A century of architecture - The Architectural Review celebrates 100th anniversary - Editorial

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 1996

The Architectural Review is 100 years old in 1996 and, during the year, each issue will celebrate our centenary in a different way. Here, we start by paying homage to our illustrious predecessor Henry Wilson, the first editor, and explain how much his example guides the magazine today.

Sometime in 1896, members of the British architectural profession (a small and exclusively male group(1)) received a rather tatty flier which promised a new monthly periodical would soon appear. It announced that: 'The publishers have determined to make "The Architectural Review" the leading magazine for those engaged in Arts and Crafts, and while in its illustration and letterpress, and general excellence of production, it will rival the finest Art periodicals of Europe and America, it will be published at a price that will bring the Magazine within universal reach'.(2)

The first edition emerged on November 12 with a cover drawn by the Editor, Henry Wilson (the present incumbent of his position would not dare to do the same). It is now the oldest architectural magazine in the world still published under its original title. This is not the moment to recount the history in detail (we shall be making a special issue later in the year which will tell the story), but we want to celebrate our links with Wilson, and try to explain our debt to him.

He was John Dando Sedding's chief assistant, and inherited the practice when Sedding(3) died suddenly in 1891. (In those days architectural monthlies were run almost casually in the practitioner/editor's spare time - only in Italy does this happen now). Wilson was the very model of an Arts and Crafts architect: not only the maker of fine buildings, but a fine draftsman, and a brilliant designer of metalwork, church plate, enamel and jewellery. (He was the first to use new small electric batteries and bulbs to give his pieces sparkle).(4)

In issue number one, he included articles on the artist-craft couple Nelson and Edith Dawson; a long essay on the restoration of the oldest church in London, St Bartholomew's, Smithfield by Aston Webb; the first of a series of articles on the great late-Victorian Goth, John Loughborough Pearson. And there was a piece on the competition for the dramatic and powerful buildings for the North Bridge in Edinburgh. (So it is particularly happy that, 100 years later, we are able to show the results of the competition we have sponsored for a for another key Edinburgh site at the Haymarket - pp58-79). In 1896, there was the equivalent of a leader about whether architecture is a Fine or Applied Art, which came very firmly down on the applied side: 'the Art, not of the few but of the whole; not the Art which can be shut up in a court-yard, or a rich man's gallery, or heard only in a concert-hall, or enjoyed only in a theatre'.(5)

Over the century, much has changed. We no longer argue about whether architecture is a pure or applied art (indeed the very term 'applied' has changed its meaning from 'put in use' to 'stuck on'). The debate now, particularly in places such as the RIBA and the AIA, is about whether architecture is an art at all, or just a branch of business involved with making large three-dimensional objects that will maximise profit for their developers. In the modern sense of the term, far too much architecture is now applied, stuck on as a thin veneer, or made into silly (but nonthreatening) gestures a la Koolhaas.

Yet for all the changes, today's AR has much in common with the one created by Wilson. It continues in the belief that architecture is for everyone: the English tradition of architectural criticism, which from Pugin, through Ruskin, Morris, the Arts and Crafts, and the British branch of the Modern Movement, has emphasised the proposal that architecture has a moral role - literally every line you draw will have an effect on someone's life. English criticism is different from that of France and the US, which tends to emphasise architecture as an autonomous art (the purity of which has to be sullied by the sordid process of building), and that of the German-speaking countries which draws so much from the awesomely rigorous technical and Kunstgeschichte tradition.

This is not to try to claim for architecture the determinist powers that the high Modern Movement asserted at its most arrogant. However well-meaning the intentions of its creators, architecture can only set the scene on which the play of human life is enacted. Yet undoubtedly (as the failure of the most reductively utilitarian Modern Movement schemes has demonstrated) it must be made with an understanding of the human condition, and the complexities of our psyche.

And, as Pugin explained with great clarity, if architecture is to have a moral role, it must itself have integrity. In True Principles, he announced that 'The two great rules for design are these: 1st, that there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction or propriety; 2nd, that all ornament should consist of the essential construction of the building. The neglect of these two rules is the cause of all the bad architecture of the present time.'(6) It still is. For that reason we do not publish PoMo and other kinds of glued-on architecture, except in our Outrage column.