, grew into an insuperable difficulty It was the call for variety within the social landscape of

the room that broke the hallowed ring of peripheral furnishing.'" The champion of variety within the room in England - the belated champion, for this parlour revolution had been heralded in the 1750s in Paris -was Humphrey Repton. Adam stood for variety of rooms within the house; Repton stood for variety of occupations within the rooms. The circle of chairs had to be broken, redolent as it was, he said, of dull, obsequious, outmoded conversation directed at one senescent, overbearing figure, the matriarch, whose domineering presence was symbolized by a portrait in his drawing of 'the Old Cedar Parlour'. The circle of chairs was the vehicle for this old way of assembling company" His intention was to destroy the remaining instrument of hierarchy As it happens, this second disestablishment would never bring about the expected congruence between the occupation of a room and the occupation of the house as a whole so that both would work against hierarchy at once, but Repton was explicitly attempting to combine them.'' The variety achieved in the serial organization of different rooms was to be matched by a microcosm of variety in each room. In order for this to take place, the purely geometric correspondence between rings of rooms and rings of walls would have to be done away with. The two kinds of similarity could not coexist. The one would inevitably cancel out the other. A geometrical figure works differently in different situations. It is not like a gene, something that always carries the same message and always produces the same results; it does not have a meaning independent of the circumstances of its employment, unless it be an entirely conventionalized meaning. In one instance (the plan), the ring was the agency for variation; in another (the room), the agency for unification. So the geomeby of the ring was supplanted by the logic of variety; an idea about social intercourse took over from a configuration as the key theme. Repton's target, the ring of chairs, was vulnerable to attack because, as noticed already, furnishing in the last half of the eighteenth century had become so light and mobile that the pattern of

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intercourse it politely represented in deference to past practice the peculiar unity demanded of social events during the seventeenth century - could easily be disfigured or dispersed. What is more, the aesthetic bondage of furniture to wall surface was, by the time of Repton's animadversions in 1816, in any case loosening. The reason why the subsequent disengagement of furniture from the wall surface was so important was that it altered the basic geography of the interior, acting as agency for a new mode of occupation. The Regency Period between 1800 and 1826 was the time of transition. A few examples: George Smith in 1808 produced a design for room furnishing that shows the customary ring of chairs, now bedded in a highly modelled wall surface. Added to the ring of chairs is a central island table surrounded by four chaises-longues. This island is quite different to the traditional centrepiece of the dining table, or king's bed, which focused all attention inward. The Smith plan instead distributes attention around an annular ring of space between wall and centre, a centre which has been effectively taken out of service, suggesting a circle of varied activity rotating round an inactive core; in other words, a room-sized miniature of the circuit plans of the previous decades.'" Then there are the disquieting illustrations from Gaetano Landi's Architectural Decorations of 1810, showing a series of interior perspectives with different styles of decor, not one piece of furniture to be seen (Fig. 10):" The large Grecian salon looks, for instance, as if it has been folded straight out of a developed surface drawing, while on a separate plate, a collection of furniture in the same style, Greek, stands afloat in an unbounded perspective space where the individual pieces are planted awkwardly as though meant to stand free of architecture, but still hankering for a wall (Fig. 11). The clumsy division between interior and furniture suggests some conflict between them. This was not a problem of projection technique, for Landi's two plates are both perspectives. It was just that, despite its stylistic compatibility with the room, the furniture could

10.Large Grecian salon, from Gaecano Landi, Archi&chml Dccorallons. 1810.

I I. Furniture in the Grecian style, from Gaetano Landi, Ardrikxlarrnl &CO~&N, 1810 .

1 :

not he efii-ctively positioned: it was literally neither here nor there, neither in the room nor on the wall. The publication two years later of some far more sophisticated drawings l y Henry Moses, an employee of Thomas Hope, resolves these uncertainties and illuminates some salient features of the neu; interior landscape. The purpose of hiloses' drawings, published as Dcsigz.~Jor hiod~r11 Co.slume, was to display the Greek stylc of dress devised 1 1 y Hope. This he did in sixteen little cameo perspectives of ar-chitectural interiors, richly furnished and decorously populatcld (Fig, 12). Thc interiors are of Duchess Street, a house 1 1 y Adam that Hope had redecorated. The plan is a circuit. The furil~turi. is Hopr iurniture." One of Moses' drawings, the 'Beau h.londr', shows a reception in the Duchess Street Picturc Gallery. l'here are nine clusters of two, three or four persons, some using chairs and tables that edge away from the sides of the room. Thc Beau Monde is still the ambiguous world of Adam's interiors, where the furniture belongs to the wall, yet can be easily displaced."

