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John Wood was the first after Inigo Jones to impose Palladian
uniformity on an English square as a whole. All the squares in
London and elsewhere laid out since 1660 had left it to each owner
of a house to have it designed as he liked, and it was only due to
the rule of taste in Georgian society that not one of these houses ever
violently clashed with its neighbours. John Wood now made one
palace front with central portico and secondary emphasis on the
comer blocks out of his Queen Square in Bath. That was in 1728.
Twenty-five years later he designed the Circus (1754-c. 1770),
again as a uniform theme. His son, the younger John Wood (died
1781), in the Royal Crescent of 1767-r. 1775 (pl. xcy) broke open
the compactness of earlier squares and ventured to provide as the
only response to his vast semi-elliptical palace frontage of thirty
houses with giant Ionic columns a spacious, gently sloping lawn.
Here the extreme opposite of Versailles had been reached. Nature is
no longer the servant of architecture. The two are equals, The
Rotnantie Movement is at hand.
In London the principle of the palace facade for a whole row of
houses was introduced by Robert Adam in his Adelphi (that magni
ficent composition of streets with its Thames front known all over
Europe, which was destroyed, not by bombs, but by mercenary
Londoners just before the war) and then taken up at Fitzroy Square
and Finsbury Square. But Adam’s work, which won international
fame in the sixties and seventies—at the same moment when the
English garden also began to influence Europe—should not be
discussed so close to the Palladianism of the Burlington group.
It is of a fundamentally different kind. As a rule this difference is
expressed by placing Adam at the beginning of the so-called Classical
Revival. But that is not the whole answer, for the Classical Revival
is really only a part of a much wider process, the Romantic Move-
ment. So from the renewed direct approach to Greek and Roman
antiquities as well as from the English creation of landscape garden~
ing we are led into a consideration of the central European problem
of 1760-1830: the Romantic Movement.
