Book review
A History of Building Types By Nikolaus Pevsner
published by Thames and Hudson, London 1976 (352 pages, $43.05)
Reviewed by I.V. PORSOLT
The study of building types is not new. On the Continent of Europe especially, architectural education has been engaged in it for the last hundred years at least. Historical treatment of the subject, however, has mostly been submerged in general architectural history: and in this context overshadowed by the study of stylistic development. Since the Second World War, and no doubt under the impact of functionalist architecture, the writing of the history of building types has been expanding - though mainly in the form of monographs.
Dr Pevsner wanted to deal with the subject on a much broader front. He was given an opportunity to do so in the A.W. Mellon lectures at Washington in 1970. The present book is an expansion of those lectures.
Exigencies of timetable may have forced such building types as exchanges and banks into the same Chapter Twelve, or warehouses and office buildings together into Chapter Thirteen - although the market halls, conservatories and exhibition halls are grouped together with a very shrewd insight into their origins and early history, and are logically placed between the railway stations before, and shops and stores after. Four chapters are devoted to all sorts of government buildings (the first of them reaching back into the twelfth to seventeenth centuries); and one should have thought that, so far as pen-pushing establishments are concerned, private and governmental bureaucrats need similar building types, while town halls, whose very origin is tied up with festive civic occasions, could have found more congenial company with concert halls and the like.
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Longitudinal section of the Paris Opera, by Charles Garnier, 1861-75. Note the preponderance of reception rooms. |
The introductory chapter deals rather arbitrarily but amusingly, and politely avoiding any outright facetiousness, with royal residential extravaganzas of the nineteenth century. The next chapter describes monuments - still with a touch of amused aloofness in cases such as the non-executed and the executed designs for the Victor Emanuel pile in Rome. This story is incomplete, however. The author does not see the origin of such 'national' monuments in the Royal Squares in France from Henry IV onwards. And he could have mentioned such decidedly less stodgy examples as the Reformation Memorial in Geneva, the Gandhi Memorial in Delhi, and, perhaps the most touching of the works, the Memorial for the victims of the Cave Ardeatine massacre in Rome.
One of the most informative chapters is one on theatres. Dr Pevsner asserts that the story only starts in the Renaissance. But the Renaissance began with a reconstruction of the Classical theatre as learned from Vitruvius, with a semicircular seating, and classy seats nearest the stage. The finally triumphant version puts the really distinguished seats into the 'boxes' around the walls, on the model of the Mediaeval-to Elizabethan tradition of courtyard performances, with gentlefolk in the galleries and misera plebs in the pit. From the communal religious-artistic event of the Mediaeval mystery play (or farce), theatre has become a social event, to be seen at, rather than to see the spectacle - a development infinitely more relevant than the stylistic ripples upon which the author lavishes so much expertise.
Libraries and museums belong together (Chapters Seven and Eight) and the information assembled about the early stages is, as always, first class. But these two types of buildings are part and parcel of the educational system, and there is no space allotted in the book to educational buildings of any sort - a serious and rather inexplicable omission. And while we are discussing the absence of schools from the agenda, we may as well note the absence, too, of sports and recreational buildings. Also dealing with absences, we may note the most serious ones: that of popular housing, that of engineering works, and, overriding all else, that of urban design.
It is easy to see the human factors which prevent Sir Nikolaus from producing the encyclopaedic work he had in mind. But there is another thing. In his chapter on shop and store design he says: ' . . . planning-wise the shop is not of interest to the art historian. But technologically and stylistically it is.' This after finding that the basic design of a shop has hardly changed from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. There was no change because, in spite of all the violent changes that did take place the basic human relationship expressed in shop layout did not change. So the art historian writes this aspect off. On the other hand, technology (plate glass) did; and so did 'style' (decor). So the art historian is interested.
Now it may be argued that human nature remains much as it has ever been, but circumstances (technologies, fads, styles) change. . . There is even reversion to a former state. For instance, Dr Pevsner has pointed out, correctly, that the story of building types is one of diversification. But is there no trace of a contrary movement? One building which was practically canonical in its time, the Town Hall (Stadthalle) of Magdeburg by H. Goericke (1927), came into being precisely because civic demand arose for a multi-purpose hall which would serve for civic receptions as well as for concerts, balls, political meetings - even indoor sports. The wonderful new Termini station in Rome serves as town terminal for air-lines too. And the Lijnbahn in Rotterdam is not only for shopping but eminently also a social gathering place. And the modern equivalent of the old theatrical entertainment is television, which is mostly in the home. Public and private functions begin to de-diversify, to reintegrate.
Dr Pevsner has shown in this book much more interest in the development of the one-off building types than in the development of that civic context which alone can explain changes in individual buildings. He has not shown that the greatest of buildings, the city itself, is always in transition from one way of functioning to another. He has approached the subject of building types with the armory of the art historian: the approach to the single detached work. But it seems on the evidence of this book, that to deal with the past-to-present-to-future story of building types and their contexts, the armory of the art historian is not sufficient.
Dr I. V. Porsolt lectured in the history of architecture, building and town planning in the Auckland School of Architecture. The subject of his doctoral thesis was The Origins of Axial Layout - Greek Town and Sanctuary Planning. He is now in private practice.
Originally published in Art New Zealand 26 Autumn 2008