Translations from Drawing to Building

Robin Evans

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RECEIVED PRINCEP;R";XI?ERS(TY

OCT 3 1 1997

SCHOM OF ARCHITECTM

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts

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

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

55 Figures, Doors and Passages

93 Rookeries and hiodcl Dwellings:

English Housing Rcform and the hloralities of Private Space

1 19 Not to be Used for Wrapping Purposes: <

A Review of the Exhibition of Peter Eisenman's

Fin d'Ou 'r Hou S

153 Translations from Drawing to Building

195 The Developed Surface:

An Enquiry into the Brief Life of an

Eighteenth-Century Drawing Technique

233 Mies van der Rohe's Paradoxic,al Symmetries

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 195

Drawing Technique

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 ob-

vious to anyone why the interiors dealt with, nor the way of draw- ing them, should warrant attention.

English interiors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-

tury, 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 be-

tween things visual and things social, even if at what we are prone to consider (perhaps mistakenly) a lower level than the grand ques- tions 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 gen-

eralized 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 dom-

estic 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 I

I

yet Adam, also, has become marginal to a neo-classicism increas-

ingly 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 196 while he was busy recording antiquities, could hardIy, even then,

have been based on shared motives. We might say that Piranesi's I

work was theoretical and Adam's not. But this seems to devalue Adam's percipience, giving the impression that his architecture was

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 de- sign, 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 en-

gagements 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 formu- lations, 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 inter- 197

est, considering the interiors of the late eighteenth and early

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 visi-

bility the social significance that only then may be absorbed into

the verbal metabolism of an existing body of knowledge concern-

ing society?

Beneath the allegorical frontispiece to Thomas Sheraton's Cabi-

net Maker and Upholsterer's Drawing Book, published in 1793, was the

following inscription: 'Time alters fashions and frequently obli-

terates 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 fur-

niture, 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 de-

sign: drawing was to be regarded as fundamental. The 'geometry

and real science' to which the motto referred was the geometry re-

198 quired for drawing: that is what Sheraton's book was about. It con-

tained 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 inadver-

tently helping to force this sort of drawing into oblivion.

In what follows it will be suggested that techniques of represen-

tation, far from being of permanent value, are subject to alter-

ations 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 199

does this interaction operate? It is not a matter of simple causality.

2. A plan and section of a drawing room, from Thomas Sheraton, The Cab& Maker and UphoLcImr's Drawing E d , 1793.

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 em- bedded 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?

In the middle years of the eighteenth century a new way of repre- 200 senting interiors was to be found turning up more and more fre-

quently in pattern books and design drawings. In technical terms,

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

this was not a profound break from earlier methods, just a modi-

fication 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 spa-

tial 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 nor- mal 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 hap- pens, from the late 1750s, show three different ways of extending

the range of what was represented of interiors. The most accom- 201

plished is William Chambers's famous section of a town house for

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

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.3 The second is a sketch

elevation by James Stuart of part of one wall of the dining room at

Kedlestone, which the same authors say is the earliest repres-

entation 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 Builder's Assirtunt (Fig. 5).5 The 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

202 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

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, carto-

grapher's practice of laying elevations of buildings, landmarks and

trees flat on a map's surface to facilitate recognition. The seven-

teenth-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

I eighteenth-century application of this technique was that it made

i actual individual rooms the subject of architectural drawing, I I rather than the enlarged room-like areas of gardens and squares.

To go back to the Lightoler drawing: all four walls of the rec- i tangular stairwell are shown connected to the side of the plan they

originate in. Five discontinuous planes are therefore represented in I

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 sec-

tion, the developed surface interior is a three-dimensional organ- ization 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 produc- tion 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 indi- vidual room portraits using the developed su~face.~

A good deal of Adam's work involved additions to, or con- versions 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 con- siderable change that had taken place in the organization of dom-

estic 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 syrnmetric- ally graded from centre to edge, from capacious grandeur to privi-

leged 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, rrom llu Modnn &daWs 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.

accommodation is strung out into a ring.8 There is little real differ-

ence 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 same-

ness, 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

206 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 I

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 counter-

point 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 under-

stand why the developed surface interior drawing was so appro- 207

priate to the houses and villas of the 1770s' 1780s and 1790s.