But practically all the other scenes in ll~sipz,~for rlfodprn Cbstume are oS sil~all groups that accenruale the role of furniture in laying the groui~d\\~ork for closeness and intimac): I11 these toucl~ing,dou r l t i t u r e occ~ipiesthe rooin and then figures nlestic scenes, the J inhabit the f~irniture. Tlle relatioil between body, dress, furniture, architecture and intercourse attains a truly conlprehensive unity in these pictures, although they are unnerving, as are all such syntl~esesill their insistence on the l~oi~~ogci~izatioi of appearances. M'hat they demon~tratc is the sustenance offered to quartel, trio or couple by couches, tables and chairs, and the increasing encroachment of' iiirniture onto the floorspacr as the groups reduce in size. This littering of the floor breaks up its consistency, giving it a inore complex, diverse geography which aids and abets intiinacy. The room is no longer a circus, hut a miniature interilal landscape. It is 110 longer an edge and a centre (distantly but distinctly related to those spectral archct);l)cs, the domed space and the ideal city), always looking towards the latent authority of the centre, as was so well parodied in Repton's Cedar Parlour. It is now a topography of varied elenlents distributed picturesquely across the floor, without evident formality, but nevertheless with concern for the niceties of subdivided, l~eterogeneous association. 'l'he emphasis had moved from the wall to the floor. We returil now to the developed surface, its fate sealed with the migration of tl~rniture out of its reach. There are, in the V&A ~ ~ u s e u m a col, lection of drawings fYom the London company of Gillows, fiirniture makers. Produced between 18 17 and 1832, they illustratr proposals for various interiors, for the most part drawing rooms. Gillows, then still in the forefront of the trade, understood the new mode of furnishing very well and their catalogue contained freestanding pieces that colonized open floorspace as well as a range of traditional wall-hugging items.'" 17et their design drawings, presumably meant for clients, indicate a dislocation between the

21!1

I -I. Fu1-nisliilig\ I i r a11 octago~d dra\r.~llg morn.

Gillows illld Co.. 11.~1.

recognized technique of representing interiors and the altered geography of the floor. They needed to show the walls because some of their merchandise still belonged there. For that the developed surface was the obvious choice. They needed also to show each item of potential purchase, whatever its position, in sufficiently pictorial a form, and they needed to show their combined effects on the room as a whole. They ended up conflating three distinct types of drawing in a vain attempt to illustrate the topography of the floor and the flatness of the walls in one summary representation (Figs. 13 and 14). The old technique of folding the walls outward is trundled out unflinchingly to satisfy one part of the requirement. At the same time small-scaled perspectives of the disengaged chairs, couches, footstools, card- and dining-tables float in the maelstrom of conflicting imagined spaces, each piece contributing its own idiocentric and cock-eyed cone of vision. Orientation of the drawing is utterly impossible, directly adjacent objects being frequently upside-down or sideways in relation to each other.

292

Add to this thc constant flicker between the two-dimensional representa~iollor the lvall surface and floor plan, and the splayed threr-dimensionality of the autistic perspective constructions, and the confusion is complete. There is some pattern: one might guess that the individual pieces, which are viewed always from the sanle height, were traced from a catalogue, and their perspective 1-anishing-points tend to converge on he nearest wall as if not quite emancipated from it. None of this, though, is any aid to visualization." The company purveyed these masterpieces of vacillation for at least fifteen years, yet their eloquence is their failure to convey in drawing any idea of spatial consistency or relative position. Nothing could more clearly demollstrate their incapacity to show what had to be shown than this hilarious incoherence. Insufficient by itself, incapable (because of the extremity of its flatness) of' incorporation with perspective, the developed surface was now a positive hindrance to comprehension.

