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Associationist Aesthetics and the Foundations of the Architectural Imagination

This chapter seeks to provide an account of how aestheticians and practising architects in the long eighteenth century variously accounted for the imaginative potential of Gothic architecture. Showing how architectural debates in the period were structured according to the classical/Gothic divide, it explores the empiricist discourse of architectural association as it runs from John Locke, through Joseph Addison, Mark Akenside, William Chambers, Alexander Gerard, Thomas Gray, William Gilpin, and others, into the work of John Soane. Situating the architectural writings of Horace Walpole within this tradition, it discusses Walpole’s engagement with the architectural theories of his day. Through a reading of the work of William Beckford, the chapter charts the shift from empiricism to idealism in the architectural imagination of the early nineteenth century.