Rambling round delight: the dynamics of delight: architecture and aesthetics - Reviews

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2003 by Timothy Brittain-Catlin

THE DYNAMICS OF DELIGHT: ARCHITECTURE AND AESTHETICS

By Peter F. Smith. London: Routledge. 2003. [pounds sterling]65 (paperback [pounds sterling]25)

This 200-page book contains enough information for what could have been a short, personal essay on the ways in which the brain reacts to exposure to new visual information. As it is, its author has been tempted into a lengthy ramble which does his subject no favours. Sometimes it is about perception; sometimes about proportion. Some of it is an attempt at reading townscape in the fashion of Gordon Cullen; some of it is whimsy with a bio-hippie flavour (about 'limbic domains', 'epigenetic manuals' and suchlike); some of it is recollections from trips abroad; and some of it is just curiously glib comments, such as that 'the Victorian window is visually weak': what sort of pronouncement is that?

Smith allows a sentence or two at most about each of his many examples; and subjects crop up all over the place in a disjointed fashion. But the book is also littered with unfortunate mistakes. If David Watkin is offended by seeing his name misprinted here, he could take consolation from the fact that AWN Pugin appears as 'NAW'; that Colen Campbell is 'Colin'; that Dominikus Bohm is 'Bohm'; that Sackler (of the Royal Academy galleries) is 'Secklar'; that Landseer's Trafalgar Square lions are attributed to Lutyens; that Liverpool's Anglican cathedral is referred to as a nineteenth-century building; that Saarinen's TWA terminal at JFK is captioned as 'New York Airport'; and that the Louisiana Museum for Modern Art is called on one occasion the 'Danish National Louisiana Gallery' and on another the 'Louisiana Danish National Gallery'. All this from a former professor of architecture. And Routledge must take the blame for the hopeless editing, examples of which appear liberally in the footnotes; some have page numbers, some do not, and at least one footnote signalled in the text fails to appear at the end of the chapter.