The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain, 1550-1960. - book reviews

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 1996 by Patrick Hannay

Those who might assume that architecture is somehow separate and superior to the world of fashion, and people who would like to place architectural ideas on to a plateau, safe from the messy business of political economy, are in for a rude shock in Lubbock's penetrating and masterful analysis of four centuries of design politics. He boldly links teacups and town squares into a complex matrix of ideas.

The glue to the matrix is 'Taste'. This is an uncomfortable word. In a liberal pluralist democracy it can be simply shrugged off with a 'well it's not my taste', but we so easily equate 'taste' with 'good design'. From Lubbock's perspective and reading of history, 'good design' (taste) became increasingly a moral and ideological tyranny, a 'taste' invasion which moved from the public domain of town planning and architecture right through to that of the private world of domestic objects. He sets out to find why and how this came about.

Lubbock's decision to not write the book as a strictly linear history means that it can be read as a series of quite self-contained essays. For students and educators in this hurried world of right deadlines and budgets this is enormously valuable. The quality of writing in the prefaces to each part are Lubbock at his best.

He adeptly crosses many disciplinary boundaries, constructing one of those rare things, a holistically considered treatise on what he has come to define as the 'political economy of design'. So its scope is huge, but he is appropriately selective. It doesn't suffer from its UK-only focus. All those who have fallen under the influence of the English language and British culture will find the content enlightening and relevant.

Beginning with the mid-sixteenth-century consumer society of London, he takes us through the world and ideas of Lord Burghley, the Prodigy Houses, Nicholas Barbon and Bernard de Mandeville; he focuses on what he considers to be the vastly underestimated influence of The Spectator flowing from the pens of Pope, Addison and Hume. Traditions of thought on 'competitive consumption' and the 'luxury debate' are precisely chartered. The Stuart country house poems are revealed as subtle state propaganda on taste. Lord Arundel, Inigo Jones, Wren, John Evelyn, Hogarth, Wedgwood, Pugin, Henry Cole, the great Exhibition and Ruskin are all reconsidered from his critical perspective. Through Le Corbusier, Loos, Utility furniture and most aspects of post-war town planning and architecture, you finally arrive at what drives Lubbock's fear of the Tyranny: in other words 'good modern design'. The jump from Ruskin to contemporary design is uncomfortable considering the interweaving flow of the rest of the book but this is still a masterly polemic.

The author might balk at such a description, particularly as he goes to such pains to say he aims to simply 'reconstruct the traditions of thought' rather than putting his own views in any conclusion. While there is no opinionated conclusion there is a subtle subtext of personal views running through the chapters.

There is of course a perfectly respectable polemical sort of history which, in being deliberately selective, unearths new evidence or makes us reconsider old evidence in new light. It wouldn't be a 'Tyranny of Taste' unless he intended to overthrow it. He wants to shed new light on our understanding and make us reconsider. The subtitle may give a false impression of an all-embracing comprehensive survey of ideas from 1550-1960.

Lubbock is good at overthrowing preconceptions mainly through excellent scholarship. He takes on many post-war historians. Summerson and Girouard are turned over. He berates those who chose to misread Hogarth as the first functionalist or a defender of rococo. Adam Smith misread Burghley. Wedgwood did not simply exploit contemporary neo-classical tastes. Pugin is finally given his appropriate prominence, taking him out from the shadow of Morris and Ruskin. Henry Cole's famous white cup was not the great white hope; the Renaissance was not simply the start of the modern world but 'a major retrenchment; a cultural and economic movement to stabilise an immensely turbulent and uncontrollable state of affairs caused at least in part by the growth in private ownership of furniture, household goods, jewellery and clothes'.

This is thought-provoking polemical history. He is so conscious of how historians of the past have selectively ignored facts because they were committed to retelling a tale they thought would influence powerfully their contemporary political context. Will historians of the twenty-first century charge Lubbock with the same misdemeanor? 'From the outset,' writes Lubbock, 'good design was associated with policies intended to restrict the consumption of the lower classes, particularly of the poor ...' but sadly we only get briefest of snapshots of that evidence, because Lubbock is focusing on the elite and they are not the poor. Lubbock is no E.P. Thompson.

As he wades selectively into the puritanical influence of John Evelyn on Stuart Restoration England, one can't help wondering was he really the only dominant writer on Taste? Was there not a debate? Surely someone gave legitimacy to the supposedly effeminate and unusual male attire of the period. Was Evelyn really such a tyrant or is there a subtext throughout which is a pro-diversity, pro-intricacy, pro-catholic in spirit, pro-female sensuality, pro-complexity, a sort of taste that Lubbock feels has been suffocated in contemporary life?