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(b Vicenza, April 5, 1719; d Vicenza, Oct 25, 1790).

Italian architect and theorist. He was the son of Antonio Bertotti, a local barber, and Vittoria Scabora; through the patronage of Marchese Mario Capra, an amateur poet and architect, he was able to study architecture in the private school opened in Vicenza in 1748 by Domenico Cerato, and he became curator of the Accademia Olimpica in 1753. This gave him a small annual income and the use of the house attached to the Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza, for which he was responsible for the maintenance. For the rest of his life Bertotti Scamozzi superintended the restoration works on the theatre, to which he published an excellent guide in 1790.

In his will the architect Vincenzo Scamozzi had left a legacy for the support of a promising young student of architecture in Vicenza. As executor the Marchese Capra awarded this to Bertotti, who added Scamozzi to his name in accord with the provisions of the will. In ...

(b c. 1690; d June 2, 1765).

Irish painter and architect. He was the only Irish artist other than Charles Jervas to study at Godfrey Kneller’s Academy of Painting and Drawing, London. Bindon’s family held an estate in Co. Clare, and, like his father and brother, he was MP for Ennis, Co. Clare. He travelled in Italy, had a notable library and was a friend of Jonathan Swift, whom he painted four times between 1735 and 1740. During his lifetime he enjoyed a high reputation as a painter, probably based more on lack of competition than on his skill.

The buildings most securely attributed to Bindon are houses in Co. Kilkenny: Bessborough (c. 1744; rebuilt), Woodstock (mid-1740s; ruined) and Castle Morres (partially destr.). They are related in style to the houses of Richard Castle, with whom Bindon collaborated in the 1740s (he probably completed Russborough, Co. Wicklow, after Castle’s death in 1751). The houses confirm Bindon’s status as a gentleman–amateur rather than an innovative and imaginative professional. The routine rhythms of his façades are enlivened by rusticated detail (Gibbs surrounds and quoins), features that suggest Bindon’s presence or influence at undocumented contemporary houses such as Sopwell, Co. Tipperary, Altavilla, Co. Limerick, and Carnelly, Co. Clare, and also at St John’s Square (begun ...

(b Dromkeen, Co. Limerick, 1670; d Oldtown, Naas, Co. Kildare, Dec 18, 1730).

Irish architect. He emerged from a background of military engineering to become one of the most prominent architects in Ireland in the first two decades of the 18th century. In 1700 he succeeded William Robinson as ‘Engineer, Overseer, Surveyor & Director Generall of all…Fortifications, buildings’ etc in Ireland, a life appointment with responsibility (not always clearly defined) for erecting and maintaining most government, and some military, buildings.

Burgh’s most important works are public rather than domestic buildings, though it is difficult to tell to what extent this view depends on the uneven survival of records. His earliest building of consequence was the Royal (now Collins) Barracks, Dublin, begun shortly after 1700. Arranged around four open squares, Burgh’s ranges (partly destr.) display his characteristic astylar classicism, derived from William Robinson and from English 17th-century architects such as Roger Pratt. The elements of this style, adaptable to barracks, country houses, custom houses or hospitals, include façades of two or three storeys with central and end projections (sometimes pedimented), quoins and continuous string courses, rusticated ground-floor arcades and sometimes a top storey of dormers. This reticent, flexible, economic and undeniably prosaic formula was popularized by Burgh and dominated pre-Palladian architecture in Ireland, where there are few parallels to the work of English Baroque architects....

(b 1676; d London, ?Sept 13, 1729).

Scottish architect and writer. He was the key propagandist for the Palladian revival in early 18th-century England (see Palladianism). First as an architectural publisher and then as an architect, he did as much as any contemporary to determine the lines of development of secular architecture for a generation.

Campbell was a nephew of Sir Hugh Campbell of Cawdor, Nairnshire, and his first career was as an advocate in Edinburgh, where he began to establish a reputation at the outset of the 18th century. Between c. 1708 and 1712 Campbell abandoned his legal practice to begin a career as an architect in London. By December 1708 he was in London hoping to become Master of the [Royal] Works in Scotland. This post, then unpaid, was currently held by James Smith, an architect by whom Campbell was to be significantly influenced. It is known that Campbell had been abroad before ...

