Superficial, Ambitious, and Un-English: Characterising Architectural Aficionados in Early Stuart Dialogues
(2025) TEMPORANEA. Journal of Architectural History — Vol. 1, n° 6, p. 164 (2025)
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- Authors
Sik, Daniel 
- Abstract
- This article identifies a recurring archetype in early Stuart dialogue writing—the architecture enthusiast—within the broader debates on public participation in architecture in seventeenth-century England. Drawing on studies that have traced the rise of non-professional observers of the built environment, it argues that dialogue texts offer something those sources do not: they show how less enthusiastic contemporaries received that enthusiasm. In plays and dialogues ranging from Norden’s Surveyor’s Dialogue (1607) and Benvenuto Italiano’s The Passenger (1612) to the Caroline comedies set at Covent Garden, characters who revel in “new erections,” orderly rows, and Italianate imports are juxtaposed with less enthusiastic or more conservative interlocutors. Read together, these portrayals constitute a polemic against the growing architectural appreciation, articulated in three related arguments. First, the amateur is stereotyped as superficial, content with facades, long fronts, and visual pleasure. Second, the amateur is ambitious, employing architectural discourse to align themselves with designers, social advancement, and the tastes of the "nobility and chivalry." Third, the amateur is un-English, favoring foreign models that threaten an imagined Protestant and domestic architectural vernacular. Whether or not these characters reflect historical individuals, their recurrence registers real anxieties about new tastes, new titles, and buildings, and shows that vocal admiration for architecture in early Stuart England was not an action without reaction.
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Citations
Sik, D. (2025). Superficial, Ambitious, and Un-English: Characterising Architectural Aficionados in Early Stuart Dialogues. TEMPORANEA. Journal of Architectural History, 1(6), 164. https://doi.org/10.12795/TEMPORANEA.2025.06.02 (Original work published 2025)