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106-509: The Banqueting House , on Whitehall in the City of Westminster , central London, is the grandest and best-known survivor of the architectural genre of banqueting houses , constructed for elaborate entertaining. It is the only large surviving component of the Palace of Whitehall , the residence of English monarchs from 1530 to 1698. The building is important in the history of English architecture as

212-497: A Corinthian column nine diameters high, although the actual ratios used vary considerably in both ancient and revived examples, but still keeping to the trend of increasing slimness between the orders. Sometimes this is phrased as "lower diameters high", to establish which part of the shaft has been measured. There are three distinct orders in Ancient Greek architecture: Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. These three were adopted by

318-467: A Scottish designer, James Acheson. William Portington was the carpenter, and Peter Street made a special auger to hollow out the columns. The interior was painted and gilded by John de Critz . King James visited the construction site in September 1607 and was displeased with the placing of pillars which obscured the windows. A Venetian diplomat, Orazio Busino, praised the proportions of the space, and

424-677: A capital that consists of only an echinus and an abacus. In proportions it is similar to the Doric order, but overall it is significantly plainer. The column is normally seven diameters high. Compared to the other orders, the Tuscan order looks the most solid. The Composite order is a mixed order, combining the volutes of the Ionic with the leaves of the Corinthian order. Until the Renaissance it

530-585: A century or so, resulting in the use of classical forms and motifs in late Tudor, Elizabethan and Jacobean buildings, on his return from Italy Jones brought with him far more thorough and up to date understanding of the underlying principles of late Renaissance classicism. With his work at the Queen's House in Greenwich, and the Banqueting House, Jones transformed English architecture. The overthrow of

636-452: A colour contrast. Oxfordshire stone was used for the walls, and Purbeck stone for the columns, pilasters, and other ornaments. At Inigo Jones's request, a new pier was built at the Isle of Purbeck in 1620 for shipping the stone. The foundations and internal walls were brick. Some of windows were partly blocked and plastered and painted over, possibly for ease of hanging tapestries. The building

742-428: A height that is only four to eight times its diameter, the columns are the most squat of all orders. The shaft of the Doric order is channeled with 20 flutes. The capital consists of a necking or annulet , which is a simple ring. The echinus is convex, or circular cushion like stone, and the abacus is a square slab of stone. Above the capital is a square abacus connecting the capital to the entablature. The entablature

848-716: A memorial for both World Wars. It is the main war memorial in Britain and an annual service is held here on Remembrance Sunday , led by the reigning monarch and leading politicians. In 2005, a national Monument to the Women of World War II was erected a short distance north of the Cenotaph in the middle of the Whitehall carriageway. The Royal Tank Regiment Memorial is at the north east end of Whitehall, where Whitehall Court meets Whitehall Place. Erected in 2000, it commemorates

954-429: A more delicate classical form of sculpture inspired by Michelangelo 's Medici tombs . This is evident in his swags on the street façade of the Banqueting House, similar to that which adorns the plinth of his Francis Holles memorial . In 1638, Jones drew the designs for a new and massive palace at Whitehall in which his banqueting house was to be incorporated as one wing enclosing a series of seven courtyards, visible on

1060-539: A residential street by the 16th century, and had become a popular place to live by the 17th, with residents including Lord Howard of Effingham and Edmund Spenser . The Palace of Whitehall, to the east of the road, was originally named York Palace, but was renamed during the reign of Henry VIII . The palace was redesigned in 1531–32 and became the King's main residence later in the decade. He married Anne Boleyn here in 1533, followed by Jane Seymour in 1536, and died at

1166-574: A route connecting Charing Cross to Westminster since the Middle Ages ; the 12th-century historian William Fitzstephen described it as "a continued suburb, mingled with large and beautiful gardens, and orchards belonging to the citizens". The name Whitehall was originally only used for the section of road between Charing Cross and Holbein Gate ; beyond this it was known as The Street as far as King Street Gate , then King Street thereafter. It had become

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1272-575: Is a road and area in the City of Westminster , Central London , England. The road forms the first part of the A3212 road from Trafalgar Square to Chelsea . It is the main thoroughfare running south from Trafalgar Square towards Parliament Square . The street is recognised as the centre of the Government of the United Kingdom and is lined with numerous departments and ministries, including

1378-441: Is also marked by an entasis , a curved tapering in the column shaft. A column of the Ionic order is nine times more tall than its lower diameter. The shaft itself is eight diameters high. The architrave of the entablature commonly consists of three stepped bands ( fasciae ). The frieze comes without the Doric triglyph and metope. The frieze sometimes comes with a continuous ornament such as carved figures instead. The Corinthian order

