The following thesis addresses Manfredo Tafuri's historical and critical method. It considers a selection of studies conducted by the Italian historian at different moments of his intellectual trajectory, and it explores how his unorthodox approach succeeded in challenging established architectural accounts and in exposing the ideologically constructed figure of the architect. The thesis takes its points of departure from Fredric Jameson's interpretation of Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co's book Modern Architecture as a story of sequential failed attempts to resolve the contradiction between the city and the building (or more abstractly, between totality and individual work). Expanding on Jameson's reading, it illustrates how, in the selection of works considered, Tafuri organises his narrative around pairs of (apparently) antinomic terms such as plan and Plan, image and fragment, rule and licence, reality and utopia. Central to the thesis is also the charting of the theoretical and political encounters that shaped Tafuri's mode of thinking. Chapter One focuses on Tafuri and Italian Workerism. It investigates how the Frankfurt School-inflected critique of planning initiated by the founder of Workerism Raniero Panzieri inspired Tafuri's own reading of urban planning. It also looks at the way Tafuri extended the critique of intellectual labour advanced within the frame of the Italian Marxist journal Contropiano to the domain of architecture. Chapter Two tackles Tafuri's analysis of the use of fragment and fragmentation in the work of the Venetian etcher Giambattista Piranesi and in that of the 20th-century avant-garde. It contends that Tafuri's exploration of the meaning of the fragment in works dating from different historical moments is intended to reveal the effect of capitalist development on the communicative potential of form. Chapter Three takes its lead from the 1977 text 'The Historical "Project"', in which Tafuri establishes a set of guidelines for the historical research which will inform his study of Renaissance architecture in the following years. It examines how the application of this method allows Tafuri to challenge established historical accounts of the Renaissance such as that of Rudolf Wittkower. Finally, Chapter Four returns to Tafuri's earliest interventions in the post-war Italian architectural debate. Whereas the first part considers journal articles on the question of the replanning of Rome, the second focuses on a selection of texts tackling the discussion over the new urban scale and architectural neo-realism.

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The definition of what architecture means and how it signifies shifts with different conceptions of shared time (history) and personal time (memory). Turning to the nineteenth century, the thesis explores how comprehensions of architectural meaning were informed by architects' acquaintance with history. Because architects were acutely aware of the schism between a new socio-historical interpretation of architecture and its more traditional grounds, re-examination of this period offers us the opportunity to reconsider issues still relevant today - the struggle between imitation and innovation, the definition (or rejection) of aesthetic experience, the stakes behind architectural judgment (who decides and how), or fundamentally, how to act (i.e. build) when there is no longer a single grand narrative but a plurality of possible histories. The work focuses on how the English architect Charles Robert Cockerell (1788-1863) addressed the dilemma of history: if architecture was over-identified with the past, the dangers of an eclectic historicism loomed ahead if architecture was dissociated from all historical narratives, it risked become meaningless. Analysis of Cockerell's conception of history suggests that he attempted to avoid these consequences in two essential ways. First, a reading of Cockerell's textual and graphic representations of history (diaries, Royal Academy lecture notes and drawings) reveals how his definition of an active relation with the past inherently guarded the communicability and metaphysical significance of architecture. Second, a study of Cockerell's unfinished building for Cambridge University Library, illuminated by various drawings (Grand Tour studies and publications design development, contract and exhibition drawings), discloses how the setting of his architecture was not merely historical but deeply contextual and experiential. Questioning architecture as a trace from the past, an imprint of its time and an index requiring movement for comprehension, the work addresses the ways in which memory is drawn in architecture and architectural discourse.

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The first twenty formative years Lethaby spent in Barnstaple where his father was a skilled craftsman, active Liberal and loading Bible Christian and there he served his apprenticeship to a local architect. Then for a decade from 1879, when he won the RIBA Soane Medallion, the Pugin studentship and other prizes, he worked as chief clerk for Norman Shaw, making an elegant and learned contribution to his principal's mature style. Later in practice on his own, he produced many fresh and original designs includtn6 half a dozen executed buildings.

Henry Clutton was a, pupil of Edward Blore and an associate of William Burges. He was related to the Cluttons of Whitehall Place (Surveyors to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners) and his reputation has suffered from confusion with another Henry Clutton (1814-95), a partner in that firm. This thesis constitutes the first full-scale biography of Henry Clutton (1819-93). It explores the professional relationship between Clutton and Burges, with particular reference to their designs for Lille Cathedral. A study of the extent, nature and distribution of Roman Catholic church-building in the second half of the nineteenth century forms a significant part of the thesis because Clutton converted to Catholicism at a crucial point in his career. The country churches and restorations which Clutton undertook for the Dukes of Bedford show another aspect of his work and an examination of his country houses further demonstrates his versatility. Extensiveuse has been made of family papers and of deposits in County Record Offices, local libraries, diocesan archives, scattered Anglican and Roman Catholic material as well as national archives. Clutton travelled on the Continent and he wrote a handsome book on French Domestic Architecture. During the l850s his career advanced rapidly, under the influence of the Ecclesiological Society and the writings of John Ruskin. The design "Foederis Arca" by Clutton and Burges gained first premium in the Li Il e Cathedral Competition (1856), establishing Clutton as a master of Early French Gothic architecture and a leader of the Early French phase of the Gothic Revival. As a Roman Catholic architect Clutton designed French Gothic and Romanesque churches, and a Westminster Cathedral comparable in design to Cologne or Amiens. Clutton's buildings are bold and never pretty. Utility, reality, space, scale. mass and horizontality were the chief principles of his designs and his details were invariably French.

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Sir James Pennethorne (1801-1871) was the architectural heir of John Nash, in whose office he received much of his early training. From 1839 until 1870 he worked almost exclusively for the government: devising and carrying out major street improvement schemes in central London; designing and laying out the first metropolitan parks intended primarily for the use of the poor; acting as architecural surveyor to the Crown Estate in London; advising successive governments on schemes for new public buildings in the capital; and designing some of the most important of those buildings himself. He was one of the leading architects and urban planners of the mid 19th century, and a study of his career fills a major gap in the history of London, and the archtectural history of19th-century England. A first chapter traces Pennethorne's early career, examining his training, his role in the Nash office, and his first independently commissioned buildings. An assessment of his contribution to the planning of London follows, concentrating first on street improvements, then on the Crown Estate, and finally on parks. Pennethorne's main activities in these areas were concentrated in the 1840s and early 1850s. In 1844 he began his involvement in the planning and design of government buildings, and from the 1850s until his retirement the interest of his career is mainly architectural. A chapter traces hisdealings with the Office of Works, through which department government buildings were conceived and carried out. The buildings themselves are then considered by type: government offices, museums, royal residences, and a miscellaneous group which includes the Public Record Office and the first purpose-built headquarters of the University of London. A final chapter provides an assessment of Pennethorne's achievements and of his place in the history of English architecture.

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