Davies Paul - Architectural History Retold

If we were to read a general architectural history written a half-century ago, say Pevsners Outline of European Architecture , it would feel a lot different from this one. There would be more of it; it would be denser, more technical and harder to read. Even during this research I hesitated to pick Pevsner up from the dusty bookshelves of a secondhand bookshop in Oundle, the sort of place these days youd expect to find it.

So I do not expect students of our age to dip happily into such historical volumes, despite their authority. In our mix-and-match, jumbled-up age, our technology makes us butterflies. Students jump from this to that. Authors jump from this to that, too. As a consequence, ambitious academics strive to complete world histories across vast digital platforms to keep up. Instead, I like to think of this contribution as a kind of horrible history with attitude or as a classic story abbreviated, and it is intended that this book might be read alongside those digital sources so that various images and further investigation might take place while reading it.

There is much to be said for the old grand narrative; it reminds us where weve come from and what we have achieved. To my reasoning, Western architectural history needed to be retold with more cultural infrastructure and less comparative detail, in broad sweeps rather than intricate distinctions. Retold since of course all the material here has come from somewhere and retold because it is necessary to remind ourselves that we have a history not so much to be plundered as secured back in the minds eye as progress. This is a term that has almost disappeared from our lexicon but is nevertheless something that got people interested in the built environment out of bed every morning with a mind for something other than estate agency; which of course, in my more despairing moments, is precisely what I fear architecture might become that or some inadvertently pretentious parlour game.

Furthermore, I tell it as a human story mine as much as everybody elses for human is what we are and because thats what makes history alive and neither some dull abstraction nor an idiotic fairy story. Meanwhile, knowing Mies van der Rohe kept a stash of Edvard Munch prints under his bed tells us a great deal. The personal story is always illuminating if you can get to it, and despite the unfortunately rarefied atmosphere of the great architectural bookshops, architects are not supreme beings, even if some aspects of our academic industry demand we kiss the hem and figure out their parallel universe over thousands of pages of difficult words.

The book derives from a lecture course given to eager undergraduates when they first arrive at a London university to study architecture in the twenty-first century a basically chronological story explained in the context of a culture but it should become clear to anybody that there are many crossovers that belie a straightforward tale and many levels to the notion of culture and architecture. In general I have placed material where I think it fits best and selected the most entertaining examples.

There are always flaws to the construction of history, and I have chosen almost the autobiographical method, opinionated in the sense that presently I may be rather down on Ruskin and up on Morris but with the lurking feeling the situation might possibly reverse with time. The working title of this volume was Architecture: The Unauthorised Biography for quite a long time, until I got fed up with the question as to what might be unauthorised about it or, for that matter, biographical; hence Architectural History Retold is better.

The list of whats left out is scary but serves at least to educate us as to what others include by comparison. In no particular order, I remove everything I havent yet got much of a clue about but some that I have: Byzantium, Ottoman and Moorish architecture, large swathes of the Rococo, Russian Constructivism, postwar British architecture, Deconstruction, German Expressionism, Italian Futurism and Nordic Classicism, just for starters. I hardly mention four of the five architects James Stirling thought were the only great architects Britain had ever produced: Mackintosh, Vanbrugh, Archer, Hawksmoor and Jones. Only one of these makes the fulcrum of my discussion. I even leave out John Soane, whom Stirling left on the bench as a substitute. There is certainly no mention of the Catalan monk Antonio Gaudi. This bizarre reasoning I hope will become clear as the reader progresses.

To make it relevant (a dangerous word), I do one thing that Pevsner would never have done: I say the past never goes away, it just mutates. The historical sense is always here even if you dont self-consciously cultivate it. Our media continually re-represent the past to us, and students need mechanisms to decode what they absorb, to gain a critical perspective, to understand something approximating a road map. This book is my attempt to provide such a thing.

Im sorry there are not more women in our pantheon of flawed genius, but that will change. Denise Scott Brown was lovingly pictured with Robert Venturi in a volume commemorating the National Gallery Extension in 1991, but the caption still read Robert Venturi and His Design. It was pathetic. But I havent gone out of my way to be revisionist, either.

Neither do I dwell on particular race or colonial issues, these being subsumed in to the larger project. When I was studying in the mid-eighties, it was still the ambition of one of my best friends to become the first black partner in a major architectural practice in the UK. At least, thankfully, thats exactly what he became.

And the architecture Im talking about represents a tiny percentage of the work done by architects. This may not have been true of Michelangelo, but these days, however elevated in reputation, architects work in teams, so when I discuss an architect as if it is one person, I do it only for convenience. Looking at some Mies van der Rohe blueprints, a flag set used on site in the construction of the Fellows Building, IIT, Chicago, in 1956 fragile, light-sensitive dyelines that I unroll only once in a blue moon I think not just of Mies but also of the person who drew them. Im transported into this unknown persons world, what he was looking forward to that week, his Friday night and what he was dreading perhaps Mies himself looking over his shoulder that afternoon.