During the nineteenth century the process of f~~rniture accumulation conti~lued; more of it became free-standing, and its weight increased until rooms were hardly traversable at all. Plan and perspective became the characteristic means of representing interiors. The demise of the developed surface, complete by 1820, was the demise also of a way of nlaking interiors. Its disappearance coincided not only with a change in the way rooms were occupied. but with a change in the prevailing conception of architectural space. John Soane's drawing of the vestibule at Pitzhanger was its swansong (Fig. 15). In the published folio of drawings of Soane's suburban villa it is the only one of its kind." The illustration shows a narrow defile of a room, pulled upwards into a lantern, the shaft of which opens out onto other rooms on the first floor. Sections -not elevations - of the walls are distributed around a central plan. Wall thickness and openings are therefore made \,isible in contravention of the Adam technique. Although the spatial outflow from the vestibule to adjacent rooms is limited in comparison with other Soane interiors, the relationsl~ipsare not easy to deduce. The drawing still keeps the room relatively hermetic. Even though the thin, unfurnished hall was no doubt chosen by Soane as a good candidate for developed surface representation, the limitations of the technique are evident. The pressure to gain full-bodied three-dimensionality is so strong that the section on the fourth side thrusts back into a perspective. This is the same layout, but not really the same technique as the developed surface interior, for it has undergone considerable redefiniti~n."~ Soane's architecture, like so much to follow, broke through walls to achieve real and extended depth. Enclosures would dissolve into virtual presence, revealing a complex of receding, partially enclosed volumes beyond. Containment is virtual, depth real: the formula is an exact reversal of that which could be applied to Adam's work (Fig. 8). To attempt to illustrate deep spaces expanding out from a room represented as if it were a flattened paper box was plainly

221-

futile. The Pitzhanger vestibule drawing, though a modificatioll of developed suiface projection, was not sufficient to save the species from extinction in the new surroundings. The two mutations in the drawing of the interior, around 1760 and then around 1810, corresponded to changes in the environment in which the drawing functioned. The first mutation brought developed surface projection into plans. The room was made into a ring of decorative surfaces, similar in geometry to the characteristic circuit of rooms in the house plans of which it was part. Yet while the ensemble of rooms had been to a considerable extent freed from the old tyranny of hierarchical organization, the room itself remained much as it had before. Escape here was achieved by surreptitiously mobiliziilg furniture, not by altering the formatioil of space. In the second mutation tlle room was liberated and made the scene of variety, as the house had been in the first. The developed surface belonged only with the first set of relationships, because as attentioil moved from the enveloping surfaces of the room to the spaces in fi-ont and behind, the interior required a different mode of investigation and therefore a different sort of drawing. One final point: the second mutation was not an extensioil of the first. As the effort of liberation moved from house to room, the house plan altered yet again, suggesting that two versions of the same variegated geography, two attempts to escape from the same tyrant, could not coexist within tlle same shell. Repton, Nasll and Soane did not employ either the ancient hierarchical plan or the circuit of rooms but something else again; varied still, but more complex, more private. A kind of hierarchy found its way into their plans nevertheless: a hierarchy based on the divisioil between circulation and occupation rather than on sequential gradation. But what kind of liberation was this? It was modest and, like all liberation, insofar as it is an experience of release, temporary. We have already noted that it was confined to a certain area of existence for a certain class of persons. It is sobering to recall that dur-

16. A plantation in Cco~@a in 1860 and 1881 (redrawn by the author Firon1 J. B. Jackson, Amriran Spacc The Cmlmaial Imix
1865-1876)

ing this same period other classes of persons were being subjected to an architecture of precisely opposite tendency, bent on forcing consciousness as well as activity into a gven mould, frequently based on just the hierarchical authority being erased from the town houses and villas of the well-to-do. Figures such as Adam, and even Repton, were happy enough to provide either on request. Nor was this other architecture, the architecture of the prisons, workhouses, factories and model cottages, an outmoded thing soon to be got rid of. It was dreamt up and put together in the same period. And this should not be forgotten, because an architecture conceived of as altering both human consciousness and the circumstances of human intercourse, can work against liberty as well as for it. In fact, it can do the former rather more easily and effectively. So, if there was, during this period, when the great institutions of modern life were being formed, an instance of architecture being effectively deployed against authority, it must surely be of interest, even if it was restricted in scope, and only temporary.