1484-401: Is distinguished by slender, fluted pillars with a large base and two opposed volutes (also called "scrolls") in the echinus of the capital. The echinus itself is decorated with an egg-and-dart motif . The Ionic shaft comes with four more flutes than the Doric counterpart (totalling 24). The Ionic base has two convex moldings called tori , which are separated by a scotia. The Ionic order

1590-419: Is divided into three horizontal registers, the lower part of which is either smooth or divided by horizontal lines. The upper half is distinctive for the Doric order. The frieze of the Doric entablature is divided into triglyphs and metopes . A triglyph is a unit consisting of three vertical bands which are separated by grooves. Metopes are the plain or carved reliefs between two triglyphs. The Greek forms of

1696-601: Is one of three purple squares on the British Monopoly board, along with Pall Mall and Northumberland Avenue . All three streets converge at Trafalgar Square. Notes Citations Sources Further reading Classical order Whereas the orders were essentially structural in Ancient Greek architecture , which made little use of the arch until its late period, in Roman architecture where

1802-712: Is the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, constructed from 335 to 334 BC. The Corinthian order was raised to rank by the writings of Vitruvius in the 1st century BC. The Romans adapted all the Greek orders and also developed two orders of their own, basically modifications of Greek orders. However, it was not until the Renaissance that these were named and formalized as the Tuscan and Composite , respectively

1908-425: Is the base of the system. All the other measurements are expressed in fractions or in multiples of this module. The result is an arithmetical model, and with its help each order, harmoniously proportioned, can easily be adapted to any given height, of a façade or an interior. From this point of view, Vignola's Regola is a remarkable intellectual achievement". In America, The American Builder's Companion , written in

2014-460: Is the most elaborated of the Greek orders, characterized by a slender fluted column having an ornate capital decorated with two rows of acanthus leaves and four scrolls. The shaft of the Corinthian order has 24 flutes. The column is commonly ten diameters high. The Roman writer Vitruvius credited the invention of the Corinthian order to Callimachus , a Greek sculptor of the 5th century BC. The oldest known building built according to this order

2120-476: Is the only architectural writing that survived from Antiquity. Effectively rediscovered in the 15th century, Vitruvius came to be regarded as the ultimate authority on architecture. However, in his text the word order is not to be found. To describe the four species of columns (he only mentions: Tuscan, Doric, Ionic and Corinthian) he uses, in fact, various words such as: genus (gender), mos (habit, fashion, manner), opera (work). The term order , as well as

2226-514: The Banqueting House has survived. Whitehall was originally a wide road that led to the gates of the palace; the route to the south was widened in the 18th century, following the destruction of the palace, and the area was largely rebuilt for government offices. As well as government buildings, the street is known for its memorial statues and monuments, including the UK's primary war memorial,

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2332-657: The Cabinet Office , and the Department of Health . It ends at the Cenotaph , the road ahead being Parliament Street. Great Scotland Yard and Horse Guards Avenue branch off to the east, while Downing Street branches off to the west at the southern section of the street. The nearest tube stations are Charing Cross at the north end, and Westminster at the south. Numerous London bus routes run along Whitehall, including 12, 24, 88, 159 and 453. There has been

2438-683: The Capitol building in Washington, DC, designed a series of botanical American orders. Most famous is the Corinthian order substituting ears of corn and their husks for the acanthus leaves, which was executed by Giuseppe Franzoni and used in the small domed vestibule of the Senate. Only this vestibule survived the Burning of Washington in 1814, nearly intact. With peace restored, Latrobe designed an American order that substituted tobacco leaves for

2544-618: The Department of Health since 1987. The building is scheduled to be a temporary debating chamber from 2025, while the Houses of Parliament undergo a refurbishment and modernisation programme. Statues and memorials have been built on and around Whitehall, commemorating military victories and leaders. The Cenotaph was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and erected at the southern end in 1919, commemorating victory in World War I and later used as

2650-546: The Earl Haig Memorial ), Field Marshal Montgomery (commander of the 8th Army , the 21st Army Group and Chief of the Imperial General Staff ), William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim , Commander of the 14th Army and Governor-General of Australia , and Alan Brooke, 1st Viscount Alanbrooke , Chief of the Imperial General Staff . The Whitehall Theatre opened in 1930 at the north west end of

2756-605: The London Loop . This house was used to entertain the French agent in London and ambassador Antoine de Noailles and his wife in 1556. A more permanent Banqueting house was built at Whitehall in 1581, costing £1,744-19 shillings. Raphael Holinshed described the building, with its timbered structure covered with canvas painted in imitation of stone, and a painted ceiling including the queen's devices and heraldry. The new building

2862-511: The Ministry of Defence , Horse Guards and the Cabinet Office . Consequently, the name "Whitehall" is used as a metonym for the British civil service and government , and as the geographic name for the surrounding area. The Palace of Whitehall previously occupied the area and was the residence of Kings Henry VIII through to William III , before it was destroyed by fire in 1698; only

