Victorian architects and the Near East: Studies in colonial architecture, architectural theory and orientalism, 1840-1870

The Victorian obsession with an imaginary orient is well known; its products were countless objects adopting eastern forms or allusions, representing a cultural otherness that helped better to define the nation itself. Victorian experience in the geographical equivalent to this imaginary world, is both less well known and more complex. This dissertation explores the architecture that the British built in the Near East as well as their reactions to the architecture that they saw there. It takes four building projects in the cities of Istanbul, Jerusalem and Alexandria as detailed case studies, examining these with reference to other British buildings in the Levant, to the building industry in these localities, and to architectural practice and theory in Britain. Here it traces the activity of James Wild, William Burges, and T. L. Donaldson, amongst other architects. It also discusses the Victorian interpretation of Byzantine and Islamic architecture, particularly in the work of John Ruskin, James Fergusson and Owen Jones, but also in travel reportage, visual records, and built simulacra. These acts of building and reading are linked by the period\u27s broader concerns with race, religion, language, commerce and politics. While there is a congruence between the increasing influence exerted by the British over this area and the scholarly ordering of new worlds, there is no such consistency between the latter and the building of British communities in the Near East. Although British architecture held before it ideal images of imperial control or quasi-alliance, its experience was a mixture of incomprehension and compromise. If local crafts were explored and indigenous climatic solutions exploited, more often British skills and technology were imported, and while ambitious symbolic programs were planned they were usually supplanted by a more sober representation of the conditions of informal imperialism. There was little continuity or accumulation of practical knowledge between these projects, unlike the apparently mounting data and certainties of orientalism. Yet, in their inflated attempt to address myriad audiences while identifying the different aspirations of their clients, these projects reveal the extraordinary semiotic flexibility of Victorian eclecticism