Architecture and Society in an Age of Reform

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This Network aims to bring together an international group of scholars from different disciplines (including architectural history, history, literature and music) with an interest in the cultures of Enlightenment, reform and radicalism to discuss the complex of ways in which the practice, theory and experience of architecture contributed to debates about modernity and urban experience in the decades around 1800. It will do so through lens of the life of Thomas Rickman (1776-1841), which provides a springboard for discussing many of the issues involved. His internationally influential work, 'An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of Architecture' (Liverpool, 1817) was the first architectural 'best seller', through which the educated public were taught how to identify and discuss architectural styles. Through studying and writing about architecture, Rickman transformed his identity from depressed bankrupt exile to successful professional architect. Rickman was closely associated with reformist circles, his architectural research was informed by methods of classification learned from the natural sciences and he was a pioneer of new methods of construction, but as a successful practitioner he worked for a wide range of clients, from wealthy industrialists, to Anglican parishes, municipal corporations and Cambridge colleges. His career - and the associated buildings and archive - provides a connecting thread across this project, a springing point for addressing broader research questions and engaging the general public through a touring exhibition, website and associated workshops and walking tours devoted to his life and work. Many of today's debates about the contribution of buildings, both new and old, to societal wellbeing have their counterparts in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discourse and juxtaposing the two will contribute a historical dimension to discussion of modern planning and heritage policies. Through networking symposia in Liverpool and London, and research workshops with site visits to buildings in Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham, the Network will address how, in addition to its existing role as the most prestigious public site of display, architecture became a site of social experiment, embodying decisive shifts in medical, penal and educational theory, to be tested through the impact of new building forms. These debates intertwined buildings and books in a virtual sphere but the public sphere also had a spatial dimension: the new libraries, news rooms and lecture theatres in which such debates were encountered and performed and the transformation of towns through public and private investment (actual and anticipated) through which modernity was imagined and experienced. These involved changing patterns of patronage, funding and building, contributing to the professionalisation of the architect and the emergence of general contracting. The Network aims to frame public discourse about architecture in relation to the transformation of the public sphere, both through changes in print culture and contemporary economic and social changes wrought by war, capitalisation, industrialisation and urbanisation. Through print and travel, this discourse had a global dimension and the Network will develop international connections in order to enable a globally comparative approach. Our objective is to build capacity for ongoing collaboration and future international comparative research.