Review: Architecture as Profession: The Origins of Architectural Practice in the Low Countries in the Fifteenth Century, by Merlijn Hurx

Abstract

Merlijn Hurx Architecture as Profession: The Origins of Architectural Practice in the Low Countries in the Fifteenth Century Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2018, 459 pp., 16 color and 265 b/w illus. €119 (paper), ISBN 9782503568256 The three words of this significant book's main title might well stand between quotation marks, for the inclusion of “practice” in the subtitle indicates its real subject. This is a complex story of how architectural design as practice—still far from the modern use of the term profession —parted ways with the provision of materials and the supervision of building projects on-site. Merlijn Hurx's focus on the Low Countries immediately challenges conventional narratives that privilege Italy while also shifting the usual chronology back to the mid-fourteenth century. Like many recent historians of this period, Hurx decentralizes issues of style (although key aspects of challenging alternative styles have their place here), suggesting that factors such as economics, provision of materials, and networks of patronage offer more useful guides to a changing landscape of ambitious building projects. Dominant figures, whom we might well call “architects,” are present in these pages, but they emerge as having been trained and skilled in ways that contrast with modern perceptions of the architect's role in society. Hurx lays the case for an Italo-centered view at the door of Richard Goldthwaite, even as he praises Goldthwaite's groundbreaking analysis. He challenges Goldthwaite's claims that only in Italy were architects afforded the privilege of focusing their attention on design—leaving others to handle construction management—and that traditional building practices outside Italy supplied materials to one commission at a time. The evidence for northern Europe proves otherwise; the booming construction activity, both public and private, in the towns and cities of the Low Countries led to the formation of new supply patterns, making the transportation of materials across long distances profitable. If the argument for Italian exceptionalism emerged from Goldthwaite's The Building of Renaissance Florence (1980), his subsequent book, Wealth and the …