2968-915: The Office of the Parliamentary Counsel at No. 36, the Horse Guards , the Ministry of Defence Main Building , Dover House (containing the Scotland Office ), Gwydyr House (containing the Wales Office ), the Cabinet Office at No. 70, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Government Offices Great George Street ( HM Treasury , HM Revenue and Customs and parts of

3074-552: The Palace of Versailles contains pilasters with bronze capitals in the "French order". Designed by Charles Le Brun , the capitals display the national emblems of the Kingdom of France : the royal sun between two Gallic roosters above a fleur-de-lis . Robert Adam 's brother James was in Rome in 1762, drawing antiquities under the direction of Clérisseau ; he invented a "British order" and published an engraving of it. Its capital

3180-564: The Provisional IRA fired mortars from a van parked in Whitehall towards No. 10 , one of which exploded in the gardens. Additional security measures have been put in place along Whitehall to protect government buildings, following a £25 million streetscape project undertaken by Westminster City Council . The project has provided wider pavements and better lighting, along with installing hundreds of concrete and steel security barriers. Richmond House , at No. 79, has held

3286-567: The Renaissance and that of Andrea Palladio , and returned to England with what were, at the time, revolutionary ideas: to replace the eclectic style of the Jacobean English Renaissance with a more pure, classical design, which made no attempt to harmonise with the Tudor palace of which it was to be part. The design of the Banqueting House is classical in concept. It introduced a refined Italianate Renaissance style that

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3392-528: The "speaking architecture" ( architecture parlante ) that was taught in the Paris courses, most explicitly by Étienne-Louis Boullée , in which sculptural details of classical architecture could be enlisted to speak symbolically, the better to express the purpose of the structure and enrich its visual meaning with specific appropriateness. This idea was taken up strongly in the training of Beaux-Arts architecture , c.  1875–1915 . The Hall of Mirrors in

3498-591: The 1820s, which allowed Sir Robert Peel to use it as the main headquarters when forming the police in 1829. It was formally named the Metropolitan Police Office, but became quickly known as Great Scotland Yard, and eventually Scotland Yard. The buildings were damaged in a series of bombings by Irish Nationalists in 1883, and an explosion from a Fenian terrorist attack on 30 May 1884 blew a hole in Scotland Yard's outer wall and destroyed

3604-481: The 18th century, traffic was struggling along the narrow streets south of Holbein Gate, which led to King Street Gate being demolished in 1723. Holbein Gate, in turn, was demolished in 1759. Meanwhile, Parliament Street was a side road alongside the palace, leading to the Palace of Westminster . After the Palace of Whitehall was destroyed, Parliament Street was widened to match Whitehall's width. The present appearance of

3710-561: The 1950s and '60s, and 1981's satirical Anyone for Denis , written by John Wells and Private Eye editor Richard Ingrams . The venue was Grade II listed in 1996 and renamed the Trafalgar Studios in 2004. Because of its importance as the centre of the British government, several political comedies are based in and around Whitehall. These include the BBC television series Yes Minister and The Thick of It . Whitehall

3816-460: The 19th century, as private leases ran out on residential buildings, ownership reverted to the Crown, which began to use them as public offices. The name "Whitehall" is now used as a metonym to refer to that part of the civil service which is involved in the government of the United Kingdom . The street's central portion is dominated by military buildings, including the Ministry of Defence , with

3922-529: The 19th century. The Bauhaus promoted pure functionalism, stripped of superfluous ornament, and that has become one of the defining characteristics of modern architecture . There are some exceptions. Postmodernism introduced an ironic use of the orders as a cultural reference, divorced from the strict rules of composition. On the other hand, a number of practitioners such as Quinlan Terry in England, and Michael Dwyer , Richard Sammons , and Duncan Stroik in

4028-617: The Banqueting Hall became redundant for the purpose for which it was designed, and it was converted to a chapel to replace the Chapel Royal of Whitehall, which had been destroyed in the fire and was used to host concerts. It remained a chapel before being given to the Royal United Services Institute by Queen Victoria in 1893. Highly controversial plans to partition the large mansion house space in

4134-484: The Banqueting House ceiling which was sketched in London but completed at his studio in Antwerp due to the scale of the job. It was probably commissioned in 1629–30, and finally installed in 1636, the ceiling having been completely remodelled to frame the various sections. The subject, commissioned by the king, was the glorification of his father, titled The Apotheosis of James I, and was an allegory of his own birth. To

