A necessary insight into the contribution of artisanal work in early modern architecture.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represent a high point in design and workmanship intersectionality. Skilled artisans worked across a spectrum of practices in design, supervision, and execution, and architects relied on this experience when building sites. However, this relationship has been under-studied in the architectural achievement of the early modern era.
 
Combining analysis of buildings, archival material, and eighteenth-century writings, editors Andrew Tierney and Melanie Hayes re-evaluate the social and professional fabric binding design to the act of making and reflect on the asymmetry between architecture and craft. They argue for a process-oriented understanding of architectural production that explores the scribbled and annotated beginnings of design; the debates and revisions in forging details; and the grappling with building materials that pushed projects from conception to completion.

An argument for taking the craft work of surface enrichment of buildings more seriously in architectural history.
 
Architectural history has tended to marginalize the many types of refinement and enrichment of surfaces in stone, wood, and plaster that were fundamental aspects of early modern architecture. Enriching Architecture aims to retrieve and rehabilitate surface achievement as a vital element of early modern buildings in Britain and Ireland, arguing for the historical legitimacy of creative craft skill as a primary agent in architectural production. The contributors draw upon the major rethinking of craft and materials within the wider cultural sphere in recent years to deconstruct traditional, oppositional ways of thinking about architectural production. The book explores broad themes of surface treatment such as wainscot, rustication, plasterwork, and staircase embellishment, along with chapters focused on virtuoso buildings and set pieces that illuminate these themes.