CARR, John - b. 1723 Wakefield, d. 1807 Horbury

English architect. He was a prolific architect, much of his work was in the Palladian style. He is best known for Buxton Crescent and Harewood House, In his day he was considered to be the leading architect in the north of England.

He gained an extensive practice in the north of England, where he erected many fine edifices. Among them are the Town Hall of Newark, Harewood house, Yorkshire, and the mausoleum of Lord Rockingham at Wentworth. Carr decided to remain in Yorkshire rather than move to London because he calculated that there was ample patronage and the wealth to sustain it. No job was too small. His largest work, only partially finished, was the Hospital de Santo António in Oporto, Portugal.

He started an independent career in 1748 and continued until shortly before his death. He was chosen Lord Mayor of York in 1770, and again in 1785.

Exterior view

Lisbon was the architectural centre of the Enlightenment in Portugal, but other parts of the country - as well as the overseas colonies - aspired to replace the predominant late Baroque style with a more rational formal language. In Porto, the pragmatism of the style, preferred by Pombal in Lisbon, was combined by the Neo-Palladian ideas of the city’s English colony, which had dominated the port wine trade since the Methuen Treaties of 1703.

Evidence of this so-called “port wine architecture” can be found in the enormous Hospital de Santo Ant�nio with its Neoclassical portico. It is the work of the English architect John Carr, who delivered the plans in 1769, without ever having set foot in Portugal.

In this Baroque maritime city, it must, at first, have appeared as if it had been set down in the wrong place, but a short while later it was followed by various other Palladian buildings.