About Architecture: An Essential Guide in 55 Buildings
Hugh Pearman
Yale University Press, £30, 256 pages
Hugh Pearman is an architectural writer, and has written a number of books on modern architecture. He was architect and design critic of the Sunday Times from 1986 to 2016, and edited the journal of the Royal Institute of British Architecture (RIBA) from 2006 to 2020.
The book is organised by building type. Pearman has chosen 11 basic types with five examples of buildings in each section. These types are: Civic, Houses, Education, Offices, Industry, Transport, Museums, Performance, Religion, Retail and Gardens.
He shows an unsurprising bias towards modernity. Of the 55 buildings the 20th cent-ury provides 20 architectural examples and the 21st 12. Going backwards the centuries provide the following numbers: 19th (7), 18th (3), 17th (4), 16th (2), 15th (2), 14th (2), 12th (1), 4th BC (1) and 5th BC (1). The earliest example is the Acropolis and the most recent example the Shenzhen Energy Ring (2016-22).
The geographical spread is equally widespread. The USA provides the most examples (9) followed by the UK (8). France has four, and China, Germany, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands provide three examples each. Greece and Spain claim two and Australia, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Eritrea, Finland, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Ireland, Peru, Slovenia and Turkey one each.
The British examples oddly enough do not generally reflect the modernist enthusiasms of the author. The eight examples chosen are Blackwell, Cumbria (Baillie Scott, 1898-9), St John’s College (15th-21st century), Somerset House (William Chambers and successors, 1775-1856), Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings (Charles Bage, 1751-1822), Dulwich Picture Gallery (Sir John Soane, 1753-87), the Globe Theatre (1599-1614, reconstructed 1971-97), Magna Park, Milton Keynes (Chetwoods, 1987-2020), and the gardens of Stowe House (Charles Bridgeman, Sir John Vanbrugh, James Gibbs, William Kent and Capability Brown).
Two Catholic ecclesiastical buildings, both unsurprisingly in the Religion section, make the cut. The first is the Basílica de la Sagrada Família in Barcelona, Spain by Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926) and his successors. Construction began in 1882 and the pious Gaudí was appointed two years later. He was aware that he would not be alive to see the full completion of the building. He famously, perhaps apocryphally, remarked, “My client [ie God] is not in a hurry.” When Gaudí was run over and killed in 1926 about a quarter of the building had been completed. The Spanish Civil War caused further delays and it is now only some 70 per cent complete.
Despite this Pope Benedict XVI consecrated the edifice in 2010 and declared it a min-or basilica. It is hoped to complete work by 2026, the anniversary of Gaudí’s death. The style is a mixture of Gaudí’s unique approach, combining elements of Art Nouveau, Catalan Modernism and Spanish late-Gothic design. The original plans called for 18 spires to represent the Twelve Apostles, the Four Evangelists, Our Lord (the tallest) and Our Lady. Eight have been completed to date. There are three main frontages to the church representing the Nativity, the Passion and Glory. The colourful interior is seen as kitsch by some and magnificent by others: “an extreme stylised example of the organic forms inherent in neo-Gothic architecture”.
The second ecclesiastical building is the remote chapel of Notre Dame du Haut, built from 1950 to 1954 at Ronchamp in a former mining area between the Vosges and Jura mountains near Belfort, France. The architect was the Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris known as “Le Corbusier” (1887-1965), one of the pioneers of modernism between the wars. Le Corbusier was not a man of faith; he said “Every man has the religious consciousness of belonging to a greater mankind, to a greater or lesser degree. Ronchamp is a response to the desire that one occasionally has to extend beyond oneself, and seek contact with the unknown.”
The small chapel on a hill is supposed to symbolise the recovery of France from the trauma of the Second World War. A long-est-ablished pilgrimage chapel on the site was destroyed in that conflict. The exterior is “refined primitivism” and has “something of the spirit of a Neolithic barrow”. The chapel can apparently be seen as a boat. The interior is built of concrete and stone with the former being more apparent. A number of small windows are set in deep splayed apertures. A convent of Poor Clares arrived here in 2006 and constructed a building next to the chapel, having sold their previous premises in Besançon.
Interestingly, Pearman says in his Introduction that “The buildings and places I cite have to be a personal selection, so these inevitably reflect my background, tastes and interests, though these include some examples I do not necessarily like.” Make of that what you will.
Michael Hodges is the Herald’s architecture correspondent.
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