Nicholas Hawksmoor - Recovering Hawksmoor's Reputation

Recovering Hawksmoor's Reputation

Modern scholarship has sought to distinguish Hawksmoor's work from that of Christopher Wren and the other designers in the Office of Works such as Robert Hooke. Many buildings were previously attributed without distinguishing their designers by name and Hawksmoor's reputation as an individual designer has been obscured by this fact. Modern re-apraisal began with a study in 1924 by Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel. The major breakthrough in Hawksmoor scholarship came with Kerry Downes's 1979 monograph the examined the numerous documents of Hawksmooor's work, a happy result of much of his work being for the Office of the King's Works, who kept their records.

Hawksmoor's influence by Old Testament descriptions of the Temple of Solomon and lost wonders of the ancient world is explored in Pierre De La Ruffiniere's du Prey's 2000 study of Hawksmoor. In 2002 Hawksmoor was the subject of an award-winning monograph by the architectural historian Vaughan Hart, which appraised Hawksmoor in the light of archival discoveries since the work of Kerry Downes.