Conclusion: the builder rehabilitated?

In a satirical postscript to the preface of The architectural remembrancer (1751), concerning ‘the peculiar Fondness of Novelty, which reigns at present’, author Robert Morris announced a new publication on behalf of ‘a Friend’: There is now in the Press, and speedily will be published, ...

Introduction: a new apology for the builder

Borrowing its title from the notorious seventeenth-century speculative builder Nicholas Barbon’s seminal work on free market economics, published in 1685, the introduction offers a new apology for a much-maligned member of the architectural community: the building artisan. Taking the form of a discursive chapter in its own right, it weaves together a critical literature review with an extended analysis of the artisan’s place within architectural, design and cultural histories. Topics include the adverse effect of eighteenth and nineteenth-century criticisms of the building community on modern scholarship, distinctions between intellectual and manual labour in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the systemic problems arising from a new literature devoted to British Atlantic world studies.

Building sales: advertising and the property market

Having examined the building and decorating of the urban house, this chapter explores how the artisan approached marketing and selling real estate. As the first sustained analysis of property advertising in the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world, this chapter first considers how regional variations and social demographics (aristocratic audiences in London and Dublin compared with merchant audiences in Boston and Philadelphia) dictated the form and content of property notices, reflecting on issues such as location, quality of structural and decorative finish, convenience, and decorum. But while house-building and house-selling were principally economic activities, representing the motivating force for building mechanics to enter the real estate market, the evidence from property advertisements reveals that builders were cognizant of the semantics of advertising rhetoric and employed a vocabulary that emulated that of auctioneers, luxury goods manufacturers and other polite retailers.

Decorating houses: style, taste and the business of decoration

Reflecting on the separation of house building and house decorating in the historiography of the eighteenth-century town house, this chapter explores the role of the building artisan in determining the form and appearance of the urban domestic interior. Of particular importance here is the business of decoration: the impact of decorators, such as decorative plasterers and timber joiners, as speculative builders and property developers; and the standardization of interior decoration in the form of pre-fabricated ornament. Key topics include the dissemination of architectural tastes through the agency of immigrant artisan populations; the role of books and magazines in shaping vocabularies of decorative taste; and the creative adaptation from printed sources. Focusing on the artisan’s negotiation and interpretation of the neo-classical (or ‘Adam’) style, this chapter also considers how degrees of separation from the source of that ornamental language fostered distinct dialects in towns and cities across Britain, Ireland and North America. Collectively, the topics of chapter make a case for the artisan as a key agent of fashionable taste in elite real estate markets.

Building reputations: a genteel life in trade

This chapter presents a cultural history of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century building tradesman in Britain, Ireland and North America, focusing on his social identity and professional class; the textual and visual representations of the building trades in contemporary print culture; degrees of social and professional mobility; and the means by which the builder promoted and self-fashioned as an arbiter of architectural taste. Of particular importance here is how the reputations of tradesman were characterized in social and architectural discourse at a time when concerns were raised about the quality of speculatively built urban domestic architecture (in terms of aesthetics and sound construction); a discourse predicated on the emerging architectural profession and its corresponding demand for authority over all aspects of design and building. Taken together, the themes of this chapter provide the cultural backdrop for an examination of the artisan’s relationship to house design, to interior decoration, and to real estate advertising.

Designing houses: the façade and the architecture of street and square

This chapter builds on a rich and complex history of the eighteenth-century urban house in the cities of Britain, Ireland and North America. Shifting emphasis away from construction, economic competence and labour organization – the predominant focus of academic studies devoted to this class of building producer – it investigates the artisan’s engagement with the processes and aesthetics of architectural design. With prominence given to the design of the house façade, topics include the emerging standardization in building construction; building regulations and the varying degrees of control exercised by landowners and city councils; and the responsibility of design to the urban milieu, specifically the requisite (ideal) interface between private concern (house) and public obligation (street). With reference to artisanal education through apprenticeship and builders’ academies, and the role of pattern books and drawing portfolios, this chapter argues that building tradesmen were concerned as much with making design (architecture) as with making profits (building).