225

226

But was it even so temporary? The answer is equivocal. An illustration from J. B. Jackson's American Space traces the effects of another escape (Fig. 16)." Maps of a plantation before and after the Civil War show the tight authoritarian community of the slave era dispersed, sharecroppers' cabins spread out to cover the vacant peripheral territory; another rejection of personified authority, another release registered in the physical distribution of buildings - not simulated, not signified by it, but registered. There is no denying, however, that this led to a kind of sterility, the effects of which would in time develop their own species of tyranny, as those subject to the revised pattern came to realize both its power and its limits. The same could be said of the synchronized revisions that took place in the format of polite society, planning, furnishing and architectural drawing around 1760, and then again around 1810. Something of this has come down to us. Many aspects of our own domesticity emanate from these events. We no longer regard them as liberties, since they no longer represent an escape from anything. They are simply background characteristics of everyday life, occasionally irritating, but more usually taken for granted. It is worth bearing in mind that informality, the word that was used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to describe the new domestic geography, was not an abolition of formality by an alternative constitution of relations between many diverse things. For instance, in order to escape the tyranny of obsequious, unified conversation, the empty space of the room, which offered a sort of freedom of its own, was overrun by furniture which then rendered the definition of action far more specific than before. While the results of these trivial but momentous events should therefore retain some interest for us, I would direct attention also to the pattern of interaction between the various practices involved drawing, social intercourse, planning and furnishing. These practices form constellations. The constellations change every now and then, taking up a new shape, incorporating new elements. Is each

I
I

i
I

reconstituted constellation the result of a single idea expressing itself thus? Does a change in the informing principle account for the changes that occur in the constellation? Is the difference between the work of Adam and Repton the difference between a body of work dominated by the idea of circuits, in the one case, and informality, in the other? Not quite. In both cases the tendency to impose a distinct theme was counteracted by the recalcitrance of the medium. The theme could never express itself as a fundamental informing principle; it was closer to the surface of events than that. In both cases the theme itself was in the process of development, and its power only extended so far. Things remained out of its reach, or were seen to be unreasonably distorted by it. What we have here, then, is a tendency toward informing principles rather than fully fledged examples of the type. There is a difference between tying a group of people together with rope and saying they are related, and pointing out that they all have the same parents. Adam and Repton el a1 use rope to establish relations. Or, to make the analogy more exact, they impose a family resemblance on a diverse body of subjects, which it is all too easy for us to interpret as fundamental, when in fact it lies on the surface. Each confronted an existing set of practices; each attempted significant alteration to the set at whatever appeared to be the critical point. Adam and his contemporaries challenged the hierarchy of the early-eighteenth-century plan; Repton and his contemporaries colonized the open floorspace of the late-eighteenth-century interior. There is no equivalent of stellar gravitation here. Each constellation was held together, not by one force, but by a multiplicity of forces. Yet in order to alter it, a stronger force had to be introduced. Reality can manage without unity, the intellect cannot. As soon as a set of practices becomes the subject of manipulation, as soon as they are altered to correspond to human intention, the unifying principle comes into play. Only in this way can any pur-

227

pose or direction be given to things. And precisely because of this conscious, unifying tendency in human affairs, things do not issue from a fundamental unity but converge toward unities fitfully."
NOTES
I . I am thinking of architects such as Balthasar Ncumann and Bernard0 Vittone, whosc surviving architecrural drawings are all orthographic. Thcy seem to have set much stom by perspectival sketches of the kind so well known from Juvarra, and yet the architecture they produced was decidedly scenographic. See Christian Otto, Spotc inlo Liyjlt: Tile Churches of Ballharar JVeumann (Boston, 19791, pp. e Ilolian Baroque 37-9; also Rudolph Wittkower, 'Vittone's Domes', in Studies in h (London, 1975), pp. 2 17-8.

here less with where this werc the case, it is hardly to the poinr. I all1 co~icer~ied rhings conle from, morc with what is done with them. Scc John Fleming, Roberl .Idrun nrtd h u Circlc (London, 19781, pp. 65 el seq. 7. This arrangement is rarely as consistently portrayed in plans as inJames Gibbs's d Rwk ofdrd~ilecture (London, 1728), whcre even a variant of the Villa Rotunda is ~iiadc subjecr to the same inrcr~~al o~.ganization,but it was characteristic of much produced in the last half of the seventeenth century and the first quarter of thc rightcc~~tli. See Cornforth and Fowler, Englisli htleTiOr Lkcoralwn m tlu E i g l ~ h U tCotlay (London, 1974), chapter 3; Petcr Thornton, Seuotlmth-Cmlury hrla~rrrDecoration in England, France 3 Holland (London, 1978), pp. 55-63; and Mark Giroual-d, I$ in the EnglirIt (,'ountv House (London, 1978), chapter 5.
8. Thc 1761 proposal for Syon, with a central rotunda, puts it in a different categ-

2. It may be useful to describe the rest in relation to the drawing, not because architectural drawing informs other ideas and practices - it has no such priority but because it is often presumed to be a purely technical matter, related perhaps in some vague way to spatial sensibility, though nothing much else. The seminal work on architectural drawing studied in its setting is Wolfgang Lotz's 'The Rendering of the Architectural Interior in Architectural Drawing of the Renaissance', in Studis in Italian Renairsance Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., 19771, pp. 3-65, which provided the stimulus for this article.
-

