Power and Virtue

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

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

Introduction 1. Experimental Knowledge and the Use of Architecture 1.1. Knowledge for Power 1.2. Let Use be Preferred before Uniformity 1.3. Desiring to be Modern 2. The Political Use of Architecture: Magnificence, Divine Mysteries and Delight 2.1. Magnificence: Wren and the English Court 2.2. Divine Mysteries Set in Brick and Stone 2.3. Architectural Delight and Strangeness in the Proportion 3. The Sense Prior to Other Senses 3.1. Platonism in England 3.2. Virtue, Moral Sense and Taste 3.3. Faith in an Unsurpassable Past 4. The Virtuoso and the Second Maker 4.1. Shaftesbury's 'Science of Design' 4.2. Closterman, Matteis and Gribelin 4.3. Gardens and Architecture 5. Reconstituting Taste in Architecture 5.1. The Virtuosi 5.2. Defining Taste Through Critique