Architecture in Rare Books at the University of Reading Special Collections

Our Overstone Library is an excellent example of a 19th-century gentleman's library with many significant books of learning.
Take The Antiquities of Athens by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett. They pioneered British Neoclassicism by giving accurate examples of Greek architecture.

Some of the earliest architects were Ancient Egyptians, and they were certainly among the first to use columns.  
The Dendera temple (c. 380 BC) shown in this image was captured as a coloured lithograph by the 19th-century Scottish painter David Roberts.

This image of the North Rose Window in Westminster Abbey shows how it looked before a redesign in the 19th-century. 
The stained-glass window showing figures of Jesus, the Apostles and Evangelists was created in 1722 by the father-and-son glass painters Joshua and William Price.

Venetian architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi worked on his book, Vedute di Roma (Views of Rome), between 1747 and his death in 1778. With prints like this, of the Vatican Basilica, he revolutionised both the world's ideas of Rome and the standard of architectural printmaking.

Just as Piranesi was captivated by classical Roman architecture, Jules Goury and Owen Jones were enchanted by the Islamic architecture of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. 
The chromolithographs beautifully demonstrate the details and polychromy (several colours) of the buildings.

Andrea Pozzo painted a famous ceiling in the church of Sant’Ignazio in Rome. The ceiling was completely flat, but Pozzo designed it to look like a dome. He repeats the same trick here in his book Prospettiva de’ pittori e architetti. 

Not all the buildings you see in our books are real. This image shows an elaborate practical joke design by 17th century polymath Athanasius Kircher. His idea was to use tubes to feed the sound of the street through the walls and sound like it came from the mouths of statues. 

Vitruvius Pollio was a Roman architect living in the 1st century BC. We can remember him today because his book De architectura was passed down in manuscript form for 1500 years before it was first printed in Latin in 1486. This edition, an Italian translation, is from 1567.

Our Printing Collection is full of extraordinary feats of printing. This book, Old England, produced by Charles Knight in the mid-19th-century is noteworthy for just how full it is of images. From tiny woodcuts to full colour plates such as this, no expense was spared.

Looking at the House of Commons in London, as shown in Microcosm of London, published in the 1810s, we can instantly recognise its similarities with how it is today. 
This is despite the fact that the Chamber had to be rebuilt after World War II by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.

This book, Wren’s City Churches, lists churches designed by Sir Christopher Wren. 
It was written by the Art Nouveau pioneer, Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, who evocatively titled his illustration of St Paul’s Cathedral as ‘Soul strivings from struggle into calm'.

From our Great Exhibition Collection, this book includes illustrations of the interior of the Crystal Palace in 1851, purpose-built and designed by Joseph Paxton as the exhibition's centrepiece where the exhibits were shown.
The Palace burnt down in 1936 and was lost to history. 

Art critic, John Ruskin, had long been occupied with the overlap between the natural world and the built environment. In this book The Stones of Venice, he used the city’s buildings to exemplify beauty in architecture and argued that it was all derived from nature. 

As the design of buildings is always developing, so is garden design and landscape architecture. In his book The Art and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1890), Henry Ernest Milner reinterpreted the design of the English formal garden.