3. John Cornforth and John Fowler, E~glirh Inlerior Decoralion in the Eighteenth Cenluy (London, 1974), pp. 26-8. 4. Ibid. There is at least one much earlier example of the same sort: an unatwibuted drawing in the V&A, showing furniture against an elevational wall surface. See Peter Ward Jackson, Englirh Furnilm in Le EighteenL Cmtury (London, 1958), plate 11. However, Cornforth and Fowler's attachment of importance to Stuart's drawing as first ripple of the coming tide would seem justified. 5. William Halfpenny, Robert Morris, Thomas Lightoler, The Modern Builde-P As~utanl(London, 1757), plates 7 1 and 72 (both stair halls) and 75 (a hall withour stairs). All are shown as developed surface interiors. Other interiors in this work are shown as sections or ceiling plans. This was by no means the earliest use of the technique in England; Colcn Campbell shows the great hall at Houghton thus; see Vilruvilrs Britannicur, vol. 3, plate 34. William Kent also drew interiors for the Houses of Commons and Lords this way; see RIBA, Cahlogue oj Drawings Collection, edited by J. Lever (London, 19731, vols. G-K, Kent W, f. 18, 2 1. 6. Robert Adam's own education in drawing with Clerisseau Lcd in a completely different dircction; perspectival and pictorial. His acquaintance with Piranesi (whose architectural elevations, quite unlike his ucdute and canere engravings, trcated the wall as a flat surface, rather like a page to be written on) may have encouraged Adam to attempt the contraction of space into surface, but even if

o ~ yalthough , the rotunda was never built. Sometimes a complete circuit develops only on one side of a central entrance, as in Newelston, Harewood and the first Luton Hoo plan. And sometimcs the clear circuit organization of early schemes dcger~eratcsinto more complex, less distinct patterns, as at Luton Hoo. Indecd the most unequivocal circuit plans are pattern-book examples by John Carter, William Thomas and George Richardson. If this suggests a disinclination on the part of the clients, it also suggests a ccrtain insistence on the architect's part. The circuit was an ideal arrangement fmquently modiicd in practice. See Arthur f Robert B j a m Adam (London, 1922),vol. 1, p. 42, vol. 2, Bolton, The Archi&ctun o pp. 78, 81, 266, 279; William Thomas, Ongnal D e w in Arclti&clure, 1783, pla~c I774 and after, plates xxxix and Ixxxiii. 2; John Carter, Buildm'Mag&e, 9. Richardson, who worked with Adam for eighteen years, produced A Book of Ceilings, London, 1776, all Adamesque, and Iconology, 2 vols. (London, 1779); this latter a revision of Cesare Ripa with the figures made more Greek and agreeable, their allegorical purpose conventionalized. Giuseppe Manocchi was responsible for a great many Adam ceilings. See Walter I.. Speirs, Catalogue of Drawings of R B 3 Adam irr he Sir john Soane M u s e u m (Cambridge, 1979); and Geoffrey Beard, The Wrk of Robert Adam (London, 197% chapter 3, pp. 20-7. 10. George Smith, writing in 1826, said that Chippendale introduced the arabcsque in furniture, but that the Adam brothers, following their studies of Diocletian's palace and baths, had introduced it into interior design: 'A complete revolution in the taste of design immediately followed; the heavy panelled wall, the deeply coffered ceiling, although they oltPred an imposing and grand effect, gave way to the introduction of a light arabesque style.' G. Smith, Cabinet Maker and Upholsterer's Guide (London, 1826), p. v; see also Eileen Harris, T h Furniture of Robert Adam (London, 1963).
1 1. The traditional posture of the body would emphasize authority by facing the fig-

ure directly out into the major space of the room, as happens, for example, in the recess of the Queen's closet, Ham House (1670s). In the Adam alcove room, a figure on the day-bed would certainly not be able to maintain frontality. She, too,

229

\vould or course face 0111 towards the room, turning sideways to do so, but accomplish this her posture, though still classical, would bccome 'inbrmal'.

