CHAMBERS, William - b. 1723 Göteborg, d. 1796 London - WGA

CHAMBERS, William

(b. 1723 Göteborg, d. 1796 London)

English architect of Scottish descent, but born in Sweden. He was an eclectic architect of the Georgian period who was one of the leading Palladian-style architects of his day. In the 1760s and 1770s he was the most influential British architect.

He was the son of a merchant of Scottish descent living in Sweden. At age 16, after education in England, Chambers entered the service of the Swedish East India Company. A voyage to Canton supplied the materials for his Designs of Chinese Buildings (1757). In 1749 he studied architecture, first in Paris with the influential architectural theorist Jacques-François Blondel (1705-1774) and then in Rome. Returning to England in 1755, he became architectural tutor to the prince of Wales, the future George III. This appointment led to an extremely successful career as an official architect. He helped found the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768 and was its first treasurer in 1768. Upon receiving the knighthood of the Polar Star from the king of Sweden, he was allowed by George III to assume the rank and title of an English knight.

His best-known works are Somerset House (1776-86) in London, now home of the Courtauld Institute Galleries; the casino at Marino (c. 1776), near Dublin; Duddingston House (1762-64) in Edinburgh; and the ornamental buildings, including the Pagoda (1757-62), at Kew Gardens, Surrey (now in London). In the last he went as far in the direction of Romantic eclecticism as any architect of his time. In general, however, he was an architectural conservative who used a profound knowledge of European (especially French) architecture to give a new look to the accepted motifs of Palladianism. His books, notably A Treatise on Civil Architecture (1759), had widespread influence.

Pagoda

Chambers was more famous for his first-hand knowledge of Chinese architecture, acquired during his journeys to Asia in his youth, than for Somerset House or his other buildings in the Classical style. Commissioned to design Princess Augusta’s Gardens in Kew, beside the Thames in London, Chambers furnished the park with a variety of classical and exotic buildings, including a mosque, an Alhambra, a Gothic cathedral, a Confucian house, and the famous pagoda, which has survived, though without the ornament of its gilt dragons.

Although Chambers was on the one hand a champion of the classical tradition while vehemently rejecting the archeologically faithful imitation of Greek antiquity, on the other hand he was also building in a variety of other styles, anticipating the trend of the next century.

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Somerset House

Constructed on an extensive but irregular plot on the Thames Embankment in London, Somerset House was one of the first public buildings designed exclusively to house government and educational institutions. The building is a four-wing complex around a large interior court and two narrow lateral courts. The north wing facing the Strand is separated from the others and architecturally particularly emphasized, as it was to house the learned institutions of the Royal Academy and the Society of Antiquaries. Borrowing from palace architecture, it has a giant order of pilasters and engaged columns spanning the piano nobile and mezzanine. The windows are marked with pediments or straight heads. The extremely long river fa�ade is subtly organized into groups and crowned by a dome responding to the attic level of the north wing.

The Somerset House is now home of the Courtauld Institute Galleries.

The photo shows the court front of the north wing.

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