Building Reputations: Architecture and the Artisan, 1750 - 1830


Conor Lucey

Regular price €90.00

Manchester University Press, 2018
Hardcover, 264 pages

Recipient of the 2019 Alice Davis Hitchcock award by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, for providing an outstanding contribution to the study or knowledge of architectural history.

Taking a cue from revisionist scholarship on early modern vernacular architectures and their relationship to the classical canon, this book rehabilitates the reputations of a representative if misunderstood building typology - the eighteenth-century brick terraced house - and the artisan communities of bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers responsible for its design and construction. Opening with a cultural history of the building tradesman in terms of his reception within contemporary architectural discourse, chapters consider the design, decoration and marketing of the town house in the principal cities of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British Atlantic world. The book is essential reading for students and scholars of the history of architectural design and interior decoration specifically, and of eighteenth-century society and culture generally.

Dr Conor Lucey is Assistant Professor in the School of Art History & Cultural Policy at University College Dublin.