ABSTRACT
The construction histories of Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire and St Lukes Hospital in London dramatize the issues of architectural authority, and economy, with peculiar vividness, and one will use them to advance two more claims. The first is, that it is in the social gap between the roles of building designer, on the one hand, and the patron owner, on the other, that can one find a powerful structure for attitudes about the purpose and value of architecture, attitudes that finally the meaning of built form itself. The architect George Dance the younger was precocious; his All Hallows London Wall began construction in 1765, when he was twenty-four. Dance used a variation of the device at his later St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, whose 493 foot front along Old Street displayed three long, superimposed rows of semi-circular windows, each marking a single 'cell', above rectangular recessions.
