Sweet Disorder and the Carefully Careless

Architectural Review, The, August, 1994 by Colin Davies

It is understandable that a distinguished architectural critic like Robert Maxwell should want to collect the best of his essays and articles together in a single volume, and that the imprint of the university at which he taught for more than 25 years should want to publish it. It is a kind of tidying up operation. The author wants it, the publisher wants it, the University wants it, the question is: does anybody else want it? Well, it's a neat enough package, carefully sorted, dated and indexed, and it might be of interest to other critics, historians and historiographers. But for most readers, this book is basically warmed-up leftovers.

On the evidence of these writings, Maxwell is by nature a very cautious critic. His focus is narrow and his subject matter conventional. There are four chapters about James Stirling, three about Robert Venturi and, for good measure, one comparing Stirling with Venturi. Richard Meier, Norman Foster and Reyner Banham get two chapters each. That accounts for about half of the book. And when more general theoretical topics are tackled the illustrative examples are mostly taken from the established artistic canon, including the architects mentioned above.

The most striking characteristic of these writings, however, is their critical method, which is consistently dialectical: on the one hand this, on the other hand that. They are reasonable to a fault. Capitalism and Socialism, Modernism and Post-Modernism, art and life, reason and hope -- the argument proceeds like a medieval scholastic disputation between established positions, with the author always steadfastly refusing to come down on one side or the other.

Unlike his hero and one time colleague Reyner Banham (or Nikolaus Pevsner before him) Maxwell is not interested in becoming a propagandist. For him, that would be the easy way out, no more intellectually demanding than supporting a football team. And perhaps he is right. Analysis, not judgement, is his strength, and these inevitably disjointed, 'occasional' pieces, constrained by the requirements of this conference theme or that magazine editor, do not do him justice. Freed of these constraints, he might write a book that we would all want, or even need, to read.