4240-656: The Cabinet Office). Scotland Yard , the headquarters of London's Metropolitan Police Service , was originally located in Great Scotland Yard off the north-eastern end of Whitehall. The buildings had been lodgings for the Kings of Scotland, on part of the old Palace of Whitehall's grounds; by the 19th century, Little and Middle Scotland Yard had been merged into Whitehall Place, leaving only Great Scotland Yard. No. 4 Whitehall Place had become vacant by

4346-553: The Cenotaph . South of the Cenotaph the thoroughfare becomes Parliament Street. The Whitehall Theatre (now the Trafalgar Studios ) was formerly associated with a series of farces . The name Whitehall was used for several buildings in the Tudor period . It either referred to a building made of light stone, or as a general term for any festival building. This included the Royal Palace of Whitehall , which in turn gave its name to

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4452-584: The Corinthian order by William Donthorne that used turnip leaves and mangelwurzel is termed the Agricultural order. Sir Edwin Lutyens , who from 1912 laid out New Delhi as the new seat of government for the British Empire in India , designed a Delhi order having a capital displaying a band of vertical ridges, and with bells hanging at each corner as a replacement for volutes. His design for

4558-438: The Doric order come without an individual base. They instead are placed directly on the stylobate . Later forms, however, came with the conventional base consisting of a plinth and a torus. The Roman versions of the Doric order have smaller proportions. As a result, they appear lighter than the Greek orders. The Ionic order came from eastern Greece, where its origins are entwined with the similar but little known Aeolic order . It

4664-487: The Ionic in eastern Greece and the Doric in the west and mainland. Both the Doric and the Ionic order appear to have originated in wood. The Temple of Hera in Olympia is the oldest well-preserved temple of Doric architecture. It was built just after 600 BC. The Doric order later spread across Greece and into Sicily , where it was the chief order for monumental architecture for 800 years. Early Greeks were no doubt aware of

4770-504: The King's Players. One of the last functions in this structure was a banquet for the Prince of Joinville in June 1607, for which new linen was bought to dress the two cupboards of estate. King James began building a new banqueting house in 1607, which was destined to only have a short life. The building was probably designed by Robert Stickells . A "geometrical model" for the roof was made by

4876-631: The Medicis' Palazzo Uffizi in Florence , was a particular favourite. Provincial architects began to recreate the motifs of the Banqueting House throughout England, with varying degrees of competence. Examples of the style's popularity can be found throughout England; the then-remote county of Somerset alone contains three 17th-century versions of the Banqueting House: Brympton d'Evercy , Hinton House , and Ashton Court . Following

4982-570: The Palace of Whitehall in 1658. During the Great Plague of London in 1665, people boarded coaches at Whitehall, then at the edge of urban London, in an attempt to escape. The King and court temporarily moved to Oxford to avoid the plague, while Samuel Pepys remarked in his diary on 29 June, "By water to Whitehall, where the Court is full of waggons and people ready to go out of town. This end of town every day grows very bad with plague". By

5088-598: The Queen and ladies to sit on and be turned round about". Alterations for staging masques were made by Andrew Kerwyn , paymaster of the royal works. Prince Henry's Barriers was performed in January 1610. Robert Smythson made a drawing of the ground plan. An adjacent chamber was built to host events for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V of the Palatinate in 1613. Pocahontas and Tomocomo came to see

5194-531: The Romans, who modified their capitals. The Roman adoption of the Greek orders took place in the 1st century BC. The three ancient Greek orders have since been consistently used in European Neoclassical architecture . Sometimes the Doric order is considered the earliest order, but there is no evidence to support this. Rather, the Doric and Ionic orders seem to have appeared at around the same time,

5300-486: The United States, continue the classical tradition, and use the classical orders in their work. Several orders, usually based upon the composite order and only varying in the design of the capitals, have been invented under the inspiration of specific occasions, but have not been used again. They are termed " nonce orders " by analogy to nonce words ; several examples follow below. These nonce orders all express

5406-416: The acanthus, of which he sent a sketch to Thomas Jefferson in a letter, 5 November 1816. He was encouraged to send a model of it, which remains at Monticello . In the 1830s Alexander Jackson Davis admired it enough to make a drawing of it. In 1809 Latrobe invented a second American order, employing magnolia flowers constrained within the profile of classical mouldings, as his drawing demonstrates. It

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5512-639: The arch was often dominant, the orders became increasingly decorative elements except in porticos and similar uses. Columns shrank into half-columns emerging from walls or turned into pilasters . This treatment continued after the conscious and "correct" use of the orders, initially following exclusively Roman models, returned in the Italian Renaissance . Greek Revival architecture , inspired by increasing knowledge of Greek originals, returned to more authentic models, including ones from relatively early periods. Each style has distinctive capitals at

