Reading Architectural History - Looking Back And Ahead

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 2002 by Jeremy Melvin

By Dana Arnold. London: Routledge. 2002. [pounds sterling]19.99

Reading Architectural History has a satisfying coincidence between form and content. To promote a pluralist view of the subject, Dana Arnold has adopted a pluralist strategy, assembling a series of different texts whose balance shifts endlessly between confirmation and contradiction. The effect reinforces her message as no single authorial voice ever could, that history, architectural or otherwise, can only ever be partially understood, and many fragments are better than a mythical unity.

There is also a deftness to her selection of extracts. They include classics of historiography from E. H. Garr and Hayden White; classics of architectural history from Colvin, Summerson and Pevsner, contributions from those indispensable pillars of late twentieth-century France, Foucault and Barthes, and several gadflies. Few are unfamiliar in the community of architectural history, but Arnold has grouped them into pairs, each with her own introduction. Some pairings are inspired, such as Golvin's Biographical Dictionary with Foucault's What is an Author?, and Pevsner's Buildings of England with Barthes' analysis of the Guides Bleus. From these contrasts you can extrapolate much of the historiographical anatomy you need to develop a historical understanding of architecture, such as the problems of authorship and attribution, the relationship between buildings and records, or the latent assumptions with which individual historians implicitly frame their studies.

Not surprisingly, Arnold's own contributions do not always match those of the intellectual giants she includes. Equally unsurprisingly, she is best in her areas of expertise, especially dealing with the relationship between class and style in eighteenth-century British architecture. Here she uses Hans Georg Gadamer's synthesis of the functional and communicative aspects of architecture, a subtle and persuasive explanation of the relationship between form and function to underpin her own account of the evolution of style and society. Indeed a longer extract from Gadamer might have been a better pair with Summerson's Architecture in Britain 1530-1830 than the puerile Nicos Hadjinicolaou, whose ideological bombast runs against the sophisticated history which Arnold evokes.

In bringing interrelationships of ideology, social and cultural history into focus, Arnold draws largely on two themes, the evolution of the country house, and the history of Classicism. As she admits, these are the functional and stylistic organs of power, but that is perhaps precisely why they are so apposite for her purposes. A couple of decades ago, and partly in reaction to the country house cult and its satellite, the Lutyens Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, architectural historians -- and not just those of a gauchiste turn -- felt an urgency to uncover the unwritten history of architecture, of other styles, of social housing and low-road social projects like the London Board Schools, Arnold's analysis helps to reclaim Classicism and the country house for mainstream architectural history, building on Girouard's pioneering work and interweaving gender analysis from Denise Scott Brown and Alice Friedman's study of Bess of Hardwick's household.

With insights such as these, the book veers with the occasional awkward lurch between historiography (ie the writing of history) and be history subjects themselves. But once Post Structuralism enters the picture that is perhaps inevitable. Yet putting these texts together alone is an achievement: it should help to convince any doubters that architectural history is genuinely a part of the wider historical discourse.