The “Prince Architect” welcomes you: “You will see, within this domain, an epitome of the Architectural world. Mine is, as it were, a palace of congress, wherein you will be successively addressed by humble (but, it is hoped, characteristic) representatives of the great families of Design in ancient and Mahomedan India, China, Egypt, Greece, ancient and modern Italy, Turkey, Moorish Spain, and Christian Europe”.¹

This grandiose introduction is offered by the protagonist of George Wightwick’s 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 diagram of transmission, a “tree” of influence, or a catalogue of entries, but a picturesque garden. Flanking the central palace is a group of buildings representing the “ancient” corners of the world, including India, China, Burma, and Egypt. At the top-right corner of the map, Greek and Roman structures curl leftward to show a European panoply of styles including Gothic, Soanean, Greco-Roman, and finally, two pointed styles from the Christian and “Mahomedan” perspective. Before entering this garden, you face the palace gate, an unruly collage of world architecture history consisting of, among other things, a Gothic spire, an Islamic dome, and crude prehistoric stone. The gate represents the chasm between the Prince Architect’s overflowing storehouse of experience, and you, the new guest, with none. The well-traveled architect sourced the building’s components from his extensive travels and “crammed [it] with observation, the which it vents in mangled forms.”² You, the reader, are homebound and observationally deficient and therefore must feel beguiled. However, after a guided journey through the grounds of the palace, “you will return, competent to read the significant details of what, now, only vaguely addresses your understanding”.³

Unlike more familiar world histories of the nineteenth century that enticed readers with pages full of illustrations, simplified categorizations, and appeals to scientific rationality, Wightwick’s tour of world architecture was a poetically narrated experience. His florid language and direct reference to the reader were intended to “address the eye and ear of the general public with the eloquence of picturesque illustration and impassioned comment”.⁴ He believed that “the error of architectural authors has been that of writing technical treatises for professional readers” and approached the public with a different proposition: “[architecture] requires no critical knowledge of its beauties to admit; neither are its mathematics necessary to a certain enjoyment of the associations that may be connected with a building.”⁵ In other words, plans, geometry, and other artifacts of specialized knowledge are impediments to actually knowing architecture and its history, and a general audience requires none of that. What they need is a basic level of historical knowledge introduced in an evocative manner so that “the joy of being competent to appreciate” can be unlocked in order to experience “the poetic enchantment of Architecture [that] transfixes the soul of the beholder, and leaves him spell-bound under the combined influence of the phantom past, and the palpable present”.⁶ Instead of relying on the empirical evidence of professionals alone, after just one tour through the palace of architecture, you will be in command of architectural knowledge as your “own poet”.

Wightwick’s preference for “speculation and belief” over technical demonstration was directed toward a very specific readership: idle women. The seemingly neutral “you” that drew readers into the palace grounds was in fact aimed at the “fair countrywomen of England”.⁷ At a time when female readership of both popular and specialized material was growing, the book is perhaps the first world architectural history written specifically with women in mind.⁸ Eight years later, the American author Louisa Caroline Tuthill published a world architectural history that was both the first book of its kind written by a woman and the first dedicated to “the ladies of the United States of America”.⁹ Tuthill believed strongly in cultivating the taste of American women, but Wightwick’s motivations were different. He was not appealing to women for the sake of gender equality; he saw them instead as potential clients whose domesticity predisposed them to architectural fancy. He called women the “the chief ornaments of the mansion” and asked, “can they do better than give some of their leisure to an art so essentially decorative as Architecture?”¹⁰

The model reader was the subject of the book’s dedication, Frances Parker (née Talbot), Countess of Morley, a painter, illustrator, and author who was well-connected to artists and writers of the day (including, most famously, Jane Austen).¹¹ Where idleness for working class women spelt misery, and idleness for the middle class remained aspirational, for an upper class woman like Parker, wealth and status guaranteed a more cultivated form of leisure. An 1852 portrait of Parker later in life shows her indulging in the ultimate act of enlightened leisure, reading — she stares out at the viewer while sitting with a book in hand. In a sense, Wightwick endeavored to replace that book with his own so she could help him “promote a just appreciation of Architecture, in the minds of all who are susceptible of the Beautiful, the Poetical, and the Romantic”.¹² If successful, Parker and the many wealthy and “susceptible” women like her could become Wightwick’s new patrons. As an architect himself, he was skilled at worldly styles like Egyptian revival and could potentially materialize “palaces of architecture” in mansions and gardens around England.

