ABSTRACT
Whereas only a few major building projects were actually completed in seventeenth-century Britain before the Restoration, much ephemeral, paper and what we would now call virtual architecture was produced: the masque designs by Inigo Jones; the chapter called “The House” in Henry Hawkins’ emblematical collection Partheneia Sacra in which architecture is a crowded locus for all sorts of meaning; and reconstructions of ancient or lost buildings, ranging from Stonehenge to the churches of the early Christians. These varieties of paper or ephemeral architecture are usually studied separately: the ephemeral architecture of masque designs by historians of literature and the theater as part of the Gesamtkunstwerk for which they set the stage, emblem books by historians of emblemata and reconstructions by architectural historians who look mainly at their stylistic and archaeological aspects. Yet it is highly doubtful whether viewers at the time when these works of paper and ephemeral architecture were produced considered them as separate categories, each demanding their own method of study.
