Georgian Architecture

Located off Corn Street in Bristol, the Exchange was opened to trade on 21 September 1743, in the reign of George II. The edifice was designed by the renowned Palladian architect John Wood the Elder of Bath for the Corporation of the City of Bristol, and has continually remained the property of the City to this day. Originally intended as a trading court for the international merchants of Bristol, the Exchange later became a trading place for corn and animal feed, a dominant commodity trade of the time. It consequently acquired the title of the ‘Corn Exchange’ in 1812, and remained for that purpose until trading ceased in 1988. Although such commodities are no longer traded, the edifice continues its principal service as a place of diverse trade in goods and food items that is integral to the general market of St. Nicholas. In the present-day, the Exchange is protected as a Grade I Listed building and is regarded as one of the finest examples of Palladian architecture in Bristol. This short essay presents a brief historical account of the significant reasons for this claim, and traces the influences that have shaped its design and evolution to its present state.

This essay explores the strangeness of a boldly modernist building arriving in the heart of a city renowned for its historic architectural image. In October 2004 and again in January 2005, vandals attacked the Thermae Bath Spa (Grimshaw and Associates, 2006), a state-of-the-art facility under construction in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bath, England. Smashing the image of the city as reflected in the Spa’s glass curtain wall, the attacks made visible the strange incursion of the Spa into the purportedly public space of the city. Using this violence as a point of rhetorical departure concerning the fraught urban context of Bath, this essay examines the ways in which architecture can bring hegemonic struggles to the surface of the urban realm, creating a strange space of convergences between past and present, civic ambition and local resistance, architecture as icon and architecture as communication. The essay charts a course between the way that the new Bath Spa operates in promotional and journalistic discourse as an icon, and the way that its design is, in fact strangely discreet. Mobilizing a stealth modernism, the Spa appears to refuse the appellation, ‘icon’, operating smoothly as communicative mirror of its social and cultural context. Smoothly but for critical moment(s) of rupture – the violence enacted upon and the discord surrounding the Spa – in which the estranged relations between newness, heritage, power and cityscape in this particular location come sharply into focus.