The West

Christopher Tadgell taught architectural history for almost thirty years before devoting himself full-time to writing and research, travelling the world to see and photograph buildings from every tradition and period.

Born in Sydney, he studied art history at the Courtauld Institute in London. In 1974 he was awarded his PhD for a thesis on the Neo-classical architectural theorist, Ange-Jacques Gabriel. He subsequently taught in London and at the Kent Institute of Art and Design in Canterbury, with interludes as F.L. Morgan Professor of Architectural Design at the University of Louisville and as a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He has lectured at universities and other learned institutions around the world, including the universities of Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, Brown, Cornell and Virginia, IIT and the Graham Foundation in Chicago, and Cambridge University and the RIBA in the UK. He is a Trustee of the World Monuments Fund, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Asiatic Society, and a Member of both the British and American Societies of Architectural Historians.

Tadgell's The History of Architecture in India (1990, several reprints, Phaidon) is the definitive one-volume account of the architecture of the subcontinent, while many publications on French architecture include the standard account in Baroque and Rococo Architecture and Decoration (ed. Blunt, 1978, Elek) and the definitive English-language monograph on A.J. Gabriel. He has contributed many articles on Indian and French architecture to The Grove Dictionary of Art and other major reference books.