'Character', or the Anxiety of Appropriateness in Eighteenth-Century Architectural Discourse

Abstract

Architects have always been preoccupied with designing buildings and spaces that are appropriate for their socio-cultural context. This preoccupation was most famously conceptualised through the Vitruvian notion of 'decorum', which enjoyed a long after-life in the early-modern period. By the eighteenth century, however, a series of social, political and cultural changes made 'decorum' no longer suitable, or at least too rigid to articulate the desired relationship between buildings and their environment (writ large). Borrowing from literary theory, architects began to elaborate, instead, on the notion of 'character'.