5618-452: The area's leading musical country. On 5 January 1617, Pocahontas and Tomocomo were brought before the king at the Banqueting House, at a performance of Ben Jonson 's masque The Vision of Delight . According to John Smith , James I was so unprepossessing, neither Pocahontas nor Tomocomo realized whom they had met until it was explained to them afterward. Such masques were later augmented with French musicians, whom Queen Henrietta Maria ,

5724-436: The aristocratic Pembroke family. Although Charles I lavished attention and effort on the Banqueting House, it was the scene of his death. On the afternoon of 30 January 1649, he stepped out of a first-floor window of Banqueting House onto the scaffold that had been erected outside for the purpose of his own execution . The actual window no longer exists, as it was not in the main hall but just outside it in an adjacent part of

5830-409: The building which has now gone. Seen from the outside, it would have been the next window along at the north end, roughly above the current visitors' entrance. Unlike the architecture of the more southern European countries, English architecture went through no period of evolution to classicism. Through Jones it arrived suddenly and fully formed. Before this, English architecture had still been based on

5936-401: The column slightly more slender at the top, although some Doric columns, especially early Greek ones, are visibly "flared", with straight profiles that narrow going up the shaft. The capital rests on the shaft. It has a load-bearing function, which concentrates the weight of the entablature on the supportive column, but it primarily serves an aesthetic purpose. The necking is the continuation of

6042-469: The cultural history of England. The new king was a great patron of the arts. He added to the Royal Collection and encouraged the great painters of Europe to come to England. In 1623 he visited Spain where he was impressed by Titian , Rubens , and Velázquez . It became his ambition to find a comparable painter for his own court. Rubens while in England as a diplomat was asked to design and paint

6148-547: The decoration and carving of the wooden columns (in two Classical orders ) which supported viewing galleries on three sides. The new banqueting house was the venue for The Masque of Beauty in January 1608, the Venetian ambassador, Zorzi Giustinian , wrote that "the apparatus and the cunning of the stage machinery was a miracle". Stage mechanisms for The Masque of Queens in February 1609 included "sundry seats above for

6254-447: The defeat of Royalist forces. In January 1698, the Tudor Palace was razed by fire that raged for 17 hours. All that remained was the Banqueting House, Whitehall Gate, and Holbein Gate . Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor were asked to design a new palace, but nothing came of the scheme. It has been said that the widowed King William III never cared for the area, but, had his wife, Mary II , been alive, with her appreciation of

6360-411: The early 19th century by the architect Asher Benjamin , influenced many builders in the eastern states, particularly those who developed what became known as the Federal style . The last American re-interpretation of Vignola's Regola , was edited in 1904 by William Robert Ware. The break from the classical mode came first with the Gothic Revival architecture , then the development of modernism during

6466-480: The entablature may be carried from column to column in the form of an arch that springs from the column that bears its weight, retaining its divisions and sculptural enrichment, if any. There are names for all the many parts of the orders. The heights of columns are calculated in terms of a ratio between the diameter of the shaft at its base and the height of the column. A Doric column can be described as seven diameters high, an Ionic column as eight diameters high, and

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6572-416: The examples of Vitruvius and the five books of the Regole generali di architettura sopra le cinque maniere de gli edifici by Sebastiano Serlio published from 1537 onwards, Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola produced an architecture rule book that was not only more practical than the previous two treatises, but also was systematically and consistently adopting, for the first time, the term 'order' to define each of

6678-403: The fall of the monarchy, Jones' career was effectively ended, his style seen as royalist. He died in 1652, never having seen the popularity of the architectural concepts he introduced. James II was the last monarch to live at Whitehall; William III and Mary II preferred to live elsewhere and eventually reconstructed Hampton Court Palace . Following the fire which destroyed Whitehall Palace,

6784-406: The first structure to be completed in the classical style of Palladian architecture which was to transform English architecture . Begun in 1619 and designed by Inigo Jones in a style influenced by Andrea Palladio , the Banqueting House was completed in 1622 at a cost of £ 15,618, 27 years before King Charles I of England was beheaded on a scaffold in front of it in January 1649. The building

6890-526: The five different species of columns inherited from antiquity. A first publication of the various plates, as separate sheets, appeared in Rome in 1562, with the title: Regola delli cinque ordini d'architettura ("Canon of the Five Orders of Architecture"). As David Watkin has pointed out, Vignola's book "was to have an astonishing publishing history of over 500 editions in 400 years in ten languages, Italian, Dutch, English, Flemish, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, during which it became perhaps

6996-410: The former headquarters of the British Army and Royal Navy , the Royal United Services Institute , the Horse Guards building and the Admiralty , on the opposite side. Government buildings on Whitehall, from north to south, include The Admiralty Buildings, the Department for International Development at No. 22, the Department of Energy and Climate Change at No. 55, the Old War Office ,

