12 – Constructing the Heart of Empire: London’s Public Architecture
On campus
Course 12 – Summer School on campus
Monday 1 July – Friday 5 July 2024
Dr Kyle Leyden
£645
Booking for this course is now closed.
Please note that this course starts at our Vernon Square campus, but the remaining classroom sessions take place at Somerset House, in the Learning Centre.
Course description
Architecture is the art form whose presence, symbolic message and socio-political legacy cannot be avoided. The construction of great buildings is an undertaking imbued with significant symbolic and political currency which continues to have an unavoidable resonance with those who continue to interact with these spaces today.
Through an overview of key historical moments and an examination of several major architectural projects, this course will present London as a city in which architecture was consciously deployed as a potent device through which the changing essential values of and core political vision for the British Empire were communicated to Londoners, the wider British population and to foreign observers. It will also consider current debates about how post-imperial societies can and ought to deal with the highly contested legacies of these unavoidable urban spaces.
Engaging with diverse issues and concepts, the course gives students an opportunity to gain a solid understanding of the social and artistic history of London and its critical role as a stage for the theatre of Empire. It features visits to major public buildings and royal palaces and includes spaces that are otherwise inaccessible to the general public: behind-the-scenes at Kensington Palace, the Royal Apartments of the Palace of Westminster, and the spectacular interiors of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
Lecturer's biography
Dr Kyle Leyden is Lecturer in Early Modern Architecture at the Courtauld. His research focuses on the intersections of politics and architecture in the period 1560-1790 and the use of architecture as a reflection of and active agent within societal change. Following a career at the Bar of Ireland and in academic law, he completed his M.A. and Ph.D. at The Courtauld, before being appointed to Faculty. After working as an advisor at the leading heritage institutions of the British Isles for over twenty years, he was appointed to the Historic Buildings Council of Northern Ireland in 2022. Having published works architectural and political history, he is currently completing work on the late Hamish Miles’ Catalogue Raisonné of David Wilkie.