Architecture 1900

Citation

Earl, J. (1999), "Architecture 1900", Structural Survey, Vol. 17 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ss.1999.11017aae.003

Architecture 1900

Architecture 1900

Edited by Peter BurmanDonhead (Tel. 01747 828422)1998ISBN 1873394322£37 hardback384 pp

Keywords Architecture, Conservation, Construction

Publications made up of papers presented at a conference (36 of them in this case) sometimes turn out to be more like miscellaneous bundles than books, being kept on the shelf for the sake of one or two memorable items. This one is a real book with a great deal in it that will be remembered and referred to.

The International Conference on Architecture 1900, held in York in 1997, brought together experts from 19 countries whose contributions are organised here under five headings: Style and Technique, Personalities and Cross-currents, The Home, The Urban Context, and Attitudes to Conservation. Here are names and subjects you would expect to find ­ the Glasgow School of Art (George M.Cairns and Peter Trowles in separate papers on different aspects of this amazing building); C.F.A.Voysey (John Brandon Jones's paper ­ based on personal opinions, conversations and gossip, rather than on research); Peter Burman (the editor, who believes passionately in the direct relevance of the arts and crafts movement for today) on Lethaby; and a procession of writers on various aspects of Gaudi, Philip Webb and Parker and Unwin. Not all, however, come into the expected category. Other papers, for example, deal with Harrison Townsend's Great Warley church and E.W. Godwin's Japonaise interior at Grey Towers, or give new sidelights on cities like Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Riga, Calgary and Bauhaus Osaka. Jindrich Vybiral's paper on Friedrich Ohmann and Prague Architecture reminded me that a book named Architecture 1900 could have been filled quite easily with examples from Prague alone.

The breadth of view represented by the various contributors and especially by Alan Powers' "Introductory Perspective" was refreshing for an elderly conservator who remembers without affection a time when it was necessary to believe that architectural history since 1850 was simply a preparation for the International Modern movement and all that could not be shown to drive down that predetermined path was irrelevant ­ in fact, not really history at all.

For many readers of this journal, Michael Stratton's excellent essay on "Innovation and conservatism: steel and reinforced concrete in British architecture 1860-1905" will have particular appeal. My one regret was that he did not mention a kind of building whose character was changed radically and almost instantly by the availability of steel and reinforced concrete, namely theatres (I would say that, wouldn't I?). There is a paper, in the conservation section, on the reconstruction of two historic theatres in Hungary, but the UK is where one must look to discover what happened to this peculiar building type in the decade spanning the turn of the century. In 1892 a little playhouse opened in St Martin's Lane, with a veritable forest of columns supporting the balconies and ruining the view from a least a quarter of its seats. A few hundred yards away, a huge opera house had opened the previous year with its balconies spanning from side to side with no intermediate supports ­ a European pioneer, if not an unchallengeable theatrical first.

I shall forgive this lapse ­ and the fact that I was left longing for more pictures (sometimes for better pictures) in several places. One last prejudice to air. The well-designed, polished board covers make this book a pleasure to handle and should shame those publishers who still foist on the public their nasty, short-life, imitation cloth bindings, concealed by seductive dust wrappers.

John Earl