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Historicism and Architectural Knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Anthony O'Hear
Anthony O'Hear
Affiliation:
University of Bradford
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Extract

Even today, apologists for modernist and post-modernist architecture frequently appeal to what, following Sir Karl Popper, I will call historicist arguments. Such arguments have a particular poignancy when they are used to justify the replacement of some familiar part of an ancient city with some intentionally untraditional structure; as, for example, when a familiar nineteenth century block of offices in a prime city site is swept away to make room for something supposedly more fitting to the ‘new millennium’, a ‘twentieth century contribution to monumental architecture’, a building ‘of substantial importance to the present age’. Similarly, those architects or consumers of architecture who fail to conform to whatever stylistic demands the age is held to demand are marginalized in many supposedly serious discussions of architecture, and made to feel out of place and out of time.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 68 , Issue 264 , April 1993 , pp. 127 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1993

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References

1 All the phrases quoted are taken from statements made at the time a particularly controversial planning decision was made in London (and are taken from reports of 9th June 1989 in The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph referring to the acceptance of Lord Palumbo's scheme to redevelop the Bank area of London). But similar thoughts and expressions are commonplace in planning enquiries and applications throughout Europe at least.

2 Watkin, David, Morality and Architecture (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) (originally published in 1977)Google Scholar; Gombrich, E. H., ‘The Logic of Vanity Fair: Alternatives to Historicism in the Study of Fashions, Style and Taste’, in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, Schilpp, P. A. (ed.) (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Co., 1974), pp. 925–57.Google Scholar

3 Popper, K. R., The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routlege & Kegan Paul, 1961).Google Scholar

4 Pevsner, Nikolaus, An Outline of European Architecture (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1957), 5th edition.Google Scholar

5 Pevsner, , op cit., 277.Google Scholar

6 The Poverty of Historicism, 3.Google Scholar

7 Cf. The Poverty of Historicism, Preface, pp. v–vi.Google Scholar

8 Gould, G., ‘Art of the Fugue’ in The Glenn Gould Reader, Page, T. (ed.) (London: Faber & Faber, 1987), 15.Google Scholar

9 The Poverty of Historicism, 7.Google Scholar

10 An Outline of European Architecture, 285.Google Scholar

11 Pevsner, N., Studies in Art, Architecture and Design, 1968, Vol. I, p. 202.Google Scholar

12 Cf. An Outline of European Architecture, 284.Google Scholar

13 Jencks, C., What is Post-Modernism? (London: Academy Editions, 1987), 7.Google Scholar

14 ibid.

15 Rogers, Richard, ‘Pulling Down the Prince’, The Times, 3 07 1989, pp. 10–11.Google Scholar

16 Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Game with Vestiges’, interview in On the Beach, Vol.5, 1984, pp. 19–25.Google Scholar

17 Quoted by Perl, Jed, ‘The Whitney Biennial’, Modern Painters, Vol. 2, no. 2, Summer 1989, p. 83.Google Scholar

18 My criticism of modernism and post-modernism, of course, applies only to one particular type of justification of these approaches to architecture. Some people may admire the clean lines and bland features of modernistic buildings and the humour and inventiveness of the post-modernists for their own sake, as purely aesthetic phenomena. None the less, it cannot be denied that much of the argument advanced in favour of what is presented as the necessity for both these styles derives from historicist premises.

19 Cf. Wollheim, Richard, Painting as an Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), 44Google Scholar: ‘When (an artist) aims to produce a content or meaning, which is his major aim, he also paints so as to produce a certain experience.… the required experience must come about through looking at the picture: it must come about through the way the artist worked.’

20 On the way an artist imaginatively (and actually) puts himself in the position of an audience of his work, cf. Wollheim, 's illuminating remarks, op. cit., 39–45.Google Scholar

21 Stamp, Gavin, ‘The Consequences of Le Corbusier’, The Daily Telegraph, 9 03 1987.Google Scholar It is well worth noting that some spokesmen for architectural modernism, including Le Corbusier himself, claim that modernism is a true development of the classical style in that the essence of classicism is the organization of space according to ‘rational’ proportions. This is surely a misunderstanding of the perennial appeal of classical architecture, which is based on the interplay of order and decoration rather than on order per se. What, indeed, would a Greek temple be without the fluting on its columns, the detail of the capitals and the plinths, its triglyphs and metopes, the movement of the sculptured figures in the pediments, and so on?

22 Here I depart from the individualism of Popper in The Poverty of Historicism. The extreme individualism of that book is now recognized by its author to be exaggerated, if we are to believe what he now says about the reality of World 3. It is important, though, to see that one can be an anti-historicist, suspicious of talk of spirits of ages and the like, while at the same time asserting the importance of traditional orders and practices for the creation of individual identities.

23 Earlier versions of this paper were given at the London Centre for Philosophical Study's series of lectures on philosophy and architecture in 1990, at the first conference of the Centre for Environmental Policy Study in London in 1991, at Petr Oslzly's seminar in Brno, and at the King's College London Philosophy Society. I have benefited from comments made at all these meetings, and particularly from those of Professor Sir Colin St John Wilson.