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The article offers information on the architectural restoration of the Radley Hall in Oxfordshire, England. The Radley Hall is a fine baroque country house made by John Stonehouse of Radley and William Townesend and Bartholomew Peisley of Oxford on June 28, 1721. The paper also focuses on the characteristic baroque plan of such architecture to find a late eighteenth-century plan. It is noted that the house has two plans in which the front door leads directly to the garden door designed to help bring the sunlight into the north-facing hall.

The article examines the architectural history of the Blickling Hall, a Jacobean building, in Norfolk, England. It discusses various extensive building accounts from the Lothian papers in the Norfolk Record Office and surviving documents concerning the mansion's construction and personnel involve, such as the full summary drawn up by Richard Burton, the steward of Sir Henry Hobart, the first Baronet of the Blickling Hall. The architectural drawings of the house provided by the master craftsmen Robert Lying, which shows the design for a banqueting house in the east garden, and other documents which includes the total expenditures and service contracts are presented

Arthur J. Penty, an English architect in private practice in York at the turn of the century, became associated with Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin as a freelance designer and exerted a fundamentally important (though largely unsung) influence on the stylistic principles now associated with Parker and Unwin's work at the First Garden City, Letchworth (founded 1903) and at Hampstead Garden Suburb in London (commenced 1905). He was a competent Arts and Crafts designer during a late phase of this idiom's effectiveness in England, believing it to be both culturally and socially appropriate in its reflection of the English temperament and its demand for high quality production. His concerns for the latter prompted him to be an architectural theorist, to popularize the work of Voysey and Lethaby, and to advocate greater on-site collaboration between architects and craftsmen and the virtual abolition of designing on paper. It also persuaded him to become a political activist and to originate a movement--Guild Socialism-- which placed great faith in the potential governance of education and production by restored crafts guilds and which enjoyed a brief moment of success in the form of a National Guilds League just after the First World War. Medievalism is the key concept linking all aspects of his life's work--his devotion to the teachings of Morris, his respect for likeminded 19th-century practical idealists, his wish to encourage a return to systems of quality, control and production effective in the Middle Ages, and his "medievalist" detailing of several of Parker and Unwin's landmark buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the architectural authorship of the mid 18th century design of Holkham Hall in Norfolk, England, with a particular focus on the architect William Kent. The role that the architects the Earl of Burlington and Thomas Coke (who is also referred to as Baron Lovell, Earl of Leicester and Lord Leicester) played in designing the Holkham Hall is discussed. An overview of the architectural researcher Leopold Schmidt's perspective on the Holkham Hall's authorship is provided.

The article discusses the contours of the post-industrial work of Italian radical architecture group that asserted itself in the subsequent decades in London, England. It investigates the career-long fixation of Italian Radical Architecture collective Superstudio with architecture and paying special attention to their relationship with popular culture and mass media forms. It notes that the groups attitude towards mass culture point an escalating difficulty in finding spaces with capitalist system from individual action.

An essay is presented examining the history of 16th century fortification-building in England and the different forms of expertise that were used by the state. Details are given overviewing the adoption of domestic builders as experts after failures in dealing with previous Continental workers. Further analysis is offered comparing the dynamics between experts by knowledge or experts by experience within the arrangements.

The "pavilion plan" for hospital design originated in France in the 18th century and was popularised in England by John Roberton and George Godwin in the mid-19th century; the underlying rationale was that with improved ventilation the mortality rate (at that time exceedingly high) was significantly reduced. Among the enthusiasts for this new style was Florence Nightingale (herself a miasmatist)--who had experienced astronomically high death rates in the hospital at Scutari during the Crimean War (1854-6). One of the leading exponents of this style of hospital architecture was Henry Currey (1820-1900) whose greatest achievement was undoubtedly the design for the new St Thomas's Hospital on the Lambeth Palace Road. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the system of contracting in gross for buildings in England. Between the years 1800 and 1830 there was much contention about the best mode of contracting for a building. The subject came under discussion in Parliament, and was a topic of inquiry by official committees. Limited competition among chosen tradesmen was a safeguard against this danger, and in the 1820's it was employed by the Office of Works for all new building. Fears that a contractor would lose by his contract, or hopes that he would enrich himself, largely derived from the architect's lack of care in drawing up his specification and supervising the work. It might seem that these difficulties could be overcome when drawing up the contract by the architect's specifying the mode of measuring to be followed. But it has been seen that contracts in gross might give rise to disputes if extras and alterations were undertaken. Thus by the 'sixties when the Royal Institute of British Architects set up a committee on professional practice, there was general agreement that the system of measurement and a schedule of prices only led to disputes, and in many cases to frauds, and the best and most economical course for the Government was by contract in the gross.