RCA School of Architecture ResearchRCA SoA Research

‘An outstanding study of a key set of personalities that had a major effect on early twentieth century architectural culture. An excellent work of critical scholarship’.
— Professor Beatriz Colomina (Princeton University)

‘This is an extraordinary tour de force: beautifully written, original in its perceptions and scholarly revelations’.
— Professor Anthony Vidler (Yale University)

This book considers the motives, ambitions, and malaprops of writing architectural history during the early-1900s – a moment that coincided with the emergence of modernity. In reference to a series of eccentric Anglo-American cultural figures, it considers the relationships between architecture, human perception, disease, and frailty to provide original ideas regarding the writing of architectural history and the literary construction of architecture.

Architecture is not typically associated with frailty. Indeed, one of the founding principles of architecture is that it should aspire to be stable, resilient and indefatigable. In addition, architecture is also not typically thought of in terms of its literariness. Tracing this contradictoriness, this book considers architecture as a frail, literary object by examining the eccentric architectural criticism of Geoffrey Scott, author of The Architecture of Humanism (1914), together with the opportunistic connoisseurship of Bernard Berenson, the leading authority on the attribution of Italian Renaissance painting. Through a reading of their works, it interprets architecture as both “frail,” when viewed through the diffracted lens of nervous illness, and a form of “writing,” in which architecture assumes concrete form through literary description.

This book will be of interest to academics, students, and researchers in architecture and architectural history.

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Extract from the Introduction:

On or about December 1910, human character changed.
— Virginia Woolf

Architecture is also not usually associated with frailty. Indeed, one of the lingering premises about architecture is that it should be stable, resilient, and indefatigable. Permanent even. For the Roman architect Vitruvius, writing in his founding treatise De architectura (c. 25 BC), architecture should possess “firmitas, utilitas, and venustas”; a tripartite character famously interpreted by the English architect Henry Wotton in the mid-1600s as “firmness, commodity, and delight.” Such an assuredness was itself fragile, however, as the architectural period from the 1890s to 1920s examined in this book makes apparent. This was an era in which the writer Virginia Woolf famously suggested, “human character changed.” Within the Anglocentric context discussed here, this period began with a conservative adherence to the precepts of firmness, commodity, and delight, executed in various architectural “styles” that were contested during the late-nineteenth-century “Battle of the Styles.” And it would end with an unsure repudiation of modernism and the unassailable emergence of the modern epoch. If architecture is not usually associated with frailty, then it is also not typically thought of as a literary form. That is, architecture is not generally considered in terms of its innate literariness. Published only weeks before the outbreak of the First World War, Geoffrey Scott’s treatise, The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste (1914), is primarily notable for its literariness, rather than for the presentation of any coherent, historical argument. Scott (1884–1929) was first and foremost a writer, who admitted to having a capricious and highly aestheticized “interest” in the “architectural topic”; an interest that would ebb and flow throughout his work. In this way, rather than considering architecture as an object of literary representation or as an enclosure within which to write, this book will examine the intertwinement of architecture with the literary, or writerly.

For the historian Anthony Vidler, architectural history precedes architectural production. And agreeing with this proposition naturally leads to questions around the fidelity, or infidelities, of histories and of historians; that is, as Vidler intended, it invites the broader question: what is it to write history? But what then are the consequences that are borne of that action? If Scott’s conception of architecture can be read in terms of its writerliness, then his Architecture of Humanism, as with many of the later works that cite this history, is an illustration of how the notion of literary dexterity superseded any adherence to historical accuracy. A deference that was less a consequence of his academic lassitude, although this was certainly a contributing factor, than the culmination of his understanding of how architecture might be created and recreated through writerly gestures and literary forms; with such a literariness allowing architecture to possess a malleability and rhetorical abstraction that was at odds with the fixity of its built, historic forms. Like many of his contemporaries, Scott considered the architecture of the Italian Renaissance to be the highpoint of humanism, not least because it was an “architecture of treatises”; that is, it was an architecture produced in the first instance through writing, before it was then occupied by the reader as they envisaged this architecture in their mind. If the imaginary inhabitation of architecture relies on a metaphoric exchange, as Scott argued, then this form of empathetic inhabitation – derived from the late-nineteenth-century Germanic notion of Einfühlung, or empathy (literally translated as “feeling into”) – is speculative and perpetually in flux. Like all metaphors, this formulation was imbalanced, with one term borne by the other. Rather than writing about the object – the treatise, the building, the city, or even architecture – this book suggests that Scott’s lax version of history became an exercise in circumventing, or writing around the object. And it is precisely this expression of Scott’s literariness, evident in the abstractions, deferments, and oversights throughout his Architecture of Humanism, which I argue provides an illustration of the fragility of architecture itself; suggesting the pliability of what might otherwise be considered definite.

The work of Scott and the members of his orbit exemplifies a particular view of culture that is more of an amalgam of culturally pervasive ideas than a conventional, focused argument. Here, architecture, or rather the experience of architecture, became an object of connoisseurship. One to be parsed within a collection of other objects, regardless of scale, material, history, or even, in many cases, cultural origin. While fascinating in its practice, this mode of connoisseurship is particularly pertinent here in terms of its resistance to modernity. For Vidler, the views of Scott and his mentor, the Lithuanian American connoisseur Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), evidenced the “worn out shards of mandarin connoisseurship,” illuminating the death throes of a privileged society that faced modernity by turning backward to a fantastic, imaginary version of the past. In many ways, both men, and especially Berenson, were trapped by their own aesthetic certainties in a world that was undergoing profound change. Following this argument, this book will frame their works as points of divergence as a means to construct a cultural history that considers the import of the fragile, literariness of architecture.