Re-orienting Gothic Architecture: Character, Medieval Belonging and Oriental Othering (1750-1850)

Part of the project "Building Identity: Character in Architectural Debate and Design, 1750-1850," funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, project number 207599.

This dissertation explores the eighteenth-century reception of medieval architecture focusing on the notion of ‘character’ and the construction of identity. The ancient notion of character became ubiquitous in a network of texts and was explicitly and implicitly conceived and applied in architectural theory and design. Assuming a link between an exterior appearance with an interior essence, a character could manufacture coherence that spanned relations from a specific time and place to the larger narrative of the nation.

When the authoritative gravity of Renaissance theories receded in the eighteenth-century, Gothic architecture presented a dilemma. Responses to medieval architecture captured the disavowal of cultural transfers and the instability of identity. As an interruption of the classical and a marker of Christian continuity, its characteristic features conflated a sense of national belonging with a trace of Orientalised otherness. Drawn together by formal similarities of pointed arches, spires, minarets and exuberant ornamentation, Gothic and Orientalist motifs became mirror images for identity processes, either blending into each other or reflecting their alterity. The greatest mystery revolved around the role of the pointed arch and the transformation from Romanesque to Gothic architecture. Whereas extra-European travels prompted speculations on Gothic origins in the obscure geography of the “East,” topographical enquiries essentialized local medieval buildings into the myth of national architecture.

Countering well-established historiographies of the “Gothic Revival”, this dissertation argues that ambiguous identities and social conflicts over empire, religion, ethnicity and class were streamlined into the category of character. To capture the disavowal of cultural transfers and the instability of national identity, the eighteenth-century redeployment of Gothic architecture will be re-oriented between a “Christian West” and an “Islamic East”.