(b Horbury, W. Yorks, May 15, 1723; d Askham Richard, N. Yorks, Feb 22, 1807).

English architect. He was the son of Robert Carr, a mason and county surveyor, with whom he trained and later collaborated; together they surveyed the county bridges of West Riding, Yorks, from around 1752. Carr built mostly in the north of England, where his contacts with the county magistrates in Yorkshire and his support for the Whig Party brought him to the notice of influential patrons, who furthered his professional career. This proved to be prolific and wide-ranging. Though it was based on Burlingtonian principles his style was eclectic enough to accommodate Baroque, Rococo or Neo-classical motifs, and he was influenced by his rivals William Kent, James Paine, William Chambers and Robert Adam, although his work is readily distinguishable from theirs. Early houses such as Huthwaite Hall (1748), N. Yorks, or Arncliffe Hall (c. 1750–54), N. Yorks, owed much to contemporary pattern books, but at Harewood House (...

(b Hesse Kassel, ?1690; d Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Feb 19, 1751).

Irish architect of German birth. Around 1715 he was an officer in a regiment of engineers. His Essay on Artificial Navigation mentions that he sailed from Hamburg to Amsterdam, and he evidently travelled in the Netherlands and France. He was in England by 1725, when he was a subscriber to the third volume of Vitruvius Britannicus. In 1728 he arrived in Ireland, where Edward Lovett Pearce employed him as a draughtsman on the new Parliament House in Dublin. He carried out engineering work on the Newry canal, Co. Down (1730–36), and advised in 1735 on the water supply for Dublin for which he prepared An Essay toward Supplying the City of Dublin with Water. Pearce’s recommendation assured Castle a successful career, and following Pearce’s death in 1733 Castle became the most fashionable and prolific architect in Ireland. With the exception of a number of public commissions, most notably at Trinity College, Dublin (...

English 18th-century Palladian villa c. 12 km west of central London in Chiswick, in the Greater London borough of Hounslow. The villa was built in 1725–9 for Boyle family, §2, 3rd Earl of Burlington, to his own designs, in grounds laid out from 1715; the interior decoration and furnishings were largely the work of William Kent, who also added to the gardens in the 1730s.

In 1704 Burlington inherited the Chiswick estate, consisting of a Jacobean house set in formal, walled grounds of 11 ha, but it was not until he returned from a visit to Italy in 1715 that he turned his attention to Chiswick. Initially, he refronted the existing house with a classical façade of three bays surmounted by a shallow pediment. In 1719 Burlington once more visited Italy, including the Veneto, in order to see buildings by Palladio at first hand, and in 1725 he began building a Palladian villa (...

(bapt Petit Rechain, April 14, 1731; d Groot-Bijgaarden, Nov 1, 1812).

Flemish architect. He probably received his early training in Liège, where he obtained a bursary from the Fondation Lambert Darchis in 1754 to continue his studies in Rome. In 1755 he began working in Rome as a draughtsman for Robert Adam (i), alongside Agostino Brunias and Charles-Louis Clérisseau, Adam’s drawing teacher. Between 1755 and 1757 Dewez also worked on the proposed revision (unpublished) of Les Edifices antiques de Rome (Paris, 1682) by Antoine Desgodets, surveyed Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli and studied the buildings of Onorio Longhi, Jacopo Vignola, Francesco Borromini, Carlo Rainaldi and Pirro Ligorio.

In 1757 Dewez, Brunias and Adam left Rome together, and after an intensive archaeological survey of Diocletian’s Palace at Spalato (now Split) and a brief stay in Vicenza, they all settled in London in 1758. There the brothers Robert and James Adam opened an architectural office, in which Dewez briefly worked. At the end of ...

(fl c. 1760; will proved March 29, 1786).

