Volume 35, Number 14 · September 29, 1988
The Battle Over Post-Modern Buildings
By Hugh Honour
Committed to Classicism: The Building of Downing College Cambridge
by Cinzia Maria Sicca, with contributions by Charles Harpum, by Edward Powell, photography, design, and production by Tim Rawle
Downing College, 226 pp., £20.00
Quinlan Terry: The Revival of Architecture
by Clive Aslet
Viking, 223 pp., $45.00
Classical Architecture: The Poetics of Order
by Alexander Tzonis, by Liane Lefaivre
MIT Press, 306 pp., $9.95 (paper)
The Dilemma of Style: Architectural Ideas from the Picturesque to the Post-Modern
by J. Mordaunt Crook
University of Chicago Press, 348 pp., $45.00
Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture
by Charles Jencks
Rizzoli, 360 pp., $65.00
'Do you seriously imagine, reader, that any living soul in London likes triglyphs? or gets any hearty enjoyment out of pediments?' When John Ruskin asked this question in 1851 the answer was far less obvious than he wished to suggest. For most people, then as now, it was capitals, columns, and the other components of the classical orders—Doric, Tuscan, Ionic, Corinthian, or Composite—that signified Architecture with a capital A. Unornamented structures ranging from low-cost and lower-class housing to large warehouses and factories, not to mention the recently completed Crystal Palace, were excluded. Buildings in medieval styles were few and, apart from churches, remained exceptional throughout the century—rather more so than modern historians of architecture tend to suggest when they write of the Gothic revival. In 1859, when the notorious battle of styles was being waged around a project for new government offices in London, the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, described Gilbert Scott's eclectic Gothic design as 'frightful and disagreeable looking.' He wanted something 'gay and cheerful,' something specifically Italianate; and the architect was deeply hurt when he found himself obliged to comply with a neo-Renaissance–style palazzo adorned with pilasters and pedimented windows for what is now the Foreign Office.
Review, 7150 words
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