Robert and James Adam, Architects of the Age of Reason and Experience

The real nature of the Adam style is simultaneously a rational, imaginative and empirical application of the historic languages of architecture, not in their consistency, but in their novelty. While not seeking to break violently with any established tradition in terms of the choice of architectural language, the Adam brothers were free from a dogmatic attachment to any single existing style. Insisting that ‘architecture has not, like some other arts, an immediate standard in nature, to which the artist can always refer’, the Adam brothers saw in themselves the image of modernists emancipated from dogmatism.

The style-orientated notion which insists that every architect should have his own particular style has remained powerful in the study of the works of the Adam brothers. This notion has often led to rather careless dismissals of their novelty, of which Kaufmann's Baroque and Worsley's neo-Palladian interpretations are notable examples. Neither of these, however, seems to give a satisfactory picture of the Adam style. Studies that explain the Adam style in the context of the plurality of their influences by emphasizing the material resemblance of their designs to a variety of sources offer no illumination, and lose themselves in the stylistic complexity of the whole Adam style. Listing the architectonic themes that were harmoniously combined and blended together into the Adam brothers' works has resulted in nothing but a simple documentation of what one can see.