IN 1791 an Architects' Club was founded. Wyatt, Dance, Holland, and S. P. Cockerell
started it. Chambers, Robert Adam, and Mylne joined, representing an older generation.
The other twelve founder-members included comparatively young men like Soane and
Hardwick, while Carr of York, Revett, Sandby, and Gandon came in as honorary
(Country) members. The Club was extremely exclusive, since no one was to be elected
unless a Royal Academician, Associate, or Gold Medallist or a member of one of the
principal foreign academies. In 1792 a rather less exclusive Surveyors' Club was inaugu-
rated. This still exists, but what became of the Architects' Club nobody knows. It is the
first recorded instance of the professional association of English architects and its founda-
tion marks, therefore, an important stage in the profession's history. There is also much
significance in its exclusiveness and in its being imitated by an association denominated
the Surveyors' Club, in spite of the fact that there was at the time no strict difference
between the two professions. The Architects' Club, obviously, constituted an Rite and
the names do, in fact, include nearly every important figure in English Neo-classicism
from Adam to Soane.

Soane was the youngest original member of the Club and one of the few still in practice
in 1815, by which year it is obvious that the situation out of which the Club issued had
completely changed. The French wars had been fought and England herself had changed
a good deal. An aristocratic society with bourgeois leanings had become a bourgeois
society with aristocratic yearnings, and it was such a society which the next generation
of architects grew up to serve. It was in close sympathy with the changing mentality
of England that the Neo-classical tradition split itself, in the early 1800s, into two
parallel and unopposed movements, since christened the 'Greek Revival' and the
'Gothic Revival', 'Revival', in this context, is inexact, and in regard to the Greek move-
ment, positively absurd, but the term is now too well established to be disposed of.

The movement called the 'Greek Revival' may conveniently be dated from 1804. This
was the year in which Thomas Hope published a diatribe against James Wyatt's design for
Downing College, Cambridge, pleading for the substitution of a pure Greek Doric
design, or, if that was impracticable, a pure Greek Ionic. Hope's point of view was that of
a doctrinaire Neo-classicist (no pilasters; the parts of the entablature to be considered as
functional, etc.) who went a step further than his predecessors in preferring absolutely the
Greek orders to the Roman.

This attitude was new. Soane who, in his student designs of 1778-80, had been among
the first to appreciate the value of Greek Doric, ¹ never considered Greek work in general
as superior to Roman; and, in fact, used Roman orders and ornaments till the very end.

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