Review: Pevsner’s Architectural Glossary App

Abstract

Pevsner’s Architectural Glossary App New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press; Brighton, UK: Aimer Media, 2013, $4.99 Erudite detail is tempered by a certain popular appeal in Nikolaus Pevsner’s encyclopedic Buildings of England series. The forty-six volumes that Penguin first published between 1951 and 1974 were as thick as some editions of the Bible, and as authoritative—and nearly as readable. Embraced in the UK as modern lore, the architectural guides made an essential contribution to twentieth-century “topographic culture.”1 JSAH reviewer Alan Gowans praised the series in 1956, noting, “Scholarship at once meticulous and broad is combined with the informality of a personally conducted tour. … In such a program the essential thing is to hold a reader’s interest, to make him not only aware of facts, but interested in them, or … anxious to see, preserve, and perpetuate them.”2 Half a century later, a Guardian columnist similarly celebrated Pevsner’s “sparse, engaging style” for “making architecture accessible.”3 While it is true that Pevsner and his coauthors’ building descriptions were often terse—some of them no longer than a Tweet—readers sometimes had to work to parse the prose, the economy of which depended upon arcane art historical terms. Unlike Norval White’s AIA Guide to New York City , which first appeared in 1968 and which “did not require readers to know the difference between a volute and a voussoir,”4 the Pevsner guides are peppered with specialized terms. For example, a roundhouse in Essex is described as “Small round brick tower, crenellated, with turrets, and single-storey wings with stepped gables, hoodmoulded windows, and other folly-like features C19.”5A reader might flip to the twenty-five-page glossary in the back to look up hoodmould or crenellation , if not to review gable or folly . This slim glossary, a deceptively peripheral tool within a volume of up to 1,000 pages, was in fact crucial to the whole enterprise. …