John Wood, the Elder
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John Wood, the Elder, (1704 - May 23, 1754, Bath), also named Wood of Bath, was an English architect. He worked principally in the city of Bath, South West England.
John Wood, The Elder, was born in Yorkshire, Northern England. He is known for designing many of the streets and buildings of Bath, such as the The Circus, Queen Square, Prior Park, the North and South Parades, and other notable houses.
Many of the buildings he designed are littered with icons and symbols associated with Freemasonry, leading many people who have studied his work to believe that he was a member of the organisation, even though there is no documentary proof. Wood wrote extensively about sacred geometry, and argued that the myths of the supposed founder of Bath, King Bladud, were based on truth. He claimed that ancient British stone circles were the remains of once more elaborate buildings designed by Bladud.
His final masterpiece was the Circus, built on Barton Fields outside the old city walls of Bath. He demonstrated how a row of town houses could be dignified, almost palatial. The uses of uniform facades and rhythmic proportions in conjunction with classical principles of unerring symmetry were followed throughout the city.
Wood also left us the most important plan of Stonehenge ever made; his survey, carried out in 1740 and published in his Choir Gaure, was annotated with hundreds of measurements, which he resolved on the ground to one half, sometimes even one quarter, of an inch.[1] This work has been largely overlooked, partly due to criticisms made by the antiquarian William Stukeley. Stukeley disagreed vehemently with Wood’s interpretation of the monument; he also failed to see the significance of recording the stones in such detail. However, using Wood's original dimensions it has been possible to re-draw his work on a computer and compare the record with the modern plan of Stonehenge. His survey has immense archaeological value, for he recorded the stones fifty years before the collapse of the western trilithon (which fell in 1797 and was not restored until 1958).[2]
It has been suggested that Wood (and his son, also John) were connected to Freemasonry via one of their building partnerships and/or via symbolism in their architecture. In his Masonic lecture and article, Stephen B. Cox (b. 1950 UK) [3] tentatively suggests an image for this as the square (Queen's Square), the circle (The Circus) and the crescent (The Royal Crescent): standing for Earth, Sun and Moon, and following the masonic path of the sun in the Lodge from east to south and exiting in the west as a symbol of man's spiritual progress in life. There is, however, no direct evidence of deliberate masonic expression in the architecture.
Bath is now a World Heritage Site, at least partly as a result of the Woods' sublime architecture.
[edit] References
- ^ Wood, John. (1747). Choir Gaure, Vulgarly called Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain. Oxford
- ^ Johnson, Anthony (2008). Solving Stonehenge: The New Key to an Ancient Enigma. London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-05155-9
- ^ Cox, Stephen B. The Path of the Sun In The Masons Lodge
[edit] See also
[1] Biography of Wood at The Building of Bath Museum
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