It’s not clear why About Architecture exists

Architecture is a public art, but public intellectuals tend to engage with more abstract stuff. The style-wars ructions excited by Britain’s new King nearly forty years ago have been settled by gravity, but intelligent discussion about what makes a great building is still a rarity, especially in the UK’s Ministry of Leveling Up, where there is muddle. On the one hand, “generic” is anathematized; on the other, “design codes” and building regulations which stifle the original thinking necessary to good design are encouraged. Perhaps the Ministry should put in a therapeutic bulk order for Hugh Pearman’s About Architecture. “If these be the times, then this must be the man,” as Andrew Marvell said of Oliver Cromwell.

Pearman was the architecture critic of the Sunday Times of London for thirty years. No great prose stylist or wit, no street-fighting controversialist, he was nonetheless a well-informed reporter who did his dutiful site visits and wrote columns largely free from the gobbledygook which architects exchange when hotboxing in creative huddles. Accordingly, the introduction of this book is admirably lucid, and the author makes plain his interest in writing simply and clearly for the educated general reader (if such freaks actually exist). 

The schema is inspired by a fine trio: Paul Simon, Neil MacGregor and Nikolaus Pevsner. Ever since “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” in 1975 and A History of the World in One Hundred Objects in 2010, publishers have found this tick-box formula irresistible, although it is now becoming hackneyed, and frankly allows an author to write a book without the structural anguish and literary hard yards of really writing a book.

From Pevsner’s half-century-old Mellon Lectures in Washington, Pearman has borrowed the idea of looking at building types — a fresh concept in 1970. Pevsner had seventeen such types, but Pearman has eleven: civic, houses, education, offices, industry, transport, museums, performance, religion, retail and gardens. To acknowledge fashionable notions of diversity and inclusion, each of the five examples in Pearman’s types is chosen from a different country. There are not many surprises. We get the Acropolis, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Building, Soane’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Centre Pompidou, Milan’s Galleria, the Alhambra and the gardens of Stowe. When there is an outlier, a school in Burkina Faso, for example, it is not clear whether we are diversifying the canon or just being willfully idiosyncratic. The building descriptions have lots of commodity and firmness, but are quite light on delight. Still, while rarely rhapsodic, Pearman’s accounts of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia and Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp are among the best I’ve read. Maybe he finds religion inspiring.

You could say About Architecture is a classic epitome, a sort of summa; but Pearman acknowledges the limitations of his cinquante-cinq structure. He could, he admits, have written the same book many times and with entirely different contents, his choices published here being personal. Even so, it’s fun to haggle about what has been left out. For argument’s sake, why not Paul Schneider-Esleben’s Mannesmann-Hochhaus in Dusseldorf, Europe’s first skyscraper? Or Sir Thomas Trensham’s sixteenth-century Triangular Lodge at Rushton, a uniquely mysterious building in the East Midlands? And why only passing references to Norman Foster, the dominant architect of the contemporary era?

The contents are necessarily arbitrary, and on the whole enjoyable. The production has Yale’s familiar high values, but Pearman’s reluctance to make interesting contextual or cultural cross-references is irksome. At Washington’s Dulles Airport, for instance, he admires Eero Saarinen’s huge spaces uninterrupted by columns but doesn’t mention that this was an idée fixe of the designer: in his furniture, Saarinen wanted to remove “the slum of legs.” That would have sent a great writer on an interesting, imaginative journey. And the prose sometimes clunks. “Geometry” does not “echo” things, it reflects them. Describing an iron structure as “rock solid” is a metaphor a careful stylist would have avoided, and the fifteen-item “Further Reading” is pitiable, especially when it includes a book by James Stevens Curl, an astonishingly bad writer. 

The best architectural commentators are now dead (Ian Nairn, Reyner Banham), living abroad (Jonathan Meades) or American (Martin Filler and Paul Goldberger). They all added something to discourse and gave us new conceptual structures by which buildings might be understood and enjoyed. Often they wrote something funny. On this reading, Pearman is not quite ready to join them. Though by no means a bad book, it’s not really clear why About Architecture exists, since Yale has only recently published Witold Rybczynski’s The Story of Architecture. But we know publishing today is in crisis.

I suspect books like this will soon be written by AI. To check the possibilities, I asked ChatGPT to write about Dulles International Airport. My computer churned. I read and blinked. My suspicions were confirmed. The space left by architecture’s missing public intellectuals will be filled by Generative Pre-trained Transformers.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.