Architecture, Travellers and Writers

Constructing Histories of Perception 1640-1950

Anne Hultzsch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351575881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Does the way in which buildings are looked at, and made sense of, change over the course of time? How can we find out about this? By looking at a selection of travel writings spanning four centuries, Anne Hultzsch suggests that it is language, the description of architecture, which offers answers to such questions. The words authors use to transcribe what they see for the reader to re-imagine offer glimpses at modes of perception specific to one moment, place and person. Hultzsch constructs an intriguing patchwork of local and often fragmentary narratives discussing texts as diverse as the 17th-century diary of John Evelyn, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and an 1855 art guide by Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt. Further authors considered include 17th-century collector John Bargrave, 18th-century novelist Tobias Smollett, poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, critic John Ruskin as well as the 20th-century architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner. Anne Hultzsch teaches at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.

CHAPTER 1
Rendering Buildings into Words: Pevsner and Evelyn

How it is done cannot be described and only be drawn by the expert. But one should not shirk the effort of understanding it. It is like penetrating a piece of complicated polyphonic music.¹

NIKOLAUS PEVSNER, summing up a two-page description of the Lady Chapel and the Retrochoir in Wells Cathedral.

What is architectural description? How do writers translate buildings into words? Or rather, how do they render what they see into text? This first chapter scrutinizes the 'mechanics' of description in order to expose how description 'works' and what its constituent parts are, while seeking a way to answer the historical query underlying this book, whether description and its correlated modes of perception change over the course of centuries. Reading one text produced in the seventeenth century through another originating in the twentieth century will reveal specific lines of enquiry that serve to trace the writer, the reader, as well as the origins and premises of the text itself. Through an exploration of Nikolaus Pevsner's Buildings of England, this chapter first outlines modern architectural description as it had come to the fore in the mid 1900s, to then retrace similar working methods, but very different intellectual conditions, in John Evelyn's seventeenth-century diary.

Only a few years after the Second World War had ended, an architectural historian set out to review 'every building of architectural interest' in England. Nikolaus Pevsner, well-known ever since the publication of the first volumes of the guidebook series The Buildings of England in the 1950s, thought it imperative to see every single building himself and to record as many of his impressions as possible on the same day of visiting it — an endeavour he spent much of his life on and which he almost fulfilled.² As he strived to see most of England's architectural gems and write descriptions of as many as possible himself, the first editions of The Buildings of England can be regarded as a compression of one man's gaze into words. It is this circumstance that presents a unique opportunity to explore the relationship between seeing, describing, and reading. Indeed, Pevsner's writing is characterized by an objectivity and immediacy that had become crucial to a modern, perhaps Scientific, understanding, and perception, of architecture.

A historian of art and architecture, Pevsner seems to have been obsessed with original writing in the presence of the object — a preoccupation which at first sight sets him firmly apart from John Evelyn who had travelled in Italy in 1644—46 giving a detailed account of his journey in his posthumously published Diary. One of the main English seventeenth-century sources for historians and regarded by some as having changed travel writing, Evelyn is nevertheless well known for having copied extensive parts of his text from earlier guidebooks, as well as having reworked and even added long entries retrospectively, after the 1660s.³ This was not uncommon at all at the time and, indeed, Evelyn followed a practice well established and accepted in his day. However, being the meticulous documenter that he was, he subtly changed formulations and added specific observations, penning descriptions of built spaces that convey a very careful apperception of architecture, which has, however, hardly been critically considered. Comparing Evelyn's text with his alleged sources, it becomes obvious that he did, in fact, copy from them, but also that he altered what he replicated; he added and reformulated, and thus encapsulated his specific, personal mode of looking and describing in these additions and alterations.

Why this comparison? Why the leap not only over three centuries but also between two apparently contrasting approaches to description and scholarship? In effect, the aims of Evelyn and Pevsner were not that dissimilar — what have changed are our own conceptions of originality and authorship and the ways in which we validate and represent such ideas. The analysis of how Pevsner and Evelyn construct their architectural descriptions reveals shifts occurring in the attitude towards verbal representations, but it points also to commonalities in regards to the mechanics of modern description that emerged at the time John Evelyn wrote up his travel experiences. In fact, both authors wrote in the way they did precisely in order to mediate a truthful representation of what they saw, that is, of their specific mode of perception. Both were preoccupied with the problem of how to render a truth of vision into words in order to increase human knowledge. Tracing the origins of modernist writing, reading, and looking in the early modern period, this chapter seeks to introduce the three participants in the process of description: the writer and the reader — or the writer-viewer and the reader-viewer as I will come to call them — as well as the described object.

