In The Critic, James Stevens Curl reviews a new work by Mark Alan Hewitt that he calls “a welcome breath of sound common sense in a field where expensive insanity seems to have ruled the roost for far too long”:
Draw in Order to See: A Cognitive History of Architectural Design
by Mark Alan Hewitt
That architecture and architectural education are in a terrible state is obvious to anybody in the field. The reasons for this catastrophe are many, but some of the primary causes have been the universal embrace of the cult of inhumane modernism devoid of ornament (“a crime”), beauty, or even fun; the arrogant ditching of history and disregard of architectural precedents; the devaluation of craftsmanship through the adoption of factory-made components; and the desensitisation of architectural students terrorised and bullied into acceptance of nonsense by means of design “juries”, and by the compulsory study of false “grand narratives” of modernism that are patently distorted.
One of the worst of those pernicious texts was Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936), the title of which should have been enough to put off anyone who knew anything about art history. The creation of an entirely spurious connection between Arts-and-Crafts practitioners like Morris and modernists like Gropius was part of a campaign to create respectable father-figures for disreputable modernism; to legitimise the unspeakable by giving it a fabricated historical pedigree.
It says a lot about the flabbiness of the architectural world that it so readily accepted not only Pevsner’s sacred cowdom, but his enthusiastic endorsement of the Modern Movement in architecture as the “new style” of the twentieth century; a “genuine style as opposed to a passing fashion”, and one, moreover, that was, as Pevsner approvingly noted, “totalitarian”, a remark that did not even arouse a frisson of anxiety among the dimwits. Elizabeth Cumming and Wendy Kaplan put it neatly in their The Arts and Crafts Movement (1991 & 2002): they observed that few “now accept the view of Nikolaus Pevsner, put forward in his influential Pioneers … of Arts and Crafts as an antecedent of modernism”. Unfortunately, that is not true of “schools of architecture” in which falsehoods are still taught, and people like C.F.A. Voysey, who hated the modernists and everything they stood for, was held by Pevsner, in the teeth of objections by Voysey himself, to have been such a “pioneer”, a libel still perpetrated to this day in recent publications.
The widespread acceptance of untruths, obvious errors, and false attributions can only be explained if some cognitive functions have been shut down. To swallow the sort of twaddle peddled by Pevsner one would need to disengage what one actually sees from one’s understanding: in other words, instead of looking at something with care and forming sensible judgements based on careful comparisons and observations, one has one’s vision impaired by peering through Bauhaus-tinted spectacles, and therefore sees what Pevsner & Co. want one to see. In other words, whole generations have been brought up, not to see with their eyes, but to look with their ears.
Hewitt’s intelligent new book argues persuasively for the advantages of drawing in helping us to see. So often, the camera and the mobile phone are used to record something, but it is true (and I speak from many years of experience), that one can really only understand a building or an artefact by drawing it.
