England at the start of the 18th century was a mess. Churches had been defaced and often destroyed by Henry VIII’s Reformation, and the Civil War not only continued the vandalism, but the lack of money meant that very little had been built at that time. Towns and cities were crowded, filthy, falling down, and increasingly sites of industry such as foundries and smelting works in addition to the usual bake houses, breweries and houses, all of which had open fires which were often not extinguished at night. Most houses, even of the wealthy, were still made of wood with thatched roofs, the only non flammable part was often the stoves.
So, when stability came with the Restoration, new buildings were needed. At first they turned to a rather ornate form of Classical, as designed by Wren and Hawksmoor, but as more gents did the grand tour, they discovered the work of Palladio, especially his Four Books of Architecture, and his style, based on Roman country villas, became the dominant style in England, especially for country houses for the first half of the 18th century. Its standard design of a rusticated ground floor [In Italy used for storage], then external stairs to the main entrance on the first floor became diluted to become the model of thousands of Georgian town houses which retained the ground floor rustication but used the basement for storage.
This plain style was associated with strength, simplicity, and democracy, hence the style was also used for the White House. And with a minimum of fancy details, it was also cheap, so lent itself to terraces for the middle classes. By mid century, this style was seen as too limiting, too rigid, too tied to rules. And Italian villas were designed for Italian landscapes and climate; they did not have chimneys, so the English versions were notoriously cold, so mostly used in the summer.
This is from “The Georgian Triumph, 1700-1830”, by Michael Reed:
“Some of the mostly splendid of the English country houses, such as Harewood House and Luton Hoo, owe much to the strongly personal approach to classical architecture developed during the 1760s by Robert Adam. When he died in 1792 an obituary notice could claim with some justification that he had ‘produced a total change in the architecture of this country’. He did this by returning directly to the inexhaustible riches of classical architecture, much of which he knew at first hand , and yet refusing to be bound by any of the later theorists. The strict rules imposed by those who purported to be following Palladio he considered to have destroyed the flexibility and the freedom of expression which he thought to be characteristic of genuine classical building. He had a very wide architectural vocabulary, amassed during his years in Italy, and yet he very rarely reproduced exactly from his prototypes, almost always making some change, however slight.”
Adam understood Roman architecture as unearthed in Pompeii and Herculaneum, with the immense amount of murals, frescoes and mosaics that made the ancient Romans houses more like homes, places for recreation rather than for strutting round showing off your new found wealth.
texthistory 