Concise Architectural History of the English Country House
Shaun Castle 25 May 2006
Its stylistic origins derived from the ville of Scamozzi and Palladio in the Veneto and this architectural lexicon was 200 years later adapted and filtered through the English sensibilities of Campbell and Kent into an altogether grander more disaggregated expression that became the house style of the new landowning Whig millionaires. The austerity and control of Georgian ne-classicism became dissipated in the invention and stylistic promiscuity of Victorian practice. The ville of the Veneto and the large C18th country houses were solipsistic inventions in which the owners were placed at the centre of an idealised world, apotheosised in murals and sculptures with the iconography of classicism recruited to flatter their vanity and legitimise their pretension. Landscape designers exploited radical geometries and ornate symmetries to place the house and its owner at the centre of this walled-in arcadia. The benign confidence that underpinned this conceit was eroded throughout the C19th until we see a far more fractured paradigm in the remote inaccessible fastnesses of Castle Drogo and Cragside. Here man is placed precariously against a wild terrain - nature cannot here be tamed and ordered. The classical world of Bacon and Alberti is exchanged for the introspective romanticism of Neitsche and Wagner. Links to this post