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

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), in-

teriors 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 them-

selves 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

208 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 sup-

plemented 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~rat ion.~ The devel-

oped 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 ready-

made cavity. They are the things that the developed surface invites

the draughtsman to describe. Because of its inclusion and unifi-

cation 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 209

that could be pulled towards this enveloping inner surface of the

rt

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. Cover-

ing, 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 ara-

besques (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, appear-

ing 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 illus-

ion 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 accen-

tuated 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

210 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 t l~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 be-

tween 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 semi-

circular apsidal heads of the three projecting bays to an entire

surface of circular motifs that appear to develop out of them 21 I

(Fig. 9).12 But, in the event, the bays have no such relation to the

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 them-

selves 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.

Circuits of rooms were being described in plans while circles of

walls were being described in developed surface drawings of in-

teriors: 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 sup-

pression 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 appurten- ances out to the periphery of available space, consequently open-

ing 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 sur-

212 face 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 occu-

pies 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 sup-

planted 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 car-

ried over from earlier practices without compromising the circuit

plans, which retained their fundamental difference from the hier-

archical plans that preceded them. Curiously enough, no such fun-

damental 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 fur-

nishing, 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 21:

easy to move around. For some time, though, they continue to be

attached to the wall. When the V&A Museum furniture and wood- work 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 dis-

covered between the decoration of the chairs and the wall surfaces

(Fig. 8). This seemed evidence enough, but, to underline their pro-

visional 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 long-

established 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, Hepple-

white 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 in-

tensity 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.

214 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 di-

rected 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 con- gruence 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 in- evitably 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 be-

cause, as noticed already, furnishing in the last half of the eigh- 215

teenth century had become so light and mobile that the pattern of

intercourse it politely represented in deference to past practice - the peculiar unity demanded of social events during the seven-

teenth 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 18 16, 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 pro- duced 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 18 10, showing a series of interior per-

spectives 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 con-

flict between them. This was not a problem of projection tech-

nique, 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. 18 10.

I I. Furniture in the Grecian style, from Gaetano Landi, Ardrikxlarrnl &CO~&N, 181 0.

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 11y Hope. This he did in sixteen little cameo perspectives

of ar-chitectural interiors, richly furnished and decorously popu-

latcld (Fig, 12). Thc interiors are of Duchess Street, a house 11y

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 1 : 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, do-

nlestic scenes, the Jurltiture occ~ipies the rooin and then figures

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~eses ill their insistence on the l~oi~~ogci~izat ioi of appear-

ances. 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 dis-

tinctly 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, fiir-

niture 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 free-

standing pieces that colonized open floorspace as well as a range of

traditional wall-hugging items.'" 17et their design drawings, pre- 21!1

sumably meant for clients, indicate a dislocation between the

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 geo-

graphy 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 represen-

tation (Figs. 13 and 14). The old technique of folding the walls

outward is trundled out unflinchingly to satisfy one part of the re-

quirement. At the same time small-scaled perspectives of the dis-

engaged chairs, couches, footstools, card- and dining-tables float in

the maelstrom of conflicting imagined spaces, each piece contri-

buting its own idiocentric and cock-eyed cone of vision. Orien-

tation of the drawing is utterly impossible, directly adjacent objects

being frequently upside-down or sideways in relation to each other.

Add to this thc constant flicker between the two-dimensional rep-

resenta~ioll or 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. No-

thing 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' in-

292 corporation with perspective, the developed surface was now a

positive hindrance to comprehension.