Parker never commissioned Wightwick for such grandiose work, but their passing relationship exemplifies the nuanced gendering of leisure among the Victorian upper class. The female reader occupied a paradoxical role as economically dependent yet independent of imagination, living inside as an “ornament of the mansion” but immersed in the media of an outside world, and interested in new information but “susceptible” to its power.¹³ Meanwhile, men could travel the world, collect information, and exert energy. A Romantic world history of architecture like Wightwick’s served as a kind of medium between female leisure and male activity. However, Wightwick would never allow himself to be as enchanted by the picturesque fantasies he created for women. William Combe’s 1812 poem The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque famously parodied this kind of male susceptibility. The comical tale follows a cleric and pedagogue named Dr. Syntax who is so enraptured by the scenes and tales he reads about that he sets out to see the “picturesque” himself, leading naturally to folly and embarrassment. Illustrations by Thomas Rowlandson show Dr. Syntax in various states of self-debasement, including a scene in his library where the daydreaming doctor is surrounded by books that come alive and fly around his sleeping head.¹⁴ The poem skewers men who believe that the picturesque can be found in the real world, but also men who are as susceptible to the “romance” of text and images as women.

Wightwick designed the Palace of Architecture as a picturesque non-place, both of this world and outside it. It is not a compendium of actual monuments like Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach’s famous 1721 Entwurff, but rather a sequence of imagined architectural follies. Instead of exact reproductions of representative buildings, Wightwick represents world cultures with fantastical designs that are excerpted and abstracted from other history texts, colonial reports, and travel books. Each building is, in other words, an “exemplar” that best represents an architectural culture’s key traits.¹⁵ For example, the palace’s Indian garden and temple is a collage of different Hindu and Buddhist temples sourced from orientalist reports. The exterior combines a Hindu gopura or entrance tower with the Mahabodhi Buddhist Temple in Bodh Gaya; the interior is an edited re-etching of an imagined temple included in The Oriental Annual, a publication that freely combined empirical research with “historical romances” of suspect origin.¹⁶ In his tour, the Prince Architect is frank about the palace’s artifice, explaining that the reality of existing buildings is less important than capturing the “feeling” that Indian architecture produces.¹⁷ This feeling would then become fuel for what Wightwick and other Romantics called “association”, or the assemblage of knowledge from external stimulus that is “associated” with our own experiences, tastes, and attitudes. Prominent theorists of association like Joseph Priestley and Archibald Alison argued that the most beautiful art and literature resulted from strong feelings and unexpected associations in the mind.¹⁸ For Wightwick, then, the strongest architectural history included unexpected and frankly unrealistic combinations of styles (like fusing Hindu and Buddhist architecture) that did not exist in the real world, but nonetheless held emotional power.

Critical responses to Wightwick’s entreaty to female readers spanned from bemusement to venomous reproach. The Gentleman’s Magazine recognized that the book was not for the “scientific observer” of architecture but acknowledged that it could nonetheless “afford amusement to the ‘fair’ and fashionable admirers of the art”.¹⁹ W. H. Leeds, writing under the penname Candidus, was not so generous. He published an excoriating review that held the book up as an example of the withering effects of Romanticism on contemporary architectural discourse. He called Wightwick the “wickedest dog in existence” for audaciously dedicating his book not to any reputable institute, but “to a woman, or a no-man” and thinking “that romance has anything to do with art—at any rate, with architecture”.²⁰ Leeds argued that Wightwick’s avoidance of technical description, scarce reference to plans, and indulgence in imagination threatened to turn architecture into an unserious field of curiosity, charm, and play — all words invariably tinged with the feminine. If Wightwick’s book gained the influence its author wanted, then surely “that which has hitherto been the task of a higher order of intellect is now to become the amusement of women—perhaps the plaything of children”.²¹ Careful to not appear ungentlemanly, Leeds clarified that he is not opposed to women enjoying or appreciating architecture in a passive way, but Wightwick’s encouragement of active speculation and creative rearrangement of architecture history was dangerous. “We object to it”, he reasoned, “not because we question the capacity or the sex, but because we see no occasion for increasing the number of designing women”.²² Where Wightwick saw idle women as eager consumers, Leeds was concerned that an overly enticing history would shock them out of their idleness and convince them that they, too, could make architecture.

Men like Leeds feared that “designing women” would disrupt two key aspects of English architectural culture, its homosociality and its claim to truth. The first was perhaps an annoyance, but the second could be disastrous. Leeds argued that women’s flimsy associations and predilection for exclamations like “how exceedingly pretty!” could trigger the collapse of all architectural knowledge made by men before them.²³ Such anxiety represents the panic of a discipline whose propulsive drive to include more and more case studies and accommodate more and more readers also brought unwelcomed actors, like women, dangerously close to the inner circle of architectural expertise. The discrediting of Wightwick’s book shows the quick hardening of professional and epistemological borders to maintain credibility.

