Nikolaus Pevsner and the Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century
My starting point in this paper was the recognition that Pevsner's first work in English, Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936) and Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century (1972) were conceived by their author as a complementary pair. Viewed in combination, they may be used as a key to what Pevsner saw as important in architecture and in architectural writing.
Pevsner interpreted nineteenth-century scholarship in essentially Hegelian terms as a thesis and antithesis which reached a synthesis in the writings of William Morris, the pivotal figure between the two books. The dialectic was between those who wished for a style to suit the age and those who wished for the age to suit a style. To Pevsner's evident bewilderment, however, neither side came up with what was to him the obvious answer. Neither side looked to the new building forms of the age: the factories, the bridges, the Crystal Palace. Even William Morris, who combined the two tendencies by critiquing his own age yet trying to create a new style, was only, in Pevsner's terms, a softening agent, for he rejected the machine. For Pevsner, therefore, in the nineteenth century, architectural writing was in advance of building. As he put it 'the effort to realise what thought dictated was too great'. It required the catalyst of Morris, followed by the efforts of men of exceptional calibre like Walter Gropius to bring into being the style that matched the age. For Pevsner, this style was, of course, Modernism.
Pevsner's Modernism matched all the paradigms of style he had inherited from the nineteenth century. He defined it in the same terms used by nineteenth-century architectural historians describing Gothic. Both styles were described as the products of individual genius, but of genius expressing the realities of the age rather than the individuality of self. They were international styles, emerging after a period of debased historicism, whose validity was proved by their internationalism. In championing Modernism, Pevsner was deliberately adopting a partisan position, a trait he also valued in nineteenth-century writing. Other qualities he valued and indeed emulated, were the archaeological method of analysing medieval buildings and terminological precision. Most of the terms which form the essential glossary to a Buildings of England volume were coined by the nineteenth-century authors he admired, such as Thomas Rickman and Robert Willis.
For some commentators, the fundamental paradox of Pevsner is that he managed to combine a well-considered appreciated of nineteenth-century architecture, expressed throughout The Buildings of England, with a continuing hatred of historicism and devotion to the Modernist cause. Can his analysis of the architectural writers of the nineteenth-century help us to explain this apparent problem? As we have seen, for Pevsner, nineteenth-century architecture represented a similar paradox: the discrepancy between an architect's thought and the same architect's performance. Should we, perhaps, argue that in the twentieth century, architectural practice was in advance of theory? I would argue, however, that to posit a paradox within Pevsner's thought is to follow his own method too closely. Pevsner may have been a mass of apparent inconsistencies - which of us is not? - but the fact that he retained his pro-Modernist stance to the end suggests that he saw no contradiction in his position. He had never argued for the wholesale demolition of historic architecture to create a brave new world, merely that new buildings should be in a modern style. Indeed, the modern buildings he appreciated the most were those which interacted with their historical setting. The thesis of Modernism does not inevitably require as its antithesis a hatred of past architecture. Similarly, for Pevsner, the tradition of the architectural writings of the nineteenth century was not a weight to be shaken off, but an inheritance to be enjoyed.
