Architects and the "Building World" from Chambers to Ruskin: Constructing Authority (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Architects and the “Building World” from Chambers to Ruskin: Constructing Authority Peter C. Grosvenor (bio) Brian Hanson , Architects and the “Building World” from Chambers to Ruskin: Constructing Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 392, $75.00 cloth. The realization of architectural design in a finished construction involves constant interplay between theory and practice, and necessarily entails questions of hierarchy and authority among all of those involved. Furthermore, these political relationships are always embedded in epochal developments in wider social and economic spheres. Brian Hanson is an architectural historian and a key adviser to the Prince of Wales on architectural matters. In this dense and challenging volume, Hanson advances a complex and radical new thesis on the relationship between architects and the wider building process over the course of the nineteenth century. At the core of Hanson's analysis is a provocative reassessment of John Ruskin's evolving ideas on the authority of the architect, and this reconsideration of Ruskin provides the bulk of the text's structure. Hanson posits a basic dichotomy in Victorian thinking on the role of the architect: "There were two very different ways they could try to secure the necessary authority to lead: either by entering more wholeheartedly into the work of building, thus gaining the respect of craftsmen, or by seeking a vantage point above the contingencies of building" (22). Key studies in the history of Victorian architecture, usefully surveyed in the Introduction, have tended to emphasize the gradual professionalization of architecture, the rise in the authority of the architect at the expense of the building force, and the decline of the craft element in building as the process of industrialization advanced. [End Page 110] Hanson finds pre-industrial precedent for the tension between architects and builders in the architectural philosophy of Florentine architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72). Alberti presented the architect as chiefly concerned with the conceptual whole, whereas the workforce was necessarily preoccupied with the specific part. Consequently, for Alberti, the proper place for the architect was outside and above the building process. Historians have begun to revise this interpretation of Alberti. As the scale of buildings increased, practical problems of construction arose, from which the architect could not distance himself in the interests of conceptual holism. Nonetheless, Hanson concludes that, despite the increasingly inescapable necessity of engaging with the building process, "The models of debate favoured by Alberti looked forward to the learned society or professional institute rather than back to the craft guild" (3). In the work of William Chambers (1722/3–96) Hanson finds a coherent theorization of the architect's need "to instill order in the workforce by means of a sympathy with builders – looking, as it were, to control the situation from within" (22), while the reassertion of architectural authority is explored through the work of the writer Joseph Gwilt (1784–1863) and the architect John Soane (1753–1837). In the mainstream literature the Gothic Revivalists and the Arts and Crafts Movement are seen as skeptics and opponents in this professionalization process, and as advocates of a more positive and symbiotic relationship between architects and builders. Ruskin is usually presented as the pivotal theorist of the resistance to professionalization. Here Hanson makes his most significant intervention. According to Hanson, Ruskin originally held that the architect should stand over and above the building process. He later took the view that architects and builders should become co-workers within a framework of orthodox practice. Ruskin then came to regret the preoccupation of architects with the conventional, and therefore began instead to argue for the achievement of "nature-like order" (262) spontaneously through the renewal of the craft base of building. What emerges is an attempted "capture" of Ruskin for the ecological traditionalism usually associated with, for example, the British conservationist magazine Resurgence. As Hanson concludes, "Today, Ruskin's ideas seem fitted more to 'green' than to Gothic design" (264). This "greening" of Ruskin is developed across four chapters specifically devoted to the evolution of his thought, and it is a provocative thesis that students of Ruskin will be unable to ignore. General readers may find this text a forbidding introduction to the subject, though more specialist...