Writing The Buildings of England

[I] have collected the whole of the series up to now and [...] like to think of you as a personal friend on my bookshelf^.4

As the many affectionate letters by readers to Nikolaus Pevsner (1902—83) show, The Buildings of England became very quickly a huge success that built on a tight author-reader relationship highlighting the first two participants in the process of description: author and reader. The guidebook series is generally acknowledged as being unique, due in large part to the enormous personal investment of its editor. He started his grand tour of England in 1947, in a borrowed car on rationed patrol researching the first volume, Cornwall, published in 1951. The last of the first editions, Staffordshire, came out in 1974 when Pevsner was 70 years old, and the series still lives on today as the Pevsner Architectural Guides.⁵ In total, the first editions comprised forty-six volumes all of which were written by Pevsner himself, except for two counties produced with collaborators and only eight volumes that were covered entirely by other authors.⁶ He completed approximately two books per year each based on the preliminary research of an assistant and four to five weeks of travelling and night-time writing in the company of only his wife, and later a graduate student, as driver and route planner. Taken altogether, it is alleged that he visited 30,000 buildings and put eight and a half million words on paper.⁷ In the middle of each volume about a hundred black-and-white photographs were inserted but there were hardly any plans, sections, or other diagrams. In the beginning all volumes were published as handy paperbacks and still later, when their size meant they had to be produced as hardbacks, editors were keen to keep a long upright format suggesting the travel guide. Along with extraordinarily high methodical standards — Pevsner insisted on the importance of one person, himself, seeing and describing everything, recording what he saw on the very day of visiting the building — came a self-proclaimed mission to educate the public visually.

Why was it so important mat one person — Pevsner — saw it all? Why did he insist on committing a quarter of a century of his life, and more with later editions, to these guidebooks? The Buildings of England were born at the house of publisher Allen Lane during a casual conversation in the summer of 1945 which Pevsner describes in a taped interview:

We were sitting in the garden and Allen said, 'You have done the King Penguins now and we are going on with them, but if you had your way, what else would you do?'

I had my answer ready — and the answer was very formidable, because I outlined both The Pelican History of Art and The Buildings of England on the spot: each about 40 to 50 volumes. Allen said, 'Yes, we can do both,' and that was the end of the meeting.⁸

Pevsner himself had deplored the lack of architectural guidebooks as early as 1930, when he first visited England to prepare a lecture series on English architecture; his eagerness to write The Buildings of England himself must have stemmed from the acute awareness that what such a series required most of all was consistency in writing. It was during this first tour of England as well that he developed the habit of mulling over and writing up what he had seen and visited on the same day.⁹

By the early twentieth century, the guidebook as a genre was firmly established and different specializations had become common. The first tourist guides, such as the German Baedeker (1827—) or Murray's Handbooks for Travellers (1836—), often laid out along railway lines, had become an indispensable accessory for every tourist, while specific art guides such as Ruskin's Stones of Venice (1851—53) or Jacob Burckhardt's Cicerone (1855) — discussed in Chapters Four and Five — equipped the more accomplished traveller with expert accounts. Pevsner himself refers to the German Handbuch der deutschen Kunstdenkmäler [Handbook of German Cultural Monuments], envisaged by the art historian Georg Dehio, as the precedent for his own guidebook series of England's buildings.¹0 Even if there are considerable parallels between both series, especially in terms of their layout and the brief condensed style of writing, the guidebooks for England differed decisively from the German precedent. As Stefan Muthesius has observed, England's clear county structure made it easier to divide Pevsner's series into logical volumes.¹¹ Moreover, Pevsner generally covered a far broader scope of buildings, which was already implied by the more general title exploring simply The Buildings of England, while Dehio focused on the more elevated 'German Cultural Monuments'. The Dehios were conceived in 1900 at a conference on the preservation of historic monuments under the patronage of the German emperor and as such formed part of a rising Denkmalpflege [heritage conservation] establishment in Germany that has been dominated by the state ever since.¹2 Pevsner on the contrary started his undertaking under the aegis of Allen Lane and Penguin Books, famous for affordable paperbacks. Even if The Buildings of England were not a purely commercial enterprise — indeed, almost from the start research had to be subsidized by external funding — Penguin Books's mass approach turned them into a simultaneously commercial and public operation.

The Buildings of England were conceived towards the end of the Second World War and started to sell only a few years after the war had ended, at a time when British society was gripped by a passionate enthusiasm for creating a new and better world. Patrick Wright affectionately calls Pevsner a 'great sort of monument of post-war democracy'.¹³ To understand how Pevsner entered this arena, it is worth considering his work for the Architectural Review where he was appointed as assistant editor in 1941 and for which he would work for the next thirty years. In 1940 and 1941, James M. Richards and Pevsner published a series entitled 'Criticism' which they described as 'a monthly critical article in which current architecture is looked at rather than analysed, in the belief that visual perception is the next quality we have to concentrate on developing'.¹⁴ The Architectural Review is generally acknowledged for its leading role in propagating the Modern Movement and with it a new way of looking. Indeed, in 1947, its editors express the latter as one of its primary tasks:

The REVIEW has another job to do [...]. Underneath its more obvious aims, running through them and linking them together, is another less tangible one, which may be described by the words, visual re-education. [...] To re-educate the eye — that is the special need of the next decade.¹⁵

Visual education targeted both the layperson and the critic, who gained a more...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: A Manual
• 1 Rendering Buildings into Words: Pevsner and Evelyn
• 2 Ordering the Unfamiliar: Bargrave and the Early Grand Tour
• 3 Reading Books: Defoe, Smollett, and the Country-House Guidebook
• 4 Thinking in Metaphor: Evelyn and Ruskin
• 5 Looking through the Lens: Evelyn, Goethe, and Burckhardt
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index