During the nineteenth century the process of f~~rni ture accumu-

lation 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 disappear-

ance coincided not only with a change in the way rooms were

occupied. but with a change in the prevailing conception of archi-

tectural 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 illus-

tration 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~ips are 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 repre-

sentation, the limitations of the technique are evident. The pres-

sure 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

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 environ-

ment 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 charac-

teristic 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 devel-

oped surface belonged only with the first set of relationships, be-

cause 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

221- have already noted that it was confined to a certain area of exis-

tence 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 hu-

man 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 225

was restricted in scope, and only temporary.

But was it even so temporary? The answer is equivocal. An illus-

tration from J. B. Jackson's American Space traces the effects of an-

other 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 I

which would in time develop their own species of tyranny, as those I

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 1 760, and then again around 18 1 0.

Something of this has come down to us. Many aspects of our own i I

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.

I 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 prac-

226 tices form constellations. The constellations change every now and

then, taking up a new shape, incorporating new elements. Is each 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 ten-

dency 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 sub-

jects, 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 sig-

nificant 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 in-

terior. There is no equivalent of stellar gravitation here. Each con-

stellation 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 227

unifying principle comes into play. Only in this way can any pur-

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 Chris- tian Otto, Spotc inlo Liyjlt: Tile Churches of Ballharar JVeumann (Boston, 19791, pp. 37-9; also Rudolph Wittkower, 'Vittone's Domes', in Studies in he Ilolian Baroque (London, 1975), pp. 2 17-8.

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 per- haps 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~gl i rh 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 draw- ing 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

this werc the case, it is hardly to the poinr. I all1 co~icer~ied here less with where 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 t Cot lay (London, 1974), chapter 3; Petcr Thornton, Seuotlmth-Cmlury hrla~rrr Decoration 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- o~y , although 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~eratcs into 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 Bolton, The Archi&ctun of Robert B j a m Adam (London, 1922), vol. 1, p. 42, vol. 2, pp. 78, 81, 266, 279; William Thomas, Ongnal Dew in Arclti&clure, 1783, pla~c 2; John Carter, Buildm'Mag&e, I774 and after, plates xxxix and Ixxxiii.

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 agree- able, 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 Museum (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 Up- holsterer's Guide (London, 1826), p. v; see also Eileen Harris, Th 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 229 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,

\vould or course face 0111 towards the room, turning sideways to do so, but LO

accomplish this her posture, though still classical, would bccome 'inbrmal'.

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

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.

16, Sec Mark Girouard, L.2 ill lhc RgLidi Courtly Hou~e, pp. 236-9 for a discussion of 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 sus- pect 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 ~ s on fie Tlreo~y ar~d Practice 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 j n r Hous~lrold firmilure and hle~ior lIeco,nliorr (liondon, 1808), p. 30 and plates 152, 153.

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

2 1. David !\'atkin, 7110mn.1. H o p a td ~ / 1 ~ ~ m - C l m , ~ i c n l Iden (London, 18 12).

22. See also Thomas Hope, Hou.reliold Furnilure (London, 1807), wherc, in the unpop- ulatcd 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 ;~nd inusic rooms drawn in the same way.

24. The tende~lcy to incoherc~it rcprcsetitation could already bc discrrnrd ill Shcra- ton'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. 161- upon

'~cws any supposition that the spectator moves along to di&rent stations as he \ '

one sidc of the room, pe~vpectivc will 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 sugps- tion 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.

25. John Soanc, P l m i ~ Elmliuas nt~d Perspeclivc Views if I'il<lraig~r ~Manoi Holiae

(London, 180'L), plate vl.

26. Another cxanlplc of the transition can be found in the Morel and Seddon project for refurbishing Windsor. See G. dc Bellaique and F! Kirkham, 'George IV and 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~odcl- liug in the architecture.

27. J.B. Jackson, Ar~zericwr Space: Tlre Cmmsial 3'enrs 1865-1876 (New York, 1972), pp. 150-52, taken from Schriberlr bfa8arure, April 188 1 .

28. Unfortunately I was unable to read IauraJacobus's article on the drawing tcch- nique I have described until after mine was typeset (sec 'On "M'hether a man could 5ee before him and behind him both at once"', in A~rI~i&c~urnl Hutop, 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.