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Jim Richards thought that architects should be anonymous experts who served their communities, not ‘giants’ designing buildings to express their own individual creativity. He pursued this idea throughout his forty-year career as an architectural critic, journalist and editor. This book traces Richards’s ideas about anonymity and public participation in modern architecture and how they weathered the changing contexts of architecture in the mid-twentieth century. This is a story of shifting relationships between the architectural profession, public audiences and the media. The Architectural Review (AR) was first published in 1896 and by the 1930s was closely aligned with modern architecture. James Maude Richards (Jim to his friends) was the longest serving editor of the AR working from 1935 to 1971, with colleagues including Hubert de Cronin Hastings, Nikolaus Pevsner, Hugh Casson and Reyner Banham. Richards developed a specific approach to architectural criticism, which was based on promoting architecture to a public audience. He used criticism as a bridge between architects and their patrons and users. This book explores the changes and continuities in Richards’s work in the context of broader cultural shifts between experts and the public during this period. This is a history of modern architecture told through magazine articles, radio broadcasts and exhibitions, rather than buildings. Richards’s career and his position among a network of journalists, architects and artists, shows the centrality of media and promotion to architecture. It also shows how ideas about public participation, vernacular design and popular culture were key to defining modern architecture.
leading to a canteen or spectator gallery. Materially and visually, these baths offered a taste of modernity no longer fashionable in the 1980s home. My first experience of this modernity came at Radcliffe Baths, which opened in 1968 and was designed by William Gower; an archetypal modernist cube clad in white mosaic tiling, and with a facade described in Nikolaus Pevsner’s architectural guide as being ‘faintly Moorish-looking’. As a child, in the warmth of the ‘little pool’, I resisted my father’s best efforts to teach me how 162 Relics 43 Broughton Baths, designed
Nikolaus Pevsner’s 1940s articles on the picturesque.12 As Peter Mandler shows, while Hussey’s aesthetic theory argued in favour of the aristocracy’s continued residence in country estates, Pevsner’s claim was that he ‘could separate the houses from the vanished way of life they had once embodied’.13 The emerging professional historiography of the country house and its gardens was initially characterised by these disparate political perspectives. The aesthetics of the country estate thus became a contested ideological ground, both in architectural historiography and in
–13. The phrase ‘the world men carry in their heads’ was not attributed in the article but, to a modern architect or critic at the time, it would have been immediately identifiable as a quotation from Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West . 77 Spengler's book was translated into English in the mid-1920s and read widely by intellectuals and artists. Nikolaus Pevsner described Spengler's book as having drawn the ‘illuminating parallel’ between ‘scientific discoveries’ and ‘artistic innovations
1908, p. 11. 9 Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England; ‘Leicestershire and Rutland’, rev. by Elizabeth Williamson (London: Yale University Press, 2003), p.460. History 9 during the blaze to save what could be managed of the valuable contents, wrote on the Friday to his sweetheart Clementine Hozier to reassure her of his own safety, but lamenting ‘Alas for the archives. They soared to glory in about ten minutes [...] It is only the archives that must be mourned inconsolably.’10 Small wonder, then, that the academic world believed the Burley manuscript to
be found throughout the UK and Ireland.8 Such opinions can be gauged from browsing the first editions of the Buildings of England series begun by architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–83), published between 1951 and 1974, which rarely include notes on post-medieval stained glass, and these remarks were kept to a few brief dismissive words. For example, when referring to Ely Cathedral, Cambridgeshire, which contains an extensive collection of mid-nineteenth-century windows of the highest quality by leading British and French stained glass studios
or rebuilding indicate substantial stone-built predecessors, discussed in Chapter 2 . The sequence of building after 1421 is difficult to unravel. Priscilla Metcalfe and Nikolaus Pevsner, for example, found ‘no stylistic case for placing one detail before another’, to the extent that ‘no sequence of building can be deduced from them’. 8 There is little reliable documentary evidence to assist. A discussion of sources was published in 1885, 9 including reference to a manuscript found at the College
formative and offer a vital context for understanding his approach to architecture. Looking at his work in relation to that of his colleagues such as Nikolaus Pevsner, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, Philip Morton Shand, Reyner Banham, Ian Nairn and many other critics and architects shows how as part of this network Richards contributed to the meaning and character of modernism. Pierre Bourdieu's writing on the ‘biography illusion’ and Michael Freeden's work on the ‘individualist fallacy’ were helpful in thinking of biography as something more than an
.1 Front Line by C.R. Leslie published by Ministry of Information, 1942, edited by J.M. Richards. The visual language of the book is reminiscent of the AR . Richards employed the same visual techniques that he had used at the magazine to engage the readership. Back at the AR , Nikolaus Pevsner had replaced Richards as editor. 34 In 1942 Barbara Chermayeff, wife of Serge Chermayeff, wrote to Peggy Angus
He had studied art history under Nikolaus Pevsner at the Courtauld Institute of Art, completing his PhD, which went on to be the basis of his book Theory and Design in the First Machine Age published in 1960. The proximity between these people was the reason for the rhetorical tensions between them, as the younger generation carved out a distinct place for themselves in architectural practice and journalism. The contemporary and retrospective portrayal of discord and disagreement was conscious and useful to both groups of architects as it