[Daviso de Arcort] Irish architect. He may have been born in Piedmont. He is first heard of in Ireland in the early 1760s and was living in Cork by 1764. He described himself as having been ‘bred…as an Engineer’, and like other 18th-century Irish architects he worked as a canal engineer as well as an architect. He has been described as the last Palladian in Ireland.

From 1767 Ducart worked on the canal between Coalisland, Co. Tyrone, and the Drumglass collieries, which involved constructing a large and handsome aqueduct near Newmills and the earliest use in either Britain or Ireland of inclined planes instead of the more usual system of locks. His earliest building was the Custom House (begun 1765) in Limerick, which announced some decorative mannerisms seen in his later works and a more exotic Palladianism than had hitherto emerged from the school of Edward Lovett Pearce and Richard Castle....

[Francisco Xavier]

(b Medicina, Bologna, 1761; d Lisbon, 1807).

Italian architect, active in Portugal. He qualified after studying at the Accademia Clementina, Bologna, where he was influenced by the great tradition of the Bolognese school as well as by the Palladianism that was current when he received his artistic and technical training. A visit to Rome was also important; while there he was invited by the Oratorian, Francisco Gomes de Avelar, who in 1789 had become Bishop of the Algarve, to go to Portugal and work in his diocese.

Fabri arrived in the Algarve in November 1790 and lived with his cultured and enlightened patron in the Episcopal Palace at Faro. There he designed a hospital and seminary and was active in planning the reconstruction of many churches that had been ruined or destroyed by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Fabri also built the city arch, the Arco da Vila (c. 1792), at one end of the old harbour, where he framed the original gate with a majestic double architectural composition. The arch itself is framed by two Ionic columns and crowned by a niche with a triangular pediment in which stands a fine Italian statue of St Thomas Aquinas. This composition is in turn framed by another, divided by four Tuscan pilasters and surmounted by a bell-tower, also with pediment and wings. Adjoining the triumphal arch, Fabri built the new hospital incorporating the 16th-century Misericórdia Church, to which he added a façade with a triangular pediment, and at one side of this a Tuscan arcade open to the Ria (all ...

(b Aug 30, 1697; d Hampstead, London, Feb 25, 1769).

English architect. He grew up in the Office of Works community at Hampton Court, where his father was a labourer, and from 1711 he trained as a joiner. The turning-point in his career came when Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, noticed his drawing ability and employed him as a draughtsman and surveyor during the early 1720s. Many of the finished copies of the Earl’s designs as well as the publication drawings for William Kent’s Designs of Inigo Jones (1727) are in Flitcroft’s elegant hand. Through Burlington’s patronage Flitcroft entered the Office of Works in 1726. For 20 years he held the key post of Clerk of Works at Whitehall, Westminster and St James’s before being promoted to the posts of Master Carpenter (1746–9), Master Mason (1748–58) and finally Comptroller (1758–69). Although overshadowed as a designer by Kent and later by Chambers, he proved a conscientious administrator with a sound practical knowledge of building. A colleague wrote that ‘in our Office such a man is very necessary upon almost every occasion’. These qualities must have commended him to his private clients for whom almost all his architectural work was undertaken. Most were leading members of the political establishment whom he probably met through his official duties; they included Prince ...

(b Aberdeen, Dec 23, 1682; d London, Aug 5, 1754).

Scottish architect.

Gibbs was the younger son of an Aberdeen merchant, Patrick Gibb(s), and was brought up a Roman Catholic. He was educated at the Grammar School and at Marischal College in Aberdeen. Shortly before 1700 he left Scotland for the Netherlands, where he stayed with relatives before making his way through France to Italy, visiting Milan, Venice, Bologna, Florence, Genoa and Naples. He arrived in Rome in the autumn of 1703 and registered at the Pontifical Scots College, apparently with the intention of training for the priesthood. Within a year, however, he left to become a pupil of Carlo Fontana, then the most influential architect in Rome. His father had suffered financial hardship as a result of the 1688 Revolution, so that Gibbs had to rely on the charity of friends for his income, probably supplementing it by guiding and drawing for British tourists.