7102-479: The heraldic lion and unicorn take the place of the Composite's volutes, a Byzantine or Romanesque conception, but expressed in terms of neoclassical realism. Adam's ink-and-wash rendering with red highlighting is at the Avery Library , Columbia University . In 1789 George Dance invented an Ammonite order , a variant of Ionic, substituting volutes in the form of fossil ammonites for John Boydell 's Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall, London . An adaptation of

7208-408: The historical significance of Whitehall, he would have insisted on the rebuilding. The term Banqueting House was something of a misnomer. The hall within the house was, in fact, used not only for banqueting, but also royal receptions, ceremonies, and the performance of masques . The entertainments given there would have been among the finest in Europe, for, during this period, England was considered

7314-408: The idea of redefining the canon started circulating in Rome, at the beginning of the 16th century, probably during the studies of Vitruvius' text conducted and shared by Peruzzi , Raphael , and Sangallo. Ever since, the definition of the canon has been a collective endeavor that involved several generations of European architects, from Renaissance and Baroque periods, basing their theories both on

7420-405: The king dine. The lower status of those in the gallery was emphasised by the lack of an internal staircase, the gallery only being accessible by an external staircase. The building was, however, later extended to accommodate an internal staircase. James I, for whom the Banqueting House was created, died in 1625 and was succeeded by his son, Charles I. The accession of Charles I heralded a new era in

7526-420: The king's chagrin, Rubens took his knighthood and decamped back to Antwerp , leaving Anthony van Dyck, lured not only with a knighthood but also a pension and a house, to remain in England as the court painter. The panels for the ceiling were all painted in Rubens' atelier in Antwerp and sent to London by ship. Inigo Jones later designed another double-cube room at Wilton House , to display Van Dyck's portraits of

7632-458: The masque The Vision of Delight on 6 January 1617. The banqueting house was destroyed by fire in January 1619, when workmen, clearing up after New Year's festivities, decided to incinerate the rubbish or oil rags inside the building. The replacement Banqueting House was commissioned from the fashionable architect Inigo Jones . Jones had spent time in Italy studying the architecture evolving from

7738-603: The monarch and establishment of the puritanical Commonwealth caused the style to be seen as Royalist , which delayed its spread; but within a few years of the Restoration almost every English county was to have some buildings in the classical style. The Banqueting House and its features became much copied. A much-favoured motif was the placing of pediments above not only the focal point of a façade but also its windows. The use of alternating segmental and triangular pediments, an arrangement employed by Vasari as early as 1550 at

7844-562: The monumental main façade as only a small flanking wing. These revealed the ideas behind Jones' concept of Palladianism. However, King Charles I , who commissioned the plans, never amassed the resources to execute them; his lack of funds and the tensions that eventually led to the Civil War intervened and the plans were permanently shelved. The Second English Civil War resulted in Charles I's own execution outside Banqueting House following

7950-483: The most influential book of all times". The book consisted simply of an introduction followed by 32 annotated plates, highlighting the proportional system with all the minute details of the Five Architectural Orders. According to Christof Thoenes, the main expert of Renaissance architectural treatises, "in accordance with Vitruvius's example, Vignola chose a "module" equal to a half-diameter which

8056-457: The neighbouring Rising Sun pub. The headquarters was moved away from Whitehall in 1890. Downing Street leads off the south-west end of Whitehall, just above Parliament Street. It was named after Sir George Downing , who built a row of houses along the street around 1680 leading west from Whitehall. Following a number of terrorist attacks, the road was closed to the public in 1990, when security gates were erected at both ends. On 7 February 1991,

8162-555: The new city's central palace, Viceroy's House, now the Presidential residence Rashtrapati Bhavan , was a thorough integration of elements of Indian architecture into a building of classical forms and proportions, and made use of the order throughout. The Delhi Order reappears in some later Lutyens buildings including Campion Hall, Oxford . In the United States Benjamin Latrobe , the architect of

8268-417: The palace had no designated banqueting house, the king preferring to banquet in a temporary structure purpose-built in the gardens. The Keeper of the Banqueting House was a position enhanced by Queen Mary I by designating it in relation to a building of the same name at Nonsuch Palace , near the south edge of Greater London , which has since been demolished and instead marks the site of a footpath junction of

8374-399: The palace in 1547. Charles I owned an extensive art collection at the palace and several of William Shakespeare 's plays had their first performances here. It ceased to be the royal residence after 1689, when William III moved to Kensington Palace for his health to escape what had become dense urban surroundings. The palace was damaged by fire in 1691, following which the front entrance

8480-525: The plainest and most ornate of the orders. The Romans also invented the Superposed order . A superposed order is when successive stories of a building have different orders. The heaviest orders were at the bottom, whilst the lightest came at the top. This means that the Doric order was the order of the ground floor, the Ionic order was used for the middle story, while the Corinthian or the Composite order

