It was in 1506 that Pope Julius II decided to destroy the original St Peter’s, which had lasted for over 1,000 years and which was ‘cluttered with nearly 100 tombs, altars, and chapels added over the centuries’.3 In its place, and centred around the tomb of St Peter, a succession of architects – Bramante, Sangallo, […]

Colney Hatch was, even more than the proposals by Bevans and Tuke, every­thing the York Retreat was not. It represented an extreme of the new Victorian large-scale asylums, a new building type without precedent. It was built by public funds following the County Asylum Acts of 1808 and then 1845 which first allowed and then […]

But, the Sunday event excepted, by the night of 11 November Harding’s campaign platform of a ‘Return to Normalcy’ had been reasserted in the form of the Republican version of the League of Nations, the Conference on Limitation of Armaments, set to open the next day. It, too, manifested itself spatially. Against the backdrop of […]

Piranesi’s reconstruction did not staunch the flow of appropriations of the Pantheon’s design by architects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in Europe, the Americas, and in the colonies. One scholar put it succinctly: ‘The Pantheon motif can be seen wherever authority, ecclesiastic or political, demanded a recognizable, stately architectural imagery.’72 Nor did Piranesi’s research […]

Traditionally, Christian pilgrims formed a communal relationship with each other and with the caretakers of the sacred sites throughout the ritual of pilgrimage. That communal relationship, which was forged through the hazards of the journey, the sharing of resources, and the entry into an alternative reality, defined the social character of the pilgrimage. In the […]