These contacts with potential patrons proved useful when Gibbs arrived in London late in ...

(b York, June 14, 1716; d New Haven, CT, April 30, 1775).

American architect of English birth. Born to Quaker parents, he probably trained in York with William Etty and his son John Etty. On the latter’s death in 1739, he followed his seafaring elder brother Joseph and became first a mate and then a captain in the transatlantic trade until captured by a French privateer in 1744. He was imprisoned at Louisburg, Nova Scotia, where he secretly copied plans of the fortress and charts of the coastline. Released in early 1745, he passed the copies to William Shirley (1694–1771), Governor of Massachusetts, who then captured Louisburg in June that year. Harrison settled in Newport, RI, and in 1746 married Elizabeth Pelham (1721–84), a kinswoman of Shirley’s wife, which secured his social position. Harrison had two advantages in the colonies: first-hand knowledge of English architecture and a unique library. His library was impressive for the American colonies and included works by Abraham Swan and Isaac Ware, James Gibbs’s pattern books, several treatises on the art of building, and drawings and books by Robert Morris, Sébastien Leclerc (i), Edward Hoppus and William Salmon covering ancient architecture, ornament, Palladio and contemporary English architecture. These resources, coupled with surveying, cartography, engineering and carpentry skills, established Harrison’s reputation as a learned architect, an important consideration for Colonial patrons who sought to keep up with their English cultural heritage, and many buildings have been attributed to him....

(b Devonshire, 1809; d Kingston, Ont., March 27, 1869).

Canadian architect of English birth. After training as a carpenter in Devonshire and a builder in London, he went to Kingston, Ontario, c. 1832. He worked on the Palladian-style court-house (1837–9; destr.) in Belleville by Thomas Rogers (c. 1780–1853), shaping four large tree trunks into Ionic columns for the portico. Returning to England in 1840, probably to acquire further training, Horsey was back in Kingston one year later listed as Architect, Civil Engineer and Master Builder and profitably engaged in building and selling terrace houses and single dwellings. For his family, Horsey built Elizabeth Cottage (c. 1843), 251 Brock Street, Kingston, an Early Gothic Revival residence, as a replica of the Horsey family manor house in Sherborne, Dorset. In 1848 Horsey succeeded William Hugh Coverdale as architect of the Provincial Penitentiary in Kingston. He continued Coverdale’s general classical scheme for the prison and designed a dome for the main building (rebuilt ...

(b Shadwell, VA, April 13, 1743; d Monticello, VA, July 4, 1826).

American statesman and architect. One of the great founding fathers of the American nation, he was a self-taught and influential architect whose work was influenced by his first-hand experience of French architecture and his admiration for Classical architecture. ‘Architecture is my delight, and putting up and pulling down one of my favorite amusements’, he is reputed to have said. His major works are his own house, Monticello, VA, the State Capitol at Richmond, VA, and his innovative designs for the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. He also conducted one of the earliest systematic archaeological investigations of a Native North American site, excavating a burial mound on his Virginia farm in 1784.

Son of a surveyor working in Virginia, he went on his father’s death to stay with his cousins at Tuckahoe, an early 18th-century plantation still existing on the lower James River. The H-shaped house had ingenious dome-shaped plaster ceilings in the office and schoolroom, possibly an influence on his later work. While a student at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, in ...

(b Bridlington, bapt Jan 1, 1685; d London, April 12, 1748).

English architect, painter, landscape gardener and designer. He was the most exuberant and innovative architect and designer active in England in the first half of the 18th century. He was trained as a painter but was not particularly successful or remarkable in this work, showing greater skill as a draughtsman. As an architect he was highly versatile, practising in both the Palladian and Gothick styles, and this versatility extended to his work as a designer, which included interior decoration, furniture and silverware, book illustration, stage sets and gardens.

Kent was born into a poor family in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Nothing is known of his early education, nor of the circumstances that led to his apprenticeship to a coach-painter in Hull at about the age of 15. Kent is first recorded in London in 1709, when he applied for a passport to go to Italy. He was then 24 and, according to ...

