The British Arts and Crafts Movement

The generally negative view of the artistic creations of the Victorian Age presented in many studies of modern architecture has not always been shared by critics, especially those writing closer to the time. For instance, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, the architect Robert Kerr saw the Victorian Age as the start of the great “popularising of art,” whereby artistic design for the first time became a middle-class pursuit. Beginning with the Great Exhibition of 1851, Kerr argued, the formerly pedantic “Fine Art of Architecture” stepped down from its pedestal in order to merge with the “Minor Arts” and become the new “Industrial Art of Architecture.” The arts and crafts, once deemed ornamental and inferior, were thus embraced by architecture as “no longer of unequal dignity with herself, but of altogether equal and similar comeliness of grace.”

Kerr's assessment makes a very salient historical point. The Great Exhibition of 1851 did indeed represent a turning point in European theory, in the sense that critics of the event were nearly universal in their realization that the artistic principles recognized over centuries had become estranged in their adaptation to the industrial practices of fabrication.

Otto Wagner

The break with historical forms that had been contemplated in theory for much of the nineteenth century came about largely in the exhilarating years 1889–1912. If we look at the change from the perspective of European theory, the essential tracts defining the new perspective were published between 1896 and 1901. What is as surprising as the suddenness of the transformation of modern architectural thought is the breadth of activity across two continents. The great tower and buildings of the Paris Exposition of 1889 – whose role in fostering an image of “modern life” should not be underestimated – may rightly be viewed as symbols of the new modernity, but this new phase of Western culture was also being driven from below by the widespread desire of architects – now drawing upon the existing theoretical base – to make a fresh start.

Formal innovation was widespread. In 1889 the Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí (1852–1926) was putting the finishing touches on his Palacio Güell in Barcelona. In 1890 Louis Sullivan rushed into the office of his chief draftsman, Frank Lloyd Wright, in Chicago and (with the design of the Wainwright building in hand) proudly announced that he had solved the “skyscraper” problem.

The Enlightenment in France

The relative lull in architectural debate in the first decades of eighteenth-century France mirrors a more pervasive lethargy that both shifted and sapped intellectual performance at large. Rococo theory, on the one hand, turned the focus of architectural attention from monumental practice toward residential planning – a trend discernible in the three editions (the second and third each greatly expanded) of Augustin-Charles d'Aviler's Cours d'architecture (Course of architecture; 1691, 1710, 1738) and Jacques-François Blondel's De la distribution des maisons de plaisance, et de la décoration des edifices en general (On the layout of country seats, and the decoration of edifices in general; 1737–8). French rococo theory, on the other hand, was a body of thought planted on soft political and economic underpinnings. The great promise of the early reign of Louis XIV soon dissipated. The fate of his cultural renaissance in France was largely sealed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which sent tens of thousands of productive Huguenots into permanent religious exile. The whimsical overbuilding at Versailles and the disastrous War of Spanish Succession (1701–13) further depleted state coffers and undermined French morale, so much so that when the corpse of the monarch was wheeled to its burial place at Saint Denis in 1715, it was jeered along the way by angry mobs.

Mumford, Jacobs, and the Failure of the American City

Volumes have been written about the social and physical deterioration of the American city in the 1950s and 1960s as well as the contrary boom of the American suburb. And while a multitude of reasons have been adduced for the urban conflagrations of the late 1960s – racism, war, poverty, drugs, unemployment – it is difficult to fault the fiscal commitment of the federal government itself. New Deal programs such as the Federal Housing Administration (1936), the United States Housing Authority (1937), and the Federal National Mortgage Association (1938) not only survived the war but were expanded into major housing and rehabilitation programs during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. The housing act of 1949, the cornerstone of all postwar legislation, promised a “decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family” and created the Urban Redevelopment Agency, which (armed with the new constitutional powers of eminent domain) authorized federal funds for the condemnation, purchase, and clearance of slums. Eisenhower signed into law an even more comprehensive housing act in 1954, which expanded such federal programs as fha Mortgage Insurance and allowed the idea of urban rehabilitation to be translated into a full-fledged urban renewal program. The Interstate Highway Act of 1957 created a new national system of freeways, which would soon be extended into the cities.

The British Style Debate 1840–1860

The lively debate about style among German architects in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s parallels a growing sense of disquiet evident among British architects during the same years. The debate in England, however, formed along somewhat different and generally less philosophical lines. Here institutions such as the Royal Academy and the Institute of British Architects (founded in 1834) represented the status quo and therefore became objects of attack, both from new institutions (London's Architectural Association and Henry Cole's Department of Practical Art) and from powerful individuals (Augustus Welby Pugin and John Ruskin). And the backdrop to the debate was of course Britain's advanced industrialization, which in 1851 resulted in the first international exhibition devoted to art and technology.

The Cambridge Camden Society, along with its polemical organ, The Ecclesiologist, was another of these institutional voices. The society had been founded in 1839 with thirty-eight members, but by 1843 it counted over seven hundred enthusiasts, including many leaders of the Anglican Church. The Ecclesiologist became a strident voice championing liturgical and architectural “truth.” It unequivocally opposed all competing styles for churches, once noting that the introduction “of a new style, whether Romanesque, Byzantine, or Eclectic, is to be earnestly deprecated,” as “Gothic architecture is, in the highest sense, the only Christian Architecture.”

The Legacy of Jones and Wren

There are many reasons for Great Britain's relatively independent course of intellectual development in the eighteenth century. Politically, the two most significant events were the revolution of 1688 and the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. The former resulted in constitutional reforms that enhanced liberty of expression and stabilized the governing process, while the latter concluded a dozen years of war with France and instilled in the British both pride and an ambition for international political standing. The ascension of the House of Hanover in 1715 further consolidated these gains and led to a period of unmatched colonial expansion and economic prosperity that lasted until midcentury. Attention to such luxuries as art and architecture was of course congenial with these developments.

Thus Britain over the course of the century increasingly competed with France and Italy on the European cultural stage, yet with some unique traits in its national makeup. Until late in the century, it possessed no academic structure in the arts and hence had no organizational means of defining a unified set of artistic beliefs. British architects learned their trade either as apprentices in offices or through self-education by reading the principal texts of the Italian Renaissance or French classicism. Where advanced schooling was desired, one embarked on a tour of the south to imbibe the classical tradition firsthand.