Sir William Chambers (1723-1796): A Tercentenary Celebration
Monday 17 – Tuesday 18 April 2023
in Stockholm, Sweden and Engelsberg Ironworks
Abstract
In summer 2023, King Charles III will be transported to his coronation through London in a state coach designed by the Anglo-Swedish architect, Sir William Chambers. Fortuitously, the year will also mark the tercentenary of the birth of Chambers in Gothenburg in 1723. Bokförlaget Stolpe will mark the anniversary with the publication of a new edition of Chambers’s landmark architectural treatise. This conference will bring together scholars for a series of papers that will ask new questions about the most powerful architect in mid-Georgian Britain.
Scholarship on Chambers was vibrant in the late twentieth century, but following the bicentenary of his death in 1996, marked by a book of essays and an exhibition at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and the Courtauld Gallery in London, there has been a notable decline. But the time is ripe for a reassessment of an architect whose international identity and global view of architecture speak particularly well to the present. This conference will for the first time cast a twenty-first-century perspective on Chambers.
(Cover image: Sir William Chambers, with Somerset House in the background (detail). Joshua Reynolds, c.1780. © Photo: Royal Academy of Arts, London.)
Conference recording
Recordings of all conference sessions are available to watch on AXESS tv via this link: https://www.axess.se/tv/sir-william-chambers-a-tercentenary-celebration/