[Antonio José ]

(b Bologna, bapt July 1713; d Belém, 1791).

Italian architect and draughtsman, active in Brazil. While still a pupil of Ferdinando Galli-Bibiena in Bologna, he began to introduce into his projects the classicizing Palladian revival ideas that mark his later work. In 1753 he went to Brazil to take part in the work of demarcating the Portuguese–Spanish frontier set out in the Treaty of Madrid (1750). On completing this work in the Amazon Basin he moved to Belém, where he married and went on to become a royal architect. His designs were documented with illustrations in the album of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira’s scientific expedition of the late 1780s (Rio de Janeiro, Bib. N.), which facilitated the restoration in the late 20th century of Landi’s most important works. These included the vast palace for the governors of Pará in Belém, designed in 1771, for which Landi’s own designs have also survived (Lisbon, Bib. N. Col. Pombalina, no. 740). This building, despite its austere Pombaline style and the column-base ornamentation tending towards the Baroque, may, in the light of its volumetry, be considered one of the precursors of Neo-classicism in northern Brazil. Landi specialized in religious architecture, redesigning interiors, producing new retables, and decorative paintings for existing churches, as well as renovating their façades. Notable examples include the chapel of João Batista (...

[Giacomo]

(b c. 1686; d London, June 8, 1746).

English architect of Italian origin. Apparently a Venetian, he was at the court of Elector Johann Wilhelm of the Palatinate at Düsseldorf from 1708. There he was influenced by the architect Count Matteo Alberti (?1660–1716), with whom he probably worked on the Elector’s hunting-lodge, Schloss Bensburg, near Cologne. Alberti was an admirer of Inigo Jones, and it was Jones who also became Leoni’s model; this is particularly evident in the earliest known designs made after his move to England c. 1714. These were proposals for rebuilding Wrest Park, Beds (prepared by July 1715), for Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Kent. The surviving proposal (Bedford, Rec. Office, Lucas and Dingwall MSS) shows a house with two internal courtyards divided by an axially placed hall, leading to a saloon at right angles to it on the garden front. The source appears to be John Webb’s unexecuted project (1649...

House in Albemarle Co., near Charlottesville, VA, designed and later remodelled by Thomas Jefferson for his own use (see fig.). Although Jefferson continued to work on the house for more than 40 years, there were two main building programmes, in 1770–84 and 1796–1809. Jefferson began designing the house in 1768, mainly using for his guide the 1742 edition of The Architecture of A. Palladio (London, 1715–20) by James Leoni. This first version of the house superimposed the Ionic and Doric orders for the porticos that fronted the three-bay central block on the entrance and garden façades. Around 1777 the first changes were made, with the addition of octagonal bows to the wings and garden front of the central block. Jefferson used his hilltop site to advantage to conceal the service wings (planned in the 1770s but built during the remodelling in modified form after 1800). He reversed the usual Palladian scheme, where the wings flank an entrance court, by placing the wings behind the house and setting them into the side of the hill. The roofs are transformed into terrace walkways connected to the main floor of the house and serve both as extensions for the house and as landscape elements....

(Twickenham)

(b Twickenham, Surrey, c. 1701; d London, Nov 12, 1754).

English architect. Throughout his career Morris was associated with the architectural practice of Roger Morris. A design illustrated in An Essay in Defence of Ancient Architecture (pp. 84–5) closely resembles Marble Hill House (1724–9), built by Roger Morris. No details of professional collaboration are known; this reference illustrates critical approbation, however. The work that Robert Morris did on his own, however, was minor. He worked on the south front of Culverthorpe (c. 1730–35), Lincs, and made alterations to Inverary Castle (from 1745), Strathclyde. These projects are competent but show little innovation. He undertook various small interior alterations and designed fireplaces (all destr.), but his importance rests chiefly upon his writings on architecture.

His theoretical writings embody the ideas and principles of early and mid-18th-century architecture and gardening. He was the most prolific English writer on these subjects in his time and the principal theorist of English Palladianism. The principal arguments of his architectural theory were published as a series of ...