Were male architects, then, forbidden from idle dreaming and imagination? Not quite. We can see this double standard at play in Thomas Cole’s famous “The Architect’s Dream”, a painting that was completed and rejected by its patron in 1840, the same year that Wightwick published The Palace of Architecture. The image depicts a diminutive architect with his eyes closed, surrounded by a stack of enormous books (presumably about architecture) atop an even larger marble pedestal. Fluttering green curtains frame a dramatic scene projected from the nameless designer’s imagination: a vast cityscape comprised of Gothic, Greek, Roman, and Egyptian buildings crowded around a hazy port. It is another version of the “Palace of Architecture”, where invented exemplars of architectural style commingle in a picturesque space. The architect is engaged in a kind of imaginative fancy similar to that of the ideal female visitors to Wightwick’s palace, but without the aid of a “Prince Architect”.²⁴ It is his assured technical knowledge, represented by the plan drawing in his hand, that thrusts him into this richly detailed fantasy. The dreaming architect’s leisure is therefore the reward of hard work done well. While the women wandering around the Palace of Architecture were expected to limit their engagement to “appreciation”, the dreaming male architect is allowed to channel his idleness toward bold new designs.

Wightwick’s own professional designs can still be seen standing in English cities like Cornwall, however, the most lasting impact of The Palace of Architecture is found in the United States. Up and down the eastern seaboard are variations of his imagined “Anglo-Italian Villa”, discussed at the end of the Prince Architect’s tour. The villa is introduced to the reader as a living thing who describes itself: “What am I, then, but an English mansion, adapted to my locality, and to the climate and customs of my country? [I have] my leading external features from modern Italy, and my complexion from fair Greece”.²⁵ Just as Wightwick had done to colonial reports, the villa’s plans and elevations were heavily augmented by architects Andrew Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux as the basis of Italianate villas such as the Robert P. Dodge House in Washington, D.C.²⁶

Despite the popularity of his designs, Wightwick’s Romantic architectural history found little support. In the following decades, a new generation of scholars, dissatisfied with the vagaries of subjectivity, re-organized world architectural history using scientific language. The famous Scottish historian James Fergusson, for example, was inspired by the “uniformitarian” theories of geologist Charles Lyell and argued that buildings could be read like “fossil remains” to connect an extinct culture to the present.²⁷ More so than geology or biology, the science that was the most influential to late nineteenth-century architectural historians was the dubious science of race. To make sense of the huge variety of architecture around the world, historians increasingly reduced architecture to expressions of racial qualities.²⁸ Fergusson saw Indian architecture as frozen in time, an expression of the inertness of the so-called “Turanian” peoples. Similarly, his contemporary Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc searched for the Aryan roots of European vernacular architecture in the Alps. Where Wightwick invented architectural models to foster novel associations, this new history constrained interpretation to a binary of style and essentialism.

Into the twentieth century, architectural history remained stubbornly male dominated and the gendering of architectural fantasy and imagination as feminine stymied any hope that such ideas could gain professional credence. Things quickly changed in the 1960s, when young architects championed phenomenology as a critique of modernism’s universalizing assumptions about user experience. Historian Jorge Otero-Pailos argues that this phenomenological revolution allowed for a generation of so-called postmodern architects to challenge architectural history’s longstanding positivist bent. The buildings of Charles Moore, Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown playfully assemble specific and invented historical references, provoking the viewer in a manner that is not so dissimilar from Wightwick’s mutant palace gate.

While postmodernists experimented with architectural history, the written output of architectural historians such as Charles Jencks ironically remained somewhat conventional and tied to the explanatory textbook. Fantasy and imagination seemingly still carried an indelible stigma. However, a few recent books suggest a return of the repressed, so to speak. Françoise Fromonot’s The House of Doctor Koolhaas (2025) tells the history of a famous house by Rem Koolhaas through the genre conventions of a detective novel. Charlotte Van den Broeck’s Bold Ventures: Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy (2022) blends researched histories of architectural failure and suicide with self-reflective passages that question the authoritativeness of words like “explanation” that are so often used in history texts. Past authors are being rediscovered as well. Lin Huiyin’s mid-twentieth-century poems reflecting on a changing China are at last being translated and reframed as examples of architectural history. These texts are refreshingly strange — just as strange as walking into the Palace of Architecture — and signal that the discipline is finally shedding some of its enduring prejudices about imagination and fantasy.