Architectural Exchange in Europe: The Example of Kew
2.2 Architectural Studies of Kew’s Oriental Follies
2.2.2 Representations and Labels
At the time these buildings were constructed—the Alhambra, the Mosque, the Pagoda—
they were the subject of controversy and derision in the eighteenth century. The satires by Walpole, Hogarth, Chatterton and Mason of Kew and the monarchy that built the gardens, articulate the ‘foolishness’, ‘childishness’ and ‘phoniness’ of the ‘baby houses’.9 These satirical comments lead to the labelling of these structures as ‘follies’; a term which was subsequently adopted by architectural historians. ‘Follies’ constructed in the English countryside by royalty and wealthy landowners were often pulled down by their subsequent occupants and replaced by other buildings (usually these actions related to changes in taste); but there were also more violent reactions to these buildings.10 The concept of ‘folly’ as a name applied to the structures in Kew Gardens, implies a frivolous, light-hearted or inconsequential structure.
The phenomenon of negative or hostile representations of these structures is addressed in this chapter by examining the nomenclature applied to products of architectural exchange or their relegation to secondary importance in architectural histories between European and Islamic architecture. These attitudes also reveal the way these buildings were seen as anomalies in the context of architectural history. As mentioned earlier, Quaintance’s article examines the derisive reactions to Kew, and is also an example of the strong feelings these buildings incited in their observers, feelings that were so diverse that (in Quaintance’s words) ‘they rarely glimpsed the same garden.’11 Quaintance comments:
9 See Quaintance, “Kew Gardens 1731-1778: Can We Look At Both Sides Now?”, 30-42.
10 Marly is an example in France that was looted and destroyed during the French revolution.
11 Quaintance, “Kew Gardens 1731-1778: Can We Look At Both Sides Now?”, 42.
‘Walpole recorded anti-Kew pettiness. The House of Confucius must have qualified as one of Frederick’s “baby houses at Kew”’.12
These judgemental reactions by observers in the eighteenth century (as discussed by Quaintance) have now metamorphosed into the different reductive ‘labels’ for these buildings that scholars use, which continue to plague an analysis of the European-Islamic exchange.13 Watkin facetiously explains the influence of Asian architecture in the eighteenth century:
There is almost a temptation to think that the English went completely insane in the course of the eighteenth century as one turns the pages of Barbara Jones’ Follies and Grottoes (1953; rev.ed. 1974). This book records over 830 buildings designed with scenic rather than functional ends in mind.14
His wry comment about the obsession with form rather than function, and the lack of capacity for ‘rational’ reasoning by English patrons, does nothing to enhance the status of these buildings. Thus scholars have perceived them as ‘follies’, ‘chinoiseries’, ‘exotics’
or applied other terms to these ‘frivolous’ structures. For example, Summerson describes the Pagoda at Kew and the ‘Great Caprice’ (a Roman arch surmounted by a Chinese tempietto) at Tsarskoe Selo’, designed by Quarenghi, as ‘follies’.15 Similarly, Hugh Honour labels some of the buildings in Haga Park (Scandinavia) as ‘Sino-Moresque follies’.16 In addition, at the time of their construction, royal patrons such as Frederick and Augusta, who brought these examples of buildings that were evidence of exchanges with distant architectural environments into an English royal garden, were not always lauded for their efforts. On the contrary, ridicule was often employed to belittle their achievements, as Walpole’s comments illustrate.17
12 Quaintance, “Kew Gardens 1731-1778: Can We Look At Both Sides Now?”, 40.
13 Negative emotive reactions to Kew are expressed by William Hogarth in his engravings of the monarchy and Kew, Thomas Chatterton, Horace Walpole, the Whig critic Mason in his Epistle. See Quaintance,
“Kew Gardens 1731-1778: Can We Look At Both Sides Now?”, 14, 32-42.
14 David Watkin, The English Vision: The Picturesque In Architecture, Landscape and Garden Design, 52.
15 See John Summerson, The Architecture of the Eighteenth Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 101.
16 Hugh Honour, “Chinoiserie” The Vision of Cathy (London: John Murray, 1961), 171.
17Quaintance, “Kew Gardens 1731-1778: Can We Look At Both Sides Now?”, 40.
2.2.3 ‘One Way Flow’
Quaintance’s article also demonstrates the tendency to represent the influence of Asian architecture (such as Chinese) on English, as a one way flow of ideas. That is, there is no mention of the influence, at the same time, of English architecture on Chinese architecture in Canton, or European architecture on buildings constructed by the Ottoman and Qing Empires. This last point could seem like a facetious critique of Quaintance, as his intention was not to discuss the architectural exchanges in China, but by consistently emphasizing the built environment in Europe, scholars have inadvertently given the impression that architectural influence (of ideas, building, by travellers’ illustrations of buildings, etc) was an exclusively European phenomenon, which is articulated most comprehensively—and influentially—in the discourse of orientalism.18
Fig 2.2.a The figural paintings on the central ceiling of the Hall of the Kings in the Alhambra, Granada, c.1370-1430. This painting uses Italian or Catalonian gothic techniques.
18 The main studies on ‘orientalism’ in European architecture are by Conner, Sweetman, Crinson and Mackenzie. See Patrick Conner, Oriental Architecture in the West; John Sweetman, The Oriental Obsession, Islamic Inspiration in British and American Art and Architecture 1500-1920; Mark Crinson, Empire Building, Orientalism and Victorian Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); John MacKenzie, Orientalism, History, Theory and theArts (Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 1995). Other studies which engage with the phenomenon of ‘orientalism’ are by: Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts, Orientalism’s Interlocutors, Painting, Architecture, Photography (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2002); Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient, Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth- Century World’s Fairs (Berkeley, Los Angeles: Oxford: University of California Press, 1992); Charles Christopher Knipps, Types of Orientalism in Eighteenth Century England (PhD diss., Berkeley, 1974).
The exchange between European architecture and Islamic architecture in Asia (as well as examples from Islamic Spain, for example the Alhambra in Granada (see Fig 2.2.a) and North Africa, for example the buildings of Cairo) has generally been presented as a one- way flow of ideas from the Islamic architectural worlds to Europe. This tendency obscures the multi-directional nature of architectural exchange and maintains the illusion of an uncomplicated one way flow of ideas.