“The one who entirely devotes himself to the Zeitgeist is a poor wretch. The seek of innovation of the everlasting avant-garde has something castrating."
'Morality and Architecture - The Development of a Theme in Architectural History and Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement' is one of those texts, rather like 'Learning from Las Vegas' (1972) that helped break the strangle hold of Modernism on the architectural imagination. It originated as a lecture given in 1968 to undergraduates at Cambridge by the then young architectural scholar Dr David Watkin of Peterhouse. He was 27. It was first published in book form by the Oxford University Press in 1977. My edition, by the University of Chicago Press, dates from 1984.
That 'theme', Watkin argues, that architecture has become, since the 19th century, to be seen merely as a manifestation of 'something else' - e.g. religion or the 'spirit of the age'. For example Pugin, for whom his preferred style of architecture, Gothic, was a confessional marker. Not only that but the preferred style, of whatever colour, came to be seen as morally superior thing. A thing of purity, and to reject that thing was morally reprehensible.
The book then is rather like a 'Catena Patrum', a chronological catalogue of theorists, historians, and critics, many of whom once held considerable intellectual sway here and abroad but are now, I suspect, barely read. Watkins cast a wide net but the emphasis is upon British intellectuals of the past two centuries. It commences in the first half of the 19th century with the Gothic architects and theorists, the British Augustus Pugin and the French Eugene Viollet-Le-Duc before passing on to the Arts Crafts architect and theorist, the sometimes esoteric, William Lethaby. Whereas Pugin and Lethaby were excellent architects, and whose work I greatly admire, (indeed, I really rather like Pugin the polemicist). The same cannot be said of Viollet-Le-Duc, for though he stands in a long chain of French architectural theorists right back to the late 17th century, some of his buildings, such as the church of Église Saint-Denis de l'Estrée, are execrable.
So, into the 20th century and the names come thick and fast: Heinrich Wofflin, Bruno Taut, Le Corbusier, Lewis Mumford, Furneaux Jordan, Siegfried Giedion, Anthony Blunt, John Summerson, with their strange - if not overblown - rhetoric and, at times, dubious grip on architectural history. Take Siegfried Giedion for example, here talking about the Arts and Crafts: 'The circle around William Morris strives for morally pure forms."
Finally we reach Sir Niklaus Pevsner (1902-1983) - the whole of the penultimate chapter is dedicated to his writing. It is an audacious act, for Pevsner was Watkin's Ph.D. supervisor. Was there a personal animus at work? According to wiki, Reyner Banham, the critic, in a review of 'Morality and Architecture' called it 'offensive'. Writing Pevsner's obituary in The Spectator, 3rd September 1983, the architectural historian an critic, Gavin Stamp, writes of 'Morality and Architecture' as provoking 'bitter controversy'.
Watkins shows how the Hegelian idea of the 'geist', the 'spirit', what Hegel referred to as 'Volkgeist' and 'Weltgeist' - usually referred to simply by the pre-Hegelian term 'Zeitgeist'. Ernst Gombrich, quoted by Watkin, described 'This Hegelian wheel is really a secularized diagram of the divine plan; the search for a centre that determines the total pattern of a civilization is consequently no more, but no less, than the quest for an initiation into god's ways with man.' It was increasingly used by critics, such as Pevsner, in the 20th century - rather like a priestly cast picking over the entrails of a sacrificial victim - to rather self-consciously promote Modernism. And a cast they were: Reyner Banham, for instance, had been taught at the Courtauld by the likes of Niklaus Pevsner, Anthony Blunt and Siegfried Giedion, Giedion had in turn been taught by Heinrich Wofflin, who had been taught by Jacob Burckhardt. Quite the catena.
The literary equivalent of this book is Peter Carey's 1992 book 'The Intellectuals and the Masses'. I suppose Carey's book can be seen as a repost to F R Leavis. Both books are iconoclastic and may be considered as attacks on the Post-War settlement.
Further thoughts (04.04.2026):
In 1961, alarmed at recent trends in British Modernism, Pevsner wrote an article entitled 'The Return of Historicism'. Modernism of the functionalist variety, he thought, was under threat, things were definitely getting retardaire. (See also his response the construction of New Hall Cambridge by Chamberlain, Powell and Bon.) He was right; the 1950s & 60s, particularly in America (which Pevsner doesn't really mention in his article), saw the advent of an historically informed, poetic Modernism e.g. Louis Kahn (The Trenton Bath House, 1955); John M Johansen (The Bridge House, 1957); Edward Durrell Stone (The American Embassy, New Delhi, 1959), a sort of Postmodernism avant la lettre; the 1970s the emergence of a full blown Postmodernism. Pevsner's pure Modernism of function had barely survived a generation*. The Zeitgeist had simply shifted.
* Not that it's hegemony had ever been total; much to Pevsner's annoyance there had been a number of Traditionally minded architects practicing throughout the post-war period. In addition there were a similar numbers of interior designers producing traditional interiors that received a much more sympathetic coverage in the relevant press than trad architects did in the architectural press.
Further reading
'Morality and Architecture: The Development of a Theme in Architectural History and Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement' David Watkin, Chicago University Press, 1977
'Morality and Architecture Revisited' David Watkin, John Murray, 2001
'Pevsner: The BBC Years' Stephen Games, Routledge, 2016
'Pevsner: The Complete Complete Broadcast Talks' Stephen Games, Routledge, 2016
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