Architecture of Knowledge
Hawksmoor and Oxford
By Eleonora Pistis
Awarded with the 2025 Berger Prize
(The Walpole Society)
This annual prize celebrates brilliant writing and scholarship about the arts and architecture of the United Kingdom.
Awarded since 2002, the prize is offered by The Walpole Society through the generosity and inspiration of the Berger Collection Educational Trust.
“A rare example of true interdisciplinarity (…) it breaks new ground in the field of intellectual history, as well as architectural history”
Jonny Yarker, Chair of the judging panel,
2025 Berger Prize
Nicholas Hawksmoor’s dream of a new Oxford, though only partially realized between 1708 and 1736, remains one of the most striking examples of the architecture of knowledge from the early modern period. This was a time of erudite experimentation on paper and in stone. Academics and Hawksmoor as their chosen architect, alongside a range of other figures, envisaged a network of streets, paths, gates, and squares connecting newly designed colleges and libraries, as well as the university press. Complementing the feverish activity on the multiple construction sites, the study, collection, and dissemination of architecture was profoundly reshaped by a variety of types of knowledge and practical expertise. Building, thinking, and learning were more tightly intertwined in early eighteenth-century Oxford than ever before at a renowned university as it pivoted from medieval to modern. The graphic legacy of this intense activity remains with us in an abundance of drawings, prints, and treatises, many of which are published here for the first time.
Eleonora Pistis is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Columbia University. She is a specialist in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century architecture and antiquarian culture.