The name of Robert Willis is little known outside the world of architectural history, but he was probably the greatest architectural historian England has ever produced. He was born at the beginning of the nineteenth century into the world of the gentleman amateur, and yet he became a pioneer of scientific accuracy and professional methodology, being both scientist and antiquary. He was, in fact, a nineteenth-century polymath, who became an architectural scholar, while as Jacksonian Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge, he specialised in the study of mechanisms.

In this comprehensive and scholarly biography Alexandrina Buchanan has made full use of the extensive Willis papers and other archive material to explore Willis’s career. Her approach is both chronological and thematic. In early chapters she discusses Willis’s life and scientific work, while later chapters look at his earliest architectural studies, the methodological underpinnings of his work and his engagement with the controversies of the Gothic Revival.

In his studies of individual cathedrals, Willis identified two ways of understanding architecture: as one of the fine arts and as a historical document. Following in the footsteps of Thomas Rickman and William Whewell, Willis outlined the origins of the pointed arch, and attempted to analyse the essential nature and structural principles of the Gothic style, using rationalist aesthetics, which were in stark contrast to the romantic enthusiasms of Pugin and Ruskin. In particular, in the series of books, lectures and articles concerning the cathedrals of England which he produced between 1840 and 1870, Willis used his scientific research methods to put the study of medieval buildings on the firmer footing which still bears fruit today. His approach meant that he could rise above the ecclesiological debates of the later nineteenth century about the role and symbolic importance of cathedrals and concentrate his scientific antiquarianism on establishing a chronology based on close study of archival sources and the buildings themselves.

Buchanan also explores Willis’s role as Jacksonian Professor, alongside what is known of his private life. He was married to Marianne and they had nine children, the first of whom died in childbirth, while Willis continued to busy himself with professional lectures using mechanical models as visual aids, which he constructed during the course of his lectures, no doubt to great effect. In spite of this, his lecture attendance figures suggest that numbers were low, which meant that by the 1870s Willis had lost any enthusiasm he might once have had for teaching engineering as a professional subject at Cambridge. In 1873 the Revd John Clough Williams Ellis, father of the architect of Portmeirion, was appointed as Willis’s deputy in view of his failing health, and after his death the Jacksonian Professorship was made part of the Board of Natural Sciences.

Willis’s scientific reputation faded after his death, and his engineering models were relegated to a storeroom and finally lost in the 1960s. His vision that the theory and practice of science and engineering should work hand in hand found little favour either in Cambridge or the engineering profession, and it was left to others to carry forward his ideas. Similarly, in the field of architectural scholarship, a more gregarious figure than Willis might have established a formal professional school of architectural history. Instead a new generation of writers in the early twentieth century were able to cite Willis’s scholarship as the basis for their own work. In particular Paul Frankel and Nikolaus Pevsner were greatly indebted to his work on medieval architecture, and the British Archaeological Association’s studies of individual cathedrals drew on his methods. The debt that cathedral archaeology owes to Willis’s foundational work has, with contemporary practitioners such as Warwick Rodwell and Tim Tatton-Brown, at last been recognised. He is truly the founding father of architectural history and structural archaeology. Alexandrina Buchanan’s detailed monograph not only sheds new light on the interconnections between Willis’s varied fields of interest, but brings him alive for a new generation of architectural historians.