Books
Form and content
Mark Girouard
A History of Building Types Nikolaus Pevsner (Thames and Hudson £16.00) Histories of architecture tend to deal with their subject in terms of styles, or as the aggregate of works by individual architects, or sometimes (especially for the Middle Ages) in terms of methods of construction. This book, amazingly enough, is the first history of building types, and leaves one wondering why such a history has not been written before. One reason, perhaps, is that to shift the emphasis from architecture as aesthetics or structure to architecture as something arising to satisfy changing social needs is in tune with a general shift in historical approach which has only become important—one could say fashionable—in recent years. Another may be that potential writers were daunted by the formidable amount of research involved: who but Sir Nikolaus Pevsner would have been prepared to take it on as an autumnal relaxation after the hard slog of The Buildings of England?
Admittedly, the book does not pretend to cover all building types. Ecclesiastical and domestic types have been omitted on principle, on the justifiable grounds that they are the only ones to have been given exhaustive coverage already. Other types are omitted, as the author engagingly admits, because of a fervent Wish to see publication'. The twenty types dealt with range from national Monuments to factories. In some cases the history of the type starts in the Middle Ages Or before, but most of the book is devoted to the nineteenth century, when a combination of technology and the growth of cities produced new types, such as railway stations and exhibition buildings, or immensely inflated old ones, such as hotels and hospitals.
The result is a book so concentrated and encyclopaedic as to be a little forbidding at first sight, but which makes compulsive reading once one gets started. It is a masterPiece of lucid compression. Building types are fascinating to study partly because of the cOnstant interaction of symbolic and practical needs, partly because of what might be called their biological element—new types hive off from old ones, but keep the marks of their origins often for a remarkably long time. These origins are usually domestic or ecclesiastical. Museums, theatres, and government buildings hived off from Palaces; banks and factories started as rooms on the ground floor of merchants' residences. Hospitals were originally ecclesiastical buildings, and were closely modelled On Churches; patients lay along either side of a room which opened at one end into a chapel ; as there was not much hope of cur
ing them, they could at least die in an odour of sanctity.
Factories quickly lost their domestic look, but many museums, government buildings and banks continued to look like palaces or sumptuous private houses into the nineteenth century and beyond, for reasons of symbolism or prestige. The evolution of new formulas and the survival of old ones make a curious study. If one looks south from Westminster Bridge one can get a left and right at major examples of two types, the parliament building and the hospital—the latter (St Thomas's) partially rebuilt, but not enough to destroy the rhythm of the original design. Both are major nineteenth century types, but of a very different kind. In the Houses of Parliament the influence of the palace or great country house is much in evidence: the river facade—central block, wings, end pavilions—is based on a formula standard for palaces and great houses since the seventeenth century; the diversification of this basic formula by asymmetric wings and towers follows on what the landowners who sat in the Houses of Parliament were currently doing in their own country houses; the main routes from the entrances to the Houses of Commons or Lords are inflated versions of the routes from front door to drawing room devised by Barry for his Whig clients. Off these ceremonial routes the planning is not very coherent ; it is hard to understand the conventional description of it (repeated by Pevsner) as 'brilliant'.
St Thomas's Hospital, on the other hand, is an exquisitely clear expression of current Victorian views on hospital planning, based on the theory that health depended on isolating one kind of disease from another and inundating patients with fresh air. Hence the pavilion plan with different diseases isolated in separate pavilions, each pavilion consisting of long, piled-up wards, windowed on either side for cross ventilation, and with all the pavilions joined to each other by lower cross-passaging. The origins of this type, as Pevsner reveals, is the Royal Naval Hospital at Stonehouse, near Plymouth (1756), but it did not become current until the 1840s in France and the 1860s in England. It was emphatically modern (even if shortly to be made out-ofdate by the discovery of sterilisation), and the architectural uniform it was put into was of no particular importance; whereas the Gothic of the Houses of Parliament was loaded with the symbolism suited to the 'Mother of Parliaments'.
The book carries the story of each type up to the present day. This is perhaps a mistake; for reasons of space the more recent history is too compressed to be very useful, so that the book would lose little of its value if it stopped at 1914. The provision of comparatively few and very small illustrations of more recent buildings is one reason why they make a disappointing showing in comparison to Victorian and Edwardian ones. But this sense of comedown also reflects an actual situation. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had two advantages over the period which succeeded them : people still found size in building exciting, and there was a symbolic language in which to express hierarchies of importance. Huge buildings„ other than palaces and churches, were not an entirely nineteenth century phenomenon ; by the 1780s the hospital of the Hotel Dieu in Paris was already dealing with some 2,600 inpatients, even if many of them were six to a bed. But the proliferation of huge planned buildings was special to the nineteenth century, and many people at the time found them very thrilling. Zola wrote brilliantly about the glamour of the great new department stores in Paris, Frith painted Paddington Station, Arnold Bennett devoted two novels to mammoth hotels. Today we are blasé about size, and even resentful of it, so that few modern hotels, stations, supermarkets or airports distil any of the feeling of excitement so vividly expressed in, for instance, the contemporary section of the Paris Opera House reproduced in the book.
The nineteenth century was also at an advantage when buildings wished to advertise themselves, whether for reasons of civic pride or commercial gain. The tower, the dome, the portico or portal, the whole apparatus of historicism provided a readymade means by which buildings could step themselves up in the heriarchy. Now that the Modern Movement has effectively censored this vocabulary, buildings are tending to settle for a new hierarchy, with the matchbox building at the bottom and the building as free-form sculpture at the top. The latter approach has produced some exciting buildings, but as a general strategy has proved neither economic nor neighbourly. Pevsner dislikes it intensely; he is a product of the idealistic 1930s and, even if his attitudes have modified in recent years, still tends to think of the reaction from historicism in the 1920s and 1930s as representing progress to a permanently valid 'style of this century' and to be puzzled and disappointed that (aesthetically) cool, exquisitely detailed matchboxes have, in the long run, satisfied neither architects nor 'public. He also tends to take it for granted that technological advance and escape from historicism are natural allies. Yet his own book abundantly demonstrates that this is not necessarily, or even usually, the case; glass curtain-walling, for instance, was pioneered in German shops of the 1890s in combination with detailing Of ebullient historicism, and very enjoyable the combination was. But if one does not always agree with his point of view, one cannot but be grateful for being supplied, so exhaustively and readably, with the evidence on which to disagree with him. Appetite, once aroused, will be hungry for more; popular demand will surely produce volume 2, telling with equal lucidity and scholarship the story of clubs, airports, baths, barracks, schools, colleges, zoos, pleasure gardens, garages, spas, casinos, piers, cafés, restaurants, public houses, assembly rooms, amphitheatres, grandstands, water towers and pumping stations.
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