LO

25. John Soanc, P l m i ~Elmliuas nt~dPerspeclivc Views (London, 180'L), plate vl.

f i

I'il<lraig~r ~Manoi Holiae

12. hdargarrt Wliin~iey,FIoate FIou.se (Feltham, 1969), pp. 44-6; and A. Bolton, Tlrr uf R RJAdatn (Imndon, 1922), vol. 2, pp. 82-3. .~lrzlrik:(ur-e 13. Victoria
B;

Albert h~luseum, Guide fa Osfmle,) I'ark(London, 1972), pp. 52-3.

14. Ibid. pp, 5, 34-5; and Maurice 'l'on~lln,'Back to Adan1 at Ostcrley', (,;~trnl[v I.@ vol. cxlvii, 1970. 15. Daniel Marot, Das 01-rranrerrluwk(Berlin, 189.2), pan v, plates 15 1-62.

26. Another cxanlplc of the transition can be found in the Morel and Seddon project ! Kirkham, 'George IV and for refurbishing Windsor. See G. dc Bellaique and F the Furnishing of Windsor', Furtritun Hhrory, vol, viii, 1972. The drawings for the libray show the deep bay of the east wall in perspective and the flat plane of the west wall in elevation, the mode of drawing dependent on the degrcc of n~odclliug in the architecture. 27. J.B. Jackson, Ar~zericwrSpace: Tlre Cmmsial 3'enrs 1865-1876 (New York, 1972), pp. 150-52, taken from Schriberlr bfa8arure, April 1881. 28. Unfortunately I was unable to read IauraJacobus's article on the drawing tcchnique I have described until after mine was typeset (sec 'On "M'hether a man Hutop, could 5ee before him and behind him both at once"', in A~rI~i&c~urnl vol. 31, 1988, pp. 148 el fey.). We seen1 independently to have arrived at similar conclusions, although she gives greater emphasis to earlier examples. The nimt important difference is thaL she understands the box-like format to be a practical convenience that was restrictive of the architect's imagination, whereas I see it as expanding some horizons while restricting others.

. 2 ill lhc RgLidi Courtly Hou~e,pp. 236-9 for a discussion of 16, Sec Mark Girouard, L brraki~~g thr circle. I r is ditfrcult to gauge Iiow strong the circle really was during the carlier part of die eighteenth century. Hogarth's portraits of diversified g~uupings at \Vanstcad and Bowood in the 1730s, Ior instaucc, lcad one to suspect that it was to some extent a property projccred into the immcdiatc past in order to clarify prcsent intentions.
17. Humphrey Repton, F r a n p m ~on s fie Tlreo~yar~dPractice of landscape Gardeirarg (London, 18 16), f m p e n t xiii, 11. 85. 18. Il~id. fragment xxv, p. 127. 19. George Smith, ColkIiotr of D ~ . ~ @ ~ s Hous~lrold jnr firmilure and hle~iorlIeco,nliorr (liondon, 1808), p. 30 and plates 152, 153.

20. Gaetano Landi, ~lrclrilpc&iml Decotutiorr, 18 10, vol. I, plates 2 and 5.


H o p atd ~ / 1 ~ ~ m - C l m , Iden ~icn (London, l 18 12). 2 1. David !\'atkin, 7110mn.1.

22. See also Thomas Hope, Hou.reliold Furnilure (London, 1807), wherc, in the unpopulatcd rooms, the furniture still relates to the wall surface.

23. Depart~merit of Prints & Uracvings, V M Muscum, London, Gillows Conq~any folios 14, I4a 14b, 14c. l'licse include also libraries, dining rooms. bcdroonis ; ~ n d inusic rooms drawn in the same way.
24. The tende~lcy to incoherc~it rcprcsetitation could already bc discrrnrd ill Shcraton's devclopcd surFace ((Fig.2), about which he wrotc: 'In a drawing rmnl of this kind (i.e. with wall fur~iiture) very little perspective is wanted -. . h i d I would not advisc drawing every object on cach wall to onc point of sight, as those at tlir estrcmities will thercby become exceedingly distolzed and unnatural. 161upon any supposition that the spectator moves along to di&rent stations as he \'~cws ' one sidc of the room, pe~vpectivcwill admit that the designcr Iiavc as many points LO draw as the spectator has stations to view from.' 'rhomas Shcraton, Tlre Cabinet 12foker and UplioLt&rerO Drauntg Book (London, 1793), p. 44 1 . I'he sugpstion of kinetic represc~~tation, dircctly at odds with the perspectival requirement of a tised viewpoint, leads to a series of minor topological rupturcs whicl~ in this instance glide into one another with relative ease. Evc11 so, thc mixture 01' pcrspcctive and orthographic drawing deprives thc walls of thcir Hatncss.

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