Colen Campbell


Colen Campbell was a pioneering Scottish architect and architectural writer, credited as a founder of the Georgian style. For most of his career, he resided in Italy and England.
A descendant of the Campbells of Cawdor Castle, he is believed to be the Colinus Campbell who graduated from the University of Edinburgh in July 1695. He initially trained as a lawyer, being admitted to the Faculty of Advocates on 29 July 1702.
He had travelled in Italy from 1695–1702 and is believed to be the Colinus Campbell who signed the visitor's book at the University of Padua in 1697. He is believed to have trained in and studied architecture under James Smith, this belief is strengthened by Campbell owning several drawings of buildings designed by Smith.

''Vitruvius Britannicus''

His major published work, Vitruvius Britannicus, or the British Architect... appeared in three volumes between 1715 and 1725. Vitruvius Britannicus was the first architectural work to originate in England since John Shute's Elizabethan First Groundes. In the empirical vein, it was not a treatise but basically a catalogue of design, containing engravings of English buildings by Inigo Jones and Sir Christopher Wren, as well as Campbell himself and other prominent architects of the era.
In the introduction that he appended and in the brief descriptions, Campbell belaboured the "excesses" of Baroque style and declared British independence from foreigners while he dedicated the volume to Hanoverian George I. The third volume has several grand layouts of gardens and parks, with straight allées, for courts and patterned parterres and radiating rides through wooded plantations, in a Baroque manner that was rapidly becoming old-fashioned.
Buildings were shown in plan, section and elevation, but also some were in a bird's-eye perspective. The drawings and designs contained in the book were under way before Campbell was drawn into the speculative scheme. The success of the volumes was instrumental in popularising neo-Palladian Architecture in Great Britain and America during the 18th century. For example, Plate 16 of Vitruvius Britannicus, a rendering of Somerset House in London, was an inspiration for American architect Peter Harrison when he designed the Brick Market in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1761.
Campbell was influenced as a young man by James Smith, the pre-eminent Scots architect of his day, and an early neo-Palladian whom Campbell called "the most experienced architect" of Scotland.
The somewhat promotional volume, with its excellently rendered engravings, came at a propitious moment at the beginning of a boom in country house and villa building among the Whig oligarchy. Campbell was quickly taken up by Lord Burlington, who replaced James Gibbs with Campbell at Burlington House in London and set out to place himself at the center of English neo-Palladian architecture. In 1718, Campbell was appointed deputy to the amateur gentleman who had replaced Wren as Surveyor General of the Royal Board of Works, an appointment that Burlington is certain to have pressed, but a short-lived one. When Benson, the new Surveyor was turned out of office, Campbell went with him.
Later Volumes There are some later volumes also published under the name ‘Vitruvius Brittanicus’, but they are not connected to Colen Campbell's work, issued between 1715-1725. In 1739 a volume was issued by Badeslade and Rocque, described as ‘Volume 4’. However, this had little in common with Campbell, comprising mainly topographical perspective views of houses. Between 1765–1771, Woolfe and Gandon published their ‘Volumes 4 & 5’. They discounted Badeslade’s volume, believing their work to be a more correct continuation of Campbell, hence numbering it as Volume 4. The plates are indeed mostly plans and elevations of buildings largely in the Palladian style, most dating from after 1750. The various Volumes are fully described in Harris.

Campbell's main commissions

, Vitruvius Britannicus; or, The British architect, containing the plans, elevations, and sections of the regular buildings, both publick and private in Great Britain, with variety of new designs, written by Colen Campbell