JOSEPH

See also:

• JOSEPH GWILT (1784-1863)

GWILT (1784-1863)  , English architect and writer, was the younger son of George Gwilt, architect surveyor to the county of Surrey, and was born at Southwark on the rlth of January 1784 . He was educated at St Paul's school, and after a short course of instruction in his father's office was in 1501 admitted a student of the Royal Academy, where in the same year he gained the silver medal for his drawing of the tower and steeple of St Dunstan-in-the-East . In 1811 he published a Treatise on the Equilibrium of Arches, and in 1815 he was elected F.S.A . After a visit to Italy in 1816, he published in 1818 Notitia architectonica italiana, or Concise Notices of the Buildings and Architects of Italy . In 1825 he published an edition of Sir William Chambers's Treatise on Civil Architecture; and among his other principal contributions to the literature of his profession are a translation of the Architecture of Vitruvius (1826), a Treatise on the Rudiments of Architecture, Practical and Theoretical (1826), and his valuable Encyclopaedia of Architecture (1842), which was published with additions by Wyatt Papworth in 1867 . In recognition of Gwilt's advocacy of the importance to architects of a knowledge of mathematics, he was in 1833 elected a member of the Royal Astronomical Society . He took a special interest in philology and music, and was the author of Rudiments of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue (1829), and of the article " Music " in the Encyclopaedia metropolitana . His principal works as a practical architect were Markree Castle near Sligo in Ireland, and St Thomas's church at Charlton in Kent . He, died on the 14th of September 1863 .