2018 marks the bicentenary of the passing of the Church Building Act, the first nation-wide non-military exercise of architectural patronage by central government in England and Wales. To commemorate and contextualise this event, and place it in a global comparative perspective, there will be an international conference to be held at Lambeth Palace Library on 6-7 September 2018.
Keynote speakers:
- Shirine Hamadeh (Koç University, Turkey), author of The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (University of Washington Press, 2007)
- Freek Schmidt (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), author of Passion and Control. Dutch Architectural Culture of the Eighteenth Century (Ashgate, 2016)
- Henriette Steiner (University of Copenhagen), author of The Emergence of a Modern City: Golden Age Copenhagen 1800-1850 (Routledge, 2014)
- Richard Wittman (University of California at Santa Barbara), author of Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (Routledge, 2007).
20 minute papers are invited on all aspects of architectural patronage in the period 1760-1840 in Great Britain and beyond. Priority may be given to papers addressing issues of State patronage at national or local level and/or papers which look beyond case studies of individual buildings/patrons. We are also keen to attract speakers from a range of disciplines.
Questions to be addressed include, but are not limited to:
• Role of new and/or non-traditional groups as patrons (professional bodies, artisan organisations, gentlemanly societies, women etc)
• Patronage of new building types
• New models of patronage (subscriptions, tontines, new forms of taxation etc)
• The role of patronage in the emergence of general contracting
• The patron/architect relationship
• Communication and decision-making among corporate patrons
• Architectural patronage as discourse and the significance of architectural patronage to those involved
• Patronage networks
• Architectural patronage in colonial contexts and/or beyond the Anglophone world
Abstracts of 300 words plus CV should be sent to Alexandrina.Buchanan@liverpool.ac.uk by 11 March 2018.
This conference is supported by an AHRC Networking Grant, ‘Architecture and Society in an Age of Reform, 1760-1840’. The University of Liverpool would also like to acknowledge the support of Lambeth Palace Library and the Georgian Group.