This seminar will move beyond traditional frameworks of national identity and political history, exploring the unique role of personal encounters in constructing Chinoiserie architecture in 17th- and 18th-century Britain.

Since the Renaissance, architectural writers have often conceived the subject in terms of the design and the designer  - prioritising them over the social context, the materiality of buildings, the methods of construction employed and their life in use, which usually involves physical alteration. 

In this lecture Alex will explore how we might interpret the modern Gothic Revival as a unique outcome not merely of industrialisation but of the carbon-based economy that drove it, suggesting an ecocritical historiography that foregrounds its environmental allusions and discontents.