Selective histories

Architectural Review, The, May, 2005 by Sutherland Lyall

The Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America is at www.classicisl.org. It has travel programmes, does publications, runs salons, symposia and academic programmes, lists a lively calendar of events and the like. The organisation has six chapters, runs an annual conference, has recently honoured Brit Quinlan Terry and American Henry Hope Reed, who got the first Henry Hope Reed Award, presumably for being himself and certainly because of his lifelong dedication to the cause of classicism although, I think, strictly speaking it should be 'classicalism'. Dedicated to 'advancing the practice and appreciation of the classical tradition in architecture and the allied arts', according to the beginning of its rather long mission statement the institution is based at the Roman Catholic University of Notre Dame architecture school which turns out to have been a hotbed of classical and 'traditional' architecture for the last 12 years. Let a thousand flowers bloom, I say. Though what they say is 'Classical architecture is the best that a tradition produces. Every culture has a tradition. Ours runs from ancient Greece and Rome through the founding of the United States.' So there. But you still want to ask, what about Mesopotamia? And Egypt? And those blokes who might have invented Gothic, the Moors? And the Picts. Possibly.

Sutherland Lyall is at sutherland.lyall@btinternet.com