George Wightwick’s The Palace of Architecture – The Public Domain Review

This grand introduction is offered by the main character of George Wightwick Palace of Architecture: a romance of art and history (1840). The reader, an imagined visitor referred to in the second person, is quickly handed a map showing the “architectural world” not as a transmission diagram, a “tree” of influence, or a catalog of entries, but as a picturesque garden. On either side of the central palace is a group of buildings representing ‘ancient’ corners of the world, including India, China, Burma and Egypt. In the top right corner of the map, Greek and Roman structures curl to the left to represent a European panoply of styles including Gothic, Soanese, Greco-Roman and finally two-pointed styles from the Christian and ‘Mahometan’ perspective. Before you enter this garden, you stand in front of the palace gate, an unruly collage of world architectural history consisting of a Gothic spire, an Islamic dome and rough prehistoric stone. The gate represents the gap between the Prince Architect’s overflowing treasury of experiences, and you, the new guest, who has none. The well-traveled architect sourced the building’s components from his extensive travels and “stuffed it full [it] with observation, which radiates it in mutilated forms. You, the reader, are housebound and poor in observation, and must therefore feel seduced. However, after a guided tour of the palace grounds, “you return able to read the important details of what is now only vaguely your understanding.”