The assumption of architects

Press, 12 August 1978, Page 17

The assumption of architects

Morality and Architecture. By David Watkin. Clarendon, Oxford. 115 pp. Notes and index. $8.15. (Reviewed by Naylor Hillary) On first appearances. David Watkin has produced a book with a title too overwhelming for his modest text to bear The text is no more than an expanded version of a lecture given at Cambridge 10 years ago and a good deal of it is taken up with detailed criticism of the writings of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, surely the bestknown writer on architecture in England in the last 30 years. The ■Times Literary' Supplement,” in a lengthy review, took umbrage at Watkin’s temeritv — a mere lecturer in art history daring to challenge Pevsner, and presuming to take vigorous swipes at Pugin, Corbusier. Herbert Read, and other established critics of art and architecture along the way. Watkin asserts that for nearly 200 ■-ears there has been a steady growth m the belief among architects that they have something to teach communities which runs much deeper

than the shape or convenience of the buildings they design. From nineteenth-century Germany came the belief that each "age” had a unique spirit; the architects task was to interpret and display that spirit. As the attitude d«ve!oped it became a moral issue. From the belief that architects designed buildings in accordance with the "spirit of the age” came the further belief, often held passionately, that only architecture in harmony with the presumed “spirit” was morally correct. Other architecture was, somehow, morally corrupt — misleading . to the community and a nhysical lie. In the twentieth century this attitude went much further. For Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, .and Pevsner, for instance, the architect should not merely reflect the “spirit of the age,” he must help to create that spirit and to make it manifest. The architect elected to be responsible for leading human communities forward to a better future of which he had special knowledge, beyond that of ordinary men. This sense of a moral duty to promote "progress” has not. of course,

been confined to architects. It is the essential ingredient of National Socialism and Communism, to name two extreme examples. It is an attitude which can have no compromise with individual whim, or eccentricity, or even genius, and such traits in architecture came to be regarded as immoral. Perhaps this is an overstatement of the case, at least in architecture. But the sense that tradition is generally bad in architecture, that "modernity” is good for its own sake — beyond question — now pervades much architectural criticism and practice in the Western world. Architects thrust on their patrons — public or private — the buildings which they insist those patrons ought to want. David Watkin cries halt. His tensely written little book is a plea for individualism in architecture, for ap acceptance that traditions, in architecture or anything else, are not necessarily bad just because they are traditions, that architecture is not a specially favoured vehicle through which the spirit of history is inevitably manifesting itself. After reading Watkin a fresh perusal of a book such as the recent Penguin "Dictionary of Architecture,” of which Pevsner, was a princpal editor, shows just how far architectural arrogance, dictation of taste, and assumption of a high moral tone, has progressed. And few laymen dare to challenge architects who are often presumed to enjoy mystical insights into arcane knowledge. Like the members of some other professions, architects are not necessarily eager to deny this mark of special grace.

But David Watkin asks them, to justify their assumption of special knowledge about what communities ought to want in their buildings. His attack may be too vigorous, but it is argued in an especially cogent manner. As something of a lone voice crying amid “experts” who claim to have" the full weight of "historical progress” on their side, he can afford an excess of zeal in his attempt to restore a balance. "Morality and Architecture” ought to be compulsory reading for all those who care about the appearance, or mood, or plain usefulness of the buildings around them in their daily lives.