Disciplinary contrasts science, art and the imagination in the nineteenth-century writings of William Lethaby, John Ruskin and Alexander von Humboldt

Demonstrating an equal appreciation for the perceptual and representational strategies of art and science in Lethaby’s writings, I will argue the affinity of his thesis with Humboldt’s association of modernity with the “mutual reaction” of art and science. These parallels, coupled with Lethaby’s tendency to include comparative content within his buildings—be it the juxtaposition of symbolic ornament and structure or vernacular and exotic forms—in turn suggests Lethaby’s participation in what Humboldt described as the great project of modern civilisation, the intellectual and aesthetic enlightenment of the common “man”. Outlining Humboldt’s conviction that this democratic project would be stimulated by the comparative study of exotic and indigenous form experienced through the secondary sources of botanical gardens, travel literature, and landscape painting, I argue that Lethaby intended his Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (1891) as a proxy of experience, a catalogue of architectural traditions taken primarily from what Lethaby described as ‘primitive’ or ‘early world’ cultures