Robert Adam & essential architecture: Minimal, geometric, and primitive modes of architectural expression

Robert Adam (1728--1792) is accorded a special status in the historiography of Neoclassicism. Adam is the only British architect for whom a style is named: the "Adam Style." Perhaps for this reason he is regarded as primarily a stylist, an architect of the eye, a brilliant purveyor of a highly personal manner of elegant decoration. His architecture is thought of as pretty but not meaningful, and he is presumed not to have been interested in the great formal and intellectual ideas that are seen as defining Neoclassicism, especially on the continent. These include a return to sober classical forms in opposition to what was viewed as the excesses of the rococo; an interest in bold, blocky forms and sheer surfaces; the use of elemental geometry to shape plans and give form in three dimensions; and a concern with architecture's origins and exploration of primitive forms because they were bold and simple and potentially offered a fertile new beginning.;This dissertation presents an alternate, or perhaps complementary, view of the work of Robert Adam by placing him in a broader European context and comes to the conclusion that he shared the great formal and intellectual goals of British and continental Neoclassicism. Though he left few writings, his drawings and built works show that he developed a minimal or abstracted classicism in designs for farms, an approach that fertilized his work in all genres; he used ideal geometry to generate the plans and overall shape of buildings; and he developed a "cottage style" with thatched roofs and tree-trunk columns that drew on contemporary ideas of the primitive hut, vernacular building, and the "natural" architecture of William Kent. In all these regards, Adam is seen as pursuing an "essential" or elemental architecture. At the same time, his development of abstract, geometric, and primitive manners is interpreted as a manifestation of his interest in architectural expression, known at the time as "character," though his great innovation in this field was to cultivate increasingly universal, intuitive, and reductive means of expression, rather than relying on conventional allegory and symbol to carry meaning.