Architectural debates of the 1950s – particularly between ‘empirical’ and ‘formal’ strands of Modernism – are highlighted by a study of the architectural projects, biography and milieu of Colin St John Wilson.

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Adrian Stokes's (1902‐72) construct of the urban landscape of Hyde Park as a topos of negation is a remarkable recorded instance in twentieth century criticism of the influence of environment in directing an aesthetic position. Stokes's London landscape of Hyde Park and the monuments embedded within it represented, for him, a powerful negative heuristic; a set of negative rules inscribed within his personal cultural system for the purposes of rejection, and deployed to define — in antithesis — his critical direction. His accounts of Hyde Park are, outwardly, a withering critique of Edwardian moral vacuity and Victorian eclecticism while inwardly — on the psycho‐analytic level — they register projections of inner anxiety and personal guilt at the ‘destroyed mother’ that the Park represents and drive his need to make reparation. The paper examines the formation of Stokes's mental construct of the Park through a close mapping of this landscape and a concrete examination of its artefacts in relation to readings of Stokes's own writings and those of Joseph Conrad, Ruskin and others. Following an outline of Stokes's thought in the context of Kleinian psychoanalysis the paper takes Lakatos's concept of the negative heuristic as a point of departure to chart a journey from Stokes's childhood home in Radnor Place, Bayswater through the park to the Albert Memorial. These topographies disclose Stokes's offensive responses to the Park and its artefacts and show how — in eschewing Hyde Park and all it represents – he begins to discover formal and ethical positions that will frame the core of his architectural‐artistic theories.

The ‘South Opposed to East and North’ of this paper's title comes from the third section of Adrian Stokes's book The Quattro Cento of 1932 – subtitled A Different Conception of the Italian Renaissance, and the founding work of his aesthetic. The Quattro Cento can be viewed as a response to the need expressed by Strzygowski in his Origin of Christian Church Art of 1923 ‘for a work dealing with the penetration of the South by the North of Europe and the subsequent rise of the so‐called Renaissance’; a North, in Strzygowski's view, already permeated by influences from the East. Within the contested terrain inscribed in the term, this paper isolates three key ‘Orients’ crucial to Stokes's Quattro Cento aesthetic: the experiential Orient of his Conrad‐inspired voyage to the East; the Orient of the British Museum; and that of the Orientalist texts – primarily the now‐marginalized Josef Strzygowski. As a study in the historiography of Orientalism, the essay examines how Adrian Stokes inflected his experience and readings of these Orients to re‐evaluate European – specifically Italian Renaissance – culture.

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