8586-496: The public since 1963. Oliver Cromwell moved to the street in 1647, taking up residence in Wallingford House. Two years later, Charles I was carried through Whitehall on the way to his trial at Westminster Hall . Whitehall itself was a wide street and had sufficient space for a scaffold to be erected for the King's execution at Banqueting House. He made a brief speech there before being beheaded. Cromwell died at

8692-509: The service of offices for the Institution were quickly dropped in favour of the creation of a museum which displayed personal items of famous commanders and included the skeleton of Napoleon's horse. The museum closed in 1962, and the great south window, closed up by the RUSI, was restored. Today, the banqueting hall is open for tours and use as a venue space. Whitehall Whitehall

8798-463: The seven bays of windows. The building is on three floors: The ground floor, a warren of cellars and store rooms, is low; its small windows indicating by their size the lowly status and usage of the floor, above which is the double-height banqueting hall, which falsely appears from the outside as a first-floor piano nobile with a secondary floor above. The lower windows of the hall are surmounted by alternating triangular and segmental pediments , while

8904-421: The shaft, but is visually separated by one or many grooves. The echinus lies atop the necking. It is a circular block that bulges outwards towards the top to support the abacus , which is a square or shaped block that in turn supports the entablature. The entablature consists of three horizontal layers, all of which are visually separated from each other using moldings or bands. In Roman and post-Renaissance work,

9010-583: The street dates from 1899 after a group of houses between Downing Street and Great George Street were destroyed. On 8 March 1973, the IRA detonated a bomb in front of the Ministry of Agriculture building in Whitehall, injuring a number of bystanders. On 7 February 1991, the IRA launched a mortar attack on 10 Downing Street in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Prime Minister John Major and his cabinet. By

9116-473: The street, on a site that had previously been Ye Old Ship Tavern in the 17th century. The revue Whitehall Follies opened in 1942, which drew controversy over its explicit content featuring the stripper and actress Phyllis Dixey . The theatre became known for its series of farces , reviving a tradition on Whitehall that had begun with court jesters at the palace during the 16th century; these included several plays featuring actor-manager Brian Rix throughout

9222-471: The street. The street is about 0.4 miles (0.64 km) long and runs through the City of Westminster . It is part of the A3212 , a main road in Central London that leads towards Chelsea via the Houses of Parliament and Vauxhall Bridge . It runs south from Trafalgar Square , past numerous government buildings, including the old War Office building, Horse Guards , the Ministry of Defence ,

9328-589: The study of Vitruvius' writings and the observation of Roman ruins (the Greek ruins became available only after Greek Independence, 1821–1823). What was added were rules for the use of the Architectural Orders, and the exact proportions of them in minute detail. Commentary on the appropriateness of the orders for temples devoted to particular deities (Vitruvius I.2.5) were elaborated by Renaissance theorists, with Doric characterized as bold and manly, Ionic as matronly, and Corinthian as maidenly. Following

9434-535: The styles of the Middle Ages , if for the previous century influenced by Netherlandish and French renaissance classicism, which had resulted in an English renaissance style during the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. However, as can be seen at prodigy houses like Hatfield House , one of England's first purpose-built "Renaissance" houses, even during this era, English domestic architecture never quite lost its "castle air". Although English architecture had been influenced, mostly indirectly, by Italian classicism for

9540-411: The time the palace was destroyed, separation of crown and state had become important, with Parliament being necessary to control military requirements and pass laws. The government wanted to be some distance from the monarch, and the buildings around Whitehall, physically separated from St James's Palace by St James's Park , seemed to be a good place for ministers to work. The Horse Guards building

9646-401: The top of columns and horizontal entablatures which it supports, while the rest of the building does not in itself vary between the orders. The column shaft and base also varies with the order, and is sometimes articulated with vertical concave grooves known as fluting . The shaft is wider at the bottom than at the top, because its entasis , beginning a third of the way up, imperceptibly makes

9752-417: The upper level, the room is surrounded by what is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a minstrels' gallery . While musicians may have played from this vantage point, its true purpose was to admit an audience; at the time of the Banqueting House's construction, kings still lived in "splendour and state", or publicly. The less exalted and the general public would be permitted to crowd the gallery in order to watch

9858-488: The upper windows are unadorned casements. Immediately beneath the entablature , which projects to emphasize the central three bays, the capitals of the pilasters are linked by swags in relief , above which the entablature is supported by dental corbel table . Under the upper frieze , festoons and masks suggest the feasting and revelry associated with the concept of a royal banqueting hall. The Banqueting House facades were originally faced with two kinds of stone providing

