For the architectural historian Christine Casey, the surface is the thing, which is not to say her new book, Architecture and Artifice: The Crafted Surface in Eighteenth-Century Building Practice, lacks depth. In this handsome new production, she seeks to counter architectural historians such as the great Alistair Rowan (of whom she is justly respectful nonetheless), who has written that

a well-laid floor, and a neat keystone is a nice piece of carving but neither the floor nor the keystone is integral to the meaning of the house as a work of art and architecture.

Instead, Casey argues that “the materials and methods of making buildings play a crucial role in the semantic resonance of architecture.” She offers many compelling examples in support of her contention, but a single one may suffice. Consider Christopher Wren’s Trinity College Library in Cambridge (1676–95),

crafted in pink and gold Ketton limestone, which glows in elevation and in watery reflection . . . . What a different building this would be in white Portland stone.

The logic of this is plain to see, so the question arises as to why exactly materiality has been so ignored in contemporary architectural history. For, as Casey states and proves throughout, “the quality, variety and cost of materials and workmanship were dominant features of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century commentary.” But, modernism, that agent of chaos, intervened:

Antipathy to surface agency in architectural history results from a multiplicity of factors, not least modernism’s idealisation of volume and proportion and its attendant rejection of ornament.

We can forgive the infelicitous phrase “surface agency,” because Casey’s book is otherwise very good and her identification of modernism as somewhat of a problem for architectural history is fairly brave. She digs in:

A further complicating factor in antipathy to the surfaces of buildings is modernism’s and neomodernism’s disdain of luxury, architecture’s principled refusal to articulate the resources by which it is sustained by operating as an agent for social change.

Our benighted modern world may indeed think this way, but the eighteenth century didn’t.

And so, with her compass firmly oriented to material reality, Casey leads us on an enlightening tour of various projects in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland, explaining how architects and their tradesmen worked with multifarious materials to produce visual effects, and what those materials meant to contemporary practitioners and viewers.

The first chapter is an illuminating survey of the interactions between architects and their tradesmen, relationships given to a natural degree of tension. The list of complaints made by the architects is long and sundry. William Chambers maintained that “workmen are careless in perusing the designs and seldom read what is written on them.” Giacomo Leoni suggested that confusions “would easily be resolved if the abilities of the workmen should know to adapt the Space of [the] Ground more or less as it is in the deposition of my Draughts.” Perhaps the most extreme example, not cited by Casey but which has stuck with me since I read it many years ago, was the diatribe of James Stuart to his patron Thomas Anson when building 15 St James’s Square in London in 1764. Stuart grumbled,

I shall not know how to quit London till I see a Capital completed . . . my inspection and instruction is continually necessary till one of them is finished, they must not murder my Capitals[,]the greatest grace and ornament of the building.

Sometimes the gripes went in the other direction, as at the Bristol Exchange, designed by John Wood the Elder of Bath in the 1740s. A junior workman there groused about the paucity of “proper instructions from the architect for want of which it was impossible to avoid mistakes.” Misunderstandings between architects and artificers could have significant consequences for the buildings themselves. Casey relates a late-1760s drama out of Limerick, where the purportedly knavish architect Davis Duckart had been hired to construct a new custom house. First industrial unrest shut down the building site, with a mob defacing the stone. A suit brought by the masons, who had gone on strike, accused Duckart of using the wrong dimensions. The result is a building in abeyance, with the vermiculation of spandrels left unfinished and capitals the wrong size for their pilasters.

Quarrels over the execution of ornament could result from the various ways architects transmitted their desires. Scale drawings were a natural aid, but many approaches were valued. Workmen often visited other buildings to understand what their masters were after; in 1724, Joseph Bower, at work on Wentworth House in Yorkshire, paid a trip to Nuland Hall and Chatsworth to understand staircases:

I have ben over at ye Duke of devenshers at Chattsworth hall and ther Is a stare case that Every Step is panild of ye underside like wane scot which a peares a great deal batter thin working them plane.

Models were expensive, and, as Casey writes, “the archival evidence suggests that they were not widely used in the eighteenth century.” But they were employed in specific cases, as in 1761 when Lord Scarsdale chose a particularly enriched Corinthian capital for the columns in the marble hall at Kedleston. Robert Adam had prepared a full-size drawing and written to his patron that

The Capital sent down for the Hall is reckoned the finest of all the Antient Corinthian ones. But it is impossible for me to determine whether your . . . [Lordship] will think the additional Beauty equal to the additional expence.

Scarsdale opted for the enriched capital, and James Gravener, a carver, “spent almost eight days carving a model that was glued in situ.”

This last anecdote goes a long way to proving Casey’s primary assertion, that the material qualities of architecture were a major concern of the eighteenth century. With further chapters on the stone industry, the facing of buildings, and interior workmanship, Architecture and Artifice is a splendidly illustrated specialist guide to the practice of eighteenth-century architecture that goes a long way in bringing the crafted surface back to the forefront.