Aarhus Town Hall and the ‘other’ environmental tradition

Extract

The first chapter of Nikolaus Pevsner's The Englishness of English Art is entitled ‘The Geography of Art’. In this he presents a reflection on the validity of geography as a means of interpreting art and architecture and in it he proposes that, ‘there is a whole string of facts from art and literature [that are] tentatively derived from climate’. The instrumental connection of architecture and climate is widely accepted in the literature of socalled ‘architectural science’. But the influence of geography and the specific conditions of climate may be shown to have a more fundamental influence on architecture than simple pragmatism.