9964-465: The use of stone columns with bases and capitals in ancient Egyptian architecture , and that of other Near Eastern cultures, although there they were mostly used in interiors, rather than as a dominant feature of all or part of exteriors, in the Greek style. The Doric order originated on the mainland and western Greece . It is the simplest of the orders, characterized by short, organized, heavy columns with plain, round capitals (tops) and no base. With

10070-556: The use of tanks in both World Wars and depicts five World War II tank crew members. The Gurkha Memorial is to the south of this, on Horse Guards Avenue to the east of Whitehall. Whitehall is also home to six other monuments. From north to south, these are of Prince George, Duke of Cambridge ( Commander-in-Chief of the British Army ), Liberal Party , Liberal Unionist Party and Unionists leader Spencer Cavendish, 8th Duke of Devonshire , Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig (known as

10176-443: The wife of Charles I, brought to the court. The masques began a slow decline, however, after the death in 1625 of Orlando Gibbons , who died on a trip to meet the newly married Henrietta Maria and her musicians. Inside the building is a single two-storey, double-cube room. The double-cube, in which the length of the room is twice its equal width and height, is another Palladianism , where all proportions are mathematically related. At

10282-461: Was bought for the Admiralty . The Old Admiralty Buildings now sit on the house's site. Banqueting House was built as an extension to the Palace of Whitehall in 1622 by Inigo Jones . It is the only surviving portion of the palace after it was burned down, and was the first Renaissance building in London. It later became a museum to the Royal United Services Institute and has been opened to

10388-543: Was controversially re-faced in Portland stone in the 19th century, though the details of the original façade were faithfully preserved. Today, the Banqueting House is a national monument, open to the public and preserved as a Grade I listed building . It is cared for by an independent charity, Historic Royal Palaces , which receives no funding from the British Government or the Crown. The Palace of Whitehall

10494-517: Was designed by William Kent , and built during the 1750s on a former tiltyard site, replacing an earlier guard-house erected during the Civil War. The building includes an archway for coach traffic and two pedestrian arches that provide access between Whitehall and Horse Guards Parade . The central archway is marked with "SMF" and "StMW", and denotes the boundary between St Martin-in-the-Fields and St Margaret's church parish boundaries. During

10600-525: Was intended as the venue for entertaining Francis, Duke of Anjou and Alençon . In subsequent years, the decorative scheme was enhanced by the painters George Gower and Lewis Lizard. The ceiling of this Elizabethan banqueting house, inherited by King James I at the Union of the Crowns , was painted with clouds by Leonard Fryer in 1604. Othello was performed in the Banqueting House on 1 November 1605 by

10706-530: Was later refaced with Portland stone only. Much of the work on the Banqueting House was overseen by Nicholas Stone , a Devonshire mason who had trained in Holland. It has been said that, until this time, English sculpture resembled that described by the Duchess of Malfi : "the figure cut in alabaster kneels at my husband's tomb." Like Inigo Jones, Stone was well aware of Florentine art and introduced to England

10812-466: Was not ranked as a separate order. Instead it was considered as a late Roman form of the Corinthian order. The column of the Composite order is typically ten diameters high. The Renaissance period saw renewed interest in the literary sources of the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, and the fertile development of a new architecture based on classical principles. The treatise De architectura by Roman theoretician, architect and engineer Vitruvius ,

10918-412: Was redesigned by Sir Christopher Wren . In 1698, most of the vast palace burned to the ground accidentally after a fire started by a careless washerwoman. Wallingford House was constructed in 1572 by William Knollys, 1st Earl of Banbury along the western edge of Whitehall. The Duke of Buckingham bought the house in 1622, and it was subsequently used by Charles I. During the reign of William III, it

11024-615: Was the creation of King Henry VIII , expanding an earlier mansion that had belonged to Cardinal Wolsey , known as York Place. The king was determined that his new palace should be the "biggest palace in Christendom", a place befitting his newly created status as the Supreme Head of the Church of England. All evidence of the disgraced Wolsey was eliminated and the building rechristened the Palace of Whitehall . During Henry's reign,

11130-480: Was unparalleled in the free and picturesque Jacobean architecture of England, where Renaissance motifs were still filtered through the engravings of Flemish Mannerist designers. The roof is essentially flat and the roofline is defined by a balustrade . On the street façade, the engaged columns, of the Corinthian and Ionic orders, the former above the latter, stand atop a high, rusticated basement and divide

11236-462: Was used for the top story. The Giant order was invented by architects in the Renaissance . The Giant order is characterized by columns that extend the height of two or more stories. The Tuscan order has a very plain design, with a plain shaft, and a simple capital, base, and frieze. It is a simplified adaptation of the Greeks' Doric order. The Tuscan order is